 Byddwn i'w meddwl gweithio'r ddau, rwy'n ei fod yn ysgolwch ar y cwestiynau ymweld. Rydym yn ymweld i'r gweithio'n ddau, ymweld i'r gweithio'r ddau a'r wahanol, efallai yma'n dod i'r ffordd, ac ac yn ymweld i'r gweithio, ymweld i'r ddau, ymweld i'r ddau, ymweld i'r ddau. A'r dweud oherwydd, os yw mynd i'r ddau ar gyfer'u cystafol, is really a live one and it's been a live one because of this question of austerity because of austerity that is faced, the national health service and education and is faced by Airt Councils and Liverpool City Council in the recent period has had 58% of of its budget cut from central governments. Now, you probably don't know that. You might be the first time you've heard of that. And that's because Liverpool City Council is its present constituent, it's not campaigning, it's managing those cuts, it's following a policy of really carrying out those cuts and kind of managing them in the kindest way that they feel is possible. Back in the 80's, every single person in the country knew that Liverpool City Council was under attack from the Tory governments because there was a campaign that started When it became a national campaign, we had to discuss that particular struggle and how we fought the cuts in the 1980s, but in talking about the 1980s, we have to go back a little bit further into history of how this came about, because the first part I want to talk about how we came to the date of fighting the cuts. This is a marks of school so we need to y tro cymaint o'r rôl o'r marxistau yn y rôl, ac y rôl ymweld yn y marxistau yn y rôl o'r marxistau. Mae'r rôl yn y 1980 oed yn yr oedd yn cyfnodd o'r milwyr. Y milwyr eraill efo'r rôl o'r marxistau yn y Llebu Ffarsie, yn y Llebu Ffarsie, mae'n gweithio'r cyfrwyr. Mae'r cyfrwyr a'r cyfrwyr yn y Llebu Ffarsie. Mae'r cyfrwyr, mae'r cyfrwyr, mae'r gweithio'r cyfrwyr, mae'r gweithio'r cyfrwyr. Fel amrygedecau, mae'r Llebu Ffarsie yn y maeth. mae'n wneud eich fawr, mae'r cyryrus, mae'r cyryrus fod원�au a'r cyryrus a'n gallu y digwydd yn colli Mededd ynALLim. O'r parell deuaippedo i elawer� experiment agricultural factory i'r junior saffers. Daeth efallai rhoi'r che Gordon, sef nad oedd yn mwybod eraill. DR÷P. Mae'r marxist yn yr 1950 oed mae ond ddawn i'r Lleju Ffarsie Şuil, Ond efallai gennych hynny'n gwyg ar bod ni'n medderilladau, y'n amser o'r cwm leaking i gyfnau'r llyfrgell ymlaenion o'r Llyfrgell. Mae'r llyfrgell sy'n cymhwyro â'r llyfrgell i gyfnau'r Llyfrgell, yn gwmhwyro â'r Llyfrgell, ac o'r bryd o'r bêfynnoes, o'r bêfynrwydd, a'n blynyddu i'r prynesau hyn rywbeth add y marxist yn dechau i'r gallu hynny o'r Llyfrgell. Now, there was another group of Marxists who joined the Labour party at the minority around about 30 comrades and all, around about 20 organised in Liverpool, the 20 organised in London were simply over about one ten in Liverpool. Those Marxists around the lead by Ted Grant actually believed that they should support the left against the right rywbeth i'w chymwaeig i fynd i gyd yn fwylo'rwyr rhaglen, i ffroedd i'w ddisgymwyr o'n gwisgrigolau'r cymnytau hynny, beth y gallwn gwneud hynny'n cael describes ond dim yn cael ei gynhyrchu. Roedd y mae'r ddechrau'r wych eren nhw'n fuddio a yw'r gweithwyr ar y program yw'r marxys, beth yw'r rhan i gynnwys o'r ysgrifennu ynglyn â'i gydfaith a gweithwyr o'r ysgrifennu i'r ac yn yr ystafell. A dyna gynnwys y parolau o'r campain o'r Gwymru yn fawr yn Ffaswr. Ac mae'r gwrthgor i'r gwrth, i ffaswr, mae'r cymdeithasio cyffredig yn dda yw ddweud i'r ddweud yn rhaid i'r ddweud, yr ddweud i'r ddweud, ddweud i'r bwrdd ar Ffraith Arth y Bryn ac i'r Gymru ac yn y rhaid i'r rhaid i'r gwrdd. A ddweud i'r ddweud, ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud na'r Daidlyniad o Marksaeth ar Wyfyddwyr. Gallai yn arddur! Rwyf wedi gweld, mae g heed Hate Shuttle yn gallu chi addoriad a müsafindi i yw Marksaeth EU propaganda i fod yn llefiad yn campsyfu yn y yw'n dda, aww, dyna'r walton i'r rhesolwysiwn. Wel, walton yw yw'r area i Liverpool, dyna'r walton i'r rhesolwysiwn. Felly, dyna'r ddim yn fawr, dyna'r dda'n gast yn y tlu gyngor, dyna'r walton i'r gast yn y tlu gyngor, dyna'n gast yn y tlu gyngor, dyna'r dda, mae'n cofnodd wedi gwybod i'r ffosiwn, rwy'n gweithio yw walton. Mae'n gweithio'r gweithio, yna, ac mae ydych yn siŵn i'r cyfeirio, dwi'n rheswm, mae'r rheswm, mae'r dwybr ysbryd yng Nghymru yng Nghymru yn ddod yn gwybwyr. Mae'r ddweud yn golygu'r ddweud. Mae'r ddwybr yn ddod yn y ddod yn gyfyrd o gyllid o'r gwybwynd yn gyfnodol yn rhoi. Mae'r ddwybr yn gwybwynd yn golygu. Rwy'n ddwy'n gwybwyr. felly, yn y cyfryd, mae'n gweithio ei ei pwysig ar gyfer y rallu, rydyn ni'n dweud allan o gyllid yr ysgol Llywodraeth Cymru, ac mae'r refertor cyfnodau ffordd o'r perffor yma yn y Llywodraeth Cymru. So gydwch i chi i ddim yn ddim yn ddim yn gweithio'r ddysgu'r ddweud, ac mae'n gweithio'r gweithio'r ysgol i'r ysgol yma sy'n ddim yn gweithio'r perffordd yma. But that's crucial to the battle and you'll see that that's crucial to the battle later on within Liverpool and the debate around that battle. But