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Weekly Worker 542 Thursday September 2 2004
Letters
Imperialism
Mike Macnair’s recent articles on the Alliance for Workers’
Liberty and imperialism were pedestrian and superficial. And despite his
urbane tone, Macnair prefers to smear the AWL than engage with the substance
of our position.
First, Iraq. The AWL is against the occupation of Iraq, for the self-determination
of the peoples of Iraq, for immediate elections and for troops out. And
we are first and foremost for the development of the Iraqi workers’
movement, as the only progressive, democratic and potentially socialist
force in the country.
Macnair doubts our commitment to Iraq’s freedom because we don’t
screech ‘now!’ at the end of every demand - yet his own position
is not for troops out ‘now’ either. His fundamental argument
is that: “The call for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal
of troops ... is a proposal for fighting for action by the British workers’
movement to force withdrawal” (Weekly Worker July 29). Right now
the British labour movement is not in a position to force immediate withdrawal.
It might be at some point in the future, but it isn’t at present.
If Macnair’s perspective depends solely on the activity of the British
labour movement, then it’s not a demand for immediate withdrawal.
Since the same thing is true of the US labour movement, the only forces
that could bring about the immediate withdrawal of troops are inside Iraq
itself. Should the resurgent Iraqi labour movement force withdrawal, we
would all rejoice, but right now it is also too weak to do so. Ironically
Macnair says he supports this labour movement, but his position is purely
verbal. I know of no concrete action by the CPGB to make solidarity with
the Iraqi working class - beyond a few platonic phrases. In contrast,
the AWL is virtually the only socialist organisation trying to work with
other like-minded trade unionists to get a solidarity campaign organised
in Britain.
However, there are other forces that might force withdrawal - such as
al-Sadr and other islamists. But of course these forces are also viciously
anti-working class and opposed to the emerging labour movement. The problem
for the CPGB is you can’t support both. The idea of an alliance between
the emerging labour movement and the so-called ‘resistance’
against the occupation is deeply flawed - such an ‘alliance’
would surely cut the throats of the labour movement, just as a similar
‘anti-imperialist front’ did in Iran in 1979-80. This is what
the AWL is trying to grapple with - and, faced with a choice, we prioritise
the workers’ movement.
Secondly, imperialism. Macnair appears not to have understood what the
AWL says about earlier Marxist theories of imperialism. We think the views
of Kautsky, Hilferding, Luxemburg, Lenin and Bukharin were more or less
adequate to explain the drives that led to World War I, but they no longer
explain the structure of the world economy, the relations between the
great powers or indeed the reasons for modern wars.
Yet much of Macnair’s critique of these Marxists, such as the inadequacies
of Lenin’s ‘labour aristocracy’ theory based on colonial
superprofits, is largely a pale shadow of our own criticisms. Macnair
is entirely disingenuous in presenting our view that imperialism can be
progressive as some kind of break with classical Marxism. It was after
all Lenin who wrote: “There is evidence that even today the indisputable
fact that imperialism is progressive” (Preface to Bukharin’s
World economy and imperialism, 1915); and: “No Marxist will forget
... that imperialism is progressive compared with pre-monopoly capitalism
(‘A caricature of Marxism and imperialist economism’, 1916).
Trotsky expressed a similar idea: “Imperialism represents the predatory
capitalist expression of a progressive tendency in economic development
- to construct a human economy on a world scale, freed from the cramping
fetters of the nation and the state” (‘Imperialism and the national
idea’, 1915). And it was Rosa Luxemburg who wrote: “Imperialist
world domination is an historical necessity, but so too its destruction
by the proletarian international. Step for step there are two historical
necessities in conflict with one another”; and “in this sense
imperialism ultimately works for us” (The Junius Pamphlet 1915).
Macnair smears us with holding the views of Kautsky during World War I,
yet goes on to describe the world after 1950 in ways very similar to Kautsky’s
picture (ie, of a great power cartel, of exploitation of the ‘third
world’). We think the world since 1950 is significantly different,
in terms of social relations, relations between states and indeed the
drive to war to warrant more serious discussion of the meaning of imperialism
than simply parroting the Comintern view from 1920.
Macnair says he agrees, but what of his own views? They are striking for
their lack of originality. His principal argument is that capitalism has
“epochal limits” - a fact so entirely uncontroversial, I wondered
whether he had simply missed all our references to the ‘age of barbarism’.
