The Newsletter, vol. 2 no. 62

T Brighton last year Nye Bevan, assuming the ‘statesman’ role which never fails to win him the praise Act the capitalist Press, wailed that the Norwood resolution on the H-bomb would leave a future Labour foreign secretary naked at international. conferences. -Alas for Bevan! The rank and file of the party does not appear td share his horror of such ‘nakedness’. Nearly one in four of the resolutions submitted for the Scarborough conference (September 29 to. October 3)

are in favour of Britain’s unilaterally renouncing THEY STRUCK AGAINST INTERVENTION nuclear weapons.

In face of this overwheming demand, which un- BUILDING WORKERS’ UNANIMOUS PROTEST doubtedly represents the views of the majority of British AT MIDDLE-EAST AGGRESSION working men and women, Bevan and the national exeBuILpING workers on the Petro-chemicals site at Flixton cutive will have to think again on this issue.

(Manchester) voted unanimously to stop work for an Perhaps they” will come to the conclusion that a- genuine hour and a half in protest against the British and socialist foreign policy is, after all, the best garment they can American intervention in the middle East. Fifty copies wear when they enter the conference chamber.

of THE NEWSLETTER are sold on this site each week.

Electric effect on workers Ellsewhere in Lancashire and Yorkshire the Labour moveIt might not: impress the representatives of other govern- ment has been exceedingly active in protesting against im‘ments—but it would have an. electric effect on the workers perialist aggression.

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and oppressed peoples of the world. Why not try it, Nye? Labour Party members and supporters in SALFORD Jt is only natural that the growth of unemployment and marched through the main streets carrying posters saying ‘No war for oil’, ‘Not a penny, not a life for oil kings’, ‘Arabs the not-too-distant threat of an economic slump should be reflected in a number of -resolutions.

Many of these put forward an expansion.in east-west trade as a solution to this problem. - ON OTHER PAGES While increased trade between this country and the noncapitalist. world is to be welcomed, it is an illusion to -believe ROBBERS AT THE SUMMIT "192 that in this way capitalism could overcome. the conditions INDUSTRY and ECONOMICS _ which lead to large-scale unemployment and economic depres:

NHS: THE NEXT TEN YEARS sion.

‘ LEARNING TO LIVE’

Unemployment is a necessity for capitalism as a means of . THE DEBATE ON DE GAULLE -196 depressing the standards of the workers and increasing the rate of Profit. CONSTANT READER LETTERS Dangerous i in every way A similar illusion on the nature and causes of unemployment A is reflected in the resolution from the Meridan Constituency have right to self-rule’ and ‘Withdraw troops from middle Labour Party. This reads:

‘This Conference agrees that sieps should be taken te East’. .

The march followed an open-air meeting organized at ensure that coloured immigrants are fully aware of the thirty-six hours’ notice by East Salford Constituency Labour position in this country as to lack of suitable accommodaParty, with trade union and Labour. Party rank-and-file tion and the shortage of employment for coloured workers.’

speakers.

In every way this is a dangerous.resolution and one which should never have been allowed to appear on the agenda of a Miners and engineers protest Labour Party conference.

First of all, it refers only to coloured immigrants, who East Salford party has asked the national executive to oppose unambiguously the Anglo-American invasion and, together - certainly do not form the majority of immigrants to this with the Trades Union Congress, to organize opposition by country.

. ali available means. - Bradford (Manchester) pit branch of the National Union- ‘of Must be overwhelmingly rejected Mineworkers has called a public protest meeting at Chorlton Colour prejudice is something which should be-completely Town. Hall, MANCHESTER. foreign to every member of the Labour Party. Broughton (Salford) branch of the Amalgamated EngineerSecondly,, the number of people emigrating from Britain Wing Union ‘has asked the AEU executive to urge the TUC is considerably greater than the number of people coming — to call an emergency conference of affiliated unions to consider to this country to settle and work-here.

(Continued on back page) (Continued overleaf)

JN the Daily Worker of July 30, Councillor Barney

T HE massive concentration of troops and armour in Lebanon and Jordan goes on. How much more evidence is needed to prove that those who are asking the . workers to pin their hopes for world peace on a summit conference are either cynical fakers or blinded by illusions? The truth about summit conferences sounds harsh, distasteful, ‘dogmatic’ to those who admire the ‘master-strokes’ of Soviet diplomacy, or have forgotten that the cause of war is capitalism and the way to. end war is to abolish capitalism and replace it with. socialism. The truth about a summit conference is that it will be a gathering of robbers bargaining over the blood, freedom and happiness of the Arabs. Nothing but evit can come from this. It‘cannot bring peace, and it cannot solve any of the. problems of the middle-East peoples.

Consider Khrushchev’s latest overture to de Gaulle. The latter is an avowed militarist, a bitter enemy of republicanism, a sworn defender of French imperialist power and privilege, a ruthless executioner of the Arab people in Algeria. He represents. the forces of reaction and counter-revolution in France and Algeria, and nothing else. Yet this is one of the men who is to help decide the future of the Arab peoples in the middle East! How ean the revolutionary workers and peasants of Iraq look on these summit manoeuvres with anything but sus-. picion’ and. contempt? Having destroyed one dictator at home they are not going to accept another at the summit.

