New Shots in Trade War

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the major European capitalist prompted Denis Healey to governments to charge the write, a stiff protest to French Scarcely a day goes by without some new shot being fired in the growing trade war between the capitalist countries. This week the European Economic Community half succeeded in intimidating its major suppliers of textiles into limiting their exports to the EEC.

Over the last month 12 such agreements have been forced. by the EEC on a number of its suppliers. No agreement has been possible, however, with India, Brazil, Egypt or Pakistan.

These countries are now The Taylor Report on the system of governors and managers in schools has been greeted by howls of rage from NUT leaders.

In September when the Report was published after 2½ years work, NUT General Secretary Fred Jarvis described it as a "busybodies He said it treated the headteacher as the "governors' office boy" rather than person with "managerial authority" and would "hand things over to a committee made up largely of people lacking in professional expertise"

Equal representation

The main proposals of the Taylor Report are that governors' bodies should give equal representation to the LEA, schoolstaff, parents, pupils and the community and that they should be directly responsible for the running of the school in all its aspects, within the framework laid down by the LEA.

There would then be a clear line of authority from LEA to the governing body to the head and teachers.

The Report rejects a division of function between the formal curriculum of the school for which, according to the NUT evidence to the Taylor Committee' teachers should be responsible and the 'hidden curriculum' tne general way in which the school is organised, its non-academic activities and relationships with the community).

No concern The NUT leaders in their hysterical defence of bigotted and bourgeois professionalism show no shred of concern for the interests of the millions of working class children, whom so many of its members daily bore and contuse.

The interests of working class children clearly do not figure in the motives of the Taylor Committee either.

Its' concern rather was to attempt to solve the crisis in education, i crisis expressed in mass truancy therefc re thr unilate •al import resti EEC.

:atened wit the imposition of ictions by the The trade war shows itself not only in protective measures of this kind but also in competition for exports through dumping (selling at less than cost price), government export subsidies, and in the giving of export credits to companies.

The cut-throat undercutting of credit terms by the West European countries, especially on exports to the Soviet Union led last year to the conclusion of a "gentlemen's agreement' between Jarvis and "behaviour problems' ', in general dissatisfaction with schools, in: protests against cuts and in the conflict between contradictory educational ideologies such as erupted Over William Tyndale.

The Taylor Report sees a reformed "participatory"

system of governors as a means of achieving improved back-up to the school in the community, of bringing more knowledge of the local area into the school, and of resolving cont ct in an orderly way.

In the context of ever-increasing cuts this involves reconciling parents, staff and pupils to staff redundancies;

falling standards of equipment, school meals and maintenance; large classes, etc.

The impossibility of this task makes the implementation of the Taylor proposals, camárates of interest Last week this agreement seemed to be on the point of breaking down as rumours spread that the Soviet Union had offered France a huge export order for machinery and equipment if the credit terms were better than those offered by Britain, Germany and Italy.

The French were apparently on the point UL agreeing; of gorapino. …and this unlikely.

The minutes of governors meetings would also provide the LEA s with the detailed recorded information about individual schools required by modern management methods in the vastly enlarged areas covered by LEA s since local government reorganisation.

Appointees

Under the existing system of managers and governors, the same committee often serves a number of schools, 26 in an extreme case found by the Taylor Committee.

Such bodies have little intimate knowledge of the schools, and usually keep no minutes.

Most of the governors and managers are, appountees of the local majority political party and merely restate the views of the local education committee.

A stunned silence greeted the Taylor Committee's question, 'What action by your governing body has made most difference to your Workers' control But school governing bodies have not always been rubber stamping or fund raising stooges.

The school boards set up in many working class districts after the Education Act of 1870 were under working class control. By 1895 a quarter of a million premier Ravmond Barre. protectionism and • the dangers of its intensifying the world slump.

They argue pathetically that a way to avoid it would be for the "clarification of the rules" of trade and tariffs and to adjust balance of payments problems by changing exchange rates rather than by tariffs.

Gloomy view

The other document, GATT's annual report on world trade, takes an even more gloomy view. It says that world recovery and the growth of investment is already being seriously hampered by the growth of protectionism.

The evident threats to production and employment involved in protectionism cannot, however, produce a world-wide response to the crisis.

Under capitalism the worker on a world scale.

Socialist solution

Such chauvinistic solutions (supported by the Labour "lefts' and the Communist Party in Britain) are part of the capitalist solution to the crisis, a solution for which the working class pays on a tition is blamed for sackings. in Britain, workers are duped into support for their "own" employer rather than action to force the nationalisation of any employer that demands redundancies.

A socialist solution must oppose every manifestation of protectionism, not in the interests of capitalist free trade but of the militant and principled unity the working class.

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SUFFER at least in full, extremely