Heseltine seeks dictatorial powers to impose cuts

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HERE'S A NICE CUT Heseltine vilified by cuts demonstrators The Wilson/Callaghan within the labour movement

CHOICE

HESELTINE -we.

Thousands more jobs and vital public services provided by local authorities throughout the country face the axe as a result of the latest Tory spending cuts.

Environment Secretary Michael Heseltine has announced that £ 450 million in government grants are to be withheld from English councils unless they submit new cuts in their spending by the end of this month.

This means in reality a cut of £900 million in the budget of local government. And in case councils try to dodge the necessity for actual cutbacks by imposing supplementary rate demands, Heseltine planning to force through new legislation to give him dictatorial power to limit rate rises.

In Scotland seven local councils already face an ultimatum: either they impose swingeing Tory cuts or face a loss of £63 million in grants.

£53 million of this is to come from just one councilLothian, Scotland's second largest regional councilwhere Labour has a majority of one.

Lothian council leader Phyllis Heriot has said that to make cuts of this huge to make cuts of this huge order would mean the loss ot to 6,000 jobs in the region and "decimate" vital services.

The counci has clung in recent years to the policy of preserving local services by raising the rates. This year' rate increase was 50%. Now Heseltine is demanding that £53 million be handed back to the ratepayers.

The continued inability of Heseltine to impose his strategy of spending cuts on local authorities has been an ongoing embarrassment to the Thatcher government.

His new fangled "block grant" system has fallen flat on its face. Indeed many of the councils which face penalties under the latest cuts in grant are Tory-controlled county councils which have tirelessly hacked at budgets for education and social services, but baulked at the full savagery of the government's latest cash limits.

Heseltine is in fact demanding that councils prune spending this year to 5.6% below the volume of expenditure three years ago in 1978/79.

Yet with unemployment and poverty having rapidly increased in the last three years, the numbers in need of social services have also increased.

None of this worries None Heseltine a millionaire or the wealthy capitalists. speculators and landowners who staff the Tory cabinet.

Depressed profits

For them, the only guiding light is their mission -to drive up the depressed rate of profit of British To do this, they reason, they need to minimise the tax burden on employers at local as well as national level-by cutting or holding down increases in rates.

To do this, they must in turn slash services to the sick and the elderly, to youth in schools and colleges and to the whole working class community.

This is in effect what Heseltine's number Two, -om king, meant last week when he complained that the Tories had been forced into their attack on the powers of local councils.

"I see a risk not from our actions, but from a remorseless march of circumstance."

The Tories have never made any secret of their starting point-private profit. But the problem faced by the working class has been that Labour and trade union leaders, too, either openly or tacitly accept the same start-* ing point.

The Labour government began the wholesale offensive on the public services precisely because it accepted that the protits of private industry had to be preserved and improved-if necessary at the expense of the working class.

Elected by workers looking for anti-capitalist policies, the Labour government instead took its instructions from the bankers of the IMF.

But the same attitude is also prevalent among Labour councillors. While they have mouthed opposition to the Tory cuts, Labour councils have almost without exception pulled back from preparing any serious confrontation with the government -and • imposed cuts, generally coupled with hefty rate and rent increases, which fall on the shoulders of their working class supporters.

And in this stand they have had the support of public sector union bureaucrats who have stood back with folded arms as their members have been made redundant or "naturally wasted"

This is why a serious struggle against the latest Tory attack on local government is inseparable from the fight for a new leadership within the labour movement Coventry The campaign around the Irish war is beginning that will make its starting point not the problems of the capitalist class or the acceptance of Tory dietates, but the defence of the jobs, living standards and hard-won rights of the working class.

In several areas strong "Labour Left" groupings emerged in the course of last winter's struggles against the cuts. These groupings must renew the offensive against the right wing in Labour councils and the unions.

Heseltine and King are arrogantly talking of the new legislation meaning "the end of local government as we know it."

Let's make the fight on the issue bring the end of local government as we know it-and the start of the struggle for accountable labour movement representation! And let's fight for mass local action leading to all out general strike action to bring down the Tory *No cuts! No rate/rent increases!

*Defend jobs and public services-for strike action, no-cover action and occupations to stop cuts and closures!

*Labour councils must take a stand! Prepare mass action to bring down the Tories! Tories! mination of the H Block