movement in the next five years.
Last week we outlined our views.
contnibute.
other contributors to this column, THE DEBATE on the way forward under the Tories has opened with a bang. Tony Benn's refusal to join the Shadow Cabinet has concentrated attention on the whole direction of the This week we invite Tony Chater of the Morning Star to Despite our differences with the Communist Party and with we believe that the widest possible range of opinions in the labour movement should be debated on the pages of Socialist Challenge at this decisive time. administration would be government since the war' right.
has faced for decades? rates, high levels of imports labour collapse of production level.
1945. That's administration is reactionary government governments since the per cent between 1975-1977 BEFORE the general election, Tom Jackson claimed a Thatcher the For once the right-wing leader of the Post Office workers was But to fight an enemy effectively you have to understand it. Why is this Tory government the most dangerous that the working class The vast scale of the Tory battie plat s dictated by the state of British ano international capitalism. The world coonomy is moving into a new reccasion on detente following the limited recovery of reaction The much vaunred prize of North Sea oil can actually make the situation of the British coonomy worse. Without an attack on the working class to drive up me rale of prol, the influx of oi revenues can infect Britain with the "Dutch discase" of soaring exchange and mobilise mass action.
So Thatcher cannot just maintain the status quo but has to rob the working sdeas. class of most of the gains made since this Tory authentically gains, smashed Heah.
But haven't both Labour and Tory (60s tried to pandis carry out such policies? Affer all, the last government's incomes policy drove down real wages hy no less than 12.5 What makes the Thatcher govern most extremist and reactionary state, of fall employment and therefore existing nationalisations, of a liberal" legal system, and'a foreign policy based As a resul a mighty defensive swamped Heath. Even sections of the trade union burcaucrats such as Scanion, convinced that the very existcilee oi the organisations on waich nes re Front their membership, maile they were based and gestures of defiance and on accasions left the door ajar for militants to Without breaking from its reformist without clear socialist cermited in detence of is poster working class, If This was the conclusion from the Heath experience what did the Tory glean the - Tatou government which followed it?
Wilson Immediately serapped Heath's war machine: The Industrial Relations Act was repcaied. -The Employment Protection Act-and the Act FACTS offered to the working class as olive branches. Yet in come and Callaghan were lo mark up a series of successes in attacking the working At the root of these victories was a complete reversal of Heath's attitude to the trade union bureaucracy. Where Heath attacked the Labour leaders Callaghan brought the union bosses into the very seat of government.
Consultation was the guiding theme at every sage. The deitils of the first round of incomes policy in 1975 were proposed by Jack Jones, then leader of centred on appeals of 'national interest above class interest', to weakening of classes rather than class conflic to the: tertied "Violence and extremism and the final the of Where such stirring battle cries had no effect the trade union leaders did the government's diny work hy such organisational threatened expulsion of the toolmaker from the Amalgamated Union Engineering Workers Apart from is defeats in the winte of 1978/9 at the hands of the Ford: workers and lorry drivers, Wilson and Callaghan led the most successtul righ wing governments in Britain since the war. They made the capitalist core of Labour reformism directly serve the ruling ciass. experience, That's why the desertba Thatcher aims of her as an "ideological politician' i accurate Of course , certain political wcapons used by Wilson and Callaghan anti-Toryism. "the unity of the labour
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fight The
against the
weapon and common starting point were labourist politics