Recall the time of the Suez crisis. The situation was no less critical than it is now. Imperialism had suffered a grave blow; its prestige and power were challenged in such a way that the imperialists had no alternative but war. So they went to war. What happened? Imperialist aggression was checked, not by any summit conference, but by the combined action of the Arab workers and the British workers. If those who lead the Soviet Union were really Marxists they would arouse _ the international working class to impose peace in its own way, instead of lulling them to sleep with illusions about secret diplomacy and horse-deals. Khrushchev himself has recently revealed how when he met the Tory leaders in London in 1956 Eden told him that the Tory Government would go to war if British oil interests and supplies were affected by any disturbance in the middle East. Yet, instead of warning the British workers about the Tories’. intentions Khrushchev went on calling for a summit meeting; and so the policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’ led directly to the Suez war.

* The task of British Labour is not to push Macmillan to any summit, but to throw him and his Government ~ out altogether. No fostering of illusions,-but a vigorous fight for the withdrawal of all foreign troops from the ~ middle and near East. No confidence in robbers’ meetings for redivision of the loot. No faith in a gangsters’ ‘peace’ settlement at the expense of the Arab liberation movement. An energetic struggle by the whole Labour movement to bring the Tory Government crashing down, and to make Labour’s policy really socialist: this is the task of the hour.

PROTESTS (Continued from front page)

how the industrial strength of the movement can be used to force the withdrawal of British troops from the middle East.

In LEEDS, the shop stewards’ committee of the George Mann’s engineering factory has written to the Labour Party national executive calling for a campaign on Suez lines against the middle-East intervention.

Leeds City Labour Party has passed an emergency resolution condemning ‘the active support given by the British Tory Government to American aggression in Lebanon’.

Right of self-determination An emergency meeting of East Leeds Constituency Labour _ Party unanimously passed a resolution calling on the party -to wage an active national campaign, ‘on the lines of the anti-Suez campaign’, for the withdrawal of British troops AucustT 2, 1958 from Jordan and against any intervention in any part of the middle East by Britain or any other power’. The resolution went on: :

. ‘We consider that the middle-East policy of a Labour government should be based on the recognition of the right of self-determination of the Arab peoples as the only way fo secure peace and friendship and solve the economic problems of the area. :

. “We condemn the action of Mr George Brown, MP, in abstaining from the vote on this vital issue.’

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Forty-eight oversea students of Leeds University sent. this telegram to Hugh Gaitskell: ‘Urge you strongly oppose use of British troops in middle East.’

About forty oversea students protesting against the invasions took part in a march through the Leeds shopping . centre organized by the Council for Nuclear Disarmament. » NPP PSSSSS PSS SS SS SPS ISIS SDDS.

Borman, chairman of an ‘anti-vice committee’ which has been formed in the London borough of Stepney to combat street prostitution there, discusses the problem in these terms: ‘ We do believe that the authorities and police have got the powers to eliminate vice. The job of the committee is to exert pressure on them to use these powers effectively. We are advised by our legal experts that although the maximum penalty for prostitution is 40s., the provisions of the Justices of the Peace Act of 1361 empower a magistrate to require a prostitute to find sureties consisting of substantial sums over a given period to be of good behaviour. We are further advised that on one or two occasions this has been done. At present the general rule is a fine of 40s., which is often earned in as many. miniites or less.

In this way it would no longer be profitable to be a pros- : titute and they would have no place to operate from.

From a professed socialist, Marxist and communist _ these are truly astonishing words. For over a hundred years socialists have taught that prostitution is an inevitable product of capitalist social relationships, that it arises from poverty, exploitation, the inferior social position of women, the sham of the bourgeois family, the splitting, stunting and dehumanization of men and women im a class-divided society. . Socialists have the duty. of defending prostitutes from the howls of the Pharisees, whose aim is not to eliminate the buying and selling of sexual gratification—in private they are not infrequently among the buyers—-but to sweep the dirt under the carpet. The distinguishing feature of the Pharisee is his narrow provincialism, his parish pump morality. “Get rid of this evil in. my neighbourhood’ is "his refrain. So the ‘woman whom circumstances have made into a tart would, if these creatures had their way, find herself shuttled backwards and forwards across borough boundaries under the virtuous brooms of the vigilantes, the morality leaguers, the puritans who deny the act that brought them into the world.

A sooialist who joins the chorus of the Pharisees thereby abandons a fundamental socialist belief: that prostitution, along with many other activities repugnant to humanists, will not.disappear until class or caste privilege disappears. Meanwhile socialists, unless they are hypocrites, are bound to defend the right of the prostitute to ply her trade in a society where each must sell something—labour power, -works of art, the pen, the human. body—if he or she is to eat. Councillor Borman will have none of this; he wants the ‘authorities’ of the capitalist State to rake out of the historical dustbin powers granted almost six hundred years ago. Instead of looking forward to the socialist solution of these problems, he grubs about-in the grimy feudal past for a stick to beat the street-walkers with.

