We want jobs not promises demand from dockers' rally

DOCKERS do not want promises of jobs. They want guarantees, Bernie Steer, stewards' leader from the Royal Group of docks, said yesterday.

He told a mass rally of London dockers at Tower Hill that they could be facing 'the Waterloo' of the docks But the dockers were not going to play Napolean. If anyone was going to lose it would be the employers.

The rally applauded Steer, Vic Turner and the other three Kid gloves come off in Ulster THE KID-GLOVE technique having failed, the Tory government is now preparing to administer a heavy blow to the IRA in Ulster.

The 4,000 extra troops ordered to Northern Ireland bring the total number of infantry units there to 27—five more than are normally kept in the whole of Britain.

All the indications are that the Tory government has given the go-ahead for a major search-anddestroy offensive against the IRA Londonderry's Bogside and Creggan areas along the lines The Lenadoon operation - 700 soldiers 'saturated' small Catholic district of Belfast.

Since the end of the 14-day June truce, the IRA Provisionals have intensified their campaign with new and heavier weapons.

With industrial unrest escalating on the home front, the Tories pressed home their 'peace' initiative to the last.

Having induced the Social Democratic and Labour Party leaders to swallow their peace bait, secret Labour and Tory talks were held with Provo leaders aimed at persuading them to lay down their arms and come to the conference table.

Both failed. Neither could offer the IRA anything but promises and as Belfast commander Seamus Twomey acidly observed: *Mr Whitelaw had promised So much to everybody he had no. thing left to give.

In point of fact the Tory cupboard had been empty from the start.

Heath and Ulster Secretary Whitelaw knew very well that all they were really asking was that Ulster's insoluble problems should be discussed rather than fought over.

Backbench Tories, the Unionist lobby at Westminster and Protestant extremist organizations further ensured that concessions to the IRA were minimal.

The Provo leaders stuck to their guns and insisted on the release of all internees, the withdrawal of British troops to barracks, steps to deal with the Protestant UDA and recognition of Ireland's right to deal with her own problems.

The RAF flew them home to Ulster necessarily empty-handed and the shooting war was called on again with renewed intensity.

Ulster's crisis is the crisis of capitalism generally. The talks with the Provos foundered the insolubility of this crisis and nothing else.

If the Tories could solve the problems of unemployment, low wages, high rents, slum housing and inflation in Ulster, they could solve them throughout Britain.

But they cannot. The overt BY DAY dockers released from Pentonville prison by the National Industrial Relations Court on Tony Merrick, one of the five, had a simple but telling message for his fellow workers: 'Pentonville prison, Caledonian Road, London. Cell Block A—Cell 38-39 are empty. Thank you.' Derek Watkins, another of the jailed men, told the rally that when they heard the demonstrators outside the jail shouting for them it was 'wonderful, wonderful.

Bernie Steer said that the docks' stewards were not opposed to the technological revolution in the industry, but to the misuse of wielding of the Tory club in Northern Ireland by the military is only one step removed from the policy being implemented against the working class in Britain through the agency of the anti-union laws and the National Industrial Relations Court.

As yet the Ulster working class is faced with no alternative to the sectarian petty-bourgeois and reformist leadership of the IRA and the UDA.

What has always been required was and is a party based on genuine es which one was perspectives which would have allowed Catholic and Protestant workers to unite in a class offensive against the masters of capital on both sides of the Irish Sea and both sides of the border.

With the failure of their peace initiative, the Tories are now faced with huge new troop commitments to the province-so substantial that three of the seven extra units have had to be brought back from Germany.

Meanwhile, as they continue to get inextricably bogged down .5. Ulster, working-class tempers in Britain are rising fast-so fast that the prospect of a General Strike has never been closer since 1926 and the national dock strike alone poses the need for a declaration of a state of emergency with all its repercussions.

The jailing of the five dockers not only concentrated the attention of the working class on the Industrial Relations Act, but on to the need to throw out the Tories once and for all.

The despatch of more troops to Ulster discloses yet again the grass-roots bankruptcy of Tory policies in the teeth of deepening recession on the one hand and a working-class offensive of unprecedented militancy on the other.

The Tories are in a corner. But like all trapped animals they are going to hit out mercilessly —in Ireland and at home.

The Tory government can and nust be forced to resign. The only prop that holds the whole rotten edifice of Tory power in office is the treacherous collaboration of the Labour Party leaders.

Wilson wholeheartedly backs Tory policy in Ulster and only on Wednesday he described the Jones-Aldington report which would lead to massive sackings in dockland as a 'first-class' set of proposals.

There is oniy one way to end unemployment and inflation in Ulster and in Britain. That is to force this Tory government to resign and elect a Labour government which must be forced to carry out socialist policies. MAUDE new developments put men out of work.

'We don't want promises, we want guarantees' he said in reference to the jones-Aidington report rejected by docks delegates on Thursday.

Dockers had accepted what they had been told about the last inquiry into the industry conducted by Lord Devlin, that it would solve all the evils of the docks. But they now found themselves with 20,000 men less than when the report was published.

The employers said in the Jones-Aldington report that they would take all the men out of the unattached pool.

That was what the dockers wanted, Steer said, but they had heard similar promises in the past. 'We don't doubt the sincerity of our negotiators, but we do doubt on past record the honesty of certain employers.' He told the employers that if they were serious in what they said about safeguards, it was easy to convince the dockers. They should take their shares out unregistered labour depots and send the work back into the docks.

Vic Turner, chairman of the Royal Group stewards, called called for constant picketing of unregistered ports which were still working.

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