"1 believe in socialism,
International Viewpoint 27 October 1986
BRITAIN
It's been suggested in the Guardian that there's been some kind of deal on the question of nuclear power. Well, I'm the mover of the composite and I'm not aware of it! What's really happened is that the Labour leadership on the NEC found out that they not consensus"
were going to lose and that's why there has been a decision to support, with reservations, composite 63 on this.
Let me make it absolutely clear: as far as the mover, the seconder, and the 252 organizations supporting
ARTHUR SCARGILL, the president of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), made the following speech at the rally held during the Labour Party conference. It is taken from the October 10 issue of Socialist Action.
Within our movement there is a tendency to believe we can go and win the next general election, and the support of working people, a softly-softly approach. That through a Saatchi and Saatchi soft-sell, we can win people that would not normally be won to the policies of our party
Well I happen to be one of those -as a disenchanted Yorkshireman who believes that the Red dyed with the blood of people who sacrificed everything for this move-
Our principles, it is said, are a little out of date. We've got to go for the middle of the road. Well, the only thing that you get in the middle of the road is... knocked over!
Ever since I was 14 years I understood we're not about winning elections. Some people may be. But I know that this is a class war and our fight is to take political power - and there's a difference. Millions of people unemployed, deprivation in our inner cities, Black communities deprived but blatantly discriminated against.
Well, at least there's the beginning of an understanding amongst working men and women of what our brothers and sisters in the Black communities have had to endure, and still have to endure. If there was one thing the miners' strike did it was to help miners understand the issues at stake. And one of the results is that miners will be voting at this conference in support of Black Sections as one of the steps towards securing the rights of Black people in this society.
Inner city difficulties and problems that we've seen are not the result of some mindless hooligans. The only hooligans that have been involved are para-military police force. In relation to the chair's opening remarks [that photographers would be trying to get pictures of Scargill with Sinn Fein councillor Tommy Carroll], TIl tell you why the paramilitary police is able to walk apparently unheeded and unhindered anywhere it wants in Britain. It is because we stood by and allowed it to happen in the North of Ireland.
Union of Mineworkers learnt a lot of lessons. I've been reading lots of books that have about the miners' strike — about what we did wrong.
academics pontificating by the score about why the miners did this or didn't do that. And I was told by a colleague of mine - she's a parliamentary candidate - that she attended a dinner not far from Hamand there were people like Eric Hobsbawm pontificating about the miners' strike. (2) And he was saying that the problem with the miners' strike was that they should never have done it at the time they Chartists and Tolpuddle
Why is it that people with firstclass honours degrees, who can see the struggle of the Chartists and the Tolpuddle martyrs with clarity, fail to see the struggle of the miners right before their eyes with any clarity
The destabilization of this government was not in spite of but because of the miners' strike. £12,000 million it cost them, as they sought to destroy
Many people are, of course, looking forward to Wednesday's debate on nuclear power. You'll have seen people like Gavin Laird [engineering workers' union leader] going television and saying if you think we're going to stand by while workers in our industry are attacked, then you've got another think coming". I wish he'd said the same thing during the miners' strike.
that composite are concerned are no reservations in our support for suggested that we're for destroying jobs. absurd. We want people in the nuclear industry to be given the opportunity to work for people's real needs instead of for death and destruction.
If you close down nuclear power stations you create - with the establishment of coal-fired stations -25 per cent more jobs. We also put thousands of people to work building new coal-fired stations and developing power sources such wind, wave, tide, geothermal and solar
Why can't we begin to say posito the British people: Labour Party will put an end to nuclear power"? If this party does what it should after Wednesday's debate, if it goes and and says "we're pledged to stop nuclear power, fired generation, above all else we're for an end to a programme that threatens the lives of youngsters in this country and of generations yet unborn." If we do that then we'll win a massive victory at the next general election. But equivocation will not only lose us votes, it'll lose us the election as well.
There are people who say "look how many accidents you've got in coal mining, look how few we've got in the nuclear industry". I answer "I don't know how many accidents you've got in nuclear power. I don't know because they don't tell you.
1. Saatchi and Saatchi is an advertising agency who made their name through creating the Tory Party's electoral propaganda from 1979 onwards.
2. Eric Hobsbawm is identified with the Eurocommunist Communist Party, and its journal, "Marxism Today'. He wrote a series of articles for the journal arguing for a coalition of Labour and other bourgeois parties to dejeat the Tories.
International Viewpoint' has published extended coverage of the 1984miners' strike and its political impact, including several major speeches by Arthur Scargill and other NUM leaders. Indexes of these issues and back issues are available from the address given for subscriptions on page 2.
