The Labour Party and the NGA

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First of all, it would have recognised that there is no distinction in the real world between industrial matters and political affairs, between the correct sphere of influence of the unions and the political arm of the unions. It would have come out right from the start and said: 'The NGA is involved in a political fight. Their fight is our fight. We will strain every sinew to support their struggle and broaden it into a mass movement capable of A workers' party would have come out and told the world: The anti-union laws were laws made by the boss class to help the boss class. They are laws intended to stop our class using its basic protective mechanisms, the unions, effectively - against the cuts, against unemployment, against wage reductions, against the attempts by Thatcher to put our class back into the 1830s. These laws are laws which must be broken. We shall do all in our power to ensure that they are broken .

A workers' party, declaring its support from day one for the NGA in the fight to defend basic rights won through a century and a half of struggle, would have urged total support by the TUC General Council for the NGA. It would have ruthlessly criticised Murray and his lieutenants. It would have rigorously insisted that they were doing the dirty work for Thatcher and the bosses. It would have called loudly for their removal.

The leaders of the Labour Party did none of these things in the NGA dispute. The NGA and the fight against Thatcher were strengthened not one iota by the performance of these gentlemen throughout the dispute. Their lamentable performance shows just how far our party is from really representing the interLabour should have given total support to the NGA — not, as the poll-paralysed new-fledged electoralists of Socialist Action argued (in no.38), because the NGA has 120,000 votes in the next General Election, but as a matter of principle. Victory in*the dispute would have strengthened our class, and defeat has set it Lose or win votes by it, the labour movement must defend And what did we get? We got Labour's shadow employment secretary, John Smith, informing us that the Tory laws, which will break effective independent trade unionism, will have "ultimately to be accepted by those affected by them"

We got Roy Hattersley telling the world, 'The general principle on which I stand, and on which the Labour Party stands, is that the law must be respected. Those of us who believe the law to be wrong have to change it rather than break it. Industrial disputes have to be conducted without violence and within the Kinnock, of course, can't keep his trap shut except when it is vital to speak out. All he could do was, like a Harold Wilson understudy, to condemn both the laws... and violence on picket Kinnock and Hattersley summed up the performance of Labour's leadership in this most vital of disputes. But there were The Campaign Group of MPs came out in direct support of the NGA and its struggle. Dennis Skinner laid about the General Council: Eric Heffer correctly commented, "| believe that now is the time for all Party members to spring to the defence of the trade unions and to give every practical support we can, both inside Parliament and in the labour movement as a whole' We must build on this. At the moment the hard left is on the defensive in the Labour Party, as it is in the unions. One way to set about ensuring that there will be no repetition of the TUC's sordid performance against the NGA is to establish strong workplace branches of the Labour Party, which can help obliterate the distinction between the industrial and political labour At the same time we must take the still-very-much-alive issue of organising support for the NGA, and the lessons of the betrayals of the TUC and the Labour Party leaders, into the wards and constituencies, to turn them out to support future WHAT WOULD a political party which really represented thi interests of the working class have done during the NGA dispute? dislodging the Thatcher government".