in terms of Liverpool itself, a couple of things happened in the 1970s and a couple of things happened in the 1970s. One is the Tory government decided to attack the working class and attack people who were council house tenants. ac y gynllunio'r ddiddordeb yn Ymgyrch yn Llywodraeth Gweithgrifennol. Rwy'n ddiddorol i'r cyfarwyddau gwahanol, ar gyfer y gynlluniau, a'r cyfridd yma ar gyfer y cyfridd. Felly mae'r reall o'r gweithredu yn ymgyrch, ymgyrch, yw'r gweithredu a'u gyfridd, yn y Llywodraeth. Mae'r cyfridd, â'r cyfridd, mae'r cyfridd yn dda, mae'r cyfridd yn dda, mae'r cyfridd, a'r cyfridd yn ymgyrch, o'n ymdegysgwtio i'r cyfrannu'r ydych chi. Felly, rydw i'n gwneud o'r ffilm yn y ffeindio'r ystafell ac rydw i'n gwneud i'w dyfodol sydd wedi'u gwneud o'r ddod. Felly, rydw i'r ddod, mae'r gwneud o'r ddod o gyfrannu'r ystafell yn cael ei. Mae'r ddod o'r ddod o drosid o'r ddod o'r ddod o'r ddod. A dwi'n meddwl i'n gwneud o'r rai. Rydw i'n meddwl i'r rai. clas rent strike within that area and I say that because this idea of you know breaking the law and of fighting back against the system. People portray Marxism as some kind of alien beings, we're all aliens, we all just come and land amongst the working class and then we disseminate our ideas, subversive ideas. But basically the working class knows that when it comes to the limit, when it comes to a choice between having a decent conditions and breaking the so-called laws of the capitalist state, they know what side they're on. They know that they have to pick their families first and they have to pick their living conditions first before obeying the law. That breaks out and it's broken out many times over our history and one of those times was that rent strike in Kirby because the council there decided they were going to, despite the fact it was a Labour council was going to implement the Tory law. Apart from one honourable exception, one counciller who interestingly enough later became one of the Labour councillers in Liverpool and at the same time was that a Labour council did stand up and the Labour council did fight back and that Labour council was the Clay Cross council. We decided that there was not going to the Clay Cross Labour council. We are not going to implement this Tory law and they actually called upon other people to support them. There was a conference called that said no we're not going to go along with this Tory law. But Clay Cross itself was left isolated and two waves, two sets of councillers stood up for the people that they were there to represent and they were say charged. All comrades will know of Dennis Skinner but Dennis Skinner's family was actually involved in that. In Liverpool the same struggles saw a split, a three way split on the council with the left wing deciding that they weren't going to implement it but with the right wing implementing that. And those right wingers, and this is an interesting parallel, those right wingers when I joined the Labour party in 1977 there was the way that went round. The dacious word you could hear in Liverpool Labour party was implementer. And every time a counciller came up it would implement the House of Finance Act and it went through because there was an alliance between the right wing of the Labour party and the Tories on the council that we should deselect the implementers. We should deselect those councillers who implemented the House of Finance Act. But also at the time in Liverpool we saw the crisis, the real crisis of capitalism. I lived at the time in the late 70s in a district of Liverpool called Speak which is an industrial estate, an awakened class housing estate. And on that estate in terms of the ideas of Marxism, every day, periodically I would go out to my house and see the crisis of overproduction because we had the four tailwood plants and we saw cars stacked up all over the estate. Every little bit of green on our housing estate was taken up by cars that Ford couldn't sell. I also saw what Ted Grant in, there's the special crisis of British capitalism. In fact there was a factory there called Dunlops which made tyres and in 1979 that factory closed. But in 1979 the equipment in that factory dated back to 1911. I went into that factory as a photographer working for a local paper called Speak Press as a trainee and took a photograph of a giant mould with a rust hole in it, probably the height of this room. This was the crisis of British capitalism that was happening before the advent of Thatcher and I think that's important as Marxists to realise that. It wasn't just Thatcher had this idea of attacking the working class. She was taking that logic and the logic for her system was that the workers must pay for the crisis of capitalism. That led to thousands of workers being thrown out of work in Liverpool. It led to the real acceleration of mass unemployment that we saw within our city. It also meant that the council and the Liverpool city council became the major employer within Liverpool. We were faced and as part of that battle obviously Thatcher came to power in 1979 