at the sharp against the Black community. We are committed ing to protect munity. THE Labour Party Black Section is appalled in police violence The list of maimings and killings has been added to in the case of Trevor Monerville and with the death of Clinton MeCurbin in Wolverhampton. Raids on our community, like the ones in Brixton, Handsworth and St Pauls based on the racist pretext of 'looking for drugs', are an attempt to criminalise Black people.
to throwing our full weight behind campaigns for justice in the face of these police attacks. If the state and its bully-boys in blue are incapable or unwillus then we mus defend ourselves by whatever means necessary. The police have proved that they are not even accountable to their Tory masters. We reaffirm our demand that they must be placed under the democratic control of the whole comSocialist Action 6 March 1987 underestimated the political threat to the labour
political wilderness ... Their influence on events will be explaining how serious is the political against it so seriously.
TO UNDERSTAND why the SDP and the Alliance is such a deadly political threat to Labour, and why it is capable of gaining such enormous victories as the Greenwich by-election certain historical facts about the British labour movement must be grasped.
Above all it must be understood that anti-Toryism, not anything else, has always been the powerful dynamic of the workers movement.
The fight against successive Tory governments went on when the British working class movement was Creder at of the revolution. During the crisis of British society in the late 1820s and early 1830s the working class found itself fighting against the Tories to secure the first extension of the right to vote. After a brief move to class independence during Chartism bulk of the IN THE six years since the Social Democratic Party was formed, the Labour Party and most of the left has greatly movement posed by the SDP-Liberal Alliance. When Jenkins, Owen, Williams, and Rogers left the Labour Party to form the SDP in 1981 Michael Foot, then Labour Party leader, simply declared: 'those who leave us will become lonely figures in the virtually nil.' Furthermore the Labour Party has carried out no sustained campaign against the Alliance. Kinnock rejected even the advice of his own campaign manager, Robin Cook, who tried unsuccessfully to persuade the party leadership to take up a central campaign against the Alliance. Tony Banks, writing in London Labour Briefing when the SDP was formed argued: "The SDP is essentially a party created from the top downwards and without resorting to force there is no recent example of parties constructed in this way surviving for any length of time.? Socialist Action has been almost alone in threat to Labour posed by the Alliance. After Greenwich surely the left, and the Labour Party, must now realise just how central is the question of the SDP and the Alliance JOHN ROSS looks at the Alliance dagger pointed at Labour's heart — and why militants in the labour movement must take the fight crucial most being Shrench and why the right NATIONAL SE US 2310