Nut Leaders Betray

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Disciplinary action by thei school governors is to be taken against five London teachers who took time off work to support the TUC lobby of Parliament on Jan 14th calling for the release of the Shrewsbury Two.

One of the teachers is secretary of Hackney Trades Council, and all were taking part in an official action called by the TUC, yet the NUT Executive has already stated it will not defend them against discipline.

This acceptance of the employer's offensive links in with the NUT's refusal to fight the cutbacks in education spending, despite the enormous support that can be won on such an issue. In Aylesbury on Friday 14th February 1,000 teachers, parents and trade unionists demonstrated in the Market Square against spending-cuts of £3,500,000 in Buckinghamshire.

Yet all a succession of trade. union speakers could say was that the local rates should be increased in order to make up fosthe government cuts.

Thus the NUT leadership along with the other teaching unions, is presiding over a massive onslaught on education, with staffing cuts and an all-round drop in standards now inevitable as inflation combines with government cuts.

SALARIES

At the same time they have refused to fight to defend their members' living standards, and accepted at the Special Salaries Conference on January 25th the Houghton report on teachers pay.

This gives heads increases of £40 ver week - more than the new ver dy rate of pay for your teachurs who get only a £4.37 per week increase.

The WL put out a leaflet in lobbying the Salaries Conference, calling not only for a £15 across the board increase, but also for a clause in the agreeme linking salaries to the rising cost of living.

The leaflet also called for edback

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OCIALIST PRESS, Inursday 20th Februar: 1s :

Page = UNITED STAT Like a python in a monkeyhouse, the world economic crisis uncoils in the US Congress.

Democrats and Republicans united in February to dismantle President Ford's carefully-prepared deflationary economic plans for 1975.

In its place they hurriedly pieced ling over f 12 billion, and continuer food subsidies as a sop to workers on the breadline.

The dissarray among the capitalist politicians reflects the severi ty of the recession now threatening the US. With unemployment rising since last August to hit a record 8.2% in January(and certain to go higher), they fear above all the reaction of the American working class.

Tens of thousands of angry workers demonstrated in Washington - many of them from the car plants of Detroit - on February' Sth.

Anxious at all costs to head off any independent movement of the working class, Democratic Senators joined the demonstratio and former Presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey demagogically declared that Ford's tax and welfare proposals make "Scrooge look like a social worker"

The overall fall-off of production is only part of the situation. Key industries are being hit with exceptional severity. Lay-offs of 40% are reported in the synthetic fibres industry, while many automobile plants are working at only one-third capacity.

While inflation continues unchecked, the dollar has fallen 24% against the Swiss franc since September.

Economic pundits are split on whether to cut interest rates and .11 These include activities against the Socialist Workers Party (sym pathising organisation of the revisionist United Secretariat of the Fourth International) which involved FBI agents procuring the sacking of SWP sympathiser Ernest Able from his job in a Florida shipyard on the grounds that he was 'a Communist' Similar stories continue to cascade through press leakages of 'secret' Congressional committees they include accounts of 'bugging the private apartment of murdered Black civil rights leader Martin Luther King.

Fabricating 'derogatory information' , attempts at blackmailing, manipulation of news media and even tapping of former Vice-President Spiro Agnew's phone furing the 1968 election campaign are among the other things reported!

None of the capitalist politicians want the deluge of political scandais. Nor have even the 'libe ral' congressmen any solutions to the economic crisis. Their role can only be to contain and divert the American working class while it is made to pay through unemployment and inflation. Never have there been more favourable conditions for building a revolutionary, Trotsk ist party within the American working class, breaking the grip of the trade union chiefs and the Democratic politicans. As the placards of the autoworkers who demonstrated in Washington showed, the crisis of American capitalism now hits at the elementary living standards and rights of millions of workers, STALINIST CORRUPTION The former mayor and his deputy head a list of public officials of the town of Sandomierz, on the river Vistula south of Warsaw, who are accused of stealing funds allocated for the restoration of historic buildings.

Their trial has received wide publicity in the national and party préss. It is alleged that over eight years they embezzled millions of pounds in money and materials, using them for the building of their own luxury villas and to finance drinking orgies.

Corruption in Sandomierz is only a drop in the ocean of 'legal' and illegal privilege which the Stalinist bureaucracy of Eastern Europe suck from the working class.

But the fact that the apparatus has been obliged to make scapegoats of these minor officials is important. Since the strikes by dock workers against price rises in Danzig toppled the old leadership in 1971, the Gierek regime has hao to tread warily.

The wide coverage in the Stalinist own press of this affair, backed up by a personal visit of premier Piotr Jaroszewicz to inspect the renewed 'restoration' works, is intended as a warning to the most brazenly corrupt elements in the bureaucrat's own ranks, that if they do not moderate their activities they could incite the wrath of the working class.

workers demonstra in Washington Eritrea, which was briefly incorporated into Ethiopia in 1962 has ever since been the scene of a struggle for national independence whir was previously carried on against the British, and the Italians This war is nor erupting more openly and shows increasing chances of success, against the present 'left' military regime in Ethiopia which has continued the Deposed Haile Sellassie's attempts to repress the national movement.

The United Nations forced this union with the reactionary Haile Selassie on the Eritreans, and the present 'left' military regime has continued efforts to enforce it. The strategic importance of Erit: especially if the Suez Canal is ope= ned to traffic again this year, is obvious from a glance at the map. The national liberation struggle there poses the possibility of tre development of an anti-imperialist regime on the shores of the Red Sea.

The present phase of the indepen. dence struggle in Eritrea is fifteen years old. Despite its non-socialist aims, the struggle of the Eritrean Liberation Front must be supporter The sincerity of any so-called 'progressive' regime can be judged in part by the way it treats national minorities, and the present Ethiopian regime is no exception.

The Eritrean forces have always been large and well-organised, and in recent weeks have gained the support not only of the mass of the local population, including bott the Moslem and Christian sections, but even from parts of the army, police and administrative apparatus The Le Monde correspondent who passed through Eritrea in January found it impossible to get to Asmara without meeting large groups of liberation fighters. sive they have been able to mount in recent weeks in Asmara itself, the reaction of the Ethiopean junta has beer the traditional imperialist response.

On 30th April, 1967 the Washington Post reported a 'pacification campaign' in which people were being herded into villages 3000 strong. During 1971 the whole of the world press heard of the large scale fighting in which many Eritreans were killed and villages wiped out.

The junta has responded in just the same way. When guerrilla activity began in Asmara, they simply burnt some of the surrounding villages. News reports from the area have been sketchy since the latest large-scale outbreaks of fighting, but it does not seem possible that this long-standing independence struggle can continue for much longer without forcing major concessions by the rulers of Addis Ababa.

The growing power of the ELF is shown by the fact that the Ethiopean junta can only send military convoys to Asmara with difficulty. Their struggle indicates that, for all the betrayals of the leaders of petty bourgeois nationalism, and despite the machinations of Stalinist diplomacy, the forces of national independence and anti-imperialism remain strong throughout the An independent Eritrea would be a small and back ward country, as indeed would be an independent Dhofar.

Without these justified national liberations struggles becoming part of a wider battle against reactionary and pro-capitalist forces, there will be no way of ensuring that the vast wealth which the area is capable of producing is controlled by those who will have to produce it.

We can play a role in strengthening these struggles against oppression through the building of the Fourth International and the fight for its

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together a hotch-potch of increased tax rebates, straight tax cuts total-

nEW WAR IN E