and one of the things she said is working class people must pay. There must be an austerity programme although we didn't call it that at the time of Tory cuts against working class people. What also happened and must be said is that the council at that time was in the hands but through a lot of the late 70s and early 80s the council started to be in the hands of the Liberal Party now part of the Liberal Democrats and the Liberal Party arose and became very popular because of the right wing of the Labour Party. The right wing of the Labour Party which ignored the aspirations, ignored the needs of the working class in Liverpool. That right wing of the Labour Party, that neglect from that right wing of the Labour Party led to Liberal councillors being elected in particular in the wards which are surrounding Liverpool city centre because they said we've got councillors we never see. They're not doing anything for the area. You've got an area around Edge Hill which had some of the waste housing in Western Europe and yet the councillors were not doing anything for it. Just as an indication of how out of touch they were, in this constituency that had the waste housing outside Western Europe, there was a by-election campaign. The Edge Hill by-election just took place in 1978 and that by-election campaign, in that campaign the Liberal upsage reached its peak. They stood a councillor, a candidate David Alton and this candidate everybody said well David Alton supports us within that constituency every Labour councillor had been defeated at the ballot box apart from one and then we had this meeting in which I was the young socialist speaker. There was the candidate and there was this councillor who was called Sahari Livermore. Sahari gets up and talks to the people in the room which fortunately was only two people such was the generation of the Labour Party in Liverpool at that time and said to them this election is not about housing. This election is not about the state of the streets or the state of your council services. This election is about bigger things like foreign policy and of course that went down like a lead balloon and that went down as the show that the Labour Party had become totally out of touch. But as you can see there was an upsage within the Labour Party of the left wing of the Labour Party and also of the Marxists who were in the Labour Party and saying we have to change and this Labour Party has to change. And there was a debate between us about how we take on the Tory cuts and this is where we come to this distinction between what is the left programme and what is a Marxist programme and the distinction was this that the left wing said well look at it. So having cuts, and this is a national picture as well, we've got cuts so what we've got to do is manage them in the best way we can for the poorest sections of society. And then what we need to do, the rates which just to explain, it was in the council tax then, council tax was preceded by the poll tax which was preceded by the rates which was based upon what was called the rateable value of your property and the rateable value of your house or your property then determined how much money you paid towards the council and that was your rates. That was one of the places where the council got money, the other place where the council got money was the rate support grant and the rate support grant was the money that we got from the central government. Anyway so the idea of these lefts was well the people who pay the most rates are the better off within society and so therefore if we put the rates up and we increase the rates by higher than inflation we'll be able to compensate for these cuts without affecting really the poorest people within society. And so this had the same and of course this idea has come up again with comrade Chris Williamson MP who has brought this particular idea up and whilst again you know Chris Williamson should be absolutely completely defended against the right wing of the Labour Party I'm afraid on this particular position you know his position is wrong because we saw that the Marxist view and the criticism of that is that the rates were nothing but a pay cut and that by making that but by increasing the rates further than inflation what you were doing is what you were doing is making a pay cut and what it also meant is that if you look at it as a national strategy of fighting the cuts because in general the poorest councils the Labour councils are the poorest councils and they would have the rates of though they were you know if you look at council tax for instance the council tax for a low end of the property in Liverpool is higher than in some of the Tory shires some of the Tory butters down south and the reason for that is because there's more of those poorer dwellings so in other ways the council has to depend upon the poorest end anyway and increase the rates on those areas so we said it was a pay cut and we said what we're doing is all all we would be doing is deciding who which section of the waking class should be attacked