No Confusion | IMGpapers

Uncorrected machine reading. This text was read by machine (Apple Vision OCR) from a scan of a newspaper page, and the page was cut into articles by machine, at the headlines found by their type size. Nothing has been corrected: expect misread words, text from a neighbouring article, and titles that are the machine reading of the headline, some of them only fragments. Quote from the scan, not from this page.
How this article was cut and titled: headline found by type size in the OCR geometry (split_tabloid.py); 4-5 of 6; machine-segmented newspaper page; uncorrected Vision OCR.

page 7 of the scan

of pushing down the value of the pound is actually consciously increas ing inflation.

As well as pursuing goals which deliberately increase inflation, the Government lies when it claims that high wages are responsible for increased prices. Just look at what has happened to prices compared with the share of wages in the economy.

Ever since the war the rate of increase of prices has been speeding February 1973 showed that take-home pay after taxes fell as a percentage of national income from 60 per cent in 1957 to 58 per cent by 1965 to 56 per cent by 1970. Today, after wage and tax increases, the percentage is even lower. In short, far from soaring wages putting up prices, wages have actually been decreasing as a proportion of the economy at the same time as the rate of inflation has been soaring. the United States. rate of over 20 percent. This cannot be accounted for by wage increases.

The real reason why capitalists maintain this huge increase in prices is to allow massive increases in profits which can only be achieved by putting up prices, and keeping down wages. What can be achieved by holding down wages and letting profits can soar. prices rip has already been seen in There must be no confusion on the arguments about wages and inflation. Wage increases are not the cause of inflation. The Government is not trying to keep down inflation but is letting it soar. The aim of its policies is not to keep down prices but to keep down wages so that As to what all this will mean for the economy and the working class. socialists reject all forms of wage con trol under capitalism including against capitalist apologists such as Kinnock.

The way forward for the working class is not acceptance of incomes policy in the vain hope that it will cut inflation, but insistence that the workers will bear none of the cost for capitalism's crisis. The demand for automatic wage increases to compen sate for every increase in the cost of living is the only way to achieve this

page 8 of the scan

Police/wnals un Ked weekly 6 May 1976 Reviewed by KAREN MARGOLIS