heckled about his role in the low pay dispute.
oration before he'd spoken.
the TUC, the THE two meetings held in Central Hall on Wednesday of last week were as militant as the march had been. The reception given to the Labour leaders who had payed the way for the present Tory onslaught on the public services was implacably hostile. Former Labour ministers Jim Callaghan, Stan Orme, Michael Foot, and Peter Shore, who have suddenly discovered compassion for the elderly and sick, were drowned out in booing and heckling.
There were some surprising faces: Strange, for example, to see Albert Spanswick, general secretary of COHSE, daring to show his face after he and Alan Fisher had been thrown off the platform at the low pay rally last January. This time the union leaders took the precaution of staying out of the main hall and splitting the rank and file into two meetings. Spanswick was inaudible es he was Dennis Skinner saved the day for the platform. His record of fighting for the reform of the Labour Party gained him a standing 'We've got to get rid of the Tories and we're not going to wait five years to do it, either' Skinner declared. 'Howdo we do it? At Furniture Makers' resolution, narrowly defeated, called for days of action. We don't just need days of action, we need weeks of action as well.' 'Labour councils, he added, 'must follow Lambeth and refuse to implement the cuts. We need actions like those at Clay Cross, and around the Pentonville dockers; like the actions of the miners and the actions against the Industrial Relations Act. We must unite path last time. which was only morement. to get rid of Thatcher and build a socialist Britain.' The next Labour government, implement socialist policies which are drawn up for it in a manifesto not written by the people who had led us up the garden He explained the fate of the 1974 Labour Party manifesto in terms of the attacks on the Labour government by the CBI, which launched an investment strike; the IMF, which dictated to the elected government; and by the unelected House of Lords, which wrecked Labour's legislative programme.
Skinner called for maximum unity, adding that Spanswick and Foot [who was in the chair] had something to offer in the fighe. "The leadership, ' he said, 'has got to listen to the mood of this demonstration and meeting'.
The problem is that the leaders represented on the platform alongside Skinner gave no sign of listening to the rank and file the last time they got into office, let alone using the sort of demonstration we had just seen to fight against the international bankers and the ruling class when they wrecked the Labour programme [with hardly a murmur from those who were supposed to be implementing it.
What now? 'Do you support Derek Robinson?' Callaghan was repeatedly asked by one militant — to sustained applause from the meetil g. Sunny Jim declined to comment. Part of ensuring that there are no repeats of the disasters of the last Labour government must be to get rid of Callaghan and his supporters throughout the Skinner continued, Socialist Challenge 6 December 1979 Pagt3.