to fight cuts Over 150 socialist teachers met in London on Saturday to discuss the present crisis facing the left in the National Union of Teachers.
The fact that all who attended are in some way way disillusioned with the 'established' organisation of the left in the NUT - Rank and File, dominated by the International Socialists - is itself a symptom of that crisis.
The IS have desperately clung to the myth that Rank and File is the organisation for teachers on the left. Their demagogic insistence that a powerful organisation on the left in the NUT can only be built around a diet of hysterical paper attacks on the union leadership combined with a refusal to extend the scope of Rank and File beyond the so-called 'immedling sales of the paper, falling membership and political impotence in the union itself.
Increasingly left with their own members and immediate supporters in Rank and File due to their sectarian antics, the IS were moved to issue a leaflet to the Socialist Teachers Conference appealing against 'a split"! Interestingly, the IS thought such a tragic possibility so important they instructed their own teachermembers not to attend the conference to warn against any such way ward instincts.
WARNING LIGHTS It was at the annual conference of the NUT at Blackpool this year that the warning lights began to flash for the left. It became clear starvation means putting forward an alternative based on the needs of the working class against the Black Paper reactionaries and the so-called "professional educationists.
Finally, Blackpool emphasised that unity of the left in the NUT can orly be around agreement on the most important issues and practical campaigns to take them up inside and outside the union. At Blackpool, Rank and to Rank and File arose on several occasions. File stood by with mouths gaping as the most electric fight of the whole conference took place over the question of women's rights.
As a small beginning to resolve these problems, against which Rank and File has always turned its face, Saturday's conference was a qualified success. But only faltering steps were taken to hammer these insights and intentions into united action.
LABOUR PARTY When the issue of affiliation of the NUT to the Labour Party was discussed, those who opposed such a notion could mouth only timeless truths about the crimes of social democracy. But the conference voted that a fight for affiliation to the Labour Party would not other workers - without. meaning necessarily one iota of support for Labour policies - but would also raise the issue of workers' democThe Socialists pulled out of the Government last Thursday - ostensibly because of the refusal of the Government to keep a promise, made several weeks ago, to take the newspaper Republica out of the hands of its workers and give it back to its Socialist Party editors. But what was really getting up MarAn economic boycott? Plans for a coup? Send in NATO troops? These must be the sort of schemes that are being discussed in imperialist circles now that the Socialist Party has left the Portuguese Government for good. For the Socialist Party - along with their capitalist allies, the Popular Democrats, who are also threatening to walk out - are the main defenders of imperialist interests against the struggles of the Portuguese working class.
and the Popular Democrats control, and which they hoped to use to back-up their pro-imperialist policies.
•AFM PLAN • The AFM plan was first introdetermination to restore 'order and discipline', guaranteeing the role of the political parties in the political life of the country. other hand, it advocated the 'popular assemblies' and promised extensive workers' control of production as part of the reorganisation of the not paralyse anything, because he hasn't the power to do so, but we, the transport workers, do..?
What the SP can do however is to provide a cover for the mobilisation and reorganisation of reactionary forces and sow the sort of chaos that can strengthen the right wing in the army and eventually lay the basis for a 'Chile' style coup.
•THREAT• The Confederation of Portuguese