Why we are forced to

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Restore your Socialist Press-has taken its toll on our movement.

From our next issue until the basis can be established for a new expansion, Socialist Press will be reduced to a ten-page weekly paper.

The Workers Socialist League's women's paper Woman Worker and the monthly paper of the Socialist Youth League, Red Youth, will appear as four page supplements to Socialist Press as well as being on sale on a separate basis.

Set-back

We make no secret of the fact that this cut in the size of our weekly press is a setback for the Workers Socialist Leagueone which we have fought to avoid.

It is clear to all that the escalation of the Tory offensive on jobs, living standards, social services and basic rights demands of us not a reduction but an expansion in the size sales of our weekly press.

But we operate in material conditions in which our members and supporters find it increasingly difficult to raise their financial contributions, while our costs are soaring and new international responsibilities flowing from the development of the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee have placed an added strain on our budget.

The 17% January increase in our print bill proved the final straw: such an increase could not be absorbed without either an increase in the price of the paper, a dramatic increase in sales, or a cut in its size.

We have chosen the third option as what we hope will be temporary measure, while every branch of the WSL investigates ways and means of maximising and increasing the sales or raising additional funds on a regular basis.

Extra copies

Every reader can help us in this task. You can take one or more extra copies as well as your own to sell to workmates, friends, neighbours or Labour Party activists. You could send us a donation-however large or small-towards our monthly of Socialist Press you could consider joining the Workers Socialist League and helping us fight to build a Trotskyist party capable of leading mass struggles against the Tory government.

Let us make the period of the ten-page paper as short as possible! Let us find ways to reach the tens of thousands of workers seeking a way forward against Thatcher, and build the circulation of the only consistent Trotskyist weekly paper in Britain!

Send all donations to:

Socialist Press Monthly Fund BM Box 5277, London WCIN 3XX If you would like to take extra copies of Socialist Press, contact your local branch or write direct to:

Socialist Press (Circulation) BM Box 5277, London WCIN 3XX early speakers a lead from the platform could have secured a strike vote.

Yet Jordan's truculent treachery • and Mathers' windy rhetoric guided an aimless Adams to abandon six of his shop stewards to Edwardes' tender mercies.

workers directly addressing their fellow workers and making an emotional appeal to their instinctive solidarity, Adams had separated them off from the floor of the meeting, and positioned them up behind the platform.

They sat mute, but in full view-as if on trial.

Judging the moment to be right, Ădams told the meeting that he and the others on the platform had been listening to the debate, and that while it progressed they had drafted a resolution.

This was obviously a lie. No resolution was written-and not much talk took place on the platform. The betrayal had been plotted well in advance.

But the resolution declared openly what Adams, Mathers and Jordan had all along been tighting for-an end of the industrial action.

A cheated, misled, manipulated workforce saw little alternative but to bitterly acquiesce, and by a 4-1 majority the plattion at Longbridge.

The task now is to prepare the basis to resume the offensive as soon as the inquiry is concluded.

We can predict with certainty that there is no way the inquiry will reinstate the eight victimised workers.

The only way to reinstate the eight is through all-out indefinite strike action not only on the Metro track but extending throughout the Longbridge plant and BL as a whole.

The Longbridge Stewards Committee must mobilise to prepare for such a fight. The TGWU must pledge full official If the struggle is not pressed home, the end of the inquiry will offer BL management a green light to sack any militant anywhere-and in Longbridge a stewards' card in the hands of a militant will become the equivalent to a one-way ticket to the dole queue.

Fords tomorrow?

Nor should workers elsewhere leave Longbridge workers to fight alone: BL today is BSC, Fords or British Rail tomorrow unless the Edwardes-Thatcher offensive is brought to a halt.

*No illusions in the inquiry!

*All out at Longbridge!

*Reinstate the 8!

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Separated off And to prevent the victmised