His supplementary point that capitalism is in decline is not substantiated
with any facts nor discussed with any great insight. Nor does he spell
out the great practical conclusions that follow from such a characterisation.
Macnair also makes an entirely crass comparison between the US and the
other big capitalist powers since 1950 and the relations between Britain
and Portugal in Lenin’s time. Such half-thoughts, wedded to his attempt
to breathe life into the corpse of dependency theory, take the discussion
nowhere.
All Macnair is left with is the CPGB’s mantra, that the AWL is fundamentally
wrong. But then factional hatred towards the AWL is presumably the only
way the CPGB can ingratiate itself with its new friends in Respect.
Paul Hampton
AWL
Free trade
I should like to comment on Mike Macnair’s excellent articles. Although
there always was an international component to capital, at the same time
there was intense competition between nation-states.
The simple explanation for this was that the financial centres within
the most successful nation-states were in intense competition to dominate
markets in goods, investment and finance. There simply wasn’t room
for multiple successful centres to co-exist if profits were to be maintained
at the right rate of return. This means that the imperialist free trade
theory of a certain organisation which shall remain nameless is a load
of bullshit, but if they were tipsters I would put never money on their
favourites as they have a very bad track record of getting it wrong.
Free trade was always used by the dominant economic and political power
to secure its position. For example, by the 1860s it was clear that capitalism
was in decline in Britain in terms of manufacturing and they turned to
finance capital. Hobsbawn and others are excellent on this - there is
an enormous literature - and the 1890s were “the climacteric of British
manufacturing”. In other words other centres had emerged.
But enter stage-right a group of strategic theorists and policy-makers.
These were the liberal imperialists and geopolitical theorists. It is
of the uttermost significance they should emerge in Britain at this time,
complete with their own guru, Sir Halford MacKinder, and thus we have
our very own geopolitical theory.
The AWL have once again, by an amazing coincidence, come up with a theory
which directly aids imperialism and confuses the left. But, as Mike Macnair
has explained, there would be winners and losers, and countries would
have to adopt economic policies that essentially favoured the British
empire, as well as political and military ones: examples being Argentina,
as well as Egypt and - wait for it - Iraq.
All this has been revived today as the ideological basis for this activity
and not just American foreign policy being corporate-driven. They had
their ideologists and always had from that date. It has been brought back
and can be seen in such books as Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The grand
chessboard: geopolitics and the American imperative and the Second American
century project. Brzezinski is a leading ideologist for these theories.
I would urge the Weekly Worker to study this aspect of imperialism and
the ‘free market’, which has been overlooked and for which a
considerable literature and items on the web exist.
Richard Roper
Sheffield
Internationalism
What Mike Macnair has to say about internationalism is not only very little
indeed but provides no indication of its present form nor any guide to
its possible future.
At present, I would argue, we are passing from ‘socialist and working
class internationalism’ (inter-nationalism) to a ‘global social-movement
solidarity’. This is revealed in the actions of the self-named ‘global
justice and solidarity movement’ - something that may include but
which simultaneously surpasses the class-limited, national, party and
union inter-nationalisms that once dominated but now exercise declining
attraction and capacity.
Give me equal space to Mike and I could argue this at length.
Pete Waterman
email
Testing times
The ‘Appeal for socialist unity’ made in the latest edition
of the AWL’s newspaper, Solidarity, should not be greeted automatically
with the understandable cynicism that sometimes afflicts us when the AWL
goes on a ‘left unity’ offensive. However hollow the AWL’s
unity-mongering has been in the past, its call for socialist unity at
the coming general election should be treated at face value and viewed
as a positive contribution to the debate about where the left orientates
after the collapse of the Socialist Alliance.
Indeed, it should be an appeal that the CPGB and Weekly Worker are at
the forefront of making. Unless we take up this call, we risk two dangers:
one is paralysis caused by our ‘wait and see’ approach to Respect;
the second is being outflanked by the inconsistent left unity-mongering
of the likes of the AWL and Workers Power.
The Respect debate has been a fundamental fault line in our organisation
recently. Let’s now put it behind us and demand that the left stands
on a genuinely socialist programme against New Labour at the next general
election. If Respect can become the vehicle for doing this that would
be good. But the Socialist Workers Party’s retreat from class politics
makes this unlikely. We were correct to critically engage with Respect
and should maintain that engagement. But, as comrade Ian Mahoney has belatedly
pointed out in recent editions of the Weekly Worker, Respect amounts to
an anti-left unity project. We should not wait till its conference at
the end of October or its results in elections to recognise that Respect
is not likely to be our project: that is, a project of principled left
unity.
