[SCOTTISH TUC general secretary Jimmy Milne reacted to…]

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SCOTTISH TUC general secretary Jimmy Milne reacted to the announcement of Britoil's decision with his standard indictment of the government for its "lack of responsibility" and yet another trip down to London to plead with Secretary of State for Scotland George Younger.

Predictably, Younger gave him the brush-off yet again. Undeterred, Milne left Younger vowing to continue with his pointless endeavours: "It simply means we have to mobilise opinion in Scotland to put the Secretary of State in a situation where he has to face up to his responsibility."

SO readers who can speak STUCese will know how 'mobilise opinion in Scotland" is translated into reality. It means sending begging letters to Tories, vicars, chambers of commerce and the CBI, asking them to Britoil's cancellation of an oil rig order threatens thousands of jobs. Stan Crooke reports.

utter a few words of protest about the closure. It does not mean working class action.

The stage is set at Scott Lithgow for a repeat of previous tragedies. The "lead" given by the heads of the Scottish labour movement is one of a search for compromise, a pleading for the Tory government to intervene, not an attempt to build support for strike action and occupation.

This "strategy" owes much to the pernicious influence of the Communist Party in the Scottish labour and trade union movement. Their attempts to gloss over the class divide in society, dressed up in the name of the 'broad democratic alliance"

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If the STUC does nothing but throw itself at the feet of the Tories and local industrialists, the situation within the trade union organisation at Scott Lithgow is not much better.

Trade unionism at the yard is stagnant. Mass meetings are rare. There is no track record of militancy. Disputes at the yard have generally been unofficial, without even the support of the bulk of the shop stewards' committee. There has been little or no opposition to the slashing of the workforce by two-thirds in the last 20 years.

Shop stewards' convenor is Duncan McNeill. He is singularly ill-suited to the task of leading the fightback against the threat now facing his members. He has "countered" previous invective against the "workshy" workforce by pledging that it would work flat out to disprove such allegations.

When British Shipbuilders offered a f7 payment in exchange for gross deterioration of working conditions, McNeil's initial reaction was to argue for acceptance. Only when the Confederation of Shipbuilding.and Engineering Unions came out against it did McNeil change his line.

The Boilermakers Broad left does not have any presence in the yards. Nor does the Communist Party, which has members in the yards on the Upper Clyde - though this is not necessarily a bad thing. The socialist Workers Party has some supporters in the yard, but its leading figure at Scott Lithgow was victimised last year.

A non-aligned "Hammer and Tongs" rank and file bulletin wayside.

Four days after the announcement of Britoil's decision, the media reported that the workforce voted overwhelmingly to back the Confed call for a national strike from 6 January. But what actually happened was more complicated.

At the mass meeting, McNeil came under attack for his record as convenor. McNeil skillfully twinned together a vote of confidence in himself and the rest of the shop stewards' committee, with a vote in support of the national strike.

So the workforce voted to fight the war under the politically crippling generalship of McNeill and the rest of the shop stewards' committee.

McNeill spelt this out after the meeting: "It was not intended to have a vote (!). About 24 people from the shop floor presented conflicting views, including the left who wanted to remove us from office. There was a call for the position to be voted on and the only way we could do this -bearing in mind the workers had already decided to back the strike - was for a vote of confidence in the shop stewards. This was overwhelmingly carried."

So, with 4,200 jobs threatened directly by the closure of Scott Lithgow and another 5,000 threatened indirectly, the STUC still shuns any idea of controntation, and McNeil and his co-thinkers at the yard follow the same low-key approach.

The key question is: where is the nucleus in the shipyard that can take the lead in making up for lost time, challenge the self-defeating "strategy" of the STUC and McNeil and campaign for support for a strategy of strike action and occupation?

Only if the small number of militants in the yard organise themselves into such a nucleus and then proceed to campaign for a strategy of job defence through militancy is there any prospect of Scott Lithgow being saved from closure.

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