Activist want.
full. stock of the welding Sections, the ultra-leftism of THIS year's Labour Party conference was dominated by Neil Kinnock and his policies. But the important step forward for the left was that, for the first time for many years a common agenda began to be hammered out. No one summarised it better than Arthur Scargill at the Labour Herald rally on Monday night of conference. We print his speech in the ed a tendency to believe we can go an win the next general election, an support of working people through a softly-softly approach That through a Saatchi and Saatch soft sell, we can win people tha would not normally be won to th policies of our party and our move ment.
Well I happen to be one o those as disenchante Yorkshireman - who believes tha the Red Flag is dyed with the bloo of people who sacrificed everythin for this movement.
Our principles, it is said, are little out of date. We've got to g for the middle road. Well, the onl thing that you get in the middle o the road is... knocked over!
Ever since I was 14 years of ag I understood we're not about winn ing elections. Some people may be But I know that this is a class wa and our fight is to take politic power - and there's a difference Millions of people unemployec deprivation in our inner citie black communities not only depri but blatantly discriminate against. Well, at least there's th beginning of an understandin amongst working men and wome of what our brothers and sisters i the black communities have had t endure, and still have to endure. there was one thing the mine strike did it was to help mine understand the issues at stake. An one of the results is that miners wi be voting at this conference in suj port of Black Sections as one of th steps towards securing the rights ( black people in this society.
Inner city difficulties and pr blems that we've seen are not tr result of some mindless hooligan The only hooligans that have bee involved are the para-militar police force. In relation to th chairman's opening remarks (th
n photographers would seeking pictures of Scargill together with Sinn Fein councillor Tommy Carroll) I'll tell you why the para-military police force is able to walk apparently unheeded and unhindered anywhere it wants in Britain. It is because we stood by and allowed it to happen in the north of Ireland.
The National Union of Mineworkers learnt a lot of lessons. I've been reading lots of books that have been published about the miners' strike — about what we did wrong. We've seen academics pontificating by the score about why the miners did this or didn't do that. And I was told by a colleague of mine - she's a parliamentary candidate - that she attended a dinner not far from Hampstead and there were people like Eric Hobsbawm pontificating about the miners' strike: And he was saying that, you know, the problem with the miners' strike was that they should never have done it at the time they did.
Why is it that people with firstclass honours degrees, who can see the struggle of the Chartists and the Tolpuddle martyrs clarity, fail to see the struggle of the miners right before their eyes with any clarity at all?
The destabilisation of government was not in spite of but because of the miners' £12,000 million it cost them, as they sought to destroy the NUM.
Many people are, of course, looking forward to Wednesday's debate on nuclear power. You'll have seen people like Gavin Laird going on television and say 'if you think we're going to stand by while workers in our industry are attacked, then you've got another think coming'. I wish he'd said the same thing during the miners strike.
It's been suggested in the Guardian that there's been some kind of deal on the question of nuclear power. Well, I'm the mover of the composite and I'm not aware of it! What's really happened is that the Labour leadership on the NEC found out that they were going to lose and that's why there has been a decision to support, with reservations, composite 63 on this.
Let me make it absolutely clear: as far as the mover, the seconder, and the 252 organisations supporting that composite are concerned there are no reservations in our support for it.
It's been suggested that we're arguing for destroying jobs. This is absurd. We want nuclear industry to be given the opportunity to work for people's real needs instead of for death and destruction.
If you power stations you create - with the establishment of coal-fired stations - 25 per cent more jobs. We also by that put thousands of people to work building new coal-fired stations and developing alternative power sources such as wind, wave, tide, geothermal and solar energy.
Why can't we positively to the British people: 'the Labour Party will put an end to nuclear power'? If this Party does what it should after Wednesday's debate. If it goes out and says 'we're pledged power, we are for the policy of alternative energy resources, we're for coal-fired generation, above all else we're for an end to a programme that threatens the lives of youngsters in this country and of generations yet unborn,' if we do that then we'll win a massive victory at the next general election. But equivocation will not only lose us votes, it'll lose us the election as well.
There are people who say 'look how many accidents you've got in coal mining, look how few we've got in the nuclear industry. I answer 'I don't know how many accidents you've got in nuclear power. I don't know because they don't tell you. And if they did give the official believe them! But I do know about the hundreds and hundreds of people who have died and are dying today in uranium mines in Namibia. And I do know about the 300,000 who will die as the result of Chernobyl. with this Kevin Scally - witch hunted If we look at international questions, there has been a mining disaster in hundreds of people have been affected. Nearly two hundred have been killed. This rotten corrupt system, not content with slaughtering black people on the streets and in the villages and in the townships, people in the close down nuclear refused to allow Union of Mineworkers of Britain to send our mining engineer to help the NUM in South Africa. That's the kind of regime that you're dealing with! That's the kind of system that Thatcher and her government are wanting to prop up.
begin to say this society began to realise that place under this government. why isn't there a ready understanding that for sanctions to be applied you don't need to have a to stop nuclear government decision? You have it in your power to take sanctions, to impose them yourselves. It can be done. At least I tried to do it.
sion scheme Mick McGahey, and I were removed because we refused to allow money from British miners' pension scheme to be invested in South Africa. I'm removed me, if that's the price I had to pay.