11
SAFETY
Miners' leader Arthur Scargill (DR)
they did give the official I wouldn't But I do know about the hundreds and hundreds of people who have died and are dying today in uranium mines in Namibia. And I do know about the 300,000 who will die as the result of Chernobyl."
If we look at international questions there has been a mining disaster in South Africa. Many hundreds of people have been affected. Nearly two hundred have been killed. This rotten corrupt system, not content the streets and in the villages and in refused to allow the National Union of Mineworkers of Britain to send our mining engineer to help the NUM in South That's the kind of regime that you're dealing with! That's the kind of system that Thatcher and her government are wanting to prop up.
It's time that working people in society began to realise sanctions are not going to take place under this government. But why isn't there a ready understanding that for sanctions to be applied you don't need to have a government decision? You have it in your power to take sanctions, to impose them yourselves. It can be done. At least I tried to do
As trustees of the miners' sion scheme Peter Heathfield, Mick McGahey, and I were removed because we refused to allow money from British miners' pension schemes to be invested in South Africa. I'm pleased that they removed me, if that's the price I had to pay....
Comrades, this week's conference has got to look at the issues. Not only 12 the question of unemployment; not only the question savaged and embattled Britain; not the question of beginning to basic industry in and all the associated policies. It's got to go much wider than that. It's got to have a political perspective - and one that's, in my view, totally different from what we've seen for a long time.
There are those in our party, there are those in our movement who want to see consensus. Well, I believe in sensus. And I think it's time that people in our party asserted exactly where they stand on the question of consensus polities.
If working people in Nicaragua for consensus never have achieved a victory. people in Vietnam had waited for consensus it wouldn't have worked.
revolutionary politics in order to win the advance-
It's time that our movement underbasic lesson, principle that it's socialist that are going to win in Britain.
You know, in our movement we seem to be a little bit down-hearted when we get setbacks. What on earth for? Don't we understand - even if the academies don't - the nature of the struggle, the nature of the system? "We're on a winning trail"
I'm not down-hearted. I know we're on a winning trail. I know that in my party and my movement, a socialist policy will emerge from what we're seeing at the present time. Every single time that I feel at all in doubt, all I have to do is to look at the history of our movement and look at what happened in real terms martyrs and yes, in recent times, to members of the National Union Mineworkers. And when you look at it in those terms, our problems, our difficulties, or our set-backs, appear infinitessimally small by com-
We're talking about a better society. We shouldn't hide the vision of a better Britain. We should talk about a splendid vision. We should talk about a society where the means of production, distribution and exchange are taken into the hands of working people. We should say without question, without equivocation, that all the firms that have been denationalized will be renationalized on the election of a Labour government.
Above all else will be a policy for peace. It will be a policy that says "an end to US bases, an end to nuclear weapons, unilateral nuclear disarmament and withdrawal from NATO". There can be no question of equivocation on that central objective.
We owe it to ourselves to look in terms of a better vision. We owe it to ourselves to put forward to the British people an alternative policy, a policy that means something, that's different and radical compared to the Tories, the SDP and the Liberals. We don't want something similar. We want a socialist approach of defiance to this government and what was envisaged by the creators of our move-
Let every single member of this party tonight reaffirm that we don't want witch hunts in this party. Expulsions and witch hunts may be for the colleagues at the back today [Khan and Scally] - but it'll be for you tomorrow. It's not all that long ago that they expelled the Communist of Great Britain from the Labour Party. I think that was wrong.
one lesson that our party and the working class have got to learn, it's that we need unity, not disunity or splits and divisions.
by expelling sincerely fighting
I ask that this party and the people at this rally go from here tonight and begin to campaign as hard as the right-wing movement in our party. Begin to campaign to win policies the trade-union movement. Begin to campaign to win a bigger Parties in the conference.
Above all else, if you seriously mean what you say, then translate into action the policy decisions of this party. Let no spokesman, let no spokeswoman, "interpret"
party conference must decide the poliey as we go to the next election.
We need to go to the electorate on a policy of full employment, a policy of reintroducing into this generate Britain's battered industry. union legislation. We want it wiping off the statute book. We want no fudge, no reintroduction of legislation in another form like in 1969 with In Place of Strife. (4)
If we do all this I'm confident that we shall not only win the next general election, we shall win it not on the basis of consensus but on the basis of socialism.
In Place of Strife' was the name given to the anti-union laws proposed by Harold Wilson's Labour government, which were never put on the statute book because of mass working class opposition. International Viewpoint 27 October 1986