Perhaps an appeal to the likes of the Scottish Socialist Party, the new
United Socialist Party, the Socialist Party, the AWL and Workers Power
will fall on deaf ears. If so, then, at least, they will be exposed as
sectarian phrase-mongers whose calls for a new workers’ party is
simply hot air. Yet if some kind of unity can be cohered at the general
election, it would mean that the limited but real progress made by the
Socialist Alliance in 2001 would not be in vain, even if our challenge
would be necessarily somewhat smaller. Though in any case it is unlikely
that Respect will mount much of a challenge outside its ‘strongholds’.
Indeed it would pose a challenge to some of these organisations to stand
on a programme of real class struggle politics - Marxism - rather than
hide behind a manifesto not so different than Respect’s, except for
the occasional use of phrases ‘socialist’ and ‘working
class’ in their literature. Open borders, republicanism, down with
the occupation of Iraq, not a penny to ‘defence’ and elected
representatives on a worker’s wage should be prominent amongst its
demands. Let’s not simply wait and see. Instead let’s put the
left to the test now and go on the offensive.
Cameron Richards
email
Millwall election
I was elected as a Respect councillor for St Dunstan’s and Stepney
Green ward in Tower Hamlets on July 29. I would not have won and nor would
Respect have had its first councillor elected without the help and support
which I received throughout my campaign. I would like to take this opportunity
to thank everyone who gave up their time to come and help.
You may be aware that there is another by-election in Millwall taking
place on September 9. We have started canvassing and we are getting a
lot of support from local people. Once again I am asking for your help
and support. Our candidate for Millwall, Paul McGarr, is a very well known
local campaigner, who has been the voice for ordinary and working class
people in Millwall since 1988. I am very honoured to call Paul my friend.
You can help by coming to Crossharbour DLR station at any of the following
times: Monday-Friday, 6pm; Saturday, 2pm; Sunday, 12 noon. For more information
please contact Martin on 07958 535231 or Noor on 07879 496680.
Councillor Oliur Rahman
Tower Hamlets
IWCA potential
The farcical reports of the ‘Campaign for a Mass Party of the Working
Class’ just prove what many of us have known for some time: the left
is a hopeless shambles digging its own grave.
The Independent Working Class Association, which won three council seats
in Oxford, has demonstrated the benefits of building the kind of solid
base of support in working class communities that no post-war socialist
party has achieved. They rightly say that the people they are trying to
win over, rather than some committee of the ‘politically advanced’,
should participate in the engineering of a new political movement, its
programme and its policies.
The IWCA has shown the potential of an unashamedly working class organisation,
with a pro-working class agenda, free from orthodox Leninist dogma. Our
Liverpool comrades should take note.
Mick O’Conaill
email
Livingstone
Pretty obviously if Ken Livingstone is making such a whopping contribution
(from the council tax of Londoners’ like myself) to the European
Social Forum, that money is going to come with some strings (‘Ken
pays the piper and now calls the tune’, August 5).
Elsewhere in the Weekly Worker you comment that the left, and many organisations
within it, are not going through the best of times. This weakness is exacerbated
by giving charlatans like Livingstone the time of day, and in particular
by taking their money. £300,000 could do a lot of good in a deprived
borough like Haringey - why waste it on the ESF? If the left wants to
be taken seriously as defenders of the working class, it should be campaigning
against, not accepting, such donations.
Paul Marsh
London Class War
Red Party
I was initially sorry to read that a minority within the CPCB had split
to form an organisation called the Red Party. Out of curiosity I looked
at its website.
I was astonished to find there this declaration of principle: “The
essence of socialism is simple. It is the fight for true democracy. Current
British society allows us to determine the constitution of parliament
by vote ... However, [this does] not constitute democracy: not true ‘government
by the people’ ... And parliament is not the seat of true power.
The unelected senior civil servants, the House of Lords and the monarchy
all exist to defend and perpetuate the basic shape of our society. And,
behind them all, the corporations control our working lives, our conditions,
and what is done with the things we make and the services we provide.
This small minority of our population, wielding power in a dozen different
and unaccountable ways, represent a ruling class.”
