Letters

Enough is enough

Nick Clarke’s article (Weekly Worker 125) on the massive cuts looming in Scottish local government is reinforced by our experience in Fife. The new Fife council is predicting a £23 million “shortfall in revenue funding”. The council leader, Alex Rowley, has admitted that they will make good this shortfall by sacking workers and cutting services. These councillors who we elect to misrepresent us have one knee-jerk response when they’re under pressure - they attack the working class. It’s our jobs and services that they continue to annihilate.

The Unison branch in Fife has stated that it will resist any compulsory redundancies. This is a start. What we need is a mass campaign across Scotland that can draw in council workers and those that use the services, to take on the Tory government and the spineless councillors from all parties that prostrate themselves before it, hoping that a Blair government will rescue them. Don’t hold your breath! Not only do we have to fight compulsory redundancies, but so-called ‘voluntary redundancies’ and any cuts in services. Enough is enough.

Andy McIntyre
Glenrothes, Fife

Past lessons

In the Weekly Worker 124 Chris Jones, under the heading ‘Inventing a tradition’, whilst correctly attacking anti-working class elements such as Steve Munby, also gives a favourable introduction to Bill Hunter and his pamphlet, They knew why they fought - unofficial struggles and leadership on the docks 1945-1989. In an indirect reference to Hunter’s pamphlet, Jones states, “The dockers’ fight to resist recasualisation is an inspiration, and their history of struggle a vast resource.” Obviously, Jones has not delved deep into the dockers’ history of struggle, particularly in the period recorded by Hunter in his pamphlet.

The dockers’ struggles, as with those of the miners, the seafarers et al, have constituted a magnificent chapter in the struggle of the working class. However, as we are all aware, all these struggles eventually ended in defeat for the working class in general - the consequences of which we bear today - as a result of incorrect tactics pursued by workers’ leaders. That ordinary militants, trade union-conscious workers, should be misled into incorrect tactics of struggle is understandable. But those leaders immersed in the ideas and methods of Marxism-Leninism should certainly know better - and even if not doing so at the time, which is excusable, could in hindsight see the errors of their past advice and leadership, and make the necessary corrections in order not to repeat the faults of yesterday, tomorrow.

In his pamphlet, Hunter not only does not see any errors in the past struggles of the dockers, but refuses to admit that Trotskyist leader and petty dictator, Gerry Healey, together with his ‘club’ associates, was largely responsible for the break-up of the virtually impregnable trade union hold over the docks through encouraging and initiating the break-away of dockers from the TGWU (white union) to the NSADU (blue union). In other words, even in hindsight, Hunter and other Trotskyists have not learnt (or is it a refusal to face up to, due to their responsibility?) the causes of the dockers’ defeats.

It is the duty of all advanced workers, armed with the scientific methods of Marxism-Leninism, to point out the failures in our ranks. This I have tried to do through the pages of Workers Press, inviting Hunter and co to discuss such failures, the lessons of the past and what must be done in the future. Not only was I greeted with slurs and innuendoes of Stalinism, disrespect for working class fighters, sectarianism, etc, but after three Trotskyists took one whole page of Workers Press in letters attacking me, the editor, despite my protests, closed down discussion, as the issue had been ‘dealt with’; that is, of course, until recently when another Trotskyist, Bob Archer, returned to the attack against me, with the Workers Press editor refusing to print my reply. Such is the democratic open discussions practised by Trotskyists of the Hunter ilk.

If this, according to Jones, is “serious and dedicated Trotskyism at its best”, which “Bill [Hunter] represents” and which he believes the Party “need to contain”, I suggest he studies the history and methodology of Trotskyism and he will discover its betrayals of workers’ movements throughout the world; the lessons of which Hunter and co refuse to face up to, and are too cowardly to discuss in the open before the class.

Tom Cowan
South London