But there is another argument against Councillor. Borman’s ‘anti-vice campaign’. Stepney is a borough where people of many races—-English, Irish, Jews, Negroes and others—live together. There are elements that seek any pretext to whip up ill feeling between these communities. It is all too easy to arouse ignoble passions and prejudices. It is all too easy for. coloured people to be fastened on as scapegoats. Councillor Borman is in danger of finding himself in strange company. Instead of scratching at the ulcers of capitalism he should strive to eradicate. the system itself. Instead of attacking ‘vice’—notoriously definable, like ‘sin’, as other people’s pleasures—he should attack capitalism.

"TRE NEWSLETTER and its supperiers are Playing an active part in the campaign against British and American aggression in the middle East.

In London’s first demonstration, organized by mem' bers of the. Movement for Colonial Freedom and the Cemmittee for Direct Action against Nuclear Disarmament, a strong Newsletter contingent. took part.

Brian Behan, a member of the editorial board of The Newsletter, spoke from the platform.

Behan also addressed the meeting at Denison House organized by the Arab Students’ Union, along with John Hatch of the Labour Party Colonial Department and the Rey. R. W. Sorenson, Labour MP for Leyton.

Tv A. Newsletier contingent marched with the Arab students in their Friday morning demonstration to the Iraqi Embassy. The following week The Newsletter held a poster parade, along with members of the Arab Students’ Union, through the West End, followed by a meeting at Manette Street.

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‘THESE FATAL ACCIDENTS MUST CEASE’

By Our Indusirial Correspondent The Newsletter has also been holding tunch-hour meetings at building sites and other jobs.

Tv Although publication was to have been suspended for a two weeks’ holiday, a special broadsheet was produced on. July 19. Thousands of copies have been sold at demonsirations, in factories, on jobs and in loca! Labour Parties. : :

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Readers in. the London area who wou'd like to help the vital work of mobilizing the Labour movement * should get in touch with us at 180 Clapham High Street (telephone MACaulay 7029), or send a donation to. the development fund.

Our warmest thanks to R. Rosindill, of .Edmonton, for a splendid and generous donation of £10. came at a time when literally every penny we receive is important.

Thanks also to supporters in Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds for remembering their guarantees in good time, IVY READ é A SIGN OF STRENGTH

WHEN a truck of cement backed over foreman Michael Quigly, crushing the life from his body, this was the third fatal accident in three months on the ShellsMex site on London’s South Bank.

$ Since this accident. 1,500 workers have been.on strike. Their ; demand? Federation steward Hugh Cassidy told me: , ‘We consider it. time. that McAlpines appointed a fulltime safety officer from outside the job.’

When ‘the men asked. for a safety officer, he explained, ; - the firm told them that this job was being done by a Mr Gillespie.

Refused to meet men ‘We are against that,’ he said. ‘After all, Mr Gillespie was the safety officer at the time of the last fatal accident.

Bro. Cassidy and the chairman of the site committee, Bro. O’Hey, said they had been in touch with the British Safety This body’s. administrative officer had’ assured them that, -provided McAlpines were in agreement, his organization would be prepared to appoint an officer for the site.

But McAlpines have refused to meet the men on this, and are insisting on their own appointment, ;

Even if the American recession merely ‘bumps along the bottom’ in the next few months and does not take a further downward plunge, as it might, the backwash will still reach these shores. :

So far the balance of payments has been helped by falling commodity prices. So have business profits. But. both the _ American depression and the fall in incomes of oversea producers are likely to redound upon British exports later this year.

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Finally there is the perennial problem of speculation on sterling. Sterling is temporarily strong, but pressure always piles up in summer and early autumn.

Any lowering of interest rates to- fight the recession at . - home may feed this pressure by encouraging a flight of funds to other centres. And certainly Amory’s policy will be taken * abroad as a sign not of strength but of impending crisis.

[ RENTS TORY COUNCILLORS RUN THE GAUNTLET SEVERAL hundred tenants from all over Wandsworth demonstrated outside the last. Borough Council meeting, protesting at the threatened eviction of families living in requisitioned. houses and the proposed increase in Council rents. ;

The banners bore such slogans as ‘No evictions’, ‘No rent increases’ and ‘Build more homes’.

Prominent in the crowd were representatives of the newly-formed Streatham Tenants’ Defence League.

Tory councillors. were heckled as they entered and left the Town Hall. When the Tory councillors drove their cars into the crowd, knocking two people down, the crowd thumped on the cars.

Labour Councillors addressed them Labour councillors Peter Hendrie, Frank Sims and Peter Gibson addressed the demonstrators. The Tory chairman of the Housing Committee, Alderman Willison, refused to speak to them.

The following resolution, put by Councillor Sims, was -agreed unanimously: — ‘This mass meeting of. Wandsworth ‘Borough Council tenants, noting the reference back of the rent increasé proposals, calls upon the Council to withdraw these ‘proposals completely.

‘Furthermore, we urge all tenants to stop any rent increases and evictions by organizing themselves in conjunction with the Labour movement.’

