The next day The Times reported another story. While Britain is acutely short of homes, 748 million bricks are lying stockpiled and the British brick-making industry is operating at 30 per cent below capacity. The stockpile of bricks represents over 70,000 houses and £28 million of locked up capital. Half the brick manufacturing capacity which has closed down in the last 18 months will never reopen, and 2,000 jobs have been lost. At the same time the construction industry unions quote a national figure of 160,000 men unemployed. The source of this red propaganda was Mr Anthony Cadman, director general of the Brick Development Association.
You do not need to be a revolutionary to see that unemployed construction workers using stockpiled bricks can build houses. But the economic future offered by the Labour Government, backed by the trade union bureaucracy and supported by the Tories and Liberals, is one of falling living standards, declining public services, and mass unemployment. The etfect of the £6 limit is to cut demand and consequently production, intensitying the jobs CESS. The smashing of the f6 limit is an essential part of the fight for jobs.
But so far the 'lefts' in Parliament and the trade union bureaucracy who oppose the £6 though both Jack Jones and Michael Foot have given up pretending to be even fake lefts, while only a minority of the Tribune group of MPs even voted against the Healey measures - have failed to counter the Government's so-called 'anti-inflation' propaganda or put forward the measures desperately needed to defend the right to work.