This has no connection with Marx’s work at all. Marx demanded an
exact concept of capital. He wrote: “What imprints the character
of capital on money or the commodity is not their nature as money or commodity,
nor the material use-value of the commodity as subsistence and means of
production, but the circumstance that this money and this commodity, these
means of production and subsistence, confront the labour-power, denuded
of all material wealth, as autonomous powers, personified in their possessors.”
So, according to Marx, the whole productive world is privatised property
as against the wage workers. The workers live in this nightmare world
of their own creation; a world that is hostile, that will only feed them
if they will make it grow even more powerful. A world in which their only
rights are to stand in the public streets (but not loiter) and, of course,
to seek work (provided you are British).
This is more than a lack of democracy. Marx started as a fighter for true
democracy but moved quite some way beyond that. The Red Party’s platform
is so vacuous that the reign of Richard II could be caught by its main
attack as much as the reign of Blair. So could the reign of the Tang emperors.
Marx’s forensic dissection of capitalist society is made with razor-sharp
intellectual tools. Manny Neira can only manage broad blows against the
democratic imperfections that mar the face of the bourgeois state.
To start, as Neira does, with the rulers and then move to the ruled is
the exact opposite of Marx’s approach! For Marx, the capitalist is
merely an adjunct of capital. Capital is the creation and recreation of
the working class, the producers who are constantly driven away from the
means of life (the land and the means of production).
The Red Party’s platform is unadulterated liberalism. Even Bernstein
would blush at it. It states that all we lack is the perfecting of the
French Revolution. The nature of capital itself is avoided. This is the
classic strategy of reformists. Where do we see expounded the true horror
of capital, human lives devoured by the machines and social relationships
working people themselves sustain? For Marx, the vampire is the iconic
image that captures the relationship between workers and capital. How
anaemic is the Red Party’s claim that our problem is a “small
minority of our population, wielding power in a dozen different and unaccountable
ways”!
Compare The Red Party programme with this one: “Our party’s
founders decided that wealth and social status were not an entitlement
to rule. They believed that wisdom and compassion could be found within
every individual and a stable government must be built upon a broad popular
base.” The Democratic Party website provided that statement. I suggest
it is not at all distant from the platform the Red Party describes as
“socialism”.
I wrote to the Red Party to suggest that the party appeared to have little
to say about the class slavery that lies behind the poverty and war that
plague the world. The website invites those who feel they cannot join
the Red Party to write to tell them why. Neira read my letter but neither
replied nor published it in the Red Star (for which, in edition one, the
pressing issue of the day is ‘Did crime start in the 1960s?’.
That will stir up the class war.) He almost exactly meets his own party’s
website definition of a sectarian. Unlike the CPGB.
I’m not a member of the CPGB and I’m not going to become one.
But I have to admire the CPGB/Weekly Worker commitment to honest socialist
debate and engagement. And the CPGB are a party who appear to know what
socialism means. You are better off without your liberals.
Richard Harris
Canterbury
Stalin
I am intrigued by the statement in ‘What we fight for?’ which
appears to reject wholesale the historic contribution of Stalin and the
Soviet Union.
I regard myself as a communist and to my mind this means advocating a
world society based on the common ownership of the whole of the world’s
resources by the whole of the working class, production for use, and free
access to goods and services, given we will ‘own’ them anyway,
in a universal classless society.
But the history of the Soviet Union and the role of Stalin is an integral
aspect of communism. If we reject these wholesale, we reject our own history
and tradition. We don’t reject the first real attempt to establish
a working class government, the 1871 Paris Commune, even though this only
lasted 71 days and was not explicitly communist in orientation. Quite
the reverse, we celebrate the sheer human heroism and the dramatic insights
it gave into what a truly democratic and human society might look like.
The Bolshevik revolution and the establishment of the Soviet Union was
in effect the second major attempt to establish working class power, being
led by people who were undoubtedly socialist, communist and probably better
Marxists than Marx and Engels! They were always in a desperate situation
and in the absence of revolution in the advanced capitalist countries,
they fully expected to be crushed within months. The desperation of an
isolated working class state in a pre-capitalist country suggested two
‘obvious’ alternatives. One, an heroic, defiant last stand and
then destruction by world capitalism. Two, accommodation and submission
to world capitalism. Trotsky and Bukharin respectively.
