Heffer tries to justify six years

the self-styled 'revolutionary reformist' • Liverpool Walton, initiated a 'great 'Perhaps Raymond Challinor does not accept these as reforms and considers them of no importance. His argument is really dangerous because it is a recipe for doing nothing until the "revolution" comes.' So, says Heffer with a routine sneer at the idea of revolution (it's all right on the Continent, but it's not British) reformism did work after all.

We may only be able to offer this rag-bag of so-called reforms. But we'd never have got them if it hadn't been for the 'realist' 'left' MPs.

This is humbug.

Heffer is simply covering up in the crudest manner for Wilson's treachery. The balance sheet of Wilson's government is a legacy of betrayal which now leaves the basic working-class organizations exposed to the most dangerous Tory threat they have ever faced. And Heffer claims Wilson and his government were doing good.

But there is worse to come.

Heffer now has to cover his left flank as well. So he boasts of his record of opposition to Wilson:

I spoke at the May Day Rally in 1969 in Liverpool organized by the Trades Council, which was in fact a one-day strike against the proposed legislation.' Yes you did, Mr Heffer. You finally opposed the anti-union laws-four years after Wilson and Castle began to prepare to bring them in, four years during which the Socialist Labour League and Young Socialists demanded the 'left' fight Wilson's policies, only to be ridiculed and rebuffed in numerous Westminster lobbies.

Abstention

The working class finally forced your ban and or are led abstention over crucial questions. • Triden MPs Supported the MPs supported the seamen' in the 1966 strike. This is an outright lie.

When Harold Wilson brought forward his emergency powers to break the seamen's strike, not a single Labour MP voted against. That was how Heffer and the "Tribune'-ites 'supported' the seamen.

As Heffer correctly comments:

'Such actions can be multiplied by the score.' Indeed they can.

After this rather pathetic attempt to fake up a new set of left credentials, Heffer goes on to defend another aspect of the "Tribune' group's policyand in the process to woo the In a passage which might well have been lifted bodily from the 'British Road to Socialism' he says:

'It is clear that the attacks on capitalism ... cannot and should not be limited to parliamentary action, but neither should parliamentary action be scorned as of little importance.' We have seen just what Heffer construes as 'opposition' to government noliev-his criteria send to NATIONAL LABOUR LEAGUE, LONDON, SW4.

If you think like Heffer that occasional abstention adds up to opposition, you are at liberty to believe him when he claims to have opposed the Wilson government on a whole range of issues. But you don't have to, because he gives himself away at the end.

It is true that Harold Wilson was not opposed for the leadership of the Parliamentary Labour Party immediately following the General Election, but the • left put forward Michael Foot for Deputy Leader and a number of MPs in the "Tribune" group stood for the Shadow Cabinet?

So, Heffer admits, even after the June 18 debacle, the "Tribune'-ites still did nothing to remove Wilson. Indeed they supported him continuing as Leader, since they advanced no alternative.

Hostile And Foot, their candidate for Deputy Leader, was so hostile to Wilson that immediately after the voting he joined his Shadow Cabinet as Minister of Power. According to Heffer, this where the real struggle is.

This sequence of events a hollow ring to 'THEY TOLD us the strike would last till next year. We're going to see Christmas on these picket lines, but we're fighting for a purpose'. These words from a picket at a Chevrolet plant in Michigan typity the nghting spirit of the third of a million strikers at the General Motors factories throughout the US and Canada.

Nor are the strikers daunted by the long queues for strike pay—$30 a week for a single man and $40 for those with families.

The strikers all know that the union's mammoth $120 million fighting fund will be exhausted in under two months' time.

In a feeble echo of his membership's willingness to carry right on past this point, United Auto Workers' leader Leonard Woodcock said: 'We have to be prepared to fight, as we used to do, in an old-fashioned way. A union with money is a bureaucracy. A union without money is a crusade.' Though Woodcock, of course, hopes to find some way of sliding out of the fight long before it reaches such a stage. The intransigence of General Motors' management is already causing thousands of workers in component suppliers to be laid off.

At the A. O. Smith Corporation — a Milwaukee car frames manufacturer — 3,000 of the 5,500 labour force have been laid off.

