Margaret Thatcher emerged last week clad in the bright blue armour of cold war rhetoric. Her aim is clear - to gather her disaffected middle class base around her while she gets ready for the serious business of preparing to take governmental power from Labour.
Meanwhile Yorkshire miners heard left Labour MP Norman Atkinson spell out the threat of a massive Tory electoral victory. 'More than 1,500,000 unemployed, massive cuts in social expenditure, and a six per cent drop in living standards are the three hoops through which Mrs Thatcher is going to make Harold Wilson and his cabinet jump', he said But the Yorkshire miners did not hear Atkinson promising to head a fight against the Labour leadership who have launched such a vicious attack on the rights of British workers. This is not surprising, since Atkinson and most of the other Tribunites voted for 8,300 Chrysler workers to be sent down the road, and voted for the budget which proposed the expenditure cuts now being implemented. He correctly voted against the pay curbs package, but has failed to lead any campaign in the base of the Labour Party and the trace unions for an open fight against the £6 limit The seriousness of Atkinson and his fellow letts in their stated aim of fighting the Government's policies is to be judged not by words but by their actions, or lack of them, in leading a fight in the whole of the labour movement to support all workers going into struggle and to fight against the Wilson leadership of the Party. Instead they choose to divert this struggle by conducting a reactionary campaign for import controls — a policy designed to create a chauvinist unity between British workers.
and the bosses at the expense of foreign workers, diverting attention away from the scandalous role which this Government and its backers in the TUC are playing.
Militants should be putting forward policies capable of unifying the class and at the same time demanding that Atkinson and the Tribunites should place themselves firmly in the camp of such efforts to oppose the policies of this Government. It is this which will show who really intends to fight Wilson and who does not. The movement to recall the TUC to break with the Government's policies is growing in strength. Every union branch should pass resolutions to this effect for their national executives. Workers like those in the steel plants, shortly to be hurled into confliet against wage cut and productivity demands from their employers, should seek to unite their efforts into a campaign of politica opposition to the course which this Government is taking.
MINORITY MOVEMENT Local conferences are also being held right round the country. These must be coordinated with a nationally organised response. For this reason the IMG will be building support for the Right to Work March called by the Rank and File Organising Committee. We will also be pressing for delegates to the Labour Movement Assembly to be held in London on 27 March, and are supporting the IC conference on the car industry.
At all these the IMG will be arguing for the formation of a militant minority movement in the trade unions, a class struggle left wing against the Government's policies. Unity in action is vital, but the formation of such a movement can only be achieved by a political fight against anyone who seeks to divide the movement of opposition to the Labour Government's policies, and against the Communist Party, whose policies-by placing their own unity with the left social democrats higher than the interests of the working class-lead inevitably to sell-outs and defeats.
The IMG will be fighting for policies which can unite the working class to repel the major attacks now being made on the standard of living of the majority of people in this country.
* Opening of the books of all companies threatening redundancy.
* For a policy of work sharing with no loss of pay.
* For nationalisation under workers control of all firms unable to meet this basic right to work.
* For a crash programme of public works — to meet social need and employ the jobless.
* For a sliding scale of social expenditure to compensate automatically for inflation.
* For a sliding scale of wages and a minimum wage of £40 per week.
against any cuts in weekend working or attempts to implement short-time working at the workers expense steelworkers can defend both their Secondly, in rejecting the BSC's plans the books of both the steel 1972 plants and the relevant government 1973 departments must be thrown open to reveal the real causes of the crisis in the steel industry - ferocious competition in a shrinking world market, secret deals with the European cartels uming producuon, outdated production methods, and years of providing cheap steel from a nationalised industry to private capitalist industry. Over the last eight years government pricing policies have cost the BSC £780 million - five times the figure the Corporation is now asking for in labour economies.
Setting BSC's Whitehall-set prices against those in the European Coal and Steel Community, the Sunday Times (18 January) calculated the cost of the Government's price policy to the BSC as follows:
Em 1967-68 1968-69 1969-70 1970-71 1971-72 -74 1974-75 The steel industry has provided a living for years for the professional pimps of private capitalist industry and the financial institutions - at the expense of the working class's tax es. And now the workers in the industry are being told it's their crisis and they must pay for it. All these debt and interest charges should be repudiated and the capital saved used in re-equipping the industry without job loss and in the interests of the working class A struggle launched on this basis could turn last week's concessions into a permanent victory for steelworkers and strike a mighty blow for the right to work of the whole working class.