Gift-wrapping Tory policies

Scan page 9

Scientists have finally perfected this new suir to enable Sir How can you make this appealing to the public? Tory.

"Excuse me, is this the housing queue?" "No mate, it's a march against the Tories"

Spare a thought-if not a dime-for poor old Angus Maude. He's the hard-line Tory with the thankless task of gift-wrapping Thatcher's policies for sale to the public-through manipulation of the press and mass media.

You might have thought this was a fairly straightforward task. But while the Tory press has in general sustained its barrage of pro-Thatcherite propaganda, the material effects of cuts, unemployment and rocketing prices have had rather more impact on workers' thinking. And some harsh facts of life keep awkwardly poking through the carefully erected press facade.

Carrying the can

Now poor Angus carries the Prior can for the growing hostility to this government amongst not only workers but increasingly disaffected sections of the middle class.

Indeed the recent bombardment of Sir Keith Joseph with foodstuffs generously donated by South Wales steelworkers merely reemphasised the problem.

Sharp words

No doubt there have been sharp words between Sir Keith and Angus since then: but little has been achieved to rectify matters.

A few steps have been taken. Maude has successfully obtained a ruling against Tory ministers appearing on live TV and radio programmes in which they can come face to face with angry members of the public-such as Any Questions.

This way it is hoped that public humiliation can be avoided.

As a substitute, Thatcher staged an elaborately managed morale-boosting visit to the extremely conservative army barracks area of Salisbury -where a crowd of local small business people mingled in front of TV cameras with the families of over-paid army gunmen in an unconvincing display of mass Anti-communist And a new Tory poster campaign has been launched by Party chairman Lord Thorneycroft. It combines an anticommunist witch-hunt with an appeal to the "national interest" under the dual purpose slogan Keith Joseph to revisit South Wales.

"Keep Britain out of the red: support the Conservatives.

But such advertising gimmicks run the risk of reviving memories of the Saatchi and Saatchi campaign prior to the last General Election, which capitalised mercilessly on the housing and health queues, unemployment and inflation that had arisen from the (capitalist) policies of the Labour Since every one of these problems has been consciously intensified under Thatcher, the Tories plainly have no wish to remind people of their earlier confidence tricks.

But embarassments continue to arise. Maude has vainly warned about the impact of colossal increases in profits that fi are being recorded by the leading clearing banks-almost entirely the outcome of Tory policies.

Such profits are far from popular among workers and professional staff in industrial firms and public services which face closures and redundancies under the guise of restoring them to "viability"

Grant halved

But what can hard-line Tories do to minimise or channel such profits? The problem is insoluble.

Economic institutes, too, continue to present their analysis of the gathering economic crisis and the dire impact of Tory policies: one particular •Chairman Lord Thorneycroft embarassment, the anti-monetarist National Institute for Economic and Social Research, has had its government grant halved by an irate Tory Chancellor Howe.

But other institutions-some of them foreign-keep coming up with the same figures!

To make matters worse Maude has had to face up to tensions within the Tory ranks themselves-from renegade Tory MP Julian Critchley, who went into the Observer to launch an anonymous attack on government policies, to the much vaunted row between Cabinet "hawks" and vultures over the content of Prior's Employment Bill.

Prior, a vulture, was publicly rebuked by Thatcher on a line is overturned. All this has -despite Maude's efforts-found its way into the Tory presseven the Tory Party's 'house organ, the Daily Telegraph!

In all this disarray, one bright spot for Angus Maude in his otherwise thankless and doomed task is the fact that while aspects of the Tory leadership crisis percolate into the Tory press, the full fire of the press and mass media can be relied upon to witch-hunt and oppose socialist currents fighting within the labour movement for action to defeat the Thatcher government.

It is only when the victory of such forces in the unions and the Labour Party is assured that workers can afford to laugh at