‘ THE measures announced recently by Amory to make it easier for business men to borrow from the capital market and the banks mean that the prospect of a sharp downturn in the economy is now accepted by the Government.

The state of capitalist economy depends upon the assess_ tment which business men make of the future.

If they are convinced—and the recent FBI survey snows that many are—that markets are going to contract and_profitability fall it will take a good deal more than the measures so far announced to induce. them to step up their investment.

Put another way—easier borrowing will be outweighed by falling profit expectations.

It can be.assumed, too, that credit will have to be made still easier, with perhaps a further cut in Bank Rate in the * offing.

‘Bumping along the bottom’?

In fact it is doubtful whether the 7 per cent. credit squeeze was a major factor in the decline in business investment, and equally doubtful whether it can be reversed simply by making credit easier to come by.

National Health Service: the Next Ten Years HE tenth anniversary.of the National Health Service has brought a spate of articles in the national — T and periodical Press reviewing the achievements of the Service in the first decade of its existence. So obvious are the advantages cf the National Health Service over all previous systems for dealing with the sick and the ailing in this couriry that even those who are instinctively hostile to anything which smells, even remotely, of socialism, have been careful not to attack it openly. At most they have concentrated on the cost of the Service—as -if. health can be measured in terms of pounds, shillings and pence—pointing out that this has risen from £305 million t6 £472 million sincé 1949, The Government-appointed Guillebaud Committee successfully scotched this type of argument in its 1956 report. _ ‘We were spending less ’ While it was true that the comprehensive cost of the Service was higher, in actual fact we were spending 1 per cent. of our national income less, :

‘Had the proportion of the resources devoted to the Service in 1953-54 been the same as in 1949-50, the net cost would have been £67 million higher.’

Since the report was issued the Tory Governnicat has continued to whittle away at the National Health Service.

Now while it is important to review the work of the past, for Labour men and women it is even more important to plan for the future. .

. a The outstanding defect of the present Health Service is that it views the treatment of disease and the prevention of diSease EAST ANGLIA LABOUR IS MARCHING IN a conspiracy of silence and security oaths, missile sites are now being constructed at top speed in East Anglia. Anglo-American H-bombers are stationed in the same area.

, The Eastern Regional Conference of the Labour Party recently expressed the strongest opposition to the building of these rocket bases, and the regional party undertook to support ~ local activities against them.

The joint committee of Cambridge City Labour Party and Trades Council is organizing a protest march and demonstration at Mepal, the missile base six miles from Ely; it will take place on Sunday, August 24. -There will be a meeting in Ely at two p.m. addressed by > two local prospective parliamentary candidates.

After the march a meeting at the base will be addressed and member of the Labour Party national executive, John Horner, general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, and a third local candidate.

The organizing. secretary of the march (Peter Cadogan, 5 Acton Way, Cambridge) has suggested to local Labour Parties and trade union branches that they book a bus to Ely to take to Mepal those who cannot march and to pick up the contingent for the return.

; By a Worker in the NHS _ , as two separate processes.

Labour should now be preparing plans which will over- : come this grave fault. The emphasis of medical practice must be increasingly placed on the prevention of ill health.

Long overdue health centres This demands the amalgamation of the public health services with the hospital services into one unified system. This would create a basic structure to which other services could be added in time.

General practitioners could be brought into this scheme : through the development of the long-overdue health centres.

Labour must also tackle the question of establishing an efficient occupational health service, as an integral part of the NHS.

Modern industrial processes, with their highly technical and complicated machinery, using raw materials which may -be poisonous, urgently require the setting up of an occupational health service.

The present system of paying doctors on the basis of capitation fees should be abolished, and all workers in the. NHS

Tue NEWSLETTER should be paid on a salaried basis.

Salaries and conditions of service in nursing are well below © those ‘for comparably trained, experienced and responsible people in private industry and the distributive trades. Great shortage of nurses This detracts from the recruitment of the most suitable -individuals and is largely responsible for the great shortage of nurses today.

Priority must therefore be given to substantial increases in salary and improvements in working conditions.

The private-pay beds in hospitals should be abolished, but provision should be made for privacy when this is essential to health.

This is only a brief outline of some of the measures needed to improve the NHS: My suggestions are additional to the already accepted Labour policy of abolishing payments and restoring a free National Health Service for all.

] EDUCATION — ENTHUSIASM AND IMAGINATION ARE If we trained teachers and built schools with the sort of drive that governed training. and construction during the war we could approach the goal of 20 children per class in five years” time.

It would. require an effort. But surely there are not many . things more worth while.

. * * ; * ‘The greatest single obstacle to educational advance is the shortage of teachers.’ This is nonsense.

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There is a gross lack of political imagination and enterprise regarding the State system of education on the part of the powers that be—and tight purse strings are the result. For this public opinion is partly responsible.

Big business is obstacle This sometimes cuts across party lines. Plenty of local Tories on Education Committees have made excellent plans for school expansion only to have them cut to pieces by their own Tory central Government.

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Big business is once again the real stumbling block, and the Government is its agency.

