practice.' With these words, Red Weekly aptly summed up last year's Labour Party Conference, a conference which had endorsed the major planks of the Government's anti-working class policies. And in the year since, in response to the most vicious rightwing Labour Government since the war, the "lefts" have summoned only words in opposition to these policDes.
What happens at this year's Labour Party Conference will be decided not by the number of left-wing resolutions that are carried over the right, but by what contribution to a fighting class struggle opposition is made: what policies emerge and what action is projected and organised for the battle to come. *When the Labour leaders clambered into their first-class compartments on the trains home from Blackpool last week they wore the smug expressions of contented bureaucrats. The Annual Conference had supported their policies on nearly every decisive issu........ Even those successful resolutions which did oppose the right wing will only gather dust in the filing cabinet at Smith Square unless a movement is built to force their implementation and to sweep away the pro-capitalist leaders who will never put them into challenge. Not one of the eighteen spells out how the cuts are to be fought or what policies are to replace them. The nearest that any of them come is the NUPE resolution which calls for 'unity in the trade union and Labour movement in resistance to the cuts, but does not spell out that the only effective unity will be united industrial This picket was organised by the London Reaional Committee Against Cuts last week to demand that the Greater London Council refuse to implement Labour's cuts It is in the sections on specific social services that alternatives are spelt out. Many admirable policies are detailed - the abolition of the private sector in health, housing and education; demands for a massive programme of social works to provide schools, hospitals and housing desperately needed; a national minimum wage for 35 hours will be prepared to do something about them outside. And the lobby will also point the way towards organising the struggle against the cuts within the Labour Party itself.
was held of CLPs up and down the country to organise the fight against the cuts. Called by Labour Against to form a Labour Against Cuts Committee to provide a national system of organisation for all those who wish to fight against the cuts and for a socialist alternative. But since the conference, Labour Ag ainst Cuts has taken no steps to organise - though one of its leaders, GLC councillor Ken Livingstone, has repeated the decision taken by the 8 May conference that it would be backing the NCC lobby. Cowardly A real programme of uction must be worked out as the basis of a systematic challenge to the right-wing leadership on every major question. But it looks likely that only the most partial steps, if any at all, will be taken along this road - and if any are taken it will be despite the traditional Tribunite The resolutions from these quarters are cowardly substitutes for a class struggle programme of action. Not one resolution calls for opposition to incomes policy Already, on 8 May, a conference Housing Cuts, the conference decided
----- pull-quotes -----
• COMMITTEE IST CUTS IN SERVICES Photo: ANDREW WIARD (Report)