Arms jobs in danger
Socialist Press1979 1979-02-14Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 10 →
Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: expect misread words, and now and then a caption or a line from a neighbouring story. For anything you quote, read the scan.
Scan page 10
One of many side- the effects the Iranian of crisis on world imperialism is the cancellation of billions of pounds' worth of defence contracts with the USA and Britain.
The lavish spending of the Shah's regime had served as a vital prop for the British armaments industry, which employs about 300,000 industrial civil servants in the public sector alone.
Inquiry The prospect of closures and redundancies following a cancellation of orders for the Chieftain tank was last week countered by a call from TGWU official Mick Martin for an inquiry into alternative non-defence projects for the Leeds plants making the anks.
But Martin is no convert to working class, independence: he wants a "tripartate working party" , consisting of union representativès, management, and government/ ministers; to draw up a plan.
Cuts And his concern for jobs has not led him to put forward any call for occupations to prevent redundancies-any more than he has called for any fight to defend the Social Services from Healey's savage spending cuts.
Certainly the jobs must Mick Martin be defended and. a programme of useful public works drawn up-but this demands not the , class-collaboration of "tripartate" committees, but a full-scale trade union inquiry, which must draw up plans including not only existing government arms factories but also demanding the nationalisation, without compensation, of private arms supplies such as Lucas, Vickers and Decca, as part of a planned, socialist economy.
Martin's 'left' gesture offers no such perspective.
----- pull-quotes -----
Laume .. OLOHd