living standards of working people.
Those in the Communist Party six per cent.
TUC must be recalled to break with the Government's actions and bring March. But the omens for this are not good. led boom! ocracy' can only tell us no.
LEN BLOOD degeneration. The pound crashed through the $ 2 barrier last week - a collapse faster and deeper than at any time since the formal devaluations of 1949 and 1967. The immediate effect will be to stoke up the rate of inflation through increased raw material and food prices, further cutting into the PATHETIC RESPONSE That is the price that the Labour Government - which is not overly concerned about the slumping pound - demands for its 'export-led boom' It is a price that the whole trade union bureaucracy are forcing their mem. bers to pay through their abject support for Wilson's anti-working class policies. They will stand by while food subsidies are eliminated and support an incomes policy which has already cut workers' living standards by At such a critical time the response of the 'traditional left' in the unions and Labour Party could hardly be more pathetic. Scanlon has announced his complete and absolute support for the Government's "strategy'. The Labour lefts have quietly accepted the National Executive Committee's refusal to hold a special Labour Party conference LABOUR MOVEMENT ASSEMBLY The responsibility for a nationally organised fight back against the Gov ernment's policies now rests with the Labour Movement Assembly on 27 The Assembly is the brainchild of the Communist Party, whose prime concern will be to cement their relationship with the Labour left. This will mean a conference high on verbal pyrotechnies and low on organising any action.
It will also mean the crushing of any real debate and discussion around the programme of action the conference should adopt to launch a fight throughout the labour movement against unemployment and the cuts. Instead we will be presented with the Tribunite programme for import controls and controlled reflation': in other words, continued restraint on workers' wages and the propping up of domestic demand in the April budget just enough to 'take up the slack'. A veritable left-wing' exportA foretaste of what militants can expect was given by the recent trade union 'conference in solidarity with the workers of Spain'. This became simply a bureaucratic beanfeast at which Foot, Jones and others were able to ease their troubled consciences over the defeats of the Thirties. Will the Labour Movement Assembly merely provide a similar platform for Scanlon and Clive Jenkins - whose 'support' contributes nearly half of the six million workers to be 'represented' at the Assembly.
And what of the forty or more Labour MPs backing the Assembly? Will the Assembly's organisers allow the demand that they break with the Government's policies, vote against them in Parliament, and support every struggle against them outside? Past experience of Communist Party 'demBUILD THE RESISTANCE Nevertheless the Assembly will see gathered many of the forces that can build a permanent labour movement opposition to the Labour cabinet and their supporters in the trade union bureaucracy. When Red Weekly calls for this new class struggle left wing in the labour movement, it does so in the traditions of the early Minority Movement before its sectarian With one sixth of the present claimed membership of the Communist Party, the CP of the 1920s was able to build a National Minority Movement with supporters in every major union holding regular na tional conferences with representation from up to a quarter of all trade unionists. It is that sort of movement which clearly challenged the right wing for leadership that we must strive to build now.