March 5 betrayal

Workers Press no. 1003, 21 February 1973 · scan pages 13, 14

Topics: Communist Party and Stalinism, Trade union leaders and the TUC, Engineering

Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: headlines and words can be misread, and a caption or advert can run into the text. For anything you quote, read the scan.

THE COMMUNIST Party has joined with right-wing reformists in consistent preparation of the ground cynical betrayal by the TUC leaders on March 5.

Within days of the gas workers starting their official industrial action against the Tory pay laws, evidence of this preparation has emerged very clearly.

One example already dealt with by Workers Press occurred at the national Ford stewards' meeting in Coventry on Sunday. On Monday, a London meeting of shop stewards' committee secretaries and chairmen from the engineering unions completely vindicated our warnings about the Coventry events.

The London meeting called on the TUC to unite the trade union movement behind workers fighting the pay laws, 'even to the extent of strike action'.

Programme

Called by the No 8 district of the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions, it endorsed an action programme drawn up by the CSEU district committee.

This includes a mass lobby of the March 5 TUC, support for the March 31 conference of the Liaison Committee for Defence of Trade Unions and a one-day stoppage on May I.

But as Workers Press reported yesterday, the platform failed to put to the meeting a motion calling on the TUC to mobilize an indefinite General Strike to force the Tories to resign.

A similar motion was also kept from being voted on at Sunday's Coventry meeting. On both occasions the Communist Party's Morning Star' has kept absolutely silent about these motions and their fate.

ing for Cone Strike sens i ree.

Can eatene —a slogan which leaves the gas, hospital, railway and Ford workers isolated and which the Stalinists know can arouse no enthusiastic support in the working. class.

In other words, by the most engaged in a strategy of trying to confine workers to the politics of defeat.

Editorial Yet at the same time, yesterday's 'Star' declared editorially that 'Heath is moving towards fascism'. The working people, the paper, went on, must put a stop to this.

If the 'Star' is serious about this analysis, why does it not declare the resolution for national day of action', passed at Coventry, totally inadequate?

Why does it not tell the London engineering stewards that they are dangerously marking time?

The reason is that the Communist Party is hand-in-glove with the reformists and the TUC leadership in wanting to hand the working class, beheaded, on a plate to the Tories.

Behind the •left'-sounding hrases in yesterday's 'Star' editorial about 'defeating Heath's policies' (not forcing the Tories out of office), counter-revolutionary Stalinism • remains as treacherous as ever.

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