by the ruling class and which section of the waking class should lose so the strategy put forward by the marxists in the Labour party by militants was that what we should do is fight the government to to retain the cuts to the to the rate support grant because that was what was being cut by the Thatcher government that we should retain those cuts and the strategy that was developed was one of a deficit budget of basically setting a budget where on the one side and the nearest thing i think we can come to that is some some activists are talking about a needs budget so we look at the needs of the community and this is what Liverpool city council did they looked at the need they looked at the need for decent housing they looked at the needs for you know for jobs and so on within the communities and said this is going to cost this amount of money and then we looked at you know we looked at where that money was going to come from and we did not want to increase the rates by more than inflation so it would leave a gap so it would be a deficit budget because it would leave this particular gap between what was coming in and what we needed to spend and what we were committed to spend but we weren't as in most deficit budgets going to borrow that from the banks what we were going to do was we were going to say that that is the money that we're going to fight the government for and when we when we first came to that campaign that that particular sum of money was 30 million a pound but we were quite clear that that such a campaign such a policy was not just a question of passing this in the council chamber that we needed a mass campaign to support this policy we needed to take this out to the working class to win not only the Labour Party to this policy but win the working class in Liverpool to this policy as a mass campaign and we also needed to win the support of the council workers on the city council now that we're in 1982 while we were discussing this and debating this and I've got to say as well as and make a crucial point because the body that was debating this was known as the district Labour Party it was a democratic body elected by by by wards by the Labour Party members throughout the city by the trade unions throughout the city and a number of other organisations but it was a democratic body and one of the things that the left did when they took control of that body is to say they decide on on the councillors and you should get a councillor become a council on the panel and what they did was said basically one of the crucial questions for a councillor was who decides the policy for the Labour council and the answer that those those those respective councillors had to give was the district Labour Party the rank and file decide the policies not the Labour group not the people who were the councillors decide the policies so that was crucial so that's where the debate took place and in fact that debate was won for the ideas of Marxism and it was won partly through force of arguments and partly through the the comrades winning those discussions but it was also won because in 1980 Labour did take control of Liverpool City Council and the under the policy of the left put the rates up by 50% so we saw that as a pay cut and the result of that is that Labour was absolutely defeated at the at the at the next election the liberals came in with a policy of cuts and so on so it was a self-defeating that particular policy was a self-defeating policy particularly within Liverpool so Labour was out of office in 1980 after it passed that rate increase and within Liverpool the community campaigns campaigning on on the issues was not just the question of the labour party that was campaigned but the many community two community campaigns in particular one around a school across the comprehensive school in north of Liverpool who occupied the the the the school students and the teachers there occupied the school to stop the liberals closing it because the liberals had a policy of closing schools and waiting class areas in order for to rationalise the education within the city and the other movement which is a movement that I was involved in because I was I was living in the flats there was a movement called the Natalie flat dwellers because because when we're talking about housing and and council dwellings which have come on to into what we we did in a minute that yes council council dwellings if you like were built during the 1960s and the 1970s and so on but a good number of them were actually flats were were were high rise flats and also were tenement flats and in and netherley we had these tenement flats where you could walk from one end of the estate to the other end of the estate and never never touch earth because you walked along these landings themselves and I lived in one of these flats you had to go in you had to go down these stairs as if you were going down into a cell to get down to your flat and so on and they were really gruesome especially when you were talking about raising children in those flats because either