Prepare for election - KICK OUTTHE COALITIONISTS!

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The decision last Thursday by Liberal leader David Steel to break the anti-socialist Lib Lab coalition deal underlines the urgent what face, the workers movement.

MA election as certainly being prepared by Callaghan. The question for the working class is on what basis will that election be fought: under the discredited coalitionist leadership that has inflicted unprecedented cuts in living standards? Or under a leadership pledged to a programme of socialist policies that are capable of galvanising maximum working class support and ensuring the return of a Labour government?

October election

The break in the Lib-Lab pact stems from Steel's beliet that an October General Election is all but certain, and his anxiety to salvage what remains of the Liberal Party's electoral Army scabs during firemen's strike support prior to that date.

For the second string capitalists in the Liberal Party and the reactionary leaders of the Labour Party the 14-month old coalition arrangement has already fulfilled its purpose:

propped minority Labour government through a period when strike action threatened to overthrow Phase I of wage control.

*It provided Healey with solid support drawn from outside the labour movement in laying down his Phase 3 ultimatum to the TUC traitors.

*It gave the Callaghan government the confidence to carry through a military scabbing operation unprecedented since the 1926 General Strike to crush the Firemen's strike.

*It has pressured even the most talkative Labour 'lefts' into abandoning even the pretence that the government stands for socialist programme.

But now, with TUC leaders already consciously preparing the ground for a fourth round of wage control, and with opinion polls, local election and by-election results suggesting that Labour might win a Generation the Laban that October di he best time to go for an election.

This they hope would allow them to continue with their method of attacking the working class, which they regard as more effective than that of the Tories.

Tories But Callaghan and Healey are quite wrong to interpret the renewed electoral support for Labour as a vote for their policies of wage cuts, mass unemployment and destruction of the social services.

Workers have been turning out to vote Labour because they have come to realise that a Tory government would be even worse.

It would mean a further intensification of racialist propaganda and legislation, a new battery of laws against the unions, still more spending cuts to benefit big business, and hundreds of thousands of jobs lost in a new round of speed-up and rationalisation in industry.

Asset stripping

Only last week a confidenifial - To revealed that the Tories are developing detailed plans for asset-stripping and selling off the nationalised industries-sizing up the scale of working class resistánce in each case.

Workers vote Labour because they recognise that such Tory attacks would destroy jobs, rights and living standards won in decades of struggle.

But the very fact that it took David Steel to break the Lib-Lab coalition, and that Callaghan-Healey intend to campaign in the election on their record as wage-cutters and jobslashers makes it clear that it is by no means enough to sit back until October and vote Labour.

The demoralisation and alienation of thousands of Labour voters can only be effectively countered by a complete break with the coalitionist Labour leaders.

Trade union branches and Labour GMCs must at once take steps to ensure that the Labour Party conference is re-called prior to the General Election; and the •Callaghan-Healey: coalician cabinet from office.

'Lefts'

Those 'lefts" that have claimed to oppose the government's flagrant collaboration with the capitalist class must be called upon to take up a fight, and turn their words ment and encourage demand and on a Labour defence of dent interes prove a cru development principled, class. into action.

To those that show the slightest sign of such a fight we extend both critical support • and the demand that they press further and fight for socialist programme based on the abolition of wage controls, restoration of all cuts in crash programme of public works to create new jobs, and nationalisation of the banks and major industries.

In this way we can demonstrate that the lefts' are incapable of seriously challenging the right wing or solving in Parliamentary fashion the problems faced by the working class.

The struggle against the existing leadership within the Labour movement preparatory to the General Election, the election of a majority Labour governthe fight to workers to force measures government in their indepenits can thus cial point of for a the working