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Name Address month minimum (20p unwaged) contri-. bution from supporters.

I want to become a Socialist Organiser supporter/ I want more information.

Send to Socialist Organiser, 28 Middle Lane, London N8 8PL. in the event of the Tories refusing to increase Rate Support Grant, it will submit this statement of intent as the basis of the 1983-4 budget.

•That the Labour Group shall, at the March 8 Council, call a local Labour Movement Conference to which it will invite delegates from council trade unions, other union branches in the area, local Labour Parties, tenants' associations and community groups. The conterence, to be held on March 26, shall be called to win support for the Statement of Intent and its application. This conference shall determine whether and how to proceed with the course of action it outlines.

Prior to the Labour Movement Conference the Labour group and Local Government Committee shall re-launch the 'Make the Tories Pay' campaign that was begun at the end of 1982 (door-to-door canvassing). jobs and services in Islington.

"We intend at a Special Meeting of the Council on March 29 to present a budget for the Council in 1983-4 which will mean:

"1. Keeping up the present level of all our services. That will cost £77.3 million this year.

'2. Improving and expanding some services - by decentralising our housing, repairs and social services, increasing the wages of our lowest-paid workers, increasing support to registered childminders and improving services for the old and disabled, at a cost of £4.2 million.

'3. Freezing council rents.

"We therefore plan to spend a total of £81.5 million on maintaining and improving the Council's services. But that figure has been made artificially high because the government is 'penalising' us for spending money to help the old, the disabled, mothers and the low paid. with our workers, fight to stop TURKEY A TOWN ON TRIAL New pamphlet, 50p; latest TSCI bulletin, 30p, plus postage. *From TSC, BM Box 5965 London WCIN 3XX.

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Will Liverpool council be the first to take on this Tory government?

TOMISPORT Ken Livingstone: the GLC became responsible for implementing JOHN HARRIS the Tories trampling on democracy in this way.

''The banks will act for the Tories too. They will try to freeze the Council's finances and force all the Borough's services to grind to a halt and leave our workers unpaid. We will fight them too. We will make it our first priority to find ways to continue paying our workers and keep our services running when the attack comes.

'We do not propose embark on this course of action without consulting and involving those most affected by the fight to stop the Tory Surcharge: the Council's workers, council tenants, and the users of our services. That is why Islington Council's Labour group of councillors is calling together a local Labour Movement Conference on March 26 to win support for our policy of refusing to pay the Tory Surcharge, before we take the final decision.

Such a campaign would have to go together with more general demands:

*Denunciation of the burden of interest charges: demand cancellation of the councils' debt burden, interest-free loans from central government, and nationalisation without compensation of the banks and finance institutions. (Interest charges are often 30% or more of councils' current spending).

*Denunciation of the inequitable features of the rates system (e.g. the fact that, since housing is a bigger part of the budgets of the poor, it bears more heavıly on many low-paid workers than on the well-off). Defend existing local democracy: for demand increased powers local authorities to levy whatever taxes they decide on. Put the burden of taxation onto the wealthy.

*Take the whole building industry into public ownership, without compensation and under workers' and community control. Launch a national crash house-building programme.

*Workers' and community control of housing and education.

If the council adopted the policy outlined above, then various things could happen next.

1. Probably the council officers would refuse to implement the 'unbalanced' budget, 50p for a single copy, 40p per copy for 5 or more, and 30p per cop for 20 or more, from Employment Unit, Southwark CVS, 135 Rye Lane, London SE15. Cheques payabl to Southwark CVS.

Please add an amount for postage: and would prepare their own rent/rate rises and cuts. Legally they can do this. The councillors should then call on the council unions and tenants to take action against the rent/rate rises and cuts, following the policy of their elected council rather than unelected officials.

2. If the officials cooperated, the next hurdle would be the banks. Councils depende heavily on short-term borrowing to run their current affairs. It has already happened that the money markets have frozen out, or imposed astronomical interest irates on councils like the GLC and Lambeth for short peripds.

Faced with such measures, the council should:

a) Demonstratively stop payment of outstanding interest charges and precepts.

b) Use all available funds, current incomes, etc., exclusively for paying its workforce.

c) Call for industrial and rent and rate strikes to demand that the government grants finance.

Unlikely

3. It is unlikely that both the senior officials and the banks would cooperate with an unbalanced budget. If they did, however, the next step would be intervention by the District Auditor, a government official, who could take the council to court and have it removed for financial i irresponsibility. The councillors would be disqualified and surcharged, and the running of the council handed over to the officials pending a new elec tion. (Under current law the government cannot send in commissioners).

Again, the council should respond by calling on tenants and workers to fight for the policy of their elected council, against the intervention of the courts and central government.

4. It is logically conceivable, but in practice very unlikely, that the senior officials, the banks, and the District Auditor could all sit back and wait for the council to run out of money on the basis of its unbalanced budget. If so, the council, when it comes close to running out of money, should stop paying interest charges and thus precipitate variant 2, above.

Diary 50p All this discusion of what the council should do in this or that eventuality has its importance. In a sense, however, it is beside the main point.* The answer to the question: 'What strategy for councils to fight the cuts?' is: No such strategy is possible. Councils do not have the power to fight the cuts. Local labour movements do. What we can develop is a strategy for local labour movements to fight the cuts, within which councillors can use their position to help the struggle and give a lead.

Labour councillors must see themselves primarily as a part of this labour movement ettort, rather than of the municipal machine - as fighters, not administrators. That is the basic principle by which all tactical issues such as rate rises are determined.

Left councillors often say that they would love to lead a fight, but there is no sign of the council unions budging, so what can they do? In fact whenever a council has given a lead for a fight, however faltering, as in Lambeth or Lothian, the working class response has been excellent. It is the councillors who eventually have been found wanting.