Working-class_ opinion, in being far- too easily satisfied, is “not blameless. Everybody says that education is.most import-

SECONDARY education should be such that when boys and girls leave school they ought to have attained:

1. A thorough ° grasp of the elements of mathematics and science.

2. The ability to express themselves clearly in spoken and written English.

3. As much understanding as possible of the world they are going into through the study of history and geog- _ “raphy.

4. Knowledge of one foreign language. ° 5. Some training in craft work, wood, metal, .clay and fabrics. ~ 6. Experience of creative activity in the arts, music, painting ~ and drama.

_7, Physical “fitness, knowledge of the body, practice and enjoyment of games.

8. A naturally developed talent for human relations.

9. Qualifications for the next stage in life, i.e. to have passed publicly recognized examinations.

It is evident that it is impossible to achieve such an objéctive in less than five years’ schooling. This is the urgent reason for raising the school-leaving age to 16.

Step producing nuclear weapons In the chapter on school priorities it says: “We must -see that the money is found, even if. this means going without other things.” Why must we have this hopeless martyred note?

Why can't we say ‘We shall find the money by stopping the production of nuclear weapons, by clearing out of NATO and by nationalizing profitable industries for a change’?

That would make excellent political sense and ring a great peal of bells in the Labour Party and among the electors.

* * * ‘Labour considers that the. proper objective is a maximum size of 30 for primary and secondary classes.’ But is this the ‘proper objective’? Ask any teacher and you will be told that a class should never exceed 15 to 20 pupils.

However, no. Ministry of Education, no political party, no responsible educational body ever puts forward, as its policy for the State schools, something that every teacher knows as commonplace!

Of course the fee-paying schools have always had classes of this size.

It will take some years to get classes down to 15- 20. But. no other objective makes’ sense. ant, but after’ all it is deeds that count.

Does the size of classes go down? Does the real value of teachers’ salaries go up? Does not education remain the principal single charge on the local rates? Do. not the new block grants make that situation worse?

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This business of the status of: education is the subject of a certain amount of disgust and some amusement to teachers. After all the lip service is paid to their work how are teachers regarded?

Having taught for seven years rl give you my opinion. -A teacher is one quarter respected, one quarter feared and - one half despised!

The status of education and of teachers (much the same thing) cannot be changed by edict. But public opinion, the Labour Party and the next Labour Government’ can give the teachers such tools to do their job as will enable them on the merits of their work to command a reappraisal of themselves and. their profession.

* oe * If we are going to raise the school-leaving age to 16 and. aim at much smaller classes in the immediate future the problem of the shortage of teachers calls for drastic action.

A certificated teacher is trained in two years. The welcome process of changing this to three years is now taking place.

It should be quite possible to promise recruits to the profession who take the two-year course that they shall have an opportunity, even an obligation, to take the third year later on when the period of transition in schools’ is either over or well advanced.

Many‘thousands of extra teachers are called for. The Labour Party should pledge itself to get them.

This must not be thought of in the casual and pessimistic . - way of ‘Leaming to Live’: ‘As things now stand we cannot count on a yearly increase of more than 6,000 in the next few years’ (p. 17).

This means raising the salaries and ‘so improving the conditions that.the necessary number of the most likely people will be attracted to the teaching profession.

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There must_be thousands Nothing. will do so much to stimulate recruitment as a massive assault on the problems of school building, size of classes and educational objectives. This will also bring in Many more university graduates who would otherwise go. elsewhere.

There must be thousands of men and women between the ages of 20 and 30 who would like to be teachers and who, given the training, are fully capable of doing the job. ‘Learning to Live’ refers to this possibility (p. 20), but does so without any of the necessary enthusiasm and imagination.

It would be an excellent idea to recruit a significant proLa

portion of teachers from men and women who have a wider experience of life than those who go from school to college and then back to school.

This sort of spirit will get results. But consider how we -‘are asked to view the problem: ‘Any government with the least respect for education will be short ‘of ‘teachers for many years’ (p. 19).

This we cannot accept.

(Fo be continued)

Aucust 2, 1958 The French bourgeosie, inferior in resources and opportunities, has not been able to absorb the pressures of sectional interests or of opposed classes.

Harsh economic reality has prevented these antagonisms from: being attenuated.

For instance, the peasants have been repeatedly impoverished by hard times, devaluations and the default of the reactionary régimes to which high finance lent their savings.

Their experience does not impress upon this mass a consciousness of common interests or common. solutions to their problems.

While the Republican politicians came from the parties of the Right Centre and Left Centre, large, united and welldisciplined parties could not grow from such a soil.

FRANCE’S HISTORY SINCE 1789 SHOWS WHY :

By John.Archer NEVER since the great French Revolution of 1789 has the French capitalist class, the revolution’s main beneficiary, been able to take into its hands the leadership _of the whole people.

It has not united society politically. Tt has not, as in Britain, been able to govern directly, through its own party and politicians, with the support of the petty bourgeoisie.

Between 1789 and 1871. France was ruled without universal suffrage by the civil service, the police and the army, headed by autocratic but. precariously poised Royalist or Bonapartist figures.

