PETER TATCHELL'S choice as Labour candidate for Bermondsey is the first victory in a long line of self-inflicted defeats for the Labour Party and trade union left.
The whole left, both inside and outside the party, should back him to become Bermondsey's MP. One year ago Michael Foot told the Commons that •Peter atener will enter this House over my dead body. Now he eats his words.
The Sun, Rupert Murdoch's answer to Salome, SCIS Tuesday's edition, in an editorial you can hardly read for spittle, tells us 'nothing has changed exMichael Foot.' Wrong, Mr Murdoch. What has changed is that the rank and party you want to destroy lave refused to tolerate the campaign you 23G your Tory friends have ortalsca. to persuade te Party to commit suicide by DUE CHIE most resolute activists and its most popular policies.
The Sun's John Akass is even more hypocritical. Tatchell stands condemnbecause 'he will lose Labour thirty seats in the Since when has tne sun wanted a Labour victory?
The truth is this: those who conspired to deprive of their right to choose their candidate outside the labour movement and want to smash it. This inex-Labour, ex-MP Bob Mellish, who moans that Foot is without honour and has stabbed him in the back. And how would Mellish describe his own action in leaving the party? Michael Foot's "crime' that, just once since taking office as leader, he has had to bow to his members instead of their enemies.
made Michael change his tune?
to sway him. A whiff of high office, and he ditched the pacifism of his middle militarism of the dotage. But it was not Tatchell's convincing argument for traparliamentary mass action, or his dedication to Labour's socialist policies, that moved dear Michael.
It was his failure, after three months of trving to serve the union right wing Militant's head on a platter, because Labour'srank and file won't allow it.
And not the same John Golding who told us in November that he would "throw out Militant root and branch because they will cost us the general found himself alone voting Tatchell because his bedfellows have been made uncomfortably aware that they are losing Labour the election, and that they, too, may suffer the fate of Sidney Weighell it they press ahead Tatchell's selection went ahead. not because Michael Foot has changed his mind or DCCaUSC ENCI witch-hunt is over, but because the Bermondsey Constituency Labour Party offered an example to the rest of the left by standing firm: Bishop Stortford-type compromises, no deal, no "sacrifices in the cause of unity - just the defence of their decisions, their rights, and policies. years: for unilateral disar- татело, agamnsi for withdrawal; for the healthworkers' strike and