Devey: 'An unprincipled sell-out'-Yorks CP secretary

ning body was under dis cussion between leading port employers and the Ministry of Transport by mid-July of last within a month of/ear, Tory election victory. 2 BY SEPTEMBER, T&GWU leaders were meeting the employers to discuss their plans-- on the understanding that nothing would be said about them until Phase Two of Lord Devlin's docks "modernization' scheme was well established.

3 PORT EMPLOYERS came away from a LiverTO ACCEPT such an offer was an unprincipled sell-out which threatens the position of every militant shop steward This was the public condemnation made on Thursday Party secretary Howard Hill the £3,000 pay-off to Batchelor's convenor Terry Devey on December 16.

Hill's correct statement presents the Communist Party's Executive this weekend with its greatest crisis since the ETU ballot-rigging scandal.

They know, as everyone else knows, that this 'unprincipled sell-out' was the direct responsibility of leading CP members and especially of George Caborn, Sheffield fulltime AUEW secretary, who negotiated for the union in the dispute.

He called in the Department of Employment and, according to them, it was the union side which suggested the cash payment as a solution.

The Yorkshire and Sheffield committees and full-time secretaries of the CP were in touch with the strike throughout.

•The AUEW district committee is dominated by the Party and accepted Caborn's recommendations the night before the decision to accept the payment (December 15).

Stalinism's responsibility is inescapable. This affair marks the biggest crisis in the CP's industrial work since the infamous ETU ballot-rigging investigations, which resulted in the installation of the rightE1,250 Jan stands at THIS weekend is the time to go all out for the January Appeal Fund. All our resources must • be turned towards the biggest political campaign since the start of Palace Rally.

Everywhere, postmen, dockers, miners, transport workers, in growing numbers, are supporting the demand of the Tory government resign.

Help us collect the extra £1,000 this month to produce Pilkington products by the national docks shop stewards' committee - believed to be meeting next Wednesday.

A meeting of 200 dockers on Hull's Albert dock yesterday morning were urged by local Transport and General

wing leadership of Cannon and Chapple.

This time the issues of principle involved are out in the open for everyone to see, despite CP eforts to brush the matter aside.

CP Industrial Organizer Bert Ramelson has remained silent to this very day.

Hill's denunciation of the sell-out appeared as part of a statement by him and Barry Bracken, Sheffield and Rotherham CP secretary.

This statement was printed in full in the Sheffield Tory 'Star', but not a word of it has appeared in the Communist Party's 'Morning Star'! Will the Executive endorse Hill's statement? Or will they try to evade it?

The settlement was a sellout! It does endanger every militant shop steward!

But from that, certain conclusions must immediately be drawn: all the CP members responsible for the sell-out, for 'threatening the position of every militant shop steward in Britain', must surely come up for discipline by the Party!

Decide quickly

The Executive must decide - and quickly — what to do about George Caborn, 20 years in the Party, once on its Executive. Is his part in the sell-out to be passed over in silence. Or will Howard Hill's statement be acted on?

Every CP member who voted on the AUEW district committee on December 15 in support of Caborn comes up for question in exactly the same way.

Devey himself says that Bracken advised him to accept the strike committee's decision, which was tantamount to giving him a formula for accepting the money.

What is the Party going to do with Bracken, then ?

The Tories and employers are driving ahead to destroy the trade unions, and a Party organizer denounces a settlement by his own members as an unprincipled sell-out which endangers every militant shop steward in Britain !

Opportunist

Devey certainly behaved like a thorough political opportunist, but he was the product of 15 years in the Party, and the was the work Caborn and the Party members on the district committee as well as of Devey himself.

Much more is involved.

The implications of Hill's correct denunciation of the sell-out are that the whole opportunist course of the Party's work, since even long before the ETU scandal, must be exposed as the inevitable outcome of Stalinism's 'peaceful road to socialism'.

Hill and Bracken do not draw these conclusions, trying instead to pin everything on