There is, of course, no guarantee that a lead from councillors would bring a response, still less a guarantee that it would bring victory against centrai government. But it is a thousand times better for the left to remain true to itself and go down fighting than for the left to take responsibility for those options that exist in the absence of a fight.

If the condition of the working class makes a real fighting council impossible, then so be it: it is the job of serious socialists patiently to argue from a minority position to change the condition of the working class, not to make themselves a reflection of it and thus, inevitably, a factor in perpetuating it.

Historically, local government has been a machine for corruption of the labour movement -parallel to, and probably just as important as, the trade union bureaucracy. Just as the shopfloor militant gets drawn into the world of committees and time-off-for-union-duties, then up into officialdom, at each stage getting more and more drawn into the business of managing industrial relations in partnership with the bosses; so the Labour Party activist gets drawn into the municipal structures.

There are differences. Some councillors develop a close relationship with the working class in their wards, but most don't.

Their constituency is an aggregate of individual citizens, not the relatively compact body of organised workers which forms the constituency of a trade union representative. Moreover, councillors are employers, or rather they are attached to a bureaucratic apparatus which is an employer. The corrupting effects of the council hierarchies are therefore usually even more devastating than those of the union hierarchies.

Just as the answer in the unions is not to do away with any permanent machinery or system of paid officials, but to fight for the rank and file to exert control, so also in local government the answer is not to leave all the councils to the Tories but to win control over councillors by the local labour movement and to make the councillors fight against the system.

The 1880 programme of the French Workers' Party, in an introduction drafted by Marx, defined the aim of the socialists in relation to universal suffrage as to transform it 'from the instrument of deception that it has been up till now, into an instrument of emancipation."

Such should be our attitude to local democracy.

This differentiates us both from the mainstream local government leftists and, at the other pole, from the Socialist Workers Party.

The SWP has made many criticisms of the left councils -some rather hysterical, some very telling. Even their valid criticisms, however, are made sterile by the fact that they are all used to promote the argument that socialists should abstain from the political struggle within the Labour Party (and, increasingly, the struggle within the unions too). thus the SWP ends up worsening the insufficiency of active Marxist engagement in the labour movement, leaving an even greater vacuum to be filled by the 'municipal socialists' Their attitude is no better than that of syndicalists who (very correctly) denounce the shams and corruption of parliamentary politics, but conclude that they should turn their backs on the whole arena and concentrate exclusively on industrial organising. Since the reality of Model resolution for trade union conferences from Labour Against the Witch-hunt.

1. This Conference recognises that the Labour Party will only achieve power for the benefit of our members if it unites toHULL gether against the Tories and their allies and stops witch-hunting its own supporters.

This Conference therefore calls for an immediate halt to all witch hunts and defends the traditional right of Labour Party members to belong to pressure groups, provided that they accept the Party's objectives as defined in Clause IV part 4 of the Party's Constitution and provided that they do not stand or campaign against Labour's candidates in public elections.

2. This Conference recognises that it is in the vital interests of the Law Lords'ruling that increased fares. parliamentary politics does not disappear when the syndicalists turn their backs on it, their abstention only strengthens the parliamentary reformists by freeing them of potential opposition. Likewise with the SWP and municipal politics.

Socialist Action has followed a strange hybrid policy - rather servile towards Ken Livingstone, not very different from the SWP in areas like Islington. IMMEDIATE PROSPECTS The immediate prospects are not good. The labour movement generally is in a depressed state, the local government left even more so. There are signs of a serious fight over the 1984-5 budget at present only in Liverpool, and Liverpool may well crumble before the crunch.

We may be wrong in our estimate on 1984-5. Liverpool may fight. Other councils may. And in 1985-6 the local government left will come into head-on collision with the Tory government: sections of it may well fight.

So long as this remains so, the job of Marxists must be to prepare for the future by patiently arguing for a fighting perspective. We will, necessarily, be in a fairly marginalised position - arguing 'from the our members to see a Labour Government returned to power at the earliest possible opportunity.

Conference therefore calls upon the Labour Party's NEC and full time officers to spend more time on promoting Labour's policies and campaigns against the Tories, and less time intervening in the internal affairs of Constituency Labour Socialise Organiser. 8 December ilS; Fag i= back of the hall', as it were.

But we should beware of sectarianism. Despite everything said in the previous sections, the local government left is not played out-yet. It has not separated off from the general labour movement left to become a crystallised elite, immune to any processes of discussion and struggle within the labour movement. While being very clear in our minds about the seriousness of the issues between us and the local government left, we must put across our arguments in such a way that we are trying to convince the local government left land the general Labour Left, from which it is not much differentiated), rather than just denounce them.

This concludes Martin Thomas's article. In the New Year, we will be opening the pages of Socialist Organiser to responses to this assessment of the local government left's experience.

tch-hunt Parties.

This Conference believes that since CLPs are generally quite capable of conducting their own affairs democratically and effic.

iently, the Party's NEC and paid organisers should not intervene to limit an individual member's activities without a forma request from his/her CLP.

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Organiser. December Page ballot BALLOT ELECTIONS are taking place this week at BL's Cowley Body Plant.

Workers will vote for a new TGWU senior steward and secretary of the 5/60 Branch as well as other officers.

But a question mark is hanging over the election, the conduct of which is entrely in the hands of supporters of the present right wing leadership. They have all 14 scrutineers: the five challengers to the existing leadership have been denied even one.

The 14 scrutineers have also refused to have the ballot papers numbered as a precaution against fraud. Needless to say this has only been allowed in the teeth of complaints because of the leadership's right wing credentials.

The contest for the senior steward position is between the former deputy senior steward, JP Alec Morton, and Socialist Organiser supporter Tony Richardson. nga JOHN HARRIS

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