Howe steps up Tory offensive

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reader earning over £400 per week, owning small businesses, or planning to open factories in the industrial wastelands of London or the North West will be well pleased with the latest Tory budget.

For the vast majority of the population, however, Chancellor Howe's package amounts to a savage escalation of the Tories' offensive on jobs, living standards, the welfare state and basic rights.

In one of the most brazen onslaughts in recent years Howe singled out the unemployed, the Les Huckfield, Labour MP for Nuneaton came to political prominence as a "left"

However, during his period as a Junior Minister at the Department of Industry he achieved a reputation as a consistent defender of the Wilson and Callaghan governments.

So enthusiastic was he in this role that it was rumoured that the Tribune group was thinking of dissociating themselves from him.

But since the Labour government's defeat at the last election Les Huckfield has become. "left' once again-incurring the particular wrath of the right wing AUEW bureaucracy who objected to his tub-thumping support for BL convenor Derek Robinson which led to the Labour NEC voting to support him as the AUEW leaders moved in for the kill.

Recently Huckfield has also proposed a 10-point programme to fight the cuts.

This programme was passed at the West Midlands Regional Labour Party Conference on Housing and Public Spending Cuts held on February 23.

Maximum resistance The preamble argues that Labour Councils should adopt it as a focus of a united fight for the "maximum resistance to Tory spending cuts"

The Labour Local Government Charter calls for an improvement in administration in terms of handling of complaints; the ending of the means test; the ending of prestige projects like new town halls and wasteful spending on banquets; the extension of low rent housing, more democratic control and improved standards of repairs, etc; the expansion of public sector economic development-the creation of new jobs, through direct labour schemes, cooperatives and factory building, and council subsidies where central government backs out; expansion of free day care for under fives (District Councils to step in where County Councils make cuts); an end to racial and sexual discrimination; no redundancies, no cuts in services no sale of municipal assets including council houses and defence of comprehensive education using falling rolls to improve standards.

This policy was adopted by Nuneaton / Trades Council on March 5 "as a policy to move forward from and in need of expansion". poor, pensioners, children and the sick as chief victims of his attack. Strikers' families, too, are to be viciously penalised.

* Earnings related unemployment benefits are to be scrapped completely-plunging the growing numbers of unemployed immediately onto poverty-level benefits.

*Unemployment, sickness, injury and invalidity benefits will rise at 5% less than the rate of inflation-to ensure that the poor get poorer. And all these benefits will now be subject to tax.

*Child benefits are to be cut by 9% in real terms, through the award of a miserable 75p increase instead of the £1.25 There is much that could.be said about this policy, which falls into two broadly different parts.

Firstly there эт₴ the elements which refer to defence and extension of existing services.

Here the problems lie in the lack of any suggestions as to how this can be done.

If a local counci does not make cuts in services, what follows? Do they overspend? Put the rates up? What will be done when the Tories move in to stop this?

There is a great danger that this Charter can be seen as the policy for Labour Councils in the indefinite future.

The second element of the Charter are the points about financing economic developments via the public sector. needed to match inflation.

*Pensions go up by only 16%-lagging again behind runaway Tory inflation.

*Prescription charges rocket to fl in a new step towards stamping out the free National Health Service and imposing a fee-paying system.

*Strikers' families will be effectively fined £12 per week -the amount to be docked from social security payments to which they are entitled. On top of this barrage of fines and penalties, Howe brought in a package of tax increases on petrol, car licences, beer, spirits, wine and tobacco. Despite superficial changes in income tax, the tax burden Here again, the questions of capitalism and socialism are conspicuously left our. The problem of the need to right for nationalisation of the banks and basic industries is ignored.

Cooperatives

In its place there is vague talk of cooperatives-simply a utopian device for attempting to solve problems within capitalism.

The nrooramme is heing raised in labour movement organisations in the Midlands itselt is actually increased by £1 billion-the bulk of that falling on the shoulders of the working class.

The main intention of Howe's tax changes is to give further handouts to the richand to cut still more civil service jobs.

Jobs to go

More jobs will also go as a result of his additional £500 million in public spending cuts in 1980-81, and his future plans for even more stringent cuts in which 50,000 civil service jobs, and thousands more public sector jobs will face the axe.

The housebuilding and maintenance programme is also to be slashed by a drastic £672 million-guaranteeing that the already vast army of homeless will grow even further in the next period.

But not absolutely everyone is miserable at Howe's package. For those earning in excess of £30,000 per year, for instance, there is a £13 per week tax handout.

For small businesses there is a succession of measures of tax relief and handouts amounting to £124 million this year and £363 million next year.

And for the most ruthless and avaricious employers "free enterprise zones" in which they are able to set up rate-free, taxdeductible businesses. free from planning regulations. customs restrictions or obligation to train their labour force.

Such measures represent Howe's attempts to restore some of the more serious damage Tory policies have inflicted on small businesses in the last year: but even the Financial Times felt obliged to point out that:

"The enterprise zone notion •.. could encourage the worst and most anti-social businessmen as well as the best entrepreneurs. For the amount of time and energy that it has already involved in Whitehall and elsewhere, it may well only have a marginal impact on the areas in which the zones are to be sited."

As Labour's arch jobslasher and social service cutter Dennis Healey pointed out in reply to Howe:

"At least those the Government puts out of business will find it a little easier to start again."

But the task of the labour movement is to mobilise in action to put the Tory government out of business and out of office.

There was no glimmer of a response along these lines from either TUC or Labour leaders in the wake of Howe's budget.

•TUC leaders vied with . each other for nitty phrases to condemn the Tory attacks-but rallied behind Len Murray's anxious denials that the call for one-day strike action on May 14 is designed as part of a move to bring down the government. Such leaders must be challenged: the most basic rights of the working class are at stake, and can be defended only through the ousting of the Thatcher government and the struggle for a government that will establish a planned, socialist