The Guard ian,

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meeting • Islington So group decided that we had to dissociate from him publicly.

It is often difficult being trapped on the edge of the movement, or "at the back of the hall" as Alan would have it.

But faced with a movement that has led itelf into confusion and crisis, better to be at the back of the hall and with the council's workers than at the front of the hall or on the platform and against them.

Better, I should add, not from the point of view of trying to keep yor hands clean' but from the point of view of trying to reorganise and reorient the movement to the tasks it faces.

Islington SO supporters have been trying to do that. We have been afraid neither to take 'responsibility' when the choice is there to lead, nor to face isolation 'at the back of the hall' when that is the best course.

Alan and many on the local government left have had a taste of 'responsibility' and being 'at the front of the hall' -and now can't realise that what they're taking responsibility for is the local finances of the capitalist state and for locally carrying out Tory policies against the rank and file of the labour movement. The socialist future lies with the rank and file. Socialist Organiser's job is to help prepare that future. We stay with the rank and file.

NIK BARSTOW Islington SO Group (Note: Nik Barstow is secretary of Islington Labour Party's Local Government Committee). THE Editor of the Guardian, Peter Preston, claims to have learned paintul lessons trom the decision that put 23 year old Sarah Tisdall into prison instead of him.

In a long, self-agonising account of how the Guardian came to hand back a secret document outlining Heseltine's public relations plans for Cruise, Preston says:

'We made - I know - some serious errors. Sometimes they were realised quickly; sometimes they came only with hindsight. There are painful lessons that remain with us, and trom which we are resolved to learn."

The only lesson that the Guardian has learned is next time it will try harder not to get caught.

Precautions

Next time the Guardian will have taken precautions. It may have destroyed the document before the law can act - but it has not budged from its policy decision to comply with the law even if that means an innocent person going to jail.

Most people who have the haziest knowledge of how newspapers work believe that journalists do not reveal their sources - whatever pressure they are put under by police or government. Most people are right in theory.

The code of conduct of the National Union of Journalists is explicit on the matter. Poil., Seven says simply: "A journalist shall protect confidential sources of informs inn."

Sarah Tisdall herself in a moving interview on the World in Action TV programme was quite clear about the issue. She said the Guardian ought to have destroyed the document and defied the law. At first blush ony the most craven proThatcher hysteric could fail to agree with her.

That the Guardian did not follow this course is only partly due to mistakes on the part of the paper and its editor. The crucial decision - not to defy the law - was woven closely with the ideological view the Guardian took of the decision which the NGA had just taken to defy the law over Stockport. The decision was taken cold-bloodedly. It put the rule of law above the duty of the paper to protect its sources. In other words it made freedom of the press a lower principle than upholding the law.

The final choice came after the Court of Appeal issued its judgement on December 16. Sir John Donaldson of various anti-union rulings fame delivered as crude a judgement as he knew how.

He identified the key question not as the ownership of the documents, nor as the content