Against all the odds and assumptions the Stalin-led collective leadership
carved out a third way, and not only ensured the survival of the socialist
state, resisted and defeated Nazi invasion, but transformed it into a
world system and superpower to counter and limit world imperialism. It
didn’t collapse in 71 days, several months, or a couple of years,
but lasted 74 years!
Nobody would claim this represented the vision of world communism described
above, or deny serious mistakes were made, or crimes committed. But to
reject the struggle and outstanding achievements of genuine socialists
and communists and the world’s first socialist state, is to reject
our history and communism itself. We must take a scientific, balanced
and positive assessment of the Soviet Union and Stalin, as we do of the
Paris Commune. Only a scientific approach to history, revolution and our
ultimate communist ideal equips us to make the third wave of communist
revolution, which this time will establish a world communist society.
Andrew Northall
Northants
Farcical
I abhor Stalin. He gave communism the poor reputation from which it has
still not recovered. Joseph Stalin was a man with many neuroses such as
paranoia. Under the banner of socialism, these flaws surfaced and he was
able to do his many evil deeds.
My stomach churned at the witness accounts of death, suffering, abuse
and torture, when I watched the August 14 documentary on Channel 4. However,
there are many paradoxes. For example, the programme condemned the massive
loss of life involved in industrialisation. But, without it, Russia would
have been defeated by Nazi Germany. Also, continuing the industrialisation
argument, how many innocent victims died during the industrial revolution
in Britain? The forced movement of the English rural population into the
new industrial towns is not so unlike Stalin’s agrarian policies.
I also disliked how the programme said Stalin began liquidating his rivals
within the Bolshevik Party. I believe Bolshevism died when Lenin died
and Trotsky did not succeed him. Bolshevism was the dictatorship of the
proletariat, not the dictatorship of the bureaucracy. I cannot forgive
Stalin for strangling communism when it had a genuine chance of changing
the world. Trotsky’s book, The revolution betrayed summed this up
perfectly, and shows how the Soviet Union should have been under its true
leader, Trotsky.
Yet the proletariat do not see this, only Stalin, gulags, torture and
repression. However, I cannot stand back while the capitalist propaganda
works on Stalin when the capitalist system is guilty of the same crimes.
The programme castigated Stalin, but blamed communism.
DM Picard
email
Tsarist abuse
I would question whether the Bolsheviks were simply engaging in cheap
smear tactics when they accused Bishop Palladii of corruption of youth
during his trial in 1919 (‘The politics of purity’ Weekly Worker
July 22). In view of some recent controversies I find it quite plausible
that child sexual abuse by the clergy was a serious problem in tsarist
Russia.
Pat Gallacher
Coordinating Committee for the Refoundation of the Fourth International
Smoking bans
Dave Edwards might think that tobacco “doesn’t have a useful
purpose whatsoever, except for making money” (Letters, August 12).
I would be interested in how he could possibly explain the widespread
use of tobacco among a group of people who had never heard of money, the
native Americans before the arrival of Europeans. The answer I would give
is that they smoked it for the same simple reason that millions of us
smoke it today - not because of capitalism but because we enjoy it. If
we didn’t then we wouldn’t do it.
Another problem that Edwards should try and solve is this: why has the
country with the most entrenched capitalist system and almost complete
lack of any left politics (America) erected smoking bans in public places,
while in European countries with much stronger social democratic and socialist
traditions there are no such bans (Ireland excepted)?
Rightwing governments like to pretend that they are standing up to tobacco
manufacturers and protecting workers by banning smoking in public places,
but in reality they are merely capitulating to the pharmaceutical industry,
which needs the government to bully people into giving up smoking so that
they can sell their nicotine gum, patches and similar items (these really
are products that have no purpose apart from making money).
Patrick Randall
email
Postpone
Sion Griffiths avoids the real challenge to the ‘personal’ politics
of the fake ‘left’ raised by the Economic and Philosophic Science
Review (Letters, August 5).
This accuses single-issue reformism (feminism, black nationalism, gay
rights, etc) in the very first paragraph of being “the last refuge
of anti-communism, which will provide history with the most reactionary,
last-ditch defenders of the monopoly-imperialist ‘free world’
system in its final counterrevolutionary debacles. When the personal became
the political, it was endless variants of extreme individualist philosophy
which were being deliberately aggressively promoted …So-called ‘human
rights’ became more successful than ever as a battering ram for the
western imperialist controllers’ non-stop worldwide propaganda priority
to wipe out communism.”
