I MUST start off today by making a self-criticism, which I owe to the party and the Labour movement as a whole. Up till today I have believed that it was best for those of us who disagreed with the Goveroment to remain quiet until after the next elections. Then after labour was defeated at the polls we could point the finger at the guilty people and fight to get rid of them. I was wrong.
What this line completely ignores is that fact that one's silence has become part of the problem. It is already being used to defeat workers in struggle. The time has come to speak out aloud. For if we do not, our labour stream will get so polluted that it will destroy many of our young aCTIVISES.
This Government is the most reactionary Labour government we have had since Ramsay MacDonald. In its eagerness to manage capicalism it has now implemented social policies which have created massive unemployment, led to a decline in the living standards of working people, and big cuts in schools, hospitals and house-building programmes. The International Monetary Fund approves of all this, but these are the very measures which are alienating our supporters throughout the country.
At the same time we have the growth of racism and fascism. Some Labour supporters have in despair turned to the fascists. What an indictment of our policies. We have an attack on democratic rights inspired by our own Government and cagerly taken up by the Tories, We have retreated on the question of women's rights and abortion.
We have allowed a tinpot employer in North London to make a laughing stock of the entire trade union movement with some Government Ministers advising APEX that it was better to lose the strike than allow mass picketing to lead to the defeat of this Government, It appears that this Government has forgotten that it won the election in 1974 because of the miners strike And if that were not enough, we have the Tories and their friends on the extreme right (in the mis-named National Association for Freedom") arguing that it is 'socialism" wbich is to blame for this crisis. We are letting them get away with this nonsense and they know it's nonsense - as if the City of London and the Treasury believed that Jim, Denis, Shirley and company are socialists — because we refuse to fight back.
In the sphere of foreign policy we remain tied to the cost-tails of the US State Department. 1 feel ashamed that as a Minister in 1968 and again as one today 1 cannot cancel the uranium contract between Rio Tinto Zinc's Rossing Mine in occupied Namibia and British Nuclear Fuels. This uranium is vital in South Africa's bid to get nuclear weapons.
Yes, contrades, we are reactionaries at home and abroad. True, this is not new for a Labour Government, But what is novel is the virtual absence of an organised opposition. Don't rock the boat lest the Government lose the election is our leaders' motto of the season.
What they refuse to understand is that the boat is being rocked by the sinister forces of an sconomic system in crisis. The only way to keep the boat on an even keel is by socialist measures. The crisis should not be an excuse for postponing these, but rather the reason for implementing them.
Let us therefore go on the offensive. Let us mobilise all the creative energies of our working class. Let us nationalise the 25 big monopolies. Let us combat the anti-socialist offensive of the Tory press and its friends in industry and the educational establishment.
We should learn from bistory that good has cone only from those without power chailenging those with power. Let us create countervailing powers to answer the capitalist challenge and in the process fight to create a socialist sociely. We must march with the unemployed, with the anti-fascists, with the rank-and-file workers opposed to the undemocratic methods of some of their union leaders.