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It really is essential therefore that we achieve the target in the first month. We urge all our readers supporters to send us a donation. Our address is:

31, Dartmouth Park Hill, London NW5 1HR Ltd., for the Workers Socialist League, 31, Dartmouth Park Hill, London NW5 1HR ers (TU), London. Registered as a newspaper at the Post Office.

The full brunt of the Tories' spending cuts must fall on manning levels in local authorities if the latest dictate from Environment Secretary Heseltine is acted upon...

In a vicious speech spelling out the Tories' determination to see the slashing of local services and public sector jobs, Heseltine declared bluntly to the Joint Local Government Associations Biennial Conference that there would be "no more cash' And while again talking of cutting down on controls and paper work imposed on local government, he announced that he would be following through the progress of local redundancies by demanding that local authorities produce quarterly manpower figures.

Huge cuts

Many of the Tory moves to ease controls on local author¡ties are of course designed to enable huge cuts to be made by the ending of their present requirement to provide a school meals service, school milk, transport subsidies, and other services.

But where they scent the prospect of pressing home still further sackings the Tories are quite willing to compel councils to produce new quarterly manpower surveys.

Cash limits

Heseltine's speech was significantly silent, however, on the question of the cash limits to be imposed in conjunction with the overall cut in expenditure.

Both Tory and Labour councils have warned that, if the government attempts to impose cash limits that do not adequately match inflation and the increased costs of last year's pay settlements, then the supposed drastic cuts of 5% in 1980-81 will in reality turn out to be a swingeing 10-15% cutback.

Even the Tory chairman of the Association of Metropolitan Authorities, Tag Tailor, has declared that:

"This is just not on, and if £465.52 in hand.

Published by Folrose Printed by Anvil Prin they further alter differences of grants against urban areas it will be quite impossible to achieve."

But the hostile tone of Heseltine's speech strongly suggests • that extremely tight cash limits will be laid down, and the bleatings of local councils brushed contemptuously aside.

Last week the tiny handful of local authorities that have voted to reject the Tory cuts were joined by Mid-Glamorgan County Council. But elsewhere Labour council careerists have POWE BE MADO PHOTO: Andrew Wiard, Report Socialist Press Monthly Fund 22 September, 19:29, Card no. 36 obediently fallen into line behind Heseltine's commands.

Protest lobby

In Lambeth, however, the Labour council has pulled back from its July decision to implement £3 million cuts, and has called for a protest lobby of Parliament on November 7, which should be made a focus for mobilisation by public sector and other trade unionists.

But there is no answer to the cuts in waiting on the offMUC,A BE chance that Labour politicians will this time have the backbone to stand up against the Tory government.

Shadow Environment Secretary Roy Hattersley is guardedly declaring support for any protest or resistance to the Tories "within the law"

Behind this choice of words lurks the embarassing memory of the Clay Cross councillors whose principled defiance of the Heath government's "Fair Rent Act" was greeted with isolation and miserable betrayal by Labour councillors, MPs and trade union leaders.

Public sector workers must resolve now to take strike action against the cuts, occupying threatened facilities and calling on the local labour movement for full scale support.

Such action, coordinated through local councils of action comprising delegates from trade unions and other labour movement bodies, must be developed towards the necessary: mass action required to bring down the Thatcher government.

SOCIALIST PRESS Special Supplement including regional reports of struggles and the policies and ecord of the Workers Socialist League in the fight against cuts in public spending Following the breakdown' of the much-heralded pay talks between the Engineering Employers Federation and the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions, the employers have redoubled their efforts to defeat the repeated two-day strikes that have crippled the Clearly acting in line with promptings through the NEB from the Tory government, EEF leader Frodsham Rolls Royce management who last week failed abysmally in a major bid to crack the solidarity of the workforce, moved in on Wednesday with a lockout of its 30,000 hourly paid • workers.

The EEF the same day circulated its 6,500 member companies "advising" them to consider like Rolls, whether three day a week working is This thinly disguised invitation to participate in a national lock-out of two million engineering workers has met a not surprisingly cool response from a section of employers who, for all their undoubted • gut hostility to trade unions and the working class, are in many. cases on the borderlines of bankruptcy and uncertain of the outcome* of such an escalation of the dispute.

While in the present conditions of gathering recession, plunging exports, unused capacity and dwindling order books many engineering employers feel able to carry the massive cost the present two-day strikes and overtime ban, they shrink from the prospect of a total indefinite shutdowna policy which-in the form of all out strike action-they know has been loudly called for by bodies representing thousands of militant engineering workers angered at the inadequacy of partial stoppages.

Timidity Indeed it is the timidity of the Confed leaders in pressing forward the struggle that has strengthened the determination of these employers to stand their ground and given them hope of a collapse in the strikes.

They can see clearly that if the claim is conceded it will have a long term impact. on wage rates. And with the unions insisting on an hour off the working week they fear that this historic concession would unleash a succession of similar demands and place British' employers out on a limb internationally.

Only Belgium among the EEC countries has conceded a shortening of the working week in engineering below 40 hours, and German employers last year secured an agreement that the 40 hour week would remain until 1983.

Win full claim

Staff workers, of course, in Britain and internationally have in many cases achieved a 37 hour or even 35 hour week.

With many firms teetering on the edge of financial collapse there is little doubt that a call now by the Confed for all-out action would rapidly force through the full claim from employers so weakened that they cannot respond to the arrogant bluster put out by their own federation.

Only the reactionary nature of the Confed and AUEW leadership now prevents such a decisive step being taken.

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POWER MUST VESTED IN THE MASSES BE OF R. MUGABE.

WANTED FOR MURDER MUST IAN SMITH STED IN MASSES *MUIZIREWA MEABWE

NEXT WEEK

4 extra pages on the fight against the cuts