The EPSR’s point was made in a letter to the Weekly Worker: “Dream
on if you think that reforms have banished racism, or reduced violence,
or made for happier families, or replaced drugs and booze for discontented
youth, or taught society to really value all people equally … or
improved the environment, or stopped international imperialist tyranny”
(July 22).
It is typical of the subjective politics now dominant that Sion Griffiths
ignores this crisis of the ‘left’ in order to make a venomous
personal attack because of only seeing some insult to homosexuality in
the EPSR piece. But there is no insult; and the real phenomenon of homosexuality
itself as such is not the issue. The cynical individualist nihilism of
some gay politics (and many other single-issue philosophies) is the problem,
typified by the sabotage of the Palestinian march to air the personal
feelings of hurt homosexuals.
Gays should feel offended and intimidated by continued barbaric backwardness
of international capitalist society on these questions, but a revolutionary
world of workers’ states is the only long-term guarantee of real
human enlightenment on all the rotten discriminations still prevalent
in an insecure, class-divided society. Have you checked out your school
playground insults lately?
But Sion Griffiths can only make jeering jokes about proletarian dictatorship,
typical of current ‘left’ ignorance about, and hostility to,
the real, historic-making achievements of the world’s workers-state
experiences so far, despite their inevitably “brutal” realities
too (as referred to, neither in praise nor admiration). And this single-issue
anti-communism will last throughout the whole dying counterrevolutionary
era of ‘free world’ degeneration.
All the other issues about ‘politically correct’ crassness on
gay questions, and doubts about the phenomenon continuing when society
is no longer macho-dominated from class or hierarchical struggle, can
be debated academically; but wouldn’t they be best postponed in favour
of the world seeing its way to a total Palestinian victory over the whole
post-1945 Jewish/imperialist colonisation attempt, one unavoidable key
on the way to the world revolution?
Another major EPSR point which Sion Griffiths managed to completely ignore
in order to pursue personal ‘homophobic’ venom.
Royston Bull
Manchester
Secular Iran
Experience of the last 23 years in Iran and the Middle East has proven
once again the destructive nature of religion in the public domain. Islamic
laws have intruded in all aspects of life in Iran. All public functions
are now designed, based and enforced by islamic law. Iranian society has
been segregated, based on sexual apartheid, and women are treated as second-class
citizens in all walks of life.
The Iranian Secular Society has been formed to publicise the destructive
effects of the islamic government in Iran and contribute to bring about:
separation of religion from the state; separation of religion from education;
prohibition of public funding of religious establishment; prohibition
of violent religious ceremonies; equality of men and women in all aspects
of life; safeguarding the children under the age of 16 from religion;
safeguarding all basic civil rights, including freedom of speech, thought,
expression, etc, and against religious intolerance.
Join us to establish a secular society in Iran (www.iransecularsociety.com).
Fariborz Pooya
Iran Secular Society
Keith Frogson
Keith Frogson (‘Froggy’) was my next door neighbour for almost
20 years and my family knew him for nearer 40 (‘Murder of a militant
miner’, August 12).
What a bloke - always a smile or an old joke, mostly with a swear word
or two, but never too blue. A man you could trust to back you up when
backs were against the wall, or dig you out in the case of a fall. Many
a morn round about dawn I would see him march off, ferret in hand, to
check his land (oh yes, it was all his), a couple of rabbits or, if lucky,
a hare. He had learned this skill when the strike had made his cupboards
bare, but one thing was for sure: Froggy was fair and what he said was
what he thought.
I bet he’s marching round heaven, finding old mates long dead. Lord
help the gaffers if there’s any up there. But come on, Keith, don’t
give ’em too hard a time, they’ve done no crime. What you must
do now, old cocker, is go haunt that little bastard who so wanted you
dead.
Rest in peace.
Dale Arnold
email
FBU nightmare
Your article on the Fire Brigades Union dispute was excellent (‘Defend
the union, defend the rank and file’, August 12). It was very well
informed and shows a knowledge of the underlying issues from both sides
that made this dispute such a nightmare. It seemed almost unsettlable
due to the hidden agenda of government, employers and union.
John Vernon
email
Impressed
‘Defend the union, defend the rank and file’ was an outstandingly
accurate article. I’m truly impressed.
Paul Pinder
email