the children would have to play out on the landing or they play a good distance away from your front door so they were they were gruesome prison like block they looked like a kind of science fiction prison that you would get on one of these things probably aliens or whatever it is anyway so so the so the people there decided they were going to campaign against this and one of the one of the boost that they got was that the councillor who was elected and this one mentioned a few names was Derek Hatten was elected as a councillor in a netherley who comrades may have heard of and Derek supported this campaign of the flat dwellers and the flat dwellers had a key demand is that they wanted houses and I went on on some of the campaigns with them some of the lobbies of the council and he used to sing a song about wanting a house with a garden but they wanted their children to be brought up in decent conditions and what the what this meant was that when Liverpool City Council came into power that we built 5000 4800 houses and bungalows they didn't build flats they didn't build masonettes they didn't build any of these other tenement blocks they were houses and they were houses because those that was the demand of the working class within Liverpool and it shows that when we it's not just a question of resources it's not just a question of fighting of a council fighting for those resources it's a question of the democratic input of the working class and of the demands of working class people who are directly involved and whether the council listens to those particular those particular demands and when you look at the you know the council that was elected the legacy of that council which was a which was a council as I said following a revolutionary course of action of taken on the government of taking on the the power within society of fighting the power with it within Britain that yes it was a revolutionary council but by being revolutionary it came to some massive reforms for working class people 4800 houses and bungalows built of 7400 houses and flats improved during that time and of and literally something like 12 000 flats either added flats bungalows tenement blocks demolished to and and those working conditions actually improved and on the employment side the Liberals why it's a we used to have discussions as a council worker with with my colleagues but I had one colleague who was not involved in the Labour Party but absolutely supported a council and the way reason she supported a council was because the workers on the council under the Liberals were employed on 47 week contracts then finished up for five weeks and then taken on again for another 47 weeks because at that particular time the employment protection was 12 months so they never acquired employment protection and they could just be finished off things and there was a few hundred of those workers and when Labour was elected in 1983 Labour was elected into into into the council with this program that the Liberals were looking at a cuts budget of cutting around about a thousand jobs from Liverpool city council because of the Tory cuts cutting those thousand jobs in a city that had already had thousands of redundancies thousands upon thousands of redundancies from industry it's itself Labour came in the first thing they did when they came in this was to stop these temporary contracts to save the thousand jobs and then have a program of taking on a thousand more so through the program there's 2000 extra workers working in in in Liverpool city council and would have been if Labour had lost so that was a reform that that we won by by taking a revolutionary program but also the council house building program itself employed 10 around 10 000 workers building workers at its height that UCAT which was the trade union that covered construction workers reported in 1985 that they didn't have an unemployed joiner on the books because all they were all employed building council houses in Liverpool decent council houses you know i have to say so we then come to this this program has come in and in 1984 yes we had to get that we got the trade unions on side we built the mass campaign on the working house council estates where on the way in class council estates we had meetings of 200 and of 300 and in March 29 1984 because i looked at the chronology there was a there was a mass demonstration of 50 000 on the streets of Liverpool and the pictures that they are online to prove it that mass demonstration was really the high point you know the high point in 1984 of that and and through that council and i won't go into details how it got through there was a little bit of trickery we managed to get through well Labour re-elected in 1984 on that program with it with an increased majority and a program of fighting the Tories well in 1984 the Tories had another problem which they're discussing downstairs the minus strike and the fight of Liverpool city council was something that they didn't want to do so they saw that we were determined and they actually folded to the extent that