referendum on 12 May.
On 14 January the elected Transport and General Workers Union convenor representing five hundred workers at Armstrong Patents Ltd in Beverley near Hull was offered a [5,000 bribe to induce her to leave Three months later Jean Jepson, the convenor, is still picketing the gate of Armstrong's Swinemoor Lane plant. And she is still waiting for official action by the T.&G.W.U. to support the strike committee's demand for her reinstatement by the Not only has the union's bureaucracy failed to come to the defence of un elected convenor-scandalous enough under any circumstancesbut it has blandly ignored the fact that Jepson was openly victimised for attempting to pursue official union policy during the Tory Goverinternal contradictions and was paralysed. It resigned, and was replaced by another Government headed OUT by Rumor which included representatives of the left-wing of the Socialist Party and from the right of the Christian Democrats (including Andreotti), who had not patticipated in the previous Government.
The new Government is a very shaky solution indeed, It could woll be swept away by the result of the This succession of crises, which has been accompanied by a diet of scandals involving politicians, famous industrialists and managers. judges, and civil servants, has produced, in the context of the overall situation, a serious weakening of the bourgeois democratic regime set up after the Second World War.
ise their workforce.
For the workers employed by these concerns, everything turned on what to do with the agreement between the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions and the engineering employers on the gurunteed 40 hour week. From the outset it was clear that this question was potentially divisive.
But instead of launching a centralised defence of the agree ment, the leaderships of the Confed and its constituent unions vacillated With one hand they instructad local officials not to sign away the agreement, while with the othet they conceded in practice that it could not be enforced.
The result was that strongly organised sections of engineering workers who would do better on three days' pay plus two days dole than on the guaranteed basic were permitted to abandon the agree ment. Meanwhile, weakly organised sections which needed the guarantee to sustain their earnings were left to fend for themselves. TWO WAYS The extreme gravity of the puralysing crisis in which the ruling class now finds itself has been clear for some time. The best known daily лемврареть openly ucknowledge this state of affairs.
The bourgeoisie has two ways out. Faced with the wearing down of the Parliamentary regime and with the necessity of reorganising the economy it can decide to bring the crisis to a head, and install an authoritarian On the other hand, faced with a mobilisation of the masses which is still very powerful, it can move
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THE VICTIN THREE MONT