workers and £80 for surface workers, were withdrawn.
The motion carried means all things to all people. Although moved by Arthur Scargill, the motion was seconded by the notorious Nottingham right-winger, Len Clarke.
Despite Scargill's brave words denouncing the capitalist crisis, Len Clarke pointed out that 'you don't remove the word demand and put in the word "seek" and mean une same tning. We'll get the £100 when the country can afford it and not before.
SETBACK
The agreed position is definitely a setback for the left in the NUM. It is also a setback for the whole working class giving a much-needed boost to the Government's attempts to get a voluntary incomes policy All this, however, did not stop the Morning Ster, the paper of the Communist Party, from claiming that the decision was a big victory. *Neither 10 per cent nor £6 has any relevance - Miners vote to seek £100 a week' ran the headline the next day.
The Communist Party, in fact, played a thoroughly sordid role in the whole affair. Instead of sponsoring a motion totally rejecting the Government's wage-cutting plans, supporting any group of workers striking against it, and pledging to continue the campaign for £100 in the fields, the Communist Party had already decided to drop the Yorkshire resolution the Thursday night (3 July) before the conference began.
For the next four days the Communist-dominated South Wales, Scotland and Kent areas sat quiet while the right-wing tried to produce a compromise the CP had already decided on. Eventually on Tuesday 8 July, at a lunchtime meeting of the Ine NUM executive two hours before the wages debate was due to begin, CP member and NUM Vice-President Mick McGahey urged Scargill to acA great opportunity to launch the fight-back against Wilson's wage-cut plans was lost at the annual conference of the National Union of Mineworkers last week. The conference voted unanimously to accept a composite motion seeking pay rises to give face workers £100 a week. But the demand for the claim to be met by 1 November, and the demands for £85 for other underground cept the compromise.
*Get the best compromise you can. It is better to look responsible than beaten?, was the message from McGahey that Scargill read to the Yorkshire delegation just before the wages debate. Despite this the Yorkshire delegation at first refused, forcing the South Wales, Scotland and Kent delegations to come out into the open and indicate they would vote against tne yorkshire resolutior if it went ahead. The Yorkshire delegation met again - and Scargill emerged to propose the compromise.
IMPASSE
The Stalinists quite consciously betrayed Scargill and Scargill knows 1l. but the explanation is not to be found in the undoubted personal hostility towards Scargill, an ex-Party member whose meteoric rise and popularity in the NUM obviously threatens the CP's plans to install MeGahey at the top of the no. Denma te is betraval lies the bankruptcy of their politics in Lic lace ol the present crisis.
Unable and unwulling to open up ary action going beyond the token gestures supported by the Labour left, the Communist Party is left in a total political impasse when these same leits reluse to lead any ligat against Wilson's Tory policies. When the CP leaders inside the NUM argued that they thought there would be for a head-on clash with the Government over lu, what they were admitting was that they had no effective strategy to mobilise class-wide action against the Government This is not surprising. In the time since the Healey measures were announced, the Communist Farty has not put forward one sing le concrete proposal for organising measures which the labour move ment should see were rushed through Parliament in place of the wage cuts White Paper" (Morning Star, 14 July our emphasis).
WEAKNESS
If the NUM conference exposed this bankruptcy, however, it alse snowed up une weak mank or Armur Scargill's brand of militancy. The burning need of the moment is for the organisations of the labour move ment to develop their own plan to deal with the crisis, as a concrete alternative to the class collaboration ist policies of the Labour Government In the recent past Scargill himself argued for one of the aspects of such a plan an integrated energy policy. But he did nothing at the NUM Conference to spell out how such a plan bore on other questions - such as wages and the organisation of the coal and oil fields. In other words he sees his plan not as a basis for working class action to impose a workers solution to the crisis, but as a proposal to be referred to the relevant ministry to consider. In the meantime it's militant trade unionism' as before.
By relying on sectoral militancy to defend miners' living standards, rather than setting political goals for this militancy which benefit the whole working class, Scargill allowed the right wing to exploit Wilson's claim that the demand for £100 would wreck the Government's anti-inflation plan and undermine democracy. wormiey s slander that sec tions of the NUM leadership were "drunk with their own power' could have been completely smashed by spelling out precisely how the miners could use their industrial might fo the benefit of every section of the working class.
EXAMPLE
By developing an alternative plan, a perspective of mass extra-parliament• by fighting for a series of class-wide demands to defend the real value of workers' incomes and the social services against inflation, by campaigning for industrial action in support of the low paid and those fighting unemployment, the miners could have an electrifying effect on the rest Government and their own bureaucrate misteaders In the months to come it will be the ability to begin to impose this sort of workers solution to the crisis which will not only defeat the manoeuvres of the right and the Stalinists in the trade union bureaucracy, but will determine the ability of smashed at one blow the 'run on the pound'. the foreign debts. a scale coping with the world economy. of funds out of the country.
4 - workers control _red weekly 17 july 1975
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of the workers movement giving insufficient support outside the NUM it confidence to struggle against the