NALGO, NUT NEIL KINNOCK's Tuesday was hailed by the press and by La victory for the party as a whole out of was due to the fact that Kinnock took the opportunity to launch a fight the Tories now.
Kinnock ridiculed the attempt to He used the errors of Militant to was at the unions door.
the first time that the city council has found itself at odds with a section of the population in whose interests it claims to act. The Sam Bond affair is another, notorious, such case.
with no track record ow worth in Liverwords, pool's black pointed the city's race relations chief the Liverpool Black Caucus objected. Their protest was labelled 'divisive' and 'anti-working class" by Militant, all its ana black caucus supporters were au cused of thugery or worse.
The Labour Party claim a monopoly on the ability to prosecute the class struggle — and anyone who disagrees is divisive and not acting in the interest of the working class. They fail to undersatndd that the working class as a whole is composed of its separate component parts whose immediate coincide at any given moment of time. The only strategy which can unite the whole class in a battle against the Tory attacks which everyone's interests - is one which takes that fact into account: one aimed at uniting in struggle trade unionists, black people, women, and so on. speech to Labour Party conference sections of the labour movement as and for him as its leader. Rejoicing direct attack on that section of the Labour Party which is prepared to Referring to Liverpool council, defend the city's jobs and services. essential services.' This is the most dramatic, but not When Bond, a Militant supporter community, Was apThatcher's attacks.
The trouble is that Militant want to doing, interests don't necessarily do Enreates tics in pursuing that fight.
proclaim that impossible promises' would not win elections.
*You start with implausible resolutions,' he said, 'which are then pickled into a rigid dogma, and you end with the grotesque chaos of a Labour council — a Labour council — hiring taxis to scuttle around a city handing our redundancy notices to its own workers. I'm telling you, you can play politics with people's jobs, with their homes, with their to By rubbish of that type By failing to recognise this, Militan! have dug a grave for themselves and their ideas in Liverpool and beyond. ine debate on local governical Labour Party conference showed exactly that. It allowed Neil Kinnock and David Blunkett to pose at the true defenders of local jobs and services and, at the same time, to duck the real issue: that of supporting those councils prepared to fight to the end against Party conference voted in support of a resolution to defend local authority jobs and services - including to "fully compensate those representatives of the labour movement who have suffered personal loss, bankruptcy, disqualification or whatever as a result of non-compilance wiw unese laws • Dy su delegates showed their willingness to unite in the fite to protect local authorities from the Tory axe. It is now up to front-line councils to ensure that the methods they advocate are fully discussed and supported locally, thus able to find support within the labour movement as a whole. In that fight they will find, as have the people of Liverpool, that Kinnock is not an ally he is an obstacle. His attack Liverpool Council was an attack on the fight against the Tories, not wrong tacKinnock justified his move to the right. His attack was launched on the eve of the debates on the miners and on local government -the two single most important struggles taking place now against the attacks of the Thatcher government.
As Tony Benn correcty pointed out at a Labour CND fringe meeting that evening,* the primary purpose of Kinnock's speech was discredit the support which conference — in its overwhelming majerity - was about to pledge to