Phase four election looms

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their crisis and so scared of the strength of their own members that they will do nothing to challenge a pay ceiling.

True to form, the Confed leaders did nothing to challenge this high-handed display by Callaghan. The press next day described official union reaction as "guardedly favourable"

There can be no doubt that if Callaghan is allowed to carry out this policy it can only bring fresh setbacks to the workers movement.

Record

Callaghan's latest plan for further wage control, combined with the whole treacherous record of Labour in government which in four years has thrown 1½ million out of work and inflicted historic cuts in working class living standards, may well be sutticient to alienate turther working class Labour voters, and bring the return of the Tories under Thatcher's right wing leadership.

But even if Labour were to scrape a majority in a General Election, the Callaghan cabinet would regard this victory as a mandate to crack down with renewed viciousness on any section of workers that defied the pay policy and fought to defend their living standards.

During the past year we have already seen Labour ministers, in a Parliamentary coalition with the bourgeois politicians of the Liberal Party, use troops in a massive scabbing operation to defeat the firemen's pay strike.

There is every indication that, with the beginnings of an upturn in inflation, working Class pressure wages after the expiry on Phase 3 will unleash further mass struggles and further acts of treachery from Callaghan and the coalition cabinet.

The question now posed starkly before every Labour Party member and trade unionist is how they must act to prevent Callaghan's planned sabotage.

Nothing could be more dangerous than to stand back passively and allow the Labour right wing and their allies in the TUC bureaucracy to ride roughshod over the interests of the working class.

Tame

Those left' Labour MPs who have consistently taken this position, and tamely gone along with every reactionary government policy have opened the door for this. latest move by Callaghan.

Headed by cabinet "left' Wedgewood Benn, the Tribune Group of MPs have trooped time and again like sheep into the government lobby to register support for mass unemployment, social service cuts, pay laws and attacks on democratic rights -each time arguing that the 'only alternative' was the return of a Tory govern- of a Tami ment.

But the way to fight and defeat the Tories is to advance tne inaepenaent struggles of the working class. And this can only take place if a clear stand is taken at each point against the reactionary poucies oi