Only an ‘arbiter’, raised ‘above classes’, could maintain social ON CANA CAAA ALAC A CAA NAA AUN ACA AN ANNAN AN ANN ANA This is the second of four articles by John Archer which are a. contribution to the debate on de Gaulle’s coming to power.

PPP PP PD DPD D SSE DLS SII DIDI I ELI I DID IID IIL peace. No single section of the propertied classes could unite the rest in support of its aims.

The nation consisted of a heterogeneous mass, -in which the interests of remnants of the old régime, new landed proprietors, financial magnates, industrialists, peasants; traders and artisans conflicted with each other.

1789 so thoroughly wiped out the old aristocracy that no Junker class remained, as in. Germany, to impose upon the State its administrators and its ideolegy of ‘discipline’.

Instability of successive ‘arbiters’

Hehce ihe instability of the successive Royalist and Bonapartist ‘arbiters’, from Louis XVIII to Louis Bonaparte.

The industrial capitalists, growing slowly, but growing, had reason enough in 1871 to reject the last nineteenth-century ‘Bonaparte’, Louis Napoleon.

He had taxed them and wasted their substance in serving Record of unstable governments The multiplicity of parties and instability of coalition governments was not the fault of the electoral system. Rather the electoral system produced its natural results; for, despite the extreme efforts of the constitution-makers in 1945, the Fourth Republic has an even worse record of unstable governments than ‘the Third.

Political life quickly came to consist more and more. of ‘empty compromises. Parliamentarism commanded less and less respect.

People learned, in time and through experience, that deputies ~ of different parties have more in common with each other than with the members of their own party outside the Chamber.

The Republic has been convulsed’ by successive exposures of corruption, such as the Panama scandal in 1889, the Dreyfus ‘affaire’ in 1894, and the Stavisky case in 1934.

‘Thus was shaped the outlook of France’s rulers. ‘Philosophy’, as taught in French lycées (State secondary. schools), means finding formulas rather than solutions to problems.

The poor ambitious boy learns that the race is to the clever, especially the clever manipulator of words.

Politicians’ bright, futile chatter Only for a short time in 1917, in the extreme emergency. of the first world war, could Clemenceau get national unity.

Hence the narrow selfishness of the French bourgeoisie; hence the bright, futile chatter of the politicians; hence the cynicism of Frenchmen of all parties towards the Fourth Republic. -Hence too the mighty impact on. French workers and in- ; tellectuals of the Russian Revolution, which showed how through the dictatorship of the proletariat the one progressive class produced by history can take the leadership of the nation —but only if it dares to lay hands on capitalist property.

-In the world crisis of 1958,.the Fourth Republic, which satisfies no one but a handful of venal politicians of Radicalism, is one of the first casualties.

From a Special Correspondent

the manoeuvres needed to maintain his autocracy—the railway concessions and State loans at high interest won the Rothschilds, cheap imports of .manufactures were to win the peasants, and paternal gestures were directed towards the working Finally he led’ them. into the senseless adventure of the Franco-Prussian War in_1870.

But in 1871 the Republicans proved their ‘sense of responsibility’ by their bloody suppression of the Paris Commune. ' The men of property, seeking a broader social base, accepted universal manhood suffrage.

Cannot absorb sectional pressures They entrusted their destinies to the representatives elected by the vast heterogeneous petty-bourgeois mass, who would be appeased with a share ofthe profits of imperialism and quieted by anti-clericalism, appeals to national sentiment and—rhetoric.

But it has not proved possible to cement a new and effective political élite on this basis.

Portuguese democrats arrested during the recent presidential election campaign, in which an opposition candidate stood for the first time in thirty-two years of fascism, are still prisoners in Salazar’s jails.

Hundreds of anti-fascists are estimated to have been jailed during the campaign and the Government has taken savage measures against the wave of pfotest strikes which swept the country following the rigged victory of the Government candidate.

Strikes and workers’ organizations have always been illegal under Salazar, Now however the Government has introduced a special measure providing the Draconian punishment of twenty-five years’ imprisonment for workers who dare to withhold their labour.

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Tue NEWSLETTER

AT a well-attended meetin, ng called by my local Nuclear Disarmament Committee I was struck by the way the H-bomb is treated by the leaders of this movement as though it had sprung from ‘nowhere, like the Demon King in pantomime rising through the stage.

There is never any social or historical analysis—indeed, anything that looks like heading that way is liable to be ruled out as ‘sectarian’ and ‘divisive’.

Consequently, no clear conception of how the bomb can actually ‘be abolished ever emerges.

Christianity by the bucketful is poured over the audience, this being, apparently, non-controversial: the effrontery of’ this assumption was particularly noticeable at the meeting in question, where a good proportion of the audience was _ Jewish!

Does opportunism pay?

In the thirties there arose the menace of Hitlerism,. and also that of chronic mass unemployment.In various countries certain groups of skin-deep socialists declared that to combat these threats socialism must-be put away in a cupboard.

Whatever else socialism might be the answer to, it was ; only a hindrance in face of the most dangerous manifestations of contemporary capitalism.

So we had an epoch of people’s fronts, support for Roosevelt_ and so forth.