they provided not 30 million but 20 million pounds extra money to Liverpool city council and we saw it as a partial victory and we saw it as a partial victory that we had to take back to the people of Liverpool and back to the back to the movement and that was a question 1984 in 1985 we then come the councils around the country when I was talking about rates was that that was our program I'm not putting the rates up if we could help it but I've taken on the government but around the country the left wing councils were raising the rates and these are councils led by people like David Blunkett in Sheffield, Ken Livingston who I believe is talking around the corner he's around the corner at seven o'clock and Margaret Hodge in Inslington that great stealing fighter for the movement and those councils were raising the rates and I've got the figures there by 38% they wanted to raise a 40% year on year raising rates in order to compensate for the Tories now the Tories of course said well hang on a minute here's a vote winner for us we'll cap those rates we'll stop them raising the rates so much these these these councils and we'll put this in so there was a campaign they decided then to have a campaign against rate cap and and we decided in Liverpool that we would join in this campaign and this would be a national campaign and I think that's important to say because a lot of people now in the movement say oh Liverpool was isolated it was like the charge of the library gate they went out and they had no idea what they were doing and they were isolated from the rest of the movement around the country it's absolutely not true we joined in a campaign against the rate cap and and the ironic thing about that is that the tactic that that campaign adopted was not our tactic was not the tactic of making a deficit budget the tactic was was to say we're not going to set a budget until it's settled we're going to have you know we're not setting a budget so we said okay we're not like we argued our case but we went along with that particular a tactic and the ironic thing is that when the councillors came to be sear charged they were not sear charged for setting a deficit budget they were not which which they eventually did they were not sear charged for our own tactics they were sear charged because of the tactics of David Blunkett, Margaret Hodge, Ken Livingston and the rest of them who unfortunately during the course of that campaign left the field of battle one by one they went down the first one to go down was Comrade Livingston and it was in the Greater London Council it was the first one to go down and the the honorable exception on the Greater London Council was John McDonnell who said no we should stick with Liverpool and also we should stick with the council Lambeth in London in fighting these particular cuts but if we go back to Liverpool that we that one of the one of the problems that we had was also obviously we came under attack from the from the leadership of the Labour Party who had this policy of what would they call the Dented Shield and basically a Dented Shield meant manage the cuts well as far as I can see the only way you get a shield dented is by actually engaging in a battle they didn't even want to engage in the battle so why it was called a Dented Shield campaign you know is beyond me so they said and of course you know Comrades can see the video of Neil Kinnick attacking Liverpool City Council and the total nonsense of talking about going around giving out redundancy notices none of which were enacted none of those redundancy notices were enacted but of doing that merely to attack the council and and all the rest of it and out of that they turned around to the Liverpool City Council said you've got to solve the situation in our way and they produced the report with the support of the lefts around the party who had previously been with us in the battle and then deserted us and saying in this report the stone rock frost report they basically said you've got to put the rates up by another 15% on top of the 9% and basically you've got to cut the cost your staffing costs and that meant as we calculated put the rates up as well make further cuts on the council but you've also got to get rid of a thousand council workers and this policy was supported by the leadership of all of the major trade unions with members on the council the general the gmb the transport in general which is now unite and and now go which is now part of unison those union leaders we have the spectacle of trade union leaders going into an employer saying make my members redundant and the employer saying no we're not going to make your members redundant this that was the the the level of the leadership of the trade union movements and of course we saw it no doubt they're discussing it downstairs about our trading movement let down the miners and and the trading movement that's similar to any battle during the 1980s of just waiting till there's a labour government and when Neil Kinnick made his attack on Liverpool some right wing a right wing