Join Our Fight- Against Tories!

Scan page 10

Returned to office after five years of Labour betrayals, the Tory government has immediately begun wielding a sharpened axe on jobs, conditions and social services. Trade Union rights face imminent legal attack. Prices are already beginning to rocket upwards.

Plum sectors of state industry will be handed to the Tories' profiteering big business backers; and the pay rises to police and armed forces mark only the prelude to increased state violence against pickets and anti-fascists, and an intensified army crackThe Callaghan-Healey leadership has made it clear that it will opppose any perspective other than settling down and meekAnd, though they have once more dusted off their near-forgotten "socialist" speeches, Labour's "left-wing" MPs have continued to duck away from any fight to remove Callaghan.

TUC leaders, too, have set out to establish a basis for collaboration with Thatcher and the Tory cabinet, parallelling their anti-working class alliance with Wilson and then Callaghan.

But the working class has experienced and overcome such betrayals before-to topple Heath's union bashing government in 1974; and smash through Callaghan's reactionary Phase 4 of wage controls in a series of monumental pay battles last winter.

These experiences are not dead. They point to the way that jobs, social services and hard won union rights can be defended But a principled, revolutionary leadership is needed if the Labour traitors, the TUC collaborators and their hangers-on in the Communist Party are to be exposed and pushed aside, and the mass struggles mobilised that can defeat and remove the Such a leadership must fight day in and day out for a programme of transitional demands which, starting from today's conditions and today's consciousness within the working class, lead workers to grasp the necessity for socialist revolution.

And in taking up democratic demands-such as an end to racial and sexual discrimination, it must show the crucial role that must be played by the working class as the only consistently revolutionary class capable of leading the struggle for the And it must fight on an international basis-mobilising solidarity for anti-imperialist and anti capitalist struggleswhether in Ireland, in Southern Africa or elsewhere throughout the world, and drawing strength, and political lessons from revolutionary upheavals such as that which ousted the hated This means fighting for the reconstruction of the TrotskyThis method of approach, rejecting any descent to simple trade union militancy, or concessions to any wing of the labour bureaucracy, is the method fought for by the Workers Socialist The next period will see major class struggles in Britain. A principled, Marxist leadership is essential. Our movement though strong in programme remains small in numbers.

JOIN US and take forward the struggle for socialism!

Thatcher-knows the best cuts At least 160 jobs in the Health Service in Oxfordshire are to be cut by "natural wastage".

This is the grim recommendation the Management Team is to make to the Area Health hospitals themselves. Authority at the end of this month.

The reason? Wage awards are they dread this control. only being partially funded; only the first 8% of this year's price increases, none of the VAT increases and none of last year's underfunding are being met by the Tory government.

Waiting lists medicine.

We, the working class, are to pay in lost jobs, longer waiting lists, an even less adequate health service.

To cap it all, these cuts are to be carried out by a Health Authority that is appointed and In last winter's pay dispute, consumers of the Health Service despite the divisions created how it is being sapped off all the locally and nationally by the time by private capitalist firms union leaders' calling only supplying drugs, furniture, "selective actions' • there were equipment, buildings. many individual hospitals where Why should workers accept union branches did take strong cuts imposed by unresponsible action, taking control of the authorities, while these private firms continue to bleed our The response of the press Health Service? and politicians showed how It is our Health Service: at this crucial period we either As the profits of private take control-or lose it. firms, for whom press and The complete inaction of the politicians speak, sink into union bureaucrats in the face of deeper crisis, it is only a matter the previous Labour government of time for the Tories before an imposed cuts have shown what NHS which the capitalists will be their cringing avoidance 'cannot afford' is abandoned to of a fight against these new cuts. the tender mercies of private Yet our strength, organised in the unions, is well capable of But for us this means we gaining control. The essential must fight for the books of the fight is to force the union misHealth Authorities to be opened leaders to harness this strength. row to show to all workers and down in the accupied North of Ireland.

ly accepting five years of Tory devastation. against renewed Tory attacks.

Tory government. emancipation of mankind.

Shah in Iran.

ist Fourth International.

League.

----- pull-quotes -----

SUBSCRIBE to Socialist Press Send to Socialist Press, 31, Dartmouth Park