[Howe's Budget did not spell out dramatic cuts…]

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Howe's Budget did not spell out dramatic cuts in spending on the National Health Service or Education. He did not have to.

Cuis in these sectors under Labour Chancellor Healey are already laying waste essential services.

And by setting course for a 20% inflation rate, Howe knows quite well that the rigid imposition of existing cash limits on these services will in fact force through a new devastating series of cutbacks without provoking unnecessary advanced public outcry.

Meanwhile the decision to more than double prescription charges and increase dental charges will act as a further means of deterring working class families from seeking necessary treatment.

Public sector workers therefore face a double offensive-on their own jobs, and on vitally necessary social services.

The day before the The fight against the cuts requires not the verbal bombast of Geoffrey Drain (NALGO) and Alan Fisher (NUPE) but practical action by workers in the public sector-occupation threatened facilities: strikes against redundancies, and full-scale blacking of private patients.

In taking such action health workers, teachers and others must fight through local trades councils, and through forming councils of action, for the broadest possible supporting action from workers in industry and elsewhere in the public sector.

In opposition to the Tory strategy of public spending cuts to boost the profits of private industry, the fight must be for a restoration of the 1974 levels of social service spending, protected against inflation through an end to cash limits and a sliding scale of spending based on figures worked out by elected committees of trade unionists and housewives. living standards.

The fight must be stepped up in every union for the submission of big wage claims linked to cost-of-living clauses that will provide automatic increases in line with rising prices.

But at a time when zovernment figures on "average wages" and the cost of living are so obviously miles away from the reality faced by every working class family, it is essential that the fight for cost-of-living clauses linked not to the Tories' Retail Prices Index but to figures compiled by elected committees of trade unionists and housewives.

Such figures would take into account the actual prices of the goods that workers buy, the effects of taxation, rates, mortgages and other factors on the cost of living, and also regional variations in rents, transport costs and other expenses.

In preparing the ground for the coming battle on wages, union branches and stewards' committees should consider setting up such Price Committees to reveal clearly to the workforce on the shop floor the extent to which their living standards are under attack, and the level to which wages must be increased simply to retain existing standards.