How Can We Get Rid of the Bomb! by Marti

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Isn't the surer focus on direct Bomb? HOW CAN we get rid of the Bomb?

By getting a government which scraps it. But that's not as simple as it sounds.

Despite repeated Labour Party conference votes, the Labour leadership is clearly fudging the issue, with talk of Polaris being a matter for international negotiations.

Even if the Labour leadership were 100% committed to unilateralism, there would be problems. The US and British military; and the top ranks of the civil service, would use all sorts of dirty tricks to block unilateral disarmament. The government would need not only a firm commitment to unilateralism, but the will and ability to take on the permanent state machine.

We won't get a government like that unless it is based on and accountable to an active and mobilised working class.

method, then, to action to stop the Strikes, sit-downs, peace camps and marches are vital. But on their own they can't hope to defeat the centralised power of the state machine on an issue of central importance to it unless they achieve general strike proportions.

revolutionary general strike, arising out of an overall politieal crisis, might achieve unilateral nuclear disarmament as part of its work. But a special frap to e Bomb meras no sense.

If we could achieve the tremendous organisation and level of awareness needed to make such an enterprise successful, then we would be able to achieve our aims without a general strike.

Neither total faith in direct action, nor pure reliance on the struggle within the Labour Party to commit iț to unilateralism and make it accountable, is the answer.

What we need is a strategy which combines these aspects, and links them with every other struggle in which the confidence and political awareness of working class people can be raised, in the perspéctive of achieving a workers' government, accountable to the labour movement and prepared to take on capitalism.

Isn't this too drastic? What about countries like Norway which keep out nuclear weapons without a social revolution and without even leaving NATO?

NATO can accept that Norway is free of nuclear weapons precisely because Britain is jam-packed with these machines of : death. To keep this or that small country free of nuclear bases is different from disarming the capitalist world's second military power.

Besides, clearing nuclear weapons from a single country is only a start. Really to remove the threat of nuclear annihilation, we have to remove nuclear weapons from whole continents, at least - and also remove from power those people who would want to rebuild the nuclear arsénals at the first opportunity.

To rely on the example of Norway is to fool ourselves. The nuclear arms race is deep-rooted in capitalist society, We won't end the arms race without changing society.

What alternative defence policy should we support? * A people's militia, democratically controlled through the labour movement and local communities, and based on universal military training.

Isn't that conscription?

Yes - in the same sense that a picket rota, or a closed shop, is a form of conscription. But there is a difference between that sort of 'conscription', and conscripting people into a capitalist army as strike-breakers and uniformed thugs.

Is this realistic? Why not go for non-nuclear conventional defence, at least as aninterim What defence policy is realistic depends on whom you're defending against what. The conventional forces of the British Army have been at war continuously since 1945 - defending British imperialism against liberation struggles.

Many of its commanders see the army's main future role in 'counter-insurgency' - defendTHE SIGHT of a sleepless Margaret Thatcher floundering her way through a more than usually lame and turgid rallying speech gave a flavour of the unexpectedly confused and desperate circumstances that dominated this year's Tory conference.

Instead of flag-waving triumphant hysteria in the aftermath of the June election victory, the platform struggled from day to day to preserve a semblance of order and confidence under the quizzical eyes of the press.

Not until Friday morning was. it confirmed that the frigate Parkinson — which singlehanded fought the Falklands war and organised the election campaign - had been sunk with all hands after a fresh «broadside from Sara Keays.

The confusion of the conference at this sudden turn in events - after Parkinson had bored everyone half to death with his speech the previous day, and survived — was multiplied by the fact that the edition of the Times carrying Sara Keays' statement was not available in But it must not be forgotten that the Tory Party - as the party of profit and property -is less of a structured organisation than an enlarged club of co-thinkers. The leadership can be knocked off balance yet still survive — because the differences are on questions of tactics rather than principle, and because there is only really room for one leader at a time.

Though marginal 'wets' like Norman St John Stevas may go round whingeing about 'poisonous ideologues' whose hostility to the NHS gives the Tory Party a bad name, the opposition to Thatcher is soft and lukewarm as well as wet: it has made little impact since Thatcher's meteoric rise in the mid 1970s.

This can be seen from the replacements wheeled in to repair the damage done by Parkinson's destruction:

Boot-boy Norman Tebbit moves up to head the relentless drive towards privatisation and the destruction of jobs in coal and other nationalised industries.

Nicholas Ridley - an original architect of the Tory policy of letting 'lame duck' firms and industries sink — is brought into the Cabinet as an additional tough guy.

'Tom King - whose stubborn stand provoked the water strike earlier this year - steps into Tebbit's shoes, publicly pledged to continue the same line of aggression towards the trade It is over King that the biggest question mark must hang: can he bring the union leaders to heel in the way Tebbit had succeeded in doing?

His task will be eased, of course, by the headlong political retreats of the last month's TUC Congress, and the evident refusal of the General Secretaries to wage any real fight against the Tories.

But there remain testing times ahead for the patched-together Tory team.

Chancellor Nigel Lawson wants to steer them into a policy of cutting back unemployment and other benefits at a time of chronic mass unemployment.

And Lawson's cash straitjacket is pushing the NHS into cutbacks and closures which are emotive issues in the working class - - and possibly the most explosive single issue to be dealt with in the next year.

Having checked out their own stamina by staying awake through Thatcher's final speech and surviving the ritualistic minute standing ovation, a after allowing their own blor lust and racialism to run free a delirious week amon friends, Tory 'representativ will now be watching anxiou to check that their governm does not run out of steam. The questions raised o Thatcher's apparent infallil ity could indeed be multipl and magnified in the event substantial victories by 1 working class.

Rather than gloating over! Tories' comparatively mi crisis of leadership, our att tion in the labour movem should be focused on resolvi the much more serious crisis leadership exposed by t year's TÜC and Labour conl ences.