Today fascism is rising again in France, and something ; very like an ‘old-fashioned’ slump seems to be under way im the United States.

Yet, in relation to the new danger.from the H-bomb, some people are saying: ‘Let there be no talk of socialism—this 3s too serious a matter for that!’

The army that got away One of the biggest factors in the middle-East situation today is a negative one—the absence of a factor which used to play a big part in that region’s affairs.

I refer to the Indian Army, which in the old days could: always be thrown in to ‘restore order’ with * an economy of Enitish lives’.

The Iraqi revolt of 1920 took 73,000 soldiers to put it down—but 61,000 of these were Indians, who will not be available this time.

A whole strategical system was blown up when the Royal Indian Navy-mutined in 1946 and forced the transfer of power mm India.

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This seems, by the way, to have taken the British authorities quite by surprise. Indeed, it was provoked by the treatment meted out to those Indian officers who had tried to serve. the national cause in their own way by fighting alongside the Japanese, and had been taken prisoner. when Japan surrendered.

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And it was the savage sentence imposed on a Moslem officer that touched off this historic revolt by a predominantly Hindu body of servicemen.

Only a little time before it happened, anything like the RIN mutiny had appeared remote.

In 1944, I remember, Thakur Chandra Singh had been released from prison; the news recalled the incident in 1930 in which he had played the leading part, and this seemed to a British observer to belong to a past age.

He it was who had led the Garwhali soldiers who refused to fire when sent to Peshawar to put down nationalist ‘riots’, The Garwhalis were chosen for this police work because i was assumed that, being Hindus, they would have no objections to shooting - Moslems.

Chandra Singh was the equivalent of a company quartermaster-sergeant—in Indian conditions a man with a lot to — lose. Nevertheless, he organized the NCOs to refuse to fire. As he wrote afterwards:

“We decided that it would be better to be shot and die rather than to let down the name of Garwhal.’’

The soldiers recalled how the 6th Gurkhas had massacred demonstrators at Amritsar in 1919, and ‘even today people spit at: the mention of their name’.

Chandra Singh and his men refused to fire, causing con- . ; 'sternation among their country’s oppressors and becoming legend that entered into the national revolutionary tradition.

‘Military discipline has no right to be used to outrage a soldier’s conscience.’ It was none other than Ernest Bevin who said that, at the great. rally in August 1920 called by the Council of Action to stop British intervention in the Russo-Polish war. And he was referring to British. soldiers.’

More Russian than the Russians?

OF all the English-language publications of the so-called _ ‘people’s democracies’ issued in London; New Hungary, edited by Lawrence Kirwan, is perhaps the best-pro_duced technically and the most servile politically.

A recent issue, in which the murder of Imre Nagy is justified, also. contains an article on the anniversary of the death “of Petéfi, the Hungarian poet who died in 1849 fighting for his country.

The writers’ club which played an important part in the early stages of the revolution of October 1956 in Hungary was named after Petéfi, but this, of course, goes unmentioned.

Not only that, but we are told that the poet was ‘cut down by the sabres of Croatian cavalrymen’.

It is politically convenient to stress the role of the Croats (Yugoslavs) in the suppression of the Hungarian struggle for independence—and to ignore the decisive role played by the Russians.

After all, one of the reasons why the editorial board of the Russian journal Problems of History got purged last year was that they published an article about Russian intervention in Hungary in 1849, mentioning the ‘honourable treason’ of Captain Gusev, a Russian officer who helped. the Hungarjan rebels.

A Russian school textbook published in 1952 states:

‘In the fighting against the tsarist troops there perished at the age of 27 the great revolutionary poet of the Hungarian . people, Sandor Petéfi, who fought in the front ranks of the _ Hungarian revolution.

‘Chernyshevsky, the Russian revolutionary democrat, wrote in his diary in those days: “Being a friend of the Hungarians, I hope for the defeat of the Russians there, and would be glad to sacrifice my own life for this.”’

. ln Connolly’s footsteps My colleague Brian Behan has shown me some issues . cf the new Dublin monthly The Plough, which is pub- -lished by a group associated with Dr Noel Browne, the Minister of Health who was forced out of office-a few years ago for trying to introduce. a national health service in the Republic.

The Plough makes very interesting reading, with many Wwellinformed and hard-hitting articles on Ireland’s social problems.

One Contributor makes the point that the IRA raids: are ‘a blind expression of the class war’ and that ‘Sinn Féin has no social policy’.

In trying to link the national struggle with the struggle - for social change, the Plough group are continuing the great work of James Connolly and Liam Mellowes.

The Plough costs fourpence and can be obtained from 23 Parliament Street, Dublin.

Toe NEWSLETTER .

HE WON HIS FIGHT. Aucust 2, 1958

; In your issue of June 14 (p. 160) you carried a report of my sacking under the heading ‘Leeds Meter Readers Stand by Sacked Shop Steward’.

Your readers might be interested to know that after an eight-week struggle I have now got a job back with the Yorkshire Electricity Board.

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My ability to continue the struggle to a successful conclusion was made possible by the solidarity of my workmates.

