Cryer sidles out

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Tribunite Bob Cryer has followed the example of cothinker Brian Sedgemore, and resigned from Callaghan's government.

For this step-dissociating himself from the decision to turn over the Merseyside KME cooperative to private industry -he will no doubt be awarded renewed 'left' credentials.

He even hinted that Healey's planned use of sanctions to enforce the 5% pay limit had something with decision.

But Cryer is not planning a serious fight against either policy. His resignation is strictly a protest action, designed to put himself in the clear while actually allowing the Callaghan cabinet to cruise on regardless.

Like Sedgemore he has shown that there is one thing more unpleasant to him than government policy: the prospect of an all out fight in the labour movement to remove and replace the Callaghan-Healey few fleeting images something of the inner conflict of the Times, It took the lofty view of "a plague on both your houses, but especially that of the workers"

On radio later in the week, Victor Matthews, owner of the Express, Standard and Star, was explaining how the role of newspaper owners precisely was to maximise profits. (Does Hamilton consider this. 'malicious nonsense'?)

Two weeks ago the Editor of the Evening Standard resigned after Matthews instructed that no editorial on foreign affairs should be permitted to appear unless he had personally vetted it.

In a fit of daring the Sunday Times permitted Paul Foot, former Socialist Worker Editor, about 350 words to comment on the Panorama programme, 'balanced' by an equal length piece from Paul Johnson, the Tory Party's second favourite convert.

Foot drew no lessons except that the struggle reflected 'class antagonism' and that Lord Thomson is extremely rich.

Capitalism is a social system that the privately owned press finds no contradiction between hysteria when workers shut down newspapers, and grim satisfaction when management carry out the same action.

The 'independence' of the press is the independence of a dog on a lead. It can go as far as it likes providing it does not want to go too far

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eedom of th boss

based on private ownership and wage labour. It is for that reason