Amid considerable anguish and confusion, the Monday Club - the organised right-wing within the Conservative Party - is starting a slow transformation. Gradually turning aside from its original role as a 'genteel pressure group inside Tory circles, the Club is stumbling towards the development of new tactics. The Club has begun a factional struggle within the Tory party aimed at eventually overturning the Heath leadership. This turn reflects the emergence of a current within the Monday Club championing the heresy of open disloyalty to the Conservative Party.
INTERNAL CONFLICTS In May this year, the Monday Club Economic Policy Group broke with custom by publishing a harsh condemnation of the Government's Industries Bill. It attacked the proposed state aid to capitalist investment as being "in stark contrast with the Party's election manifesto. The Bill was "dishonest" and represented one of the Heath' leadership's many broken pledges on nationalisation and the size of the civil service. The Government, it concluded, should repudiate the measure or "seck a fresh mandate from the country". The Monday Club Chairman declared that the statement had been issued without authority and protested that "while critical of the Government", the Club did not call for an election and in principle supports the Government".
Internal dissension re-surfaced publicly in August, when Club member and Cabinet Minister Geoffrey Rippon accepted government policy on the Ugandan Asians in opposition to the Monday Club. Leading members of the Club' Executive Council openly and bitterly clashed on the basic issue of whether cabinet loyalty should override Club loyalty. TORY CONFRONTATIONS The Monday Club emerged from a pressure group set up to rescue the banner of direct colonialism from being trampled under-foot by Macmillan's strategy of neo-colonialism. The Club itself was formed in 1961 as a wider grouping favouring a return to the politics of British imperialism before World War Two: above all emphasising "laissez-faire" values. Membership soon went beyond the Club's original aristocratic social base grouped around Lord Salisbury, and encompassed sections of the professional and commercial middle class in the constituencies. The "Monthly Newsletter reported a continuous round of Women's Group Luncheons, Annual Area Dinners and tours to Johannesburg (Only £290 per head, single room with bath") accompanied by a steady diet of semi-political and utterly respectable drivel about the menace of socialism and atrocities in Zanzibar.
But the Club's great leapforward came in 1969-70 with the Tory party's adoption of confrontation policies against organised labour. The Club set up a branch structure to harness the flood of new members and became the largest Conservative grouping, supported by 35 MPs! Its brand of "true traditional conservatism" was selling like hot cakes. The present internal struggles in the group stem from the Heath government's tactical retreat from confrontation in the wake of successive working class victories and its return to traditional Labour Party industrial and prices and incomes policies. The new rebellious trend reflects impatience with "pressure" tactics at such an hour of crisis for the ruling class, when its government is demoralised and open to potential challenge and replacement.
THE NEW REBELS The 'disloyal' elements now gaining ground within the Monday Club come from many different sources. The extreme right outside the Conservative Party, including the National Front, has infiltrated the Club over the last four years. The Polish Prince Michael Grouzinski has supplied links with East European emigre groups in the West, and Rhodesian and South African racists have provided connections. Several constituency parties have been brought under extremeright control and some of the rebel elements have publicly dabbled in neo-fascist theories in the Club's official quarterly, Monday World. Spanning an enormous range of right-wing viewpoints, all these forces have nevertheless been coming together and increasingly making the running inside the Club, undermining its former respectability. A recent newspaper report even stated that "detectives are investigating allegations that a faction in the Monday Club is running guns through a small Lancashire port to Protestants in Belfast" ? RACISM AND REPRESSION What then is the Monday Club turning into? It has sought to withstand the new currents, has declined to take any public position on E.E.C. entry despite heavy membership pressure to declare opposition, and has kept just clear of embracing the Tory right's prima donna', Enoch Powell. Powell currently remains a non-member, maintaining certain ideological differences with the Club over economic and 'defence policy, but he clearly enjoys the overwhelming support of local Club membership.The Club has responded to the alarming problems of the ruling class by moving into the position of rivalling the present Tory leadership on an "anti-capitulation" line. Yet it has not elaborated an alternative ruling class strategy, not getting further than advocating the aggressive use of racism and of the state repressive machinery. If the Heath leadership suffers a real humiliation in the coming months, the Monday Club will not stand back. It will move in the direction of trying to impose a 'strong state solution to the class struggle, through a wave of repression against the organised labour movement. The Monday Club is not a fascist organisation, but neither is fascism the short-term option for the ruling class. What is much more immediately offered for the leaders of British capitalism is to use the Monday Club's brand of reaction against the working class in the event of a total collapse of the Heath Cabinet's tactics. Such a threat can be dealt with by the working class on one condition: that working class militants see their role as going beyond militant trade unionism; that they give no quarter to racism and educate their class to oppose every act of repression on any section of the working population by the agents of the capitalist class, whatever uniform they wear.
NOTES 1. The Story of the Monday Club, a pamphlet published by the Club in April, 1972 2 Sunday Telegraph, 20 August 1972. 3. Ninety per cent prefer Powell to Heath, according to the Christchurch Star, New Zealand, of 11th April 1972, reporting on a confidential Club questionnaire.
There will be a national conference of university Monday Clubs in Oxford on Saturday, 18 November. Speakers will include William Craig and Enoch Powell. A large counter-demonstration is being organised, comrades should phone Oxford 62955 for further details of assembly point, etc. The Liaison Committee for the Defence of Students Unions, formed at the November 1971 conference of the NUS to unite all revolutionary forces to fight for a revolutionary line amongst students, particularly on the autonomy issue, formally dissolved at its conference on 29 October. This was well attended with representatives from some 40 colleges. The burningneed for some such structure as the LCDSU was underscored time and again, not only in relation to the autonomy struggle itself - Stirling being the latest and most blatant example of the need for generalising support - but also in relation to the struggle against various aspects of the capitalist rationalisation, particularly the current rent strikes.
However, what had to be admitted was that the split off of the IS group was actually a big defeat for the whole of the revolutionary left and that these vital tasks could not be fulfilled by the forces left inside the LCDSU. In order therefore that the revolutionary fight would not be completely lacking and in order to retrieve something from the situation, it was decided to go for a new unity. Here is the text of the letter that it was decided to send to all socialist groups and all affiliated organisations of the LCDSU. Dear Comrades, The LCDSU Conference on Sunday, 29 October 1972, passed the following resolution: *The LCDSU recognises the fragmentation of ine tores or revolutionary sociansm amongst students and its serious consequences, and the disagreements which varous or wese torees nave with the LCDSU. *We therefore call for a meeting of these forces before the NUS conference for wide ranging discussion which would aim for principled unity for working class power. In the first instance, this would be to work out a common basis for a fight within the NUS Conference.
•The forces within the LCDSU suggest the following as a basis for discussion, whilst not in any way wishing to limit discussion to these points:
"1. Autonomy on the basis of winning SUs as Instruments MEne Ciss suuk To actively oppose any moves to re-integrate SUs into the college bureaucracies or any other attempt to link SUs to the capitalist State. Equally, to attempt to break all those fetters - consututonal, tinancial and political - which at present tie SUs to college and state ourcaucracies *2. Capitalist reorganisation of higher education. To attempt to develop the struggle in the colleges on the basis of a struggle against capitalism. Specifically, on the basis that neither students (nor workers) will take any responsibility for the erects or ine reoranisagon and ranonausalon of higher education. In so doing to seek to develop the une or mass struggie to crecavery vero any changes which adversely affect, in whatever way, students (or workers).
"In particular:
i) Views the present accommodation crisis in the colleges as a direct result of the inability of capitalism to solve the question of social expenditure.
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