Reform the block vote!

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WITH THE drop in individual membership and the rise in union affiliation to the Labour Party the weighting towards the block vote has worsened. The TGWU, for example, does not affiliate all its membership. The Executive could, at the stroke of a pen, increase its voting power by as much as the entire individual membership of the Labour Party in CLPs.

To simply argue to constituency members that they need to democratise the block vote is a hopeless task, or at best one for many years in the future.

But a more important principle is at stake. An individual Labour Party member is not the same as someone who has not contracted out of paying the political levy from their union dues. We are against Tory moves to legalise contracting-in as it is a move towards breaking the historic link between the trade unions and the Labour A FOOTNOTE to the dispute between Socialist Organiser and Socialist Action over Palestinian solidarity work.

Readers will recall that last year the 'Workers Revolutionary Party' packed the conference of the Labour Committee on Palestine with a majority of non-members of the LCP and of the Labour Party itself, to give Ted Knight a rubber-stamp majority there.

Most of the genuine members then walked out to set up the Labour Movement Campaign for Palestine. Except, that is, the supporters of Socialist Action.

Sucialist Action stayed behind in deference to the 'great men' Ted Knight and his mate Ken Livingstone (who was sitting up in the gallery).

Socialist Action have since served as a figleaf - the main one - to hide the fact that the LCP is a front for the WRP, and therefore for the Arab bourgeois forces who retain its services. (Readers of Socialist Organiser will know, of course, that there is strong circumstantial evidence to suggest that the WRP takes money from Arab bourgeois regimes).

Ingratiate

To ingratiate themselves with Knight and Livingstone, Socialist Action covered for the WRP takeover by publishing lying accounts of what had happened.

They blamed Socialist Organiser and others for walking out, not Ted Knight and the WRP for organising an undemocratic coup.

Socialist was Party by attempting to stop money for the Labour Party.

But the fact is that the affiliated membership does include large numbers of Tories. Even to democratise the block vote would give the active members in the trade unions the control of a vote that is not real compared to the individual constituency membership.

We are told that people wanting to limit the trade union vote are against the links with the trade unions. Or that such moves would antagonise the trade unions. Or that people in the constituencies would see this move as the solution, as long as it dropped the trade union vote enough, as opposed to the fight to democratise the trade unions.

That such hostilities or illusions exist is irrelevant to whether the issue itself is right or wrong. To reduce a person who actually joins the Labour wrong, they said, to insist that the WRP, which has pubhcly justified the Iraqi regime's execution of members of the Communist Party of Iraq, had no place in such a campaign, and could no longer be regarded as part of the labour movement.

Socialist Action is still the WRP's figleaf in the LCP. But its view of the WRP has 'developed' This is what a recent socialist Action editorial said about the WRP, after it had helped whip up a hypocritical campaign in the press against Arthur Scargill for his views on Solidarnose: 'Such behaviour is the equivalent of strikebreaking and scabbing. Its perpetrators have no place within the ranks of the labour movement"

Strong words, and true ones. But does Socialist Action take them seriously? It seems not, for its supporters still serve as the WRP's main figleaf in the LCP.

Why? That's the question we should be asking Socialist Action supporters.

Perhaps the explanation for the contradiction is that they wrote that editorial in deference to Arthur Scargill, an even greater man than the great men Livingstone and Knight! And if you derive your line day by day from the need to keep in with some 'great' person or other, you're bound to contradict yourself and trip over your own feet.

Thus Socialist Action continues - out of deference to Knight and Livingstone - to cover for the WRP, which lout of deference to Arthur Scargill) it rightly denounces as a Party to the same status as an individual who does not take active steps to stop a tiny fraction of their union dues from going to the Labour Party is wrong.

We now have an even greater opportunity to argue our case, with even Alex Kitson arguing for a better proportion for the CLPs. This position is, I believe, the historic position of Marxism. I am in favour of a two-pronged policy.

1) Democratisation of union block vote.

2) A greater proportion to constituencies.

The second point I leave vague although I personally do not think it should be based on what finances the CLPs pay, I do think that one-third is about right. I want to commit us to the principle and support moves in that direction.

TONY RICHARDS body of strikebreakers who y of strikebreakers "have no place within the ranks ve no place within the of the labour movement". le labour movement"

FERGUS ENNIS, Islington.

JIM DENHAM implies that Argentina is some kind of imperialist nation in his letter in Socialist Organiser of 1 December 1983 when he says 'This sort of pseudo-internationalism has nothing to do with Lenin and Trotsky, who started from a world overview, but invariably fucussed on the class struggle within both imperialist nations."

I am sure that on reflection he will not defend this position but it dues have a certain logic for those who deny the right of nationalist governments to struggle against imperialism.

Imperialism is finance capital, i.e. the big banks and their allies in the multinational corporations. The HQs and centres of these organísations are in the USA, UK, Western Europe and Japan. None of them operate out of South America. The whole of Argentina, both capitalists and workers, are the victims of the big banks. The only "Marxist theoretician" of any note who has argued the opposite is the late Bill Warren of the BritishIrish Communist Organisation.

. GARTH FRANKLAND ed people, and in order to secure the highest standards every solicitor must be a certified member of the Law Society" , I was told recentiy. You wouldn't think the majority of solicitors were Tory voters now, would you?

'But what about free competition between solicitors, the man in the street, and conveyancing companies? Surely this would reduce the cost to the public drastically" , said I naively. • 'No, no, no, it would simply lead infree riders moving in and doing a pour job". The average salary of a solicitor is about £17,000 a year.

It's the same story with the British Medical Association, of Borg's hall.

And let's not forget the most lucrative closed shop of all -the big cartels run by our major companies. A recent US Congress investigation of the 'Internavional Electrical Association' disclosed that 50 major electrical companies in Western Europe (including GEC, Ferranti, David Browns) were defrauding Third World governments of £250 million a year through overpricing and, to paraphrase Judge Eastham, "disrupting the legitimate trading activity of companies" by taking a panoply of punitive mpasures against those nonJudge Eastham brought to the dock with charges of conspiracy laid against them? Not on your nelly, mate!

But what about freedom of the individual? What, when there's ackers at stake? You must be joking.

So what's the difference between their closed shop and a workers' closed shop?

Simple. They own the country and we don't. If you want a living wage, you've got to get organised, like the gaffers. We need a closed shop to live, they need one to get fat on.

GUS DORAZIO, Crawley, Sussex.