The shadows of the Thirties and the spectre of 1931 are hanging over the Labour Party Conference in Blackpool. The dole queues have grown at the rate of 1,000 wards.
The Wilson Government has chosen to turn its back on the appalling misery that 1½ million unemployed and their families will face this winter. With the nerve of a practiced conman, Healey - flanked by Varley and Tribunite' Foot - announced his measures to deal with unemployment last week. At the very moment when he was claiming that the Government's total investment of £205 million would save 100,000 jobs, another Government spokesman, Lord Shepherd, was telling the House of Lords of further cuts in public expenditure which will cost at least 100,00 jobs.
As Bernard Dix, deputy general secretary of the National Union of Public Employees commented: "By cutting public expenditure, Mr Healey is reducing employment in local government and the health services. Many public workers will suspect that [through the £5 employment subsidy for youth | he is hoping to Marching for jobs in the Thirties - will it be the same in the Seventies? a day since Labour took office in February 1974. One and a quarter million people are without jobs. In the last few days alone a spate of redundancies and factory closures have been announced (see box). The trend of unemployment is inexorably up| find jobs for 16-year-olds at the expense of 60 year olds.
Healey felt that he had to provide some justification' for this window-dressing prior to Labour Party Conference - - not to the millions of working class voters who voted to go back to work with Labour', but to the uneasy "confidence' of big business which might consider the measures reflationary'.
GUILTY It's nothing of the sort, insisted Healey: 'If I could give you some figures, the total gross of these measures over the whole five years which are involved so far as the investment schemes are concerned, is only one-twentieth as high as the measures recently announced by the German and French Governments, and only one-hundreth as high as the measures announced by the United States Government.' If unemployment is, as Tony Benn recently said, the issue on which this Labour Government will be judged, then the trial is already over. Wilson and Healey - together with Benn and Foot, who continue to sit in the Cabinet are clearly guilty: 1,249,078 times over.
Equally guilty are Jack Jones and the trade union bureaucracy, who planned and accepted the £6 limit. Ensconced in a Common Market meeting of trade union bureaucrats in Brussels, Jack Jones described Healey's pathetic palliatives as 'an important step forward.
But while the Government butchers and the bureaucracy betray the interests of the working class, groups of workers all over the country are beginning to fight back For seven weeks 1,600 cycle workers occupying the Norton Villiers-Triumph works at Wolverhampton have been fighting for their jobs. Despite illusions about buying and running the plant, the workers and their action committee have resolutely opposed the closure plans of the bosses and the Government.
In the hard hit Sheffield engineering industry, workers in the 360-strong tools division at Balfour Darwin have struck and occupied the I stockroom against 28 redundancies (see back page). The Sheffield AUEW shop stewards quarterly, recognising 'the danger presented to the labour movement by the right-wing course being pursued by the Labour Government, has instructed the District Committee "to approach other organisations in the labour movement with a view to organising a confer ence to discuss the most effective way to mobilise opposition to these policies and to camIn Glasgow, 240 members of the AUEW and 46 staff workers at the US-owned Person na razor-blade factory have been on strike for more than a week against redundancies. There have been 112 since March, and now management wants to cut another 40 jobs. A 24-hour picket is being maintained at the factory to ensure that no. orders are shipped out. Says Personna convenor Phil McBride: 'We have reached the end of the line. They are putting the boot in. Factories are shutting all over the place and they are striking while the iron is hot.
against the cuts! the fight for jobs In Leicester, eighty delegates from all the main unions - barring Jones's T&GWU -attended a conference a fortnight ago organised by the trades council to debate and discuss action against unemployment. ployment is now running at 13,000 in the city, compared with 7,000 at the beginning of the year. The conference decided unanimously to fight for physical occupation of factories as the most effective means of resisting closures; for nationalisation without compensation and under workers' control of all firms threatening redundancies; for opposition to all schemes of voluntary redundancies, productivity deals and wage cuts; and for the opening of the books. The trades council is printing a monthly bulletin to popularise these policies and convening a further special conference in November.
Dundee trades council has also taken up the question of unemployment. No fewer than 267 delegates from 20 different unions met on 20 September to discuss the fight for jobs.
