Prentice off the leash

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NUPE and Labour Party leaders are apparently agreed on one point in the struggle on local authority spending cuts: whatever happens, the working class must shoulder the cost!

NUPE's Executive Council has tabled a policy statement to the Labour Party NEC. that proposes:

1) Labour councils refuse to make cuts.

2) That instead they increase the rates.

3) If this provokes a confrontation with the Tory government, the whole Labour council should resign in order to fight a by election which would -if they were reelected-give them a "mandate" for their rate-rising policies.

• All this is hedged about with radical anti-Tory rhetoric. But of course at best it offers Labour councillors carte blanche to : raise rates sky high-f2 per week in Lambeththus penalising workers" and driving whole sections of the middle class into a white lather of reactionary frenzy.:

More likely, any Labour council foolhardy enough to fight a by glection on a platform of imposing astronomic rate He told Labour's local government conference last week that councils that took Tory minister Heseltine to court would receive the support "of Labour's front bench"-for all that is worth!

And Hattersley was at pains to stress that councils should not break the law in what he saw as moves to "delay" carrying out Tory cuts.

What of course is lacking from all of these policies is any conception of mobilising the organised strength of the working class in the struggle against the Tory cuts.

Conniving

NUPE, whose officials are conniving at cuts throughout the public sector, prefers to put the onus on handfuls of muddleheaded Labour councillors in each town rather than show the strength of its 700,000 members and involve other public sector unions in the fight to stop the cuts.

Indeed Alan Fisher at the local • government conference did issue an appeal to NALGO and the NUT. But it was not for a joint programme of strikes and occupations to stop the cuts or to defend Labour councils that PHOTO: Mark Rusher, IF'L PHOTO:

they must take up the traitors. and clear out the Labour traitors.

Having finally abandoned the irksome pretence of any concern for or links with the labour movement, runaway right wing Labourite •Reg Prentice is now a leaded, the sick, the old, the disabled and strikers' families.

Every week now brings a new announcement of ways in which the Tory cutbacks will hit the weakest and most oppressed sections of the working classfrom the refusal to raise child benefits to the refusal to increase pensions in line with Labour government policy, to the end of the subsidies on heating costs for old people.

But it was Prentice who last year proudly told a conference of a major charity for the blind that the disabled must bear their fair share of the Tory cuts.

And it was Prentice who ten days ago fuelled the Tory rabble rousing over the £1 million in social security benefits paid out to the families of steel strikers— implying that the Tories might speed up their plans for laws to force unions to pay strike pay in official disputes.

In this Prentice is moving further and faster than Thatcher herself, who has recognised that the initial planto "assume" that strikers are receiving £10 per week in strike pay, and thus deduct this from social security pay outs-could wind up penalising non-union members, and creating all manner of complications.

Harassment

But, however frustrating this may be for him, Prentice is now able to unleash his full hostility to the working class in a new series of measures designed to harass and intimidate the unemployed and those on social security.

Under the guise of a crackis establishing a new " Stapo of down on "scroungers" fraud officers, and unemployment review officers-whose job will be to press-gang unemployunion JOOS social securl)

In one, unnamed, city, every unemployed worker will be subjected to a special investigation!

Officers will also be taken on track down deserting husbands.

Special investigators will each be given a £50,000 a year target for savings as their "investigations"

New courses will be run to persuade and train Social Security staff to resist claims and intimidate claimants. Booklets will be produced to press forward this campaign. The overall target is a £50 million saving in SS payments.

All in all the first year of Tory government will see an additional 1,000 fraud investigators snooping, creeping and spying on working class families forced into poverty by the inability of the capitalist system to provide adequate jobs, living standards, child care and social services.

Driven out

And as supremo, directing their sordid operations, is the former Labour Minișter Reg Prentice, whose tooth and nail battle to stay in the Labour Party was endorsed to the very last by over 180 Labour MPs, including Michael Foot and other Tribunites.

Some Labourites are now understandably anxious to stress 112 finally driven out of the Party the fact that Prentice was rather than the fact that this took place only despite the frantic efforts of the Party bureaucracy-backed up by trade union bureaucrats like Clive Jenkins who spearheaded the victimisation and effective expulsion from ASTMS of antiPrentice campaigner. Tony Kelly.

But there are still elements in the Party leadership that retain more than a slight affection for the old renegade.

The Observer's parliamentary correspondent Adam Raphael reports this week that:

"In one of the lighter moments last week Reg Prentice and Stan Orme swopped anecdotes in Committee on the Social Security Bill, recalling their old days as comrades during the 1975 IMF crisis."

And of course while Tribunite Orme can still find a friendly word for "Reg" Prentice has the envious respect of his fellow crypto-Tories that linger on within Labour's leading ranks.

Should the Callaghan inquiry and its promised witch-hunt of Militant and other socialists in Labour's rank and file fail to produce the necessary reassertion of the authority of the right wing, we can expect the other Prentices to move more openly-if not all the way to the Tory front bench, at least firmly out of the ranks of the labour movement.

Prentice

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ing light in the Tory attacks on children, the unemploy-

ed workers into low wage, non- rates of pay. at social security