MPs' pay shows the way: go for cost of living clauses!

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Workers should take note. to find out how many of the MPs calmly vote to protect their £9,000 a year Labourites in own pay against inflation. Trade Parliament would support such unionists should do the same. demands. pay round must all include the Labour MPs most eager to get demand for cost-of-living clauses their hands in the till now will to provide monthly increases to be the most vicious in witchFeelings run high at the conference of the National Union of School Students held this weekend, where a It would be interesting round. unanimous motion of no confidence was carried against President and YCL member John Munford. Full report next Thanks to Tory policies, inflation is now raging out of control. Working class families face a 20% increase in the cost of living over the next year.

But MPs don't care. Not only have their already fat salaries been boosted by a £50 per week increase, but next year they will get an additional cash Joseph «The Tories must be mad!"

«How did anybody ever vote for them?"

"They don't know what they're playing at."

These are typical responses by workers to the Tories' huge increases in the cost of living, and the wholesale cutbacks in the public sector that herald 2 million unemployed.

On the face of it, the Tories nave gone weserk, oucidi services nana haanal CAnial caninno face devactatinn ann the rauc LUIG already crumbling health service will be deprived of more staff, more vital equipment and more hospitals.

Working class children face the prospect of the school starting age being raised to six or the school leaving age lowered to fifteen, along with crowded classrooms, harassed teachers, antiquated books and equipment, decaying buildings and even an end to school In the private sector the law is being changed to encourage employers to sack "surplus" labour and further speed up production: in the nationalised industries jobs by the thousand hand-out topped up to take account of inflation in the next 12 months!.

Provocation This decision-branded as an unacceptable "provocation" by the Sunday Telegraph-shows that where their own fortunes are concerned MPs know full well the kind of policies that are necessaryare being lined up for the axe, and profitable sections lined up for sale to Tory businessmen.

But the Tories are not mad. Their wild, all-round attacks on the working class are entirely logical. They flow from the desperate world-wide crisis and galloping recession of the capitalist system, and in particular the dramatic fall in the rate of profit in British industry.

Last Saturday's Financial Times revealed that the impact of the slump and of uncontrolled world inflation on private industry has been to cut profits over the last 12 months by at least 7½%.

Decline in output

And in a major economic assessment published in the Guardian last week the Independent Treasury Economic Model (ITEM) anticipates an actual decline in output beginning this year and reaching a level of minus 4% by the second half of 1980.

Unemployment, according to ITEM will rise continuously from the present official level of 1.35 million to over 2 million at the end of 1980.

And despite the massive income from North Sea Oil, the weakness of British capitalism in Wage claims for the coming keep pace with inflation, assessed by trade union committees in each area. the world market leads to the forecast of a mounting balance of payments crisis. Inflation, it says, will remain at least at the 16% mark.

The Tories' strategy for driving up the rate of profit in private industry did not take into account the full dimensions of this crisis.

World wide

Nor did Thatcher grasp the worldwide dislocation of the capitalist system which is symptomised by the oil crisis.

The 50% increase in oil prices is a reflection of the crumbling value of the dollar and other paper currencies and the refusal of the. nationalist oil states to carry the burden of the capitalist crisis.

The imperialist leaders now face the task of imposing that burden on the world's working class.

This reality was rammed home to Thatcher at the recent summit meetings at Strasbourg and Tokyo.

Hell for leather

And this has spurred the Tories into their hell-for-leather rush to drive up the rate of exploitation of the British working class.

The chances are that the hunting low-paid workers who fight for a living wagè in the next pay Their plans for a prepared confrontation with the trade unions have therefore gone off at half cock.

Thatcher may have secured a Parliamentary majority on a right wing, anti-union policy; but her plans to cultivate a mass reactionary base through handouts to the police and armed forces, tax concessions to the middle class, and the building of an enlarged pool of desperate unemployed, have scarcely had time to get under way, and already the cracks are beginning to show.

Middle class families who thought they would benefit from the tax handouts are going to be hit hard by the impending mortgage increases, by runaway Tory-stoked inflation and by the general drive to recession and nationalisation which will throw thousands of professional and white collar staff in the public sector and in private industry out of work.

And in forcing through the attacks on trade union rights, living standards and manning levels throughout industry Thatcher is going to have to confront the same undefeated working class that toppled Heath and crushed Callaghan's pay limits.

Nor can she count on the week.

Thatcher trade union bureaucracy to bale her out: conference after conference has revealed right wing officials under huge pressure from their membership for action in defence of basic rights -pressure which threatens to burst the banks of official control.

Already this militancy has forced spluttering declarations of opposition to Tory plans from leaders of the teaching unions, NALGO and the TGWU.

Isolated

Riaht wina miners' leader Gormley, who has denounced political action against the Tories, found himself isolated at the NUM conference, where the solid vote for strike action to stop the closure of Deep Duffryn colliery has forced talk of a climbdown by the Coal Board.

And the demands that union leaders act against the Tories will intensify with the moves to rush through the government's new anti-union laws within four months-giving TUC bureaucrats little or no time to head off resistance.

The latest turn in the crisis has disrupted the Tories' plans: but it now offers workers their opportunity.

In fighting on wages, against the cuts and against sackings the working class can combine defence of its conditions with the fight to bring down this reactionary Tory government.

Those TUC leaders who have Thatcher to stimulate growith and bring in import controls, and the Labour leaders who talk of waiting five years to the next election are completely out of step with the mood of the workers and have no answers tu the gathering crisis.

Indeed the question many workers are asking is not whether the Tories can be brought down, but what kind of government is needed to replace them.

Political struggle

Workers look at the treacherous record of Labour governments in office, and correctly question whether a returned Labour government would not be pressurised into similar measures to those of Thatcher.

The answer to this lies in the outcome of the political struggle that must now be waged inside the labour movement.

The only way a government representing the independent interests of the working class can be brought to power is through a sharp struggle against the existing leadership of the working class, New leadership This creates a favourable opportunity for the development of a new, revolutionary leadership within the labour movement, based on programme of demands that start from today's problems and show workers in practice the necessity for the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a planned socialist economy.

Within the unions this means confronting and fighting for the removal of all those officials and convenors who argue that workers should base their demands on the "viability" of the employer, and refrain from the all-out action necessary to drive Thatcher from office.

Instead a leadership must be built that will challenge the viability argument by fighting for the opening of the books of the employers - in both public and private sectors - to elected committees of trade unionists.

This will reveal to workers beyond doubt that unemployment, speed-up and wage-cutting are an integral part of the capitalist crisis; they cannot be Cont'd back page, col. 6

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