BLACK SECTIONS members answered
their critics at a fringe meeting on the
Tuesday night. Far from a select band
of middle-class careerists interested
only in internal wranglings of the
Labour Party, their meeting provided
a platiorm for all black people in stuggle.
Speakers from Broadwater Farm and
St Paul's, Bristol, outlined the police
attacks on their communities. A speaker from Fenestras, the trade
union federation in El Salvador, and a Sinn Fein councillor from Armagh put the meeting in an international
dimension.
Viraj Mendis described the campaign to stop his deporation. A NALGO member spoke of the reasons for building black caucuses in trade unions. Diane Abbot, Russell Profitt and Bernie Grant, all Prospective Parliamentary Candidates, spoke on the need to take real power when Labour forms a Government.
The unity of Afro-Caribbean and Asian people under the Black Sections banner was a constant theme. And the answer to Roy Hattersley's claim at last year's Conference, that "his Asians" did not want Black Sections, came in the form of Councillor Amir Khan who was expelled for organising a Black Sections meeting in Birmingham attended by nearly 300 people.
The Black Sections' "manifesto" for their NEC candidates was a clear socialist programme including opposition to all immigration controls; nationalisation of the commanding heights of industry under workers' control: abolition of YTS "slave wages"; and full British withdrawal from Northern Ireland. THE DITCHING of Eric Hefer by the Constituency Parties was a direct result of his uncompromising the witch-hunt and the purge Liverpool Labour Party. Viewpoint has differences with Heffer over many policy issues, departure from the NEC at this time is a major setback.
The Campaign Group. Action and Socialist Organiser will now have to watch the antics of their chosen candidate, the pro-nuclear, Etonian, landowning Tam Dalyell, with great interest.
this. Livingstone's left" are clear. Co-ordinating Group (LLL). Livingstone called elements within race and sex — precisely those issues which Kinnock has started cynically to incorporate in order to isolate the hard left and The ground. with the centrepiece of Kinnock's programme, despite Hattersley being the bête noire of the "cuddly left" Livingstone talks only of the need for a "regional industrial regeneration strategy" the shadow cabinet edges of policy". stand against the "hard left" are going to be taken of in by this. Unless there is a clear Socialist recognition that fighting the special but his oppression of women, black people, lesbians and gay men is closely tied to the class struggle in general and Socialist "economic strategy" in then they may well be led to believe that they can best "move" the next old Labour Government by forming such an alliance.
LABO right and hated by the left, they are Signs trying to create a new Socialist Fudge distance Alliance (SFA) to fill the space between those who recognise that a Kinnock government will be a re-run (only worse) of the Wilson-Callaghan Forum"!. governments and those who welcome Black Socialist proposals to Militant overcome this isolation of the "cuddly He hopes for a new alliance, stretching from the Labour Committee aand democracy". Tribune Group of MPs on the right across to sections of the Campaign and Labour Left Liaison welcomed what he clear "the defeat of the workerist Campaign the Group" (Heffer!) and made a clear separation between Socialist Action and its allies in LLL on the one hand, and the "distant" left around Briefing and Socialist Orgnaiser. The issues around which Livingstone would like d to hang this new alliance are those of confuse the middle reality that is Livingstone has no major differences and complains vaguely of "blurring the The clear danger is that sections of manifesto. particular, demonstration Socialist Viewpoint No. 14 November-December 1986 p10
that some have failed to themselves from such a project could be seen at the fringe meeting organised by Labour Left Liaison on "the politics of Campaign
Both Marc Wadsworth of Sections and John Ross of Action declared that no longer deserve the sympathy of the left. Ross went even further to say "we are not defending Militant, we are defending Party
The possibiltiy of hitching up with the LCC - who also opposed the expulsion of Khan and Scally but pushed for the expulsion of Liverpool Militant saupporters — are
Militant suporters of course have not been expelled for their refusal to support the demands of women and black people, nor for their opposition to Troops Out of Ireland; they are pilloried because they still argue for and attempt to carry out (in however
confused and bone-headed a fashion) the politics of class struggle. That tact still places them on the lett, even if they are still tied to crude Lesbian and Gay Rights
NEC, th needed for inclusion in the
against Labour-controlled Nottingham Council which has refused to include sexuality in their equal opportunities policies.
Who is the "real"