We're up February. I got sacked in July 1984 for refusing to invest monies from the mineworkers abroad. And in February next year, McGahey, Heathfield and Scargill are being sued for a million pounds figures I wouldn't for taking the abroad.
it so that some people like the sequestrator couldn't get hold of it. Never!
press went to our door and said to Ann (Scargill) 'Did you know that they're suing Heathfield million pounds? She said 'how much?' They said 'a million'. She said 'what, a million a piece?' They altogether! "Oh' she said I was getting worried!' Comrades, this ference has got to look issues. Not only the question of unemployment; not only the question of rebuilding a savaged and embattled question of beginning to rebuild basic industry in Britain, and all the associated policies. It's got to go much wider than that. It's got to have a political perspective one that's, in my view, totally different from what we've seen for a long time.
Many there are those in our movement who want to see consensus. Well, I believe in socialism, not consensus. And I think it's time that people in our party they stand on the question of consensus politics. Bernadette McAliskey and Sinn Fein councillor Tommy Carroll the National Led. They It's time that working people in sanctions are not going to take But tain down-hearted we understand the As trustees of the miners pensystem?
Peter Heathfield, pleased that they for trial pension scheme NUM's money It's been suggested that we did Those friends of ours in the McGahey, Peter Arthur for million week's conat the not only the terms, ficulties, infinitessimally parison.
society.
There are those in our party, should say asserted exactly where nuclear British policy, If working people in Nicaragua had waited for consensus they'd have never achieved a victory. If people in Vietnam had waited for ty. consensus it wouldn't have workput forward revolutionary politics in order to win the advancement for their class.
It's time that our movement understood this basic lesson, the basic principle that it's socialist policies that are going to win in BriYou know, chairman, in our movement we seem to be a little bit when we get setbacks. What on earth for? Don't ing - even if the academics don't — the nature of struggle, the nature of the I'm not down-hearted. I know we're on a winning trail. I know that in my party and my movement, a socialist policy will emerge from what we're seeing at the present time. Every single time that I feel at all in doubt, all I have to do is to look at the history of our movement and look at what hapDianne Abbott - Black Section got NUM support pened in real terms to the Chartists, to the Tolpuddle martyrs and, yes in recent times, to members of the National Union of Mineworkers. And when you look at it in those our problems, or our difor our set-backs, appear small by comWe're talking about a better We shouldn't hide the vi- dustry. sion of a better Britain. We should talk about a vision splendid. We should talk about a society where the means of production, distribu- no tion and exchange are taken into the hands of working people. We without question, without equivocation, that all the firms that have been denationalised will be renationalised on the election of a Labour government. Socialist Action 10 Oct 1986 Above all else will be a policy for peace. It will be a policy that says 'an end to US bases', 'an end nuclear weapons', "unilateral disarmament withdrawal from NATO'. There can be no question of equivocation on that central objective.
We owe it to ourselves to look in terms of a better vision. We owe it to ourselves to put forward to the people an alternative policy that means something, that's different radical compared to the Tories, the SDP and the Liberals. We don't want something similar. We want a socialist approach, of defiance to this government and what was envisaged by the creators of our movement.
Let every single member of this tonight reaffirm that don't want witch-hunts in this parExpulsions witch-hunts may be for the colleagues at the back today (Khan and Scally) -but it'll be for you tomorrow. It's not all that long ago that they expelled the Communist Party of Great Britain from the Labour Party. I think that was wrong.
If there's one lesson that our party and the working class have got to learn, it's that we need unity, not disunity or splits and divisions. And you don't get unity by expellpeople who sincerely fighting for a socialist policy.
I ask that this party and, yes this rally, go from this rally tonight and begin to campaign as hard as the right-wing movement in our Party. Begin to campaign to win policies inside the trade movement. Begin to campaign to win a bigger say for the CLPs in the Above all else, if you seriously mean what you say, then translate into action the policy decisions of this party. Let no spokesman, let no spokeswoman, 'interpret' what we mean. This party conference must decide the policy as we go to the next election.
We need to go to the electorate on a policy of full employment, a policy of reintroducing into this country vision hope, to regenerate Britain's battered inWe want an end to anti-trade union legislation. We want it wiping off the statute book. We want fudge, no reintroduction of legislation in another form like 1969 with In Place of Strife.
If we do all this I'm confident that we shall no only win the next general election, we shall win it not on the basis of consensus but on the basis of socialism.
Socialist Action 10 Oct 1986 ANDA like warts on a face. In reality, the naMarc Wadsworth speaking at the 1985 Alliance for Socialism conference ternational reality. And while what