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ment that they plan to close the largest wallpaper factory in Europe-the Shard Kydd plant in Dorset-at a cost of 400 jobs. The work will be transferred to other plants.

GKN, bemoaning the high interest rates policy pursued by the Tory government, announced reduced profits and a further 2,000 planned redundancies, bringing their 1980 total of sackings to 10,000.

Tootal joined the massacre of textile jobs by announcing 750 redundancies in a rationalisation move-and more textile jobs were axed in Northern And Whitefriars Glass put up the shutters after 300 years in the cut glass business, throwing 100 workers on the dole. and demonstrating once again thai the laws of capitalist profitability show scant respect for history or tradition.

Commitment

Crosville buses in Cheshire revealed that the wholesale redundancies in the area meant that workers were no longer using their buses to get to work -and that they themselves are therefore to make 450 more workers redundant!

These sackings follow on a massive 17,000 redundancies in the previous week, and come at a time when the Tories openly declare their commitment to Tory attacks on the poor, the unemployed and pensioners are bitterly attacked in the final report of the Supplementary Benefits Commission last week.

The Commission slammed into Tory moves to cut the real value of short-term benefits by 5% and to penalise the families of strikers by cutting social security payments. And it gave a maning that the policy of "An econces! ahich fais to provide jobs for so large a proportion of its workforce cansor be tolerated indefinitely...

"In view of the unemployment forecasts it would be dangerously optimistic to assume that the recent riot in Bristol could not be repeated elsewhere"

Contrary to Tory myth, the report insists, only 3% of unemployed workers receive more in benefit than they did in worklargely because of low wages.

Fraud and abuse are tiny problems "compared with the massive failure of workers to take up benefits to which they are entitled-with resulting hardship.

Payments strikers' families amounted to a grand total of only £3.3 million out of a £2,500 million a year supplementary benefit budget.

80% of all strikes last less than the two weeks necessary to be eligible for benefits.

Plight

The report draws attention io the plight of single people involved in srikes or lock-ours under the new Tory ragutations They would be ineligible for any kind of benefit. The commission says that the Tories must eventually change this policy -but warns that there is a real danger that somebody will starve to death first.

And it ridicules the Tory idea of inadequate social security payments acting as an "incentive to work", under conditions where there are insufficient jobs available, and where 59% of supplementary benefit claimants are single parents, for whom "work incentives are in most cases cruelly irrelevent"

(Supplementary Benefits Commission Annual Report 1979, HMSO £6.70).

Patrick Jenkin £10,000-but have been refused any government aid to save their giant newsprint plant at Ellesmere Port.

Cadbury Schweppes (£15,000), Lucas (£20,000) and GKN (£25,250) have recorded reduced. profits and been forced to make drastic cutbacks as a result of Tory economic policies.

And even Daily Express owners Trafalgar House (£40,000) have been forced to cut back production.

But others have done better: prominent on the list is the Adwest Group (£10,000) whose anti-union offensive at their engineering plant in Reading has now been strengthened by Prior's Employment Act.

Brewers and bakers have prospered as a result of Howe's abolition of price controls.

And the bankers of course have made a killing as a result of sky-high interest rates, the soaring level of indebtedness in industry, the strong pound and the abolition of exchange But with Tory policies now making the CBI's pips squeak it must be an open question how many of the manufacturing firms on this year's list are going to be around to consider further donations next year.

Te vaur firm on the lict? Tt is available (20p) from the Labour Party, 150 Walworth Road, London SE17 IT.

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NATO troops on manoeuvres in Turkey CIALIST PRESS, Next week's Labour Party conference will hear all manner of rhetoric on all kinds of questions: but what it will not hear from its leadership is any call for mass working class action to bring down this reactionary Tory government.

Motion after motion calls for protest campaigns designed to persuade Thatcher to change course: countless more spell out a list of more or less adequate proposals for action by a future Labour government.

But none brings together the need for the trade union and labour movement to mobilise its massive potential strength in the fight for a general strike to force Thatcher out of office.

Completely dominated by the concept of bringing about reforms through Parliamentary means, the Labour Party and its leadership time and again divert workers away from the necessity for independent mass action as the only way to stop the Tory offensive in its tracks. •While Callaghan has explicitly spoken out against action to bring down the Tories, Benn By the this article appears Operation Crusader' will be in full swing. "Crusader' will be the biggest military mobilisation of British troops since the 1956 attack on Suez, and will cost £8.5 million.

It is designed to test the Army's ability to back up its force already in Germany and to defend the UK mainland in the event of 'emergency' ' 63,000 NATO troops will be involved.

There can be no doubt that 'Crusader' represents an important show of force towards the East European countries, and can only be understood as a direct attempt to intimidate them.

In showing its and the left wing focus their energies not on spelling out a clear opposition to this line but simply on the issue of constitutional reforms within the Labour Party itself. teeth on mainiand Europe, "Crusader' will be making less spectacular but equally significant steps towards the preparation for war in Britain.

An important phase of the whole operation is designed to test the army's ability to deal with 'subversion' in Britain. Key installations will be guarded by troops, and there will be units occupied with seeking out saboteurs and 'enemy paratroops.

"Crusader' is of course only the latest and most spectacular demonstration of NATO's functions, but in many ways it is the clearest yet.

NATO is the most important Callaghan at the TUC Yet the fact is that the reforms will only advance the class struggle if they are linked to a fight for a genuine socialist perspective.

