from a Nottingham correspondent,
On Tuesday, 9th November, Ken Coates was expelled from the West Nottingham Labour Party, because of ‘his activities and publications.’ jhe decision was taken by 24 votes to 15, after much argument, in which many charges were laid against him, He was given ten minutes to reply, through a barrage of interjections from the leader of the Labour Group on the City Council, Alderman Foster. This decision is unusual for a number of reasonSe First, he is the President of the City Labour Party, of which West Nottingham Constituency is a small part. Second, the motion was initiated by the Secretary of the Council Labour Group, Councillor Kirk, and enthusiastically, if rather unscrupulously advocated by a number of aldermen, who had clearly evolved a ‘party line' upon this question. Thirdly, the Regional Organiser of the Party, representing Transport House, sat silent, when charges which he knew to be untrue, were laid against Coates, and did not intervene to prevent a procedural injustice at the beginning of the meeting.
There is no doubt that whatever the ostensible reasons that were advanced, his expulsion was sought by the Labour Group leadership in order to enable them void being controlled by the City Labour Party. That they could not expel him from that party goes without sayings indeed, his election to the chair last March was by the largest majority ever recorded, and it was this very fact which compelled them to approach their objective by the back door, expelling him at very short notice, from an crganisation which represented a good deal less than one quarter of his tote. ‘constituents.' The charges that were voiced against him fell into thres i9’n groupse As evidence of his tactivities! it was charged that he was a parvial chairman,, ruling the City Labour Party with an iron fist, terrorising Councillors, Such blatant lies could not be repeated by anyone who had attended a City Party meeting, and consequently they were fed into the meeting via the mouths of various stooges, who had been assembled at the meeting for the purpose. One lady who repeated a grotesque account of City Labour Party proceedings, which someone had retailed to her, admitted that she had only ever seen him three times in her life, one of which was the present time. This lady had never been at a City Labour Party meeting. In fact, if there has been fault in his conduct of the chair it has been of excess of tolerance not of partiality. The second, and by far the most insistent charge, was that his publications were inconsistent with party membership. This meant that the articles he had written were » judged to be grounds for expulsion, In particular, one article was quoted and misquoted, interpreted and misinterpreted, a great many times, It was an article which originally appeared in 'Briefing', the daily bulletin which was produced for the Party Conference at Blackpool. It condemned the war in Vietnam, the White paper on immigration, and the proposal to put ‘legal teeth' into the prices and incomes policy, He called upon the left to fight these policies, and to seek to reverse them, His points were strongly made, as many of us felt they needed to be, but if they constitute grounds for expulsion, then the Labour Movement is surely in a deep crisis, in which all its most conscientious members are liable to be evicted. The last charge was based on allegations appearing in a book:- 'The British Political Fringe.' It was said that'The Week', which Coates helped to found, and International Socialist Journal, of which he is a board member, were the voices of a Trotskyist conspiracy, Coates explained that these 2 journals were a part of the New left, and that they published articles from any source on the left, to style them ‘Trotskyist! was absurd, There were sever= al irregularities in the manner of his expulsion, which should be outlined before appropriate judgese This decision is a straightforward witch-hunt. Coates has been put out for his opinions, which are shared by thousands of Labour people.