[Like an unrepentant criminal released from jail the…]

Scan page 5

Like an unrepentant criminal released from jail the Times came blinking back into daylight-ds Dau Ja-lanted Lense tempered as ever and more convinced than before of its need for crime.

It came too late for many of its fans. They were irretrievably dead, some of them very publicly dead.

But if death did not suspend its ravages amongst the ruling classes simply because the Times was away, many of its victims could clearly not rest in their graves until their obituaries had been published.

The Times has begun the work of placating their ghosts, with the first of three Times Obituaries Supplements!

The cast of the dead is laid out in order of disappearancebeginning with Earl Mountbatten, 'Inspiring war commander and statesmanlike leader in peace' and Airey Neave -both blown to bits-and moving on to Golda Meir, Bhutto, Nelson Rockefeller, and other prime candidates for the Chamber of Horrors.

If the dead are now assured of peace, the same cannot be said for the living.

The Times returned with an editorial ponderously and pompously anti-worker as anything in its history.

Analysing-broadly correctly -the scale of the crisis of British capital (but ommitting all mention of the crisis of international capital) the Times finds praise for only Michael Edwardes and the Thatcher/ Joseph government.

It looks gloomily into the future and at technology.

- "If we take British productivity as 100, and American, German or Japanese as 200, and then multiply our competitors' productivity by, say five, to allow for the general adoption of electronic methods, we are left with productivity ratios of 10:1."

The trouble is, grumbles the Times, that the 'unions' (meaning union members) seem to regard jobs as something to be preserved.

"A manager who wastes labour is letting down not just his shareholders, but the people who work for him, and more broadly the nation; he is unpatriotic.".

('Wasting labour", incidently, is not leaving it idle, but employing it!)

• This argument applies also to the public sector, where the massive cuts are described in terms which Tory Central Office PR department could not better as "trying to stabilise public expenditure"

If the NHS does collapsesays the Thunderer-it will be because of poor productivity.

"a child with a heart murmur will be examined on average more than six times by different doctors". [!} Despite this apparent multiplicity of doctors:

"We are in danger of moving from a hospital service primarily staffed by doctors and nurses to one primarily staffed by porters, Ga The Campaign for Press Freedom, which boasts a number of 'left' and not-so-left MPs and-leaders of the NUJ and print unions among its sponsors, has launched a campaign against the Tories Protection of Information Bill.

A statement issued to sponsors, affiliated organisations and all NUJ branches describes the Bill as "the most serious longterm threat to freedom of , expression in the United