And this is only one of the 39,000 firms that sell goods or services to General Motors— the world's largest manufacturer.

The near bankrupt Penn Central railway has begun laying off workers who usually handle General Motors products.

By the end of a month a million men could be laid off. The General Motors' strike is the enormously powerful spearhead of the US workers' In standing for these positions, we were not standing in the abstract, but on the basis of policies which we have been and are advocating, which are clearly socialist in context and vitally different to those advanced by those who have held cabinet jobs.

"To suggest that there is no debate and that we are not seeking new policies is really to deny the facts,' he adds, protesting a good deal too much.

'The truth is, he sums up, 'that the contribution made by left-wing MPs, left-wing trade unionists and constituency party members has been much more positive for socialism than that of the small groups or even comrades like John Saville.

'One is really entitled to ask what they were really doing during the last six years.

Writing articles, pamphlets or books from the comfortable chairs of university and newspaper offices is useful and important work,' he adds patronizingly, 'but it can be somewhat "ivory towerish" and I suspect this has too often been the case?

Whereas lounging on the leather government benches of the House of Commons is presumably the highest level of socialist struggle.

wages offensive now that the ball has been passed on by the Teamsters, after winning their $1.65-an-hour increase.

But the union bureaucracy emasculates this strength—by going for the smallest demands that it thinks could be sold to the rank and file and by restricting action to only one of the Big Three car manufacturers.

Events at the General Motors' Fremont plant in California are typical of the struggle strikers are having to wage against the UAW bureaucracy.

Union officials failed to organize pickets at the plant gates for the midnight strike deadline on September 18.

Fremont men had to take the initiative to prevent management moving newly completed trucks from the plant.

The viciousness of the union bureaucracy towards the rank and file and especially one that looks like putting the leadership on the spot was soon to be exposed at Fremont.

As the pickets congregated in the street, after setting light to a garbage truck which was leaving the plant, two police cars and an ambulance approached.

The cars, CHEFFER Heffer's offensively patronizing gibes are intended to cover the fact that the 'Tribune'-ites then and now do not intend to fight Wilson and will put up no fight for socialist policies.

He writes 'more in sorrow than in anger' of 'the comrades in the smaller groups' .:. 'the probability of them ending up in total disillusionment which will take them out of socialist politics entirely.

Pertinence Yet in the very next paragraph he admits the pertinence of the question 'why did the so-called left, after getting into a position of power and influence in the prins pisngeis ae min elangyin -stasax,paa saigağr n...rr "sj-en Faren neon asa sire inta, aspene er roren snurretingeTHIS PLAI TIMES PLAM " STRIKE! ON sirens operating, passed through without incident.

But the ambulance giving no warning ploughed into a worker after the crowds had closed up as the men walked towards their hall.

Infuriated workers turned on the driver of the ambulance which had carried the man about ten feet.

Yet the next day the UAW Local 1364 Shop Chairman John Herrera told reporters that 'both the union leadership and the Fremont police' had investigated the incident and found that Berkeley rabble rousers' were the cause of it.

Behind this attack is the fear of those such as Herrera that the rank and file will break free from their control.

The demands coming up from the ranks are for committing union leaders to fighting for a $1.65-an-hour increase, and for shutting down all—not just one—of the motor manufacturers.

Rank-and-file workers at Fremont have formed the United Action Caucus to fight for these demands.

Such was the resistance of Herrera and company to being called to account that they organized 70 'goons' armed Labour Party, end policies that socialist?' Heffer cannot bring himself to say that Wilson, Castle and he rest of the so-called 'left', the "Tribune' group included, followed - and follow - policies which are not only 'less than socialist, but pro-capitalist to the core.

And his answer to the question is even more evasive.

"Much of the old left was He says. But he has already made it clear he considers the life of a 'left' MP infinitely superior to academics, writers and the 'comrades in the smaller groups', not to mention the working class. 1!.1 142 STRIK Local 174 UAW with baseball bats to force the calling off of a rally organized by the Caucus.

These bureaucrats have gone as far as to request the Fremont police—who are giving ample co-operation-to arrest anyone giving out leaflets to carworkers in the street next to the plant.

Members of the Trotskyist Workers League and other organizations have been threatened with arrest when leafleting and ordered to leave the area.

