Labour right under pressure

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Scargill gets it right inside THE parents occupying the and the Langthwaite Grange Nursery are now in their fourth week of defiance of the right-wing Wakefield Council.

At a meeting lobbied by 100 NUPE members last Wednesday 11th, Wakefield District Labour Party voted by two to one to oppose these cuts and called upon the councillors not to cut. But the majority right wing caucus bad already met that morning, and reaffirmed their determination to cut and to close the nurseries.

There is now a very sharp division between the Labour group and the District Labour Party. For example, the NUPE Led by Jack Smart, the 32 Labour councillors have implemented 14 million worth of Tory cuts down to the last job loss.

: 3004 Plas!ty, Join the Socialist Cllr Garth Frankland The Labour group has suspended 11 councillors who voted against the cuts. lobby was organised by local NUPE official George Mudie, who is also leader of the Leeds council group and Chair of the Regional Labour Party.

In the past Jack Smart has managed to keep an iron grip on the council, on the unions, and on the Labour Party, but now, in the face of the Tory offensive, that grip is slipping.

Smart has been abroad during most of the last fortnight, and the right wing has wobbled all over the place. They issued a court order against two men (one of them a local Labour councillor) involved in the occupation. Then they withdrew the summons just before the court appearance. Now the council has issued a fresh set of writs against the occupiers, and Labour Fight the seems set to carry these through, despite the District Labour Party opposition.

The solid support for the nursery occupation from local trade unionists gives it the possibility of defeating Smart. Supporting strike action should be called for from the local authority workers, many of whom are facing job losses as a result of the announced cuts.

The nursery occupiers and their supporters in the local labour movement should campaign for the policy of the Wakefield District Labour Party, against closures, to be carried out by the Labour-controlled council:

Previous injunctions have sought to compel trade unionists to continue doing their own jobs, or to lift picketing or boycott action aimed at halting -work by non-union members. But this is the first attempt by the courts to compel trade unionists to do other trade unionists' work.

The ruling against the NUJ at Dimbleby newspapers was no less outrageous. David Dimbleby, the urbane TV "personality', set out to resolve his conflict with 24 NGA members by sacking them all and diverting the printing of his newspapers to the anti-union T.Bailey Foreman group in Nottingham.

This scab outfit made its name with the NUJ when it sacked 28 journalists on the Nottingham Evening Post for taking part in the NUJ's 1978-9 provincial newspapers pay strike. The union has remained in dispute with the company ever since.

In opposition to Dimbleby's union-busting move, the NUJ

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