Housing, hospitals cut to finance more repression

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€10 million is to be cut from supplementary education spending. And the working class fuel assistance grant paid with electricity bills As if 'they had not suffered enough from sixty years of Tory government, workers in the six counties of Northern Ireland have been singled out for a special round of cuts by the Thatcher government.

In a package of proposals designed to give generous handouts to employers, the lories have slashed over £44 million from public, service spending, while awarding an additional £50 million to their big business friends.

The budget of the Department of the Environment is cut by £24 million-over half of it to take the form of cuts in the desperately inadequate housing £10 million is to be axed from health and social security, in a region where even official statistics show mass poverty and an average of 12.1% unem ployment.

Arrogant, rich, reactionary and anti-socialist though he may be, Michael Heseltine, the Environment Secretary, is not the darling of the Tory Party at the moment.

He is the Cabinet minister: responsible for the virtual destruction of the public sector house-building programme, over the last 15 months, and for a general housing crisis in which an all-party committee now forecasts a shortfall of 500,000 houses by 1985..

Flog; off

He is also the man responsible for the Tories' Housing Bill-designed to flog off existing council housing and thus force growing numbers • of workers orito the private market to pay ruinous prices for houses or be screwed by rackrenting Tory landlords.

But last week Heseltine only scraped his Bill through the Commons with the collaboration of Shadow Minister Roy Hattersley, and at the expense of an-albeit small-concession on the sale of old people's accommociation.

Fiasco

The Tories would weather this embarrassment better if Heseltinie was not also presiding over another fiasco-the dramatic flou ting of his instructions by over 200 out of 456. local councils.

Toll by Heseltine to cut their spending by a further 2% or £700 million on their actual 1978-79 spending, only around 180 councils appear to have benefit to enable families to pay is to be scrapped November.

The cash saved by these savage cutbacks is to be paid out in one way or another to capitalist holdings, in the six counties.

£30 million is to be handed to the electricity board to subsidise its supplies to industry which at present are more expensive than in the UK.

Sports cars £14 million is to be given to the American De Lorean sports car project-which, at £67 million, is one of the most ludicrously expensive job creation ventures ever dreamed up in Britain, and is in financial crisis before a car is even produced!

£7 million is to go to the Harland and Wolff shipyard.

All in all, £80 million out of the £98 million Tory package takes the form of cash aid to employers.

And to help contain the inevitable further anger these measures will spark in the oppressed nationalist popukation, the Tories have generously allocated an additional €10 million to Ine "SecuTIy 11.- 66an0I1a4tI7 services".

But the £10 million boost for the army of occupation and the thugs of the RUC and UDR was not enough to win the supIRELAND port even of Loyalist leader lan Paisley, who denounced the plan as doing "little or nothing" to create new jobs.

In reality the impact of the cuts will be to create still more unemployment in the six counties-unemployment which will once again fall largely on the backs of the Catholic working class, though increasingly affecting the Loyalist workers as the recession gathers pace.

Within the confines of the sectarian six county Orange Statelet, dependent upon the military fortunes might and economic under the leadership of the republican movement, the working class in the six counties must be mobilised to take the lead in the struggle to drive out the British imperialist troops and assert the right of the Irish people to determine their own; political future.

The struggle for this requires the tangible support of the British workers' movement in taking up the demand for the immediate withdrawal of British troops from Ireland.