THIS IS OUR ANSWER — AND OUR POLICY FOR LABOUR
By Gerry Healy
1958The NewsletterGerry Healy Read the scan at ETOL (PDF) →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.
DURING the past few weeks the capitalist Press have engaged in a furious witch-hunt against trade unionLists and Labour Party members whom they call ‘Trotskyists’. They have paid particular attention to the national industrial rank-and-file Conference called by The Newsletter on November 16.
They wrote about this Conference under headlines such as ‘Red Club Exposed. Men behind it: Secret Documents Revealed’ (News Chronicle, November 13); ‘The Men You Must Watch’ (Sunday Mercury., November 16); ‘Their Aim is More Strikes’ (Reynolds News, November 16); ‘600 Plot 24hr Strike’ (Daily Sketch, November 17); ‘Red Club Men Hold a Secret Conference’ (News Chronicle, November 17). ‘ Not for many years has the capitalist Press engaged in red-baiting on such a scale and with such venom; but it is no accident that it has chosen this time to do so.
Every trade unionist knows who owns the mass-circulation. -newspapers of Fleet Street, who pays the Fleet Street piper. and who therefore calls the tune he plays. Behind these powerful organs for moulding public opinion and. influencing people’s minds stand millionaire representatives of the employing class.
These organs and their millionaire owners are now extremely sensitive to developments inside the trade unions and the Labour Party.
They realize that the growth of unemployment and the attempts by the employers to weaken trade unionism in industry are bound to provoke reactions among the rank and They know that a general election is not far off, and they (Continued overleaf)