ernest mandel on portugal - centre pages - ernest me gry once a fortnight so that their children can be fed.
Britain's 5 million poor are being forced to exist on a worsening substandard diet. They buy 70 per cent less milk, 59 per cent less butter, 48 per cent less meat and 36 percent less fish than the average family.
Instead of eating the necessary body-building foods, the poor buy 260 per cent more baked beans, 180 per cent more margarine, 130 per cent more potatoes and 106 per cent more cheap cheese. No wonder Frank Field. director of the CPAG stated: "They eat less than the safety level for good health. It makes them open to illness. It is why the poor children are smaller than the others. It's why rickets, the bowing of legs due to lack of milk and calcium is coming back.
INADEQUATE
British families on average spend £3.48 per head each week on food a woefully inadequate sum **** ing to the most recent survey by the Child Poverty Action Group, 700,000 parents go to bed hunthe poor spend only half that amount. Even more desperate is the plight of a mother with a child under five getting Supplementary Benefit. She gets a penny-pinching 39p a day - £2.73p a week heating and clothing. to that party that the well-heeled Ministef Tony Crosland callously declared is over now.
Under the Social Contract the lot of the poor will get even worse. latest forecasts for unemployment are 1¾ million in a year. By Christmas 20,000 of this summer's chool leavers will still be on the dole. In areas like Gateshead 25 per cent of this year's school leavers will still not be working. Manchester has only 337. vacant jobs for its 5,000 school leavers.
It is the poor who have the worst **************************** housing. It is the poor who are most dependent on the social services. It is the poor whose children go to the most overcrowded schools It is the poor who have the worst health and the greatest need of a viable, efficient health service. But Labour is cutting house building. The social services are being slashed. - for food, School building programmes are beShe never got ing cut. The NHS has lengthening waiting lists and is being subject to further cut-backs.
SACRIFICING
our Government is sacrificing the very health and living standards of the working class to the defence of the profit system. The Social Contract is the bond by which Labour binds the working class to the sinking ship of capitalism.
the poverty line. ing class.
What is occurring is that the Laban automatic 70p rise Not only does the Social Contract *************** depress the living standards of the poor. but its cuts in real wages accompanied by reductions in public expenditure actually swell the growing number of people living below When the TUC talk about a Social Contract under capitalism they are condemning ever-growing numbers of people to poverty and ill health.
TO THE RESCUE Instead of coming to the rescue of capitalism the labour movement has to develop a programme of action that meets the need of the workThis means a f40 minimum wage for the employed, the unemployed, the pensioners, and the sick. It means that all wage increases should be tied to a sliding scale ensuring that for every single one point increase in the cost of living there is A vast increase, not a decrease in public expenditure is needed so that the houses, hospitals, schools etc. which are so urgently needed can be built. This must be a step to the nationalisation of all basic industry The labour movement should in ***************** struct the TUC to break off all negotiations about Social Contract Mark I. They should be told that their responsibility is to the working class and that responsibility demands an end to collaboration with capitalism and a fight for improved wages and for a socialist alternative to capitalism's death agonies. *******************
= tribune/heffer interview red weekly 3 july 1975
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While the City of London bleated over the falling value of the pound, and called for the TUC to accept still more vicious attacks on the working class, a shock new report shows clearly how the year of the Social Contract has already meant increasing poverty and misery for the poor. Accord-
WITH ERIC HEFFER - page 2