Act 1973 TOO pages. Retail: 50p. Special Offer: Mailorder: 50p post free.
From: RED BOOKS, 24 Boundary Road London N.W.8 Trade: write for terms or phone 01-624 4504 attack the proposed Act on principle and simply called for it to be applied more humanely' When the Tories conceded this point, Labour just tagged along quickly behind the Government.
RESISTANCE Over the next twelve months the Pakistani community will be paying the price for the chauvinism and racism of the British working class movement. It is important that immediate steps be taken to resist this new racist attack. So far Red Weekly has been the only paper on the left to call attention to this Act and its dangerous implications. The whole left must take up this question.
A campaign should be launched immediately throughout the trade unions to make it clear to the Government that any attempt to use the Aliens Restriction (Amendment) Act against any group of workers will be met with mass industrial action. Resolutions to this effect should be passed by every trade union body. Militants in the civil service should insist that their unions fight all attempts to apply the Act, whether by harassment of Pakistani civil servants now, or their outright purge in 1974. The entire working class movement must be won to the fight for an end to all this country's racist laws - the Pakistan Act, the Aliens Act, and the Brian Slocock Immigration Act.
Red Weekly 7 September 1973 Page 3
This week one of the most powerful unions contrenes, to would stato ee ieno in the country, the Amalgamated Union its claim for a ten pound increase.
for a whole period to come. of Engineering Workers, will be submitting TERRY CRAWFORD explains how this challenge to the Government's pay policy could determine the balance of class forces conferences, etc., would just have been ignored wing of the bureaucracy, and just stamped on the necks of the militants if they stuck them out too far. Any initiatives which were taken at rank-and-file level soon came under the hammer of 'Carron's Law"
When Carron retired, the election for President centred around Boyd and Scanlon. The former stood for the continuation of Carron's policies, with Scanlon as the candidate of the left. Scanlon was billed by his supporters not just as a man with progressive ideas, but as someone who would give a free rein to militants in the industry to take their own initiatives without the officials cracking down. This was the basis on which militants in the industry, organised mainly by the Communist Party, supported Scanlon. With this kind of base it has never been possible for Scanlon to blatantly sell out in the same way as Carron did.
But neither does it mean that the 'left' bureaucrats are any more interested in organising real struggles than the right. Scanlon adopted a different kind of tactic to prevent any major struggles - he passed the buck to the membership. The classic example of this was the decision to throw the struggle over last year's