MP came out and said Neil Kinnick's just won the next general election well in actual fact he lost the next two general elections and then retired to ignomy after that so it didn't win in the election in fact it divided the movement and it divided you know you know that particular thing so we didn't adopt the stone frost report we had the idea but but the fact that the trading in leaders were were were against the council had in effect upon the trade on the on the trading leaders within the council and those trade union leaders within the council started one by one trade unions the the lecturers union the teachers union nalgo which was the admin union started to desert the cause of the of the city council and because of that in 1985 faced with on our own if you like and isolated as we then were not by design but by betrayal I have to say then we decided that we had to retreat but the one we retreated we didn't retreat by making people unemployed we didn't retreat by stopping building council houses we retreated by borrowing money from the banks so so our idea is as you know was a marxist programme first and the thing that we regarded as a retreat as a defeat was Keynesian economics basically when you think about it we borrowed money from the banks and we regarded that as a defeat people some people now regard that as a policy we regarded that as a defeat but we maintained and the fact of the matter and the facts and the figures which I haven't got time to go into now show that in election after election that that in the last mayoral election in Liverpool Jo Anderson the current mayor of Liverpool and former paper sale former a former buyer of the militants off off yours truly gained about 50 000 votes as as mayor of Liverpool at the height of the struggle we were getting 90 000 votes in Liverpool 90 000 votes for the council and an increase in the votes for for the MPs in Liverpool Labour MPs who at that time stood with the council itself so there was a there was a great struggle there and those councillors who were involved in that struggle really needed to be commended the 49 councillors 47 who were sear charged because two councillors died during that struggle that those those councillors need to be commended and the interesting thing about those councillors is that yes the militant was very important on that council but we also had councillors on the right wing of the party and the reason the reason why they supported the policy was is because as Marxist we did things the right way we won the policies through the party we won the policies through the democratic structures of the party through the district labour party and we won that policy and we also on the council reminded people as a caucus if you like reminded people of reminded the councillors of that of that policy so we need to come down to as I'm just being tilted to sum up and obviously you know we could have an old day school on this and Lily knows I could go on for hours about this I could you know drone on for hours about Liverpool and you know my life in the 80s and so on and what happened but you know we have to draw this to a conclusion now I saw an interview with Derek Hatton who was a leader member of that campaign and he says what he said was well that was then and this is now that was then and you know those were policies that suit of the 1980s but they're not policy that suit today well we fundamentally disagree with that because the problems are the same if not waste now the problems that those companies that were at tash's session and the last about the conditions of the of the working class will know that the working that the working and the living conditions of working class people have got waste if anything since the 1980s that instead of going in the direction of getting better they're in the direction of getting worse so what we need to see and what we should demand is that labour councils do take a stand do follow the example of Liverpool unashamedly arm yourselves with the facts with the figures of what happened then arm yourself with those facts and figures and go to those go go into those labour parties and say both with the fact that the national campaign the national campaign 1985 was betrayed by the leadership of the movement then we would have seen thatcher put an end earlier we would have seen the council council services protected and we would have seen houses built through more houses built but we need to protect it now because the services that are being affected are the are the social care services is councils are talking about building affordable houses affordable to who you may ask affordable houses when they should be building council houses for the need of those communities we need these policies now more than ever we need these policies today the same as we needed them in the 1980s and if we can build this and proud record of our movement of our marxist movement that goes back through the 80s will be or the comrades who can put that forward throughout the labour party and the labour and trading movement thank you