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Printers and journalists on the 'Evening Standard' and 'Evening News' are waiting to lear who is going to be their executioner.

The bewildering series of proposals and counter proposals from financiers have just one common thread. They all start from the position that up to half of the 4,000 jobs on the two papers will be axed.

Meanwhile the resentment and frustration that had journalists jostling their bosses and printers occupying the boardrooms is being turned aside.

For years rumours have abounded that the News or the Standard would close. Now Beaverbrook is prepared to sell and leave Associated Press to run the only evening It would be likely that the Evening News staff would be first on the chopping block since redundancy agreements make it more expensive to fire Evening Standard staff.

Into the confusion has stepped Sir James Goi dsmith who would like to buy ou t. the whole Beaverbrook group to close down the Standard.

Goldsmith, whose devotion to press freedom is such that he is prepared to go to the High Court to shut up Private. Eye, would be ideally suited to join the ranks of the newspaper moguls.

So would outsider Robert Maxwell, the man the Department of Trade Inquiry into Pergamon concluded was not fit to be in control of a public company.

The Standard and the News are not alone. Only last year the Observer relied on US capital and redundancies on a large scale to bail it out.

What is clear is that for years wheeling and dealing has been conducted in the back rooms of Fleet Street papers.

If the Standard and the News are to survive without massive sackings there must be an all out campaign to open every nook and cranny of their files to the scrutiny of chapel committees.

Directors must be interrogated. The journalists and printers together must start to unfold from the cupboard the sordid planning and dealing of the past years.

Undoubtedly this demandwhich will require major industrial action and possibly occupation to achieve since the . union bureaucracies are a million miles from leading such a fight will show that the papers are indeed on rock bottom.

SECRETS

In demanding the ending of the business secrets of Fleet Street the workers must also be prepared to demand that the government puts up the money for the papers to survive-this time under the direct control of the workers involved.

Not a penny in compensation must be offered to the parasites who have led Fieet Street to the brink of complete disaster. There is not a single part of the newspaper production process that the workers in the firm are incapable of controlling.

Scan page 12

36 people were killed, some 200 wounded, and 400 arrested as a massive 170,000 strong May Day: rally in Istanbul ended in violence.

Both the capitalist press and the police are united in claiming that the shooting was started by Maoists whom the rally organisers-the lett wing trade union confederation DISK -had refused to allow on the But in fact Kemal Turkler, leader of DISK, was actually inviting the Maoists to join the demonstration at the very moment the shooting started.

DISK leaders and the leader of the bourgeois RPP, Mr Ecevit, Intercontinental Hotel, and pointed out that police drove armoured cars into the crowd, and fired on demonstrators.

The Maoist groups for their part, only add to the confusion, blaming eachother as well as the CIA, fascists, and "social fascists".

CRISIS

But the attack must be seen as part of the political crisis in Turkey in which violence from right wing forces has been on the increase for three years.

For workers' organisations to seek now to exploit the events for their own interests can only assist the efforts of the bourgeoisie to cover this up. There must be an immediate call for a workers's inquiry into the May Day events.

Only three days earlier Ecevit himself had been stoned and shot at by fascists in an election meeting leaving 15 people wounded.

A rather shaken Ecevit later accused the rival Justice Party and National Action Party of planning the attack "in order to keep the electörate away from the polls and "democratic struggle against The only serious struggle against fascism is one led by the working class in clear political independence from other classes and their parties.

This means at the same time a rejection of the absurd political positions of the Maoists who characterise both reformist and Stalinist movements as "social fascist" and therefore oppose any united front of workers' parties in self-defence against fascism.

The struggle for such a united front is the primary task now facing Turkish workers and connected completely with the struggle to rémove the reactionary National Front ruling coalition before the June elections.

YI:1 2 MAYIS 1977 ENTERNASYONEL İŞÇİ SOSYALİST BİRLIĞI (WSL) YAYINIDIR 20p The first issue of 'International', the first openly Trotskyist bulletin to be published in Turkish.

Available from WSL, 31, Dartmouth Park Hill, London NW5 1HR. GEZİ Police armoured car in action Armed guard for Ecevit