Weekly Worker 417 Thursday January 31 2002
Teesside
Campaign priorities
Teesside SA decided upon some of its campaigning priorities for the forthcoming mayoral election.
We must use our newsletter Teesside Worker to build up a base of support in selected estates and workplaces, and amongst activists and sympathetic individuals. The newsletter has to be self-financing. Obviously if we had a Socialist Alliance paper that would be more effective than local newsletters. However, in the absence of a national SA paper we have to make do.
The question of a Defend Council Housing initiative, organised by local SWP comrade Geoff Kerr-Morgan, led to some debate on how we approach this event. We are on friendly terms with the campaigners, so we all agreed that it would not be wise to organise a clumsy, ‘pack them in’ intervention. We will send along our SA candidate, Jeff Fowler, comrade Kerr-Morgan - who had helped set the campaign up - and another comrade Martyn Hudson, who has a degree of local campaigning knowledge. Our objective is to express solidarity with the DCH campaign and to encourage its own self-activity, but also to integrate this important fight into the SA movement.
Then there is the thorny issue of an election platform. Comrades from divergent stances - SWP, CPGB and some of the independent comrades (the majority on Teesside) - will be encouraged to use the pre-election period to actually discuss politics.
Lawrie Coombs
