A year earlier the MP, Reg Prentice, had resigned his post under Benn at the Ministry of Technology just three days after being 'reshuffled' from his position as Minister of Overseas Development. A stand had to be made for the "more aid lobby.
Reg Prentice has been on something of a 'spiritual' journey since then, and if the majority of Labour Party members in his Newham North East constituency are successful in their present attempts to ditch him as their MP, his travels may come to an abrupt end.
UNION-BASHING
But Prentice's present position as a rightwing union-bashing Labourite was the result of no sudden conversion. For seven years prior to his election to Parliament in 1957 he was an assistant legal secretary employed by the Transport and General Workers Union the stranglehold of Arthur Deakin. There was no election of officers, Communists were proscribed from office, and the T&GWU was the central prop of the dominant right-wing bloc inside the TUC and the Labour Party, along with the Miners and the General and Municip al Workers.
ABOON FOR CHEAP reliable IBM typesetting with tast turn around phor Cart or Martin on 01-837 9987.
BENGALI FRIENDS in Europe and elsewhere, for Bengali books Jo Intermationalen, Box 3274, 10365 Stockholm, Sweden CRISIS IN EDUCATION: public meeting in the Prince Albert pub, 37 Wharidale Rd, FREE DESMOND TROTTER Campaign: Picket every Friday, 4.306pm outside E. Caribbean High Commission, Haymarket; SW1 GLASGOW MARXIST DISCUSSION GROUP meets every Wednesday in lona Community House, 7.30pm.
OPEN CONFERENCE OF SOCIALIST TEACHERS: Saturday 11 , NUFTO Hall, Jockey's Fields (Holborn tube) central issues facing teachers: salaries, educa equality of women, teachers and the a bour movement. Tickets 50p from Bernard Regan, 24 St Agnes Prentice being lobbied by supporters of the National Abortion Campaign las Close London E 9. Supported by teachers in Hadical educatio public spending, continued the article in the Political Quarterly, the Government had made too many concessions to middle-of-the-road opinion'. The penal clauses against trade unionists contained in In Place of Strife were also attacked.
As early as 1954 Prentice made an anti-Left speech at the Scarborough Labour Party Conference on German rearmament. Again in 1961, after Gaitskell's defeat on unilateral disarmament, he spoke of the lett in the Labour Party as a little group of people' who have become 'swollen with conceit, and derided the "moderates' for being too patient for too long . By then Prentice had left his full-time post in the T&GWU bureaucracy, which was moving "left' following the none too soon demise of Deakin and Tiffin, and the delayed impact of the desertion in 1954 and 1955 of 18,000 dockers to the National Amalgamated Stevedores and Dockers. Although Prentice likes to present himself as a 'no-nonsense' T&GWU sponsored MP from a dockland constituency, his experience of trade union struggle is in fact negligible. He is the political creature of the bureaucracy that ruled the T&GWU in the then under early fifties.
Prentice's position in the bureaucratic apparatus and his job in the legal department helped to shape both his career and his political attitudes. From the bureaucracy he acquired his contempt for the working class and a disdain for the democratic rights of the members. His to "honour issues.
Committee Against Private Practice penditure.
Former deputy premier Lord and the things we would like to have dearly"
vices falling into disrepair.
badly-needed staff from the NHS.
is being hived off to finance British rupt firms.
C Prentice forced to debate with supporters of Shrewsbury pickets in February job in the legal department taught him reverence for bourgeois law - preferring the 'legal"
Prentice's refusa. to defend the Pentonville Five, jailed under the Industrial Relations Act, his onslaught on the Clay Cross councillors for refusing to implement the Tory Housing Finance Act, and his vicious attacks on the imprisoned Shrewsbury pickets were all completely predictable. So is his staunch defence of the Labour Government's decision to send frigates to the blood-soaked military dictators of Chile - after all, there was a business contract TOP OF POLL Ironically, it was the Labour lefts in the Tribune group of MPs who helped bring Prentice to prominence. In 1972 Prentice, who had never previously come in the first twelve topped the Parliamentary Labour Party poll in the Shadow Cabinet elections. Despite his attacks earlier in the year on the rail workers? go-slow and the Pentonville Five, he had been put on the Tribune slate on the bizarre basis that he was thought to be a committed antiMarketeer. For Tribune any old anti-Market alliance was preferable to fighting the right wing of the Party for positions on clear class Never has the bankruptcy of the left reformists been so quickly rewarded. As soon as Prentice was convinced there was no future for a capitalist Britain except in the Common Market, he became one of its most fervent supporters, sharing platforms with Heath and advocating a continuing coalition of "moderates" of all parties. Prentice knows that defending capitalism at the present time means curbing wages, cutting social expenditure and slashing the living standards of the working class reforms he may have favoured in 1970 are now too expensive.
In his politics Prentice is simply more consistent than the Labour lefts" - who want 'socialist measures' but refuse to face up to the task of overthrowing capitalism as the only way to achieve tham - and more outspoken than the Labour right - who fear the power of the trade union movement to wreck the best laid plans to salvage capitalism The demand for the expulsion of Prentice and the Labour right is a vital one for the working class. But getting rid of the Prentices of the Labour Party will not be decided by a simple constituency expulsion process or a fight restricted to the Parliamentary Labour Party. It requires all socialists - both inside and outside ine Labour Party - to organise and engage in mass united action against Wilson's capitalist policies.
AUSTERITY PACKAGE The first step is to defeat the economic aus terity package which Wilson is preparing and any version of the Social Contract. But it is also necessary to offer a positive socialist solution to the crisis based on demands such as a sliding scale of wages and increasing public expenditure to compensate for inflation. It means nationalisation without compensation under workers' control of all firms creating redundancies. Without these measures there will be, as so often before, words but no action - and the Wilson leadership will remain at the head of the Labour Party.
----- pull-quotes -----
Just before the 1970 General Election a troubled Labour MP accused Harold Wil- son of "falling short of our socialist standards'. From Vietnam to immigration and