.They supported me financially by making a voluntary weekly levy. They supported me morally by many resolutions to the district committee of the trade union.

At the time you published: the original article on my case things looked very black for my chances of getting reinstated. I think my case illustrates once again that whenever we “workers unite together almost anything is possible.

Thank you for your interest in the dispute. --The contrary is the case. The already serious threat of a third world war, or a war on the Korean model, would be greatly increased. ; :

The real road to peace in the middle East is the road Iraq . has taken. The achievement of Arab unity, with the political. and material support of the western Labour movement, which means a determined campaign against the Tory adventurers and warmongers—this is the solution to ‘our’ problems*in the middle East. ; ; . London, S.W.3 E. 8S. Hillman

SUMMIT talks have been seized upon by sections of the Labour Party either as a first step towards peace in the middle East or as the. basis of a comprehensive settlement.

I should like to ask the advocates of a summit conference some questions. . "Let us assume that the problem of the composition of the conference, its size, venue and agenda, is resolved. We are still left with the problem of peace in the middle East. ‘We are left with the following facts: (1) American troops are in Lebanon and British troops in Jordan. .

(2) The Baghdad Pact has been severed in two by the Iraqi revolution. :

G) The Persian Gulf protectorates, Libya, Sudan and Jordan are all caught up in a wave of Nasserism.

(4) The Arab world remains irreconcilably opposed to the existence of the State, of Israel.

Peace can come to the middle East only when all foreign troops are withdrawn, the Baghdad Pact dismantled and Arab . unity realized.

What of Arab people?

Even if all the powers were. ready to impose an agreed settlement—itself a doubtful proposition—what of the Arab . people? .

Would a ‘peace’ based on the carve-up of the Arab world into western and Russian spheres of influence be acceptable to the peoples of, the middle East?

CONFERENCE (Continued from front page) -The shortage of houses and jobs cannot, therefore, be attributed. to the arrival of, people from abroad.

In a planned, socialist economy, all available workers would be employed and the more workers there were, the greater - would be productivity and the greater the amount of wealth for distribution.

It is to be hoped that Conference will treat this racialist resolution as it deserves—by overwhelmingly rejecting it.

The next Labour Government must, of necessity, consider not only the extension of the nationalized sector of the economy but also the transformation of these industries from a capitalist to a socialist basis.

This raises the issue of workers’ participation in the management and control of industry, a problem which should be the subject of constant discussion at every Labour Party and trade union branch.

Published ‘by The Newsletter, 180 Clapham. High St, London, sw, ~ 198

I woutp like to draw the attention of readers of THE NEWSLETTER to a very fine play entitled ‘Chicken. Soup with Barley’ by Arnold: Wesker; which is.about to. be presented in London as the Belgrade Theatre’s contribution to the Royal Court Festival.

This play ran for a week ‘here in Coventry, and I saw it twice. The story, which starts off in 1936, is about a Jewish family, all members of the Communist Party.

World ‘events and other experiences bring disillusion (culminating with Hungary).to. all members of the family with the exception of the mother. .

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The acting is superb. I feel sure that when you have seen this play you will feel that here at last is somethirfg which you can identify yourself with. a ;

Coventry.

You have set yourselves up as a sectarian Left-wing offshoot of the Labour Party which, if you continue to act as you are doing, must only retard the cause of peace and socialism. .

For example, to hold a demonstration separately from what was obviously the mass demonstration on the use of U.S. and British troops in the middle East.

Why couldn’t you throw all your support in with the Movement for Colonial Freedom? .

There are too many little sects in the Labour movement. ‘For example, The. Newsletter, the Independent Labour Party, Victory for Socialism, -Communist Party.. Labour Review, New Reéasoner etc.

Isn’t it about time you really did fight for UNITY! Isn't it possible perhaps for all the different periodicals, weekly and . monthly, to hold a delegate conference and instead of Tribune weekly get it published on Wednesday and Saturday, or even daily? ° Pudsey (Yorks.) Roa Florey SAYING OF THE WEEK ‘GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION SEE NEARLY EYE TO EYE .. . Government. and opposition leaders are cooperating in an atmosphere of harmony that would have seemed wildly impossible a week ago’ (The Times, July 25)

The four resolutions on industrial democracy should form a useful basis for such discussions and the call from Edge Hill (Liverpool) CLP for the NEC to prepare.a policy statement on this issue in readiness for next year’s Conference should be supported.

There are several resolutions critical of the national execu- . tive’s statement on education, ‘Learning to Live’, and a number on housing and the National Health Service, which deserve the support of Conference.

“Despite the efforts of the NEC, the Conference resolutions ; show that the heart of British Labour remains firmly socialist, as indicated in the call from Thirsk and Malton CLP for the nationalization of the land—once -the first plank in Labour’s platform, now relegated to obscurity by Transport House officialdom-—and by the demand from Northfield (Birmingham), Horsham and Warrington that May 1 should be declared a paid. public holiday by the next Labour Government.

Printed by Plough Press Ltd. (TU), 7.0. 180 Clapham High St, London SW4 * me ~