'Absteations! Count the Abstentions!" was the cry which went up at the end of Saturday's conference on Shrewsbury, called by the London T&GWE/ UCATT Action Committee. The poorly attended meeting ended in pandemonium, as 40% of the 250 delegates registered their disgust with the platform's refusal to take amendments by abstaining on the official resolution.
This resolution was a whitewash of the UCATT and T&GWU bureaucrats, and put forward a strategy" for releasing the Shrewsbury pickets which was an insult to the political intelligence of most of the delegates. DISGUSTING LIE How could delegates vote for a resolution which contained a dogusting liet We support both the T&G National Committee and the Executive Committee of UCATT in theit statements condemning the trials as a political conspuracy on the Right to Picket' it said. Yet UCATT's most recent statement said exactly the opposite!
No wonder George Smith, Ger eral Secretary of UCA FF, booked to speak at the Conference, sent Derek Woods, his assistant secretary, fo speak instead, As Stuart Maclennan, IMG member and UCATT steward said - We heard the monkey instead of the organ-grinder!' To be at all consistent with UCATT'sreel policy, Woods couldn't help but blurt out, amid angry boos and shouts, that UCATT couldn't intervene in the case because it was ¡ a 'criminal' one. As Maclennan pointed out, the NUM did not sit back and mutter about the criminal law in 1972 when 14 Longannet miners were arrested, but pledged to stay out until they were released.
And how could delegates vote for a resolution which proposed nothing more than a call on Labour to release the pickets, a call on the union leaderships to condemn the use of the 1875 Act, support for the Day of Action already planned for 20 March, and for delegates to raise the issue in their trade union branches? The delegates had voted for this sort of thing time and again in recent months, with no noticeable effect on the course of capitalist justice"
On top of all this, the platform had the gall to propose a recall Conference to "promote further action"
CONFUSION It wasn't that the Conference was packed out with members of the IMG, still stubbornly trying to establish that only indefinite strike action will guarantee victory. Many of those seeking in put amendments. and who finally abstained, were mink and file memhers of the very Communist Party which dominates the official Action Committee stagomanaging the Conference. Their modest proposais for a one-day stoppage on | May met with cold-blooded manipulation from the platformn This was not the only surpise of the day. Two of the speeches in the morning showed the confthe campaign no longer be 'sub-judice and Then the Labour Party would amend the Conspiracy Act and the verdicts 'could" be reversed. But the courts were there to *dispense justice and their procedures could not be overturned in an 'anarchistic manner.
To retain any credibality at all after this contribution, Eddie Marsden of the Construction Section of the AUEW, one of the figures who has argued most for reliance on the bureaucracy, lad He spoke of the need for mass action to force the Goyernment's usion into which the CP's pressure the leaders strategy has plunged Norman Atkinson, Labour MP for Tottenham, said that the purpose of mass activity was to speed resolution.
up the court case, so that it would could be discussed in Parliament! to make all kinds of left demagogy. 40% of delegates registered their disgust by abstaining on the official resolution hand, and said that this was more important now than simply pressure on the TUC and the Lahour Party. Needless to add, however, he failed to move any amendment to the Carl Gardner, member of the IMG and a NATSOPA delegate, pointed out how the Communist Party of which Marsden is a member had consistently stamped on any moves towards independent mass action. He criticised the Morning Star for failing to report the call for an indefinite general stoppage in the building trade made by the Birmingham UCATT shop stewards in carly January. If the CP had taken up this call, widespread industrial action could have been launched and the pickets freed there and then. Hut this chance was ignored It was left to two other IMG speakers, Filda Keen of the NUT and Westminster Trades Council, ind Derek Brough, a T&GWU forward for the campuign They argued that the Conference should come out in favour of indefinite strike action. Those unions like the NUM whose conf idence is high as a result of victory. and those like the AUEW still to launch struggles where picketing will be decisive, should be called on to take the lead.
SPEAKING TOUR
They attempled to put forward two amendments, one which would have asked the NUM to publicly state its support for the Shrewsbury workers and to pledge active solidarity with any industr ial action taken to free them, and a second that branches of the NUM and AUEW should organise a speaking tour for the prisoners" wives to help lay the basis for industrial action These moves would have helped bring the campaign back into the centre of the arena und would have encouraged other sections of workers to commit themselves to the fight. But the London Conference proved yet another talking shop which failed to puil the campaign out of its monotonous routine of more lobbies and smaller one-day protests and conferences such as this, Meanwhile the Shrewsbury Jads are Jett languishing in prison.