"No! - to Nuclear Power", in the last issue of Socialist Action, showed clearly that the government's plans to extend the nuclear power industry are a threat to health, safety and democratic rights - and would mean a net loss of many jobs in the power industry as a whole.
Clearly, the struggle against nuclear power - which is beginning to emerge in this country - should not be regarded as a "job for the Liberals".
The article concludes with the demands "No Nuclear Power Stations - For an alternative energy strategy based on coal". To this should be added the demand: "No redundancies - retraining programmes for all nuclear power workers". Such a demand lays the basis for overcoming divisions between workers in different energy industries.
Len Wagstaff (London, SEll)
Dear Comrade, The last issue of Socialist Action contained a number of articles on the question of democracy in the Labour Party. This was correct. There ts no doubt that the issue is becoming increasingly relevant to more and more Labour activists as the last Labour Party conference proved. Tony Benn made.
Benn's rule in the last Labour Heffer made were a major step forward in democratising the Labour Party and should be supported for that reason.
Cutting the powers of the Labour PM and making policy decisions the province of the Parliamentary Labour Party would be a serious blow to the right wing.
Mike Strange (London, SW2)
While correct to raise it. howaver, 1 think your attitude towards and the proposals he to be insensitive, to say the least. Whatever you may think of government, the proposals he and to pressure from constituencies - COVER also a fact that only the Security Council - made up of 5 countries each with the power of veto -can take action. If the General Assembly sometimes passes an anti-imperialist motion, such a motion is never transformed into action because of the veto used by Security Council members such as the US. Britain or France.
The clearest example of this is South Africa. While repeated motions have condemned the apartheid politics of the South African regime, they have never led to more than token action because of the opposition of imperialist countries.
In this sense, the UN still remains dominated by the Imperialist countries which either use it as an expose its real nature, but to do so would cut across their desire to trade political support for capitalist regimes for economic and diplomatic deals.
Thus the Soviet bureaucracy was quite prepared to entertain Nixon to work out a trade deal with the US at the very time that US bombers were raining the equivalent of one atom bomb a day down upon the cities of North Vietnam.
This policy stands in marked constrast with the policy followed by the Bolsheviks towards the League of Nations, an earlier instrument of capitalist peacemaking', that came into being after WW and died with the approach of WW2. Lenin described it as a "thieves' kitchen'
Socialist Action