This mea nS above all an of a set of post war treaties among the capitalist countries designed to encircle and contain the Soviet Union and the socialist system of nationalised property relations that operate there.

The other links in the chain of encirclement-SEATO, CENTO and ANZUS (remember them?) have largely collapsed as a result of two factors: Firstly the declining influence of the United States and secondly the growing dependence of US strategy on long and medium range nuclear weaponry.

NATO remains " essential however to the present strategy of US imperialism for political as well as military reasons.

It is not just a question of bases, important though these are-as the decision by France abandonment of the reactionary demand for import controls that have been consistently called for by the 'left' , but more recently adopted as policy by the right wing Callaghan leadership.

Not only is the policy itself an economic nonsense in the midst of a world-wide capitalist recession, where such protectionist measures would trigger off retaliation and a possible all-out trade war-but it is also a complete and utter diversion from the necessary fight to take action against British employers who are actually spearheading the attack on jobs.

To call for measures to protect British capitalists and multinational firms in Britain against the impact of "foreign" competitors is to create the illusion that there is some kind of common interest between the working class and their employers.

But the right wing defenders of the import control policy make no secret of the fact that it runs alongside the drive for speed-up and rationalisation in British industry to make it "competitive" by capitalist standards on a world scale.

And even the left' advocates cease to permit NATO bases its soil showed.

More important is the use made by the USA of NATO to ensure its continued political dominance over European affairs. In point of fact there is very little military independence for the USA's NATO partners.

According to the defence estimates, the overwhelming proportion of Britain's military expenditure is committed to NATO.

The army of occupation in the north of Ireland is not directly controlled by NATO, but apart from this the only units of the British forces not committed to NATO are in Belize, Brunei and Hong Kong.

This dependence goes beyond the mere control of troops and extends to levels of expenditure. The decision to purchase a replacement for Polaris and to make other increases in military expenditure are almost entirely dictated by the pressure of Britain's "partners' in NATO, in fact by the USA.

It is clear that the func tion of NATO as a mílitary machine is to lock the junior capitalist countries into the military consequences of US foreign policy.

This finds its highest expression in the deployment of cruise missiles, the location of which will not be known to the British government at any time, even when the US is preparing to launch them against Eastern Europe:

The same will be true of the other countries that allow cruise But NATO's political aspects require more direct intervention than simply being able to ignore governments. Recently we have been learning something of the use of NATO as an agent of subversion by the US.

Members of the Labour Party right wing are known to of this nationalist strategy make it clear that they see the protection of British firms as part and parcel ot a programme of increased NEB-backed investment that would not only bolster up capitalist enterprise but also-by the introduction of new technology and rationalisation-serve to slash back still more jobs.

Import controls are therefore by no means an aswer to unemployment: rather they are a short term populist attempt to foist the blame for unemployment not onto British capitalism but onto "foreign" firms and workers.

Union leaders-such as those in the textile unions-who plead that they are really concerned to stop the "exploitation" of low-paid textile workers neo-colonial countries willfully hid the fact that all workers are exploited under capitalism, and that textile workers in Britain are themselves paid rock-bottom wages thanks to years of union betrayals.

In rejecting this policy, and rejecting the turn to the NEB advocated by the 'lefts', Labour activists must look towards Chapple be actively working with NATObacked organisations to promote anti-Soviet and pro-imperialist views within Britain and elsewhere.

David Owen for example sanctioned a project by the European Atlantic Movement involving six schools in England in absorbing NATO propaganda and ideology about the threat to Western democracy from 'authoritarian regimes' This project proceeded without the knowledge of the Inner London Education Authority, NUT officials, the TUC Education Committee or even of Shirley Williams, the then Education Secretary.

More sinister yet is the virtual running of the right wing Labour and Trade Union Press Service (LTUPS) by NATO money.

An annual grant from NATO of £5,000 is the main income of this nasty little right wing propaganda circle and its bulletins.

The LTUPS is run by the Labour Committee for Transdemands that can mobilise independent action by the working class to defend jobs, halt the cuts in public services, bring down the Tories and prepare the ground for mass action to expropriate the •major industries, banks and financial institutions without compensation under workers management.

Such demands include the occupation of factories and facilities threatened with closure and the fight for supporting strike and blacking action; the opening of the books of capitalist industry to elected trade union committees; and the building of councils of action to generalise strike action and coordinate the fight to bring down the Tories.

While Socialist Press has consistently supported the struggle for democratic reforms within the Labour Party, it is in test of the fight for tangible policies to confront the Tory offensive that those who pose as an alternative to the Callaghan right wing must stand or fall.

Duffy atlantic Understanding, a semi official NATO promotion body comprising almost every leading Labour right winger, including Michael (Lord) Stewart, Roy Mason, Terry Duffy, Frank Chapple, David Owen, Bill Sirs and Sid Weighell.

The LTUPS in reality represents part of NATO's intervention into the Labour Party.

Its links with the Social Democratic Alliance and with Truemid have been well documented by State Research Journal (Feb-March 1980).

The conclusion to be drawn from this squalid picture is that the leading figures of the Labour right wing are not honest political opponents representing large sections of the rank and file membership.

They are conscious agents of American imperialism, dedicated to derailing the socialist impulses of the rank and file of the Labour Party:

Our responsibility is not only to drive them out of the Party but also to break off all the political links with NATO that allow them to flourish.

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PRESS, Wednesday 24 September 1980