Dundee Trades Council are proud of the bronze bust of James Connolly in military uniform which adorns their drinking lounge (not that he would have approved being an abstainer himself).
Dundee Labour Party supports the PLO and the city has twinned with Nablus in Israel-occupied Palestine. The PLO flag flies above the City Chambers and the Mayor of Nablus, whose legs were blown off by a zionist bomb, was recently in Dundee as a civic guest.
A public plaque was to be commissioned by the Council, in honour of James Connolly and a museum reading room named after him. All of this may seem to paint a picture of a courageous radical Labour movement, strongly anti-imperialist and militant leading the local working class to glorious freedom.
In reality the shabby tactics and timidity of the Labour movement leadership expose the above as hollow posturing.
At a meeting of the full Trades Council on 13 January, the delegate from NUPE witnessed the appalling capitulation of Executive Committee members to a renowned police technique. The delegate’s branch AGM had passed a resolution ‘strongly’ protesting against the arrests of local hunger strike supporters in August of last year. The resolution viewed the charges against the two people as ‘a dangerous attack on the democratic rights of all Dundee citizens, political parties and Trade Unionists’.
The police arbitrarily interpreted a City Square Bye-law to silence those active on behalf of Irish political prisoners but the charges have since been dropped. However the police are likely to do exactly the same again in response to any political activity in this area of town. The NUPE members correctly saw the threat that such police behaviour posed to the democratic rights of all trade unionists and political activists. More importantly the resolution called on the TC to ‘effectively organise to uphold the democratic rights of free speech and civil liberty.’ The resolution was previously unanimously passed by the Trades Council and is still binding.
The delegate learned that a letter to the Chief Constable had been written but, incredibly, on the basis of police reports shown to the Secretary of the TC it was not sent! According to the Secretary these reports consisted of statements about ‘IRA supporters’, ‘out-of-town elements’, ‘arrest for public urination’ etc all of which was ascribed to a march in November organised by the. Dundee Irish Republican Solidarity Committee and nothing to do with the campaign against the charges.
The police are trying on a crude smear campaign against the DIRSC and hence anyone connected with the struggle for democratic rights in Dundee.
The chairman of the TC Davy Thomson, a Communist Party member, said the TC could not associate itself with a ‘…bunch of piss-artists’ and rambled on about STUC policy on Ireland.
The Executive, on the slanderous say-so of Dundee police, have resorted to the lowest distortion in order to justify doing nothing. In doing so they stand squarely alongside the police.
The Executive is entirely composed of members of the Communist Party who have dominated the TC for decades and whose horizons extend no further than the latest STUC resolution. It is tempting to imagine their response to their own police reports and files.
The NUPE delegate was not allowed to fully express his point of view but other delegates clearly saw through the dealing and political cowardice of the Executive in attempting to ditch the NUPE resolution, which was finally referred back. At the forthcoming AGM the NUPE delegate will demand to see the police reports shown to the secretary and that Thomson withdraw his remarks.
MT
FRFI 16 February 1982