The Caucus is fighting to raise the central questions posed by the strike; warning against government intervention, exposing the betrayals of the Woodcock leadership and raising the call for a labour party and a break from the two capitalist parties.

The Caucus's refusal to compromise on the wages issue puts real fear into the likes of Herrera:

•... Woodcock must not sit down at the table and bargain on these wages issues because to "compromise" on these reasonable wage demands would be a sell-out and the ranks would have to turn thumbs down on this type of offer.

by John SPENCER He adds that:

'The second and more fundamental reason is they abandoned their basic socialist ideas. This was surely not done consciously, but they slid into such a position.' But if the 'old left' slid that way, which way are their latest replacements sliding? sciously or unconsciodity in the same direction?

Heffer himself proudly admits that his sojourn on the parliamentary benches has considerably mellowed his original outlook.

And his solutions are even more hackneyed and trite.

"This can only be avoided by the rank and file being involved in the control of the party . • • In future the Parliamentary Labour Party must be kept under greater control by the party conference.' Vestige But the party leaders long emancipated themselves slightest vestige of cc ntrol conference.

As far as the party le concerned, conference MONDAY night's 'World in Action' programme about the United States Army in Vietnam showed pretty convincingly that the Gls, especially in the infantry where the 'grunts' bear the brunt of the fighting and the casualties, no longer want to fight for Nixon or for capitalism.

They may not want to die for Nixon, but they certainly show courage in fighting their biggest battles - against the Army's top brass and its represSive apparatus.

Disaffection among GIs has honeycombed the Army with hundreds of semi-clandestine organizations, many producing cyclostyled or offset newspapers exposing infringements of rights, racialism by the officers, and harrassment of militants.

The underground newspapers take advantage of the GI's rights under article 381-135 of the military code, which states that 'Unit commanders shall further insure that there is no interference with the US Mail and that every individual under his command has the right to read and retain commercial publications for his own use'.

At least that's what the law says, though papers like "The Next Step . . • published among US soldiers in Germany find it prudent to add a warning:

'You may have gotten this paper from a German you didn't know; it may have been slipped under your door; or you may have found it simply lying somewhere. This is called "covering are fit only for the waste-paper bin.

How does Heffer propose to change this?

All he can say is:

"This is a question which has been long debated in the party and many attempts have been made to get the balance right.' So for Hetter, in any case, it is simply a question of 'balancing' the requirements of the entrenched bureaucracy against rank-and-file demands.

This relationship, he says, 'is not yet satisfactory'. Heffer not only suffers from the illusion that he can reform capitalism, but hopes also to reform the Labour bureaucracy.

His article is nothing more than an apology for Wilson and bankrupt reformism.

He and his "Tribune'-ite allies will do nothing to fight for socialist policies, but they will do all they can to obstruct the building a revolutionary leadership inside the working class. Such a leadership can only be built in the sharpest conflict with 'lefts' in the "Tribune' group.

GIs one's ass". We're damned sure the brass is not going to be too pleased by "The Next Step.. "9 and judging from military policies in the past on such things, we must take measures and precautions to avoid their unnecessary meddling.' "The Next Step . .. carries reports on the W Virginia disabled miners' strike, on black strikers in the South, on racialism in the Army and Nixon's investigation team, on the Soledad three, who face death in the California state gas chamber. Its editorial comment quite openly takes the line that 'the enemy is at home.

"The struggle of the working people, it says, 'is important to the working class in uniform be enlisted men because they are most enlisted men returning to the working force on the outside ... to jobs that are dwindling in number, to paychecks that won't stretch, to debts, bills and mortgages up to their necks. They'll begin to struggle because they have to...

'At home when people challenge the very roots of the problem the troops are called out—in the ghetto for instance, like the 10lst Abn in Detroit. Troops are also used against workers, to break strikes.

It happened in 1941 against aviation workers in California, in 1948 against meatpackers in Minnesota, and in 1970 against postal workers in New York.

•And it will happen again... Only the collective might of the American working people, black and white, in uniform and out, can ensure that the military is withdrawn from every country in disbanded the world, and Present command in the service of the united working people to wrest control of society from its present rulers ...

To give that struggle, in the military and at home, an independent form and a determined leadership-that is the next step!'