On Merseyside, white-collar workers from three plants in the Plessey telecommunications company voted at a mass meeting on 23 September to resist 1,000 redundancies - with industrial action if necessary. On the same day several hundred Greater London Council workers demonstrated against plans to drop services and cut 1,600 jobs; and at a mass staff.
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ernment, or against it. meeting at the Royal Free Hospital in London, workers voted to resist any cuts in services or In the last couple of weeks the following major redundancies have been announced:
5,000 at GEC by October 1976; * 500 at Donaldson Textiles in Lornshill, Scotland, in the next three to four months; * 500 at Pye's Dulwich factory, which is clos * 2,000 at various Plessey plants; * 280 at the Bryant & May factory in Gloucester, which is closing; * 300 at Fielden's electronics plant in Manchester, which is closing only 11 months after being taken over by the Swiss firm * British Leyland is seeking 30,000 redun dancies in its car division alone, and British Steel and the Post Office want 20,000 The fight for jobs is on. Delegates to the Labour Party Conference must decide where they stand in this fight - with the Wilson GovIn supporting the 26 November lobby of Parliament called by the North-West Council of the TUC on 14 September, Eddie Loyden MP said: "The time for talking-is over, what we need now is positive action.' Lobbies and one-day strikes can be used initially to mobilise workers around an issue. But the fiasco over the Shrewsbury pickets should serve as a warning to militants that the only language this Government will understand is occupations, mass strikes and demonstrations The question facing delegates and militants in local parties is — will they use their organisations to support and build these actions; will they participate in local conferences to organise action against Wilson's policies, as Newham North-East Labour Party has done; will local councillors defy capitalist law to resist the cuts and serve the interests of the working class as the Clay Cross councillors have done?
So far Benn, the 'left' Labour MPs, and Tribune have spent their time dreaming up the most beautiful "alternatives' to the policies of the Wilson Government. But they have taken few steps to rally support for the actual struggles of the working class against this Government. Without this, their words are merely so much hot air - a left cover for Wilson.
The union bureaucrats will be using their block votes to defend the central plank of Wilson's strategy at Blackpool this week - the £6 limit. Delegates and local Labour Parties must see to it that their organisations play a leading role in the fight to drag this prop right out from under Wilson's rotten clique!
Defend the right to work! - For a 35-hour week!
er workers' control!
Mick Gosling BECED DIUY BACHI ROUTES.
Such and 'left MPs - Nationalise without compensation all firms creating redundancies, and place them undStop the cuts in public spending - for a major programme of public works!
Open the books of the bosses and the banks, and let the workers prepare a plan for production which defends jobs!
This graph shows the seasonally adjusted averag figures rising sharply line students. The dotted bottom line indicates Job SCROUI -ICEYCLE and ployment and the cuts. It steers clear of the central fight to remove the right-wing leadership that is imposing the cuts.
The building of local conferences and local action committees of the labour movement against the cuts is an excellent development. More and more will appear as the effects of the 'new' social contract begin to bite home. Delegates and militants in local Labour Parties must see that they play a full role in them.
local initiatives provide a real base from which to challenge the Wilson leadership, as op posed to the "socialist' rhetoric of conferences PROGRAMME But in order to do this, they must base themselves squarely on the struggles of the working class. In Newham that includes supporting the East London Committee Against supported bv more than a dozen trade union bodies, but spurned by left' MP Mikardo - which is organising a day of action against hospital closures on 16 October. Bound up with this is the fight for demands that unite all sections of workers against the policies of
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This week the Labour Conference meets in Blackpool. According to the press, Reg Pren- tice, the Tribunites and virtually every section of the Labour Party, the Conference will see a ately the truth is very different. Amidst the
greatest capitalist crisis for 40 years, the Lab- our Conference will not be discussing many of the vital issues at all, and even on those it does deal with, no real socialist choice will be put forward. Red Weekly looks at the crisis and policies necessary to deal with it. the fight for jobs
paign for socialist policies." 'END OF THE LINE'
•HONG IM red weekly 2 october 1975
поуи NO Housing CUT