Liverpool Workers Discuss Clause 4

By OUR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT * THERE was one outstanding feature of the Merseyside Assembly last Sunday. The audience which listened attentively to Gerry Healy’s opening statement, and then got down to the job of discussing how to carry forward the fight for socialist policies, was almost entirely one of industrial workers.

The majority of those who spoke—active trade unionists and members of the Labour Party—brought into the meeting the experience of struggle on the river, on the docks, on the building sites, in engineering factories, in mines and on the railway.

Right at the beginning, the chairman Peter Kerrigan discussed the proposed expansion of the motor industry into Merseyside in the light of conditions with which he was familiar on the docks.

‘Employers have tried to use Liverpool as a cheap port with wages and conditions below London. The trade union movement on Merseyside must plan now to prevent the same thing happening in the motor industry.

‘Contact must be made with the motor stewards in the MidJands and London so that when Fords, Standards and Vauxhalls come here the conditions won by militant action in the South are protected.’

Gerry Healy, national secretary of the Socialist Labour League, hammered home the lessons of recent events.

‘When Gaitskell attacks Clause 4 he is carrying through in. the political field the same policies of retreat before the Tory government and big monopolies as the right-wing trade union leaders on the industrial field’, he declared.

Dealing with the fight in the Labour Party around Clause 4 and the proposed lobby of the National Executive Committee meeting on March 16, he said:

Unions committed to Clause 4 ‘The Confederation of Engineering and Shipbuilding Unions has a plan for engineering which calls for the nationalization of parts of the industry. On March 16, engineers should let Boyd, AEU leader and member of the NEC, know that he speaks neither for them nor for their union when he supports Mr. Gaitskell.

‘Building workers, whose National Federation is on record for nationalization of their industry, should go to London and demand that George Brinham puts forward the policy of his members.

‘Miners should tell Sam Watson that he has no mandate to back those who want to remove Clause 4, and members of the Labour Party in Liverpool should be down in London on March 16 to let Mrs. Bessie Braddock know that in supporting Gaitskell she is not speaking for the Liverpool Trades Council and Borough Labour Party.’

Those who spoke from the floor were concerned with finding a way to fight for socialist policies, to build rank-and-file leadership in industry, to fight bans and proscriptions and to bring working-class militancy into the Labour Party in order to strengthen the fight against the right wing. In other words they wanted to discuss how to struggle and how to organize, to further militant socalist policies.

Queer bedfellows ward an amendment to a clear resolution of protest against the proscription of the Socialist Labour League.

Gerry Healy remarked in his reply: ‘Isn’t it significant that while you can say the League is an embarrassment you found it no embarrassment to stand with Jack Braddock and the right wing on the Liverpool Trades Council?’

Joe Cubbin, a Liverpool docker, took up the point about ‘never having it so good’.

‘It reminds me of another well repeated slogan: The mint with a hole in,’ he said. ‘Both slogans are selling sweet nothing.’

‘There is a growing feeling for struggle on the docks,’ he continued, ‘it is not dockers who are apathetic but their leaders. They judge the Labour Party by the trade union officials they see along the dock road.’

Strengthen Clause 4 A railwayman declared that, even if the Guillebaud report was implemented immediately, the majority of railway workers covered by it would still be on low pay.

Increases in pay are linked to ‘reorganization’ which means redundancy. There is pressure from capitalist businessmen and a section of the Tory Party for the profitable assets of British Railways to be handed back to private ownership.

Gaitskell’s retreat on nationalization comes at the same time as this attack on an already nationalized industry.

Miner Stan Boyd spoke of the need for solidarity between workers. This was an absolute necessity for miners at the present time.

He was followed by a Labour councillor; a bricklayer— who made the important point that in the struggle against the H-bomb and against racialism the decisive force was the working class—and by a dredgerman and an engineer.

The conference ended by endorsing the four points carried by the National Assembly last November. It carried a resolution (moved by a colonial brother) for freedom and complete political and national independence for the British Guianese people whose leaders are now in this country.

It passed a vigorous protest against the witch-hunt of the ETU. It called for the retention and strengthening of Clause 4 of the Labour Party Constitution and called for the fullest support from trade union branches and Labour Parties for the lobby of the NEC on March 16.

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