Green pound fall means prices must rise

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farmers to get their long- the devaluation is that the promised increase in revenue other governments do not Police at Hyde hold iaci, anti-fascist demonstrators.

Agriculture Minister Silkin was defeated last week on the subject of the "green pound"-the special exchange rate at which transactions in food products takes place inside the Common Market.

The defeat was in the Commons where Silkin's proposal to devalue the green pound by 5% was replaced by a Tory-Liberal amendment to devalue it by 72%.

At the present time the fact that the "green pound" exchanges for more "green marks" and "green francs" than the ordinary pound means that food prices to consumers in Britain are low in comparison with the rest of the EEC.

And also payments to farmers are also lower than in Indications that the Tory leadership are vying with the National Front for the racialist vote in the next general election merged last week with evidence of an all-round right wing offensive against the immigrant community.

Police in Wolverhampton have at last admitted that a gang of white thugs wearing Ku Klux Klan hoods had been roaming the town at night and had beaten up ten black youths.

Confrontation

One outcome of these provocations was Saturday night's confrontation between black and white youth and police in which bricks were thrown and seven arrests were made.

Meanwhile youth supporting the National Front were reported to have beaten up a Kenyan born Asian teacher in Pimlico, London.

In the North West, Greater Manchester Chief Constable Jim Anderton, who gained notoriety for turing out 5,000 police to protect fascist leader. Martin Wabster, again admitted secret preperations jointly with the National Front in order to protect the fascists-this time at a meeting in Hyde Town Hall.

A demonstration of 1,500 anti-fascists turned out, blocking eery road leading to the hall and forcing police to the lengths of carrying the audience of less than 100 through in police cars.

Fingerprinted

Interviewed later on television, Anderton gave another dear hint of his political views when he predicted that in 10 pears time everyone would have to be fingerprinted and carry identity cards.

"Subversives" should be severety dealt with by the law, he told radio reporters. But -innocent citizens" would have nothing to fear, he claimed.

In case this obvious link bermen the police and the nei communist, vicious racialism of the National Front seemed accidental, police in London last Thursday joined the antinigrant crackdorm by round, up 40 "illegal' immigrant se morkers in a move headlined i the evening press.

The locar 100, anxious the rest of Europe.

The bigger the devaluation the more food prices both in the shops and to farmers will rise.

A 7½% devaluation would about 8 or 9%.

Silkin's defeat was so convenient to him that it might almost have been If the devaluation goes through he can blame the higher shop prices on the Tories and Liberals.

He and Callaghan have played on this for all it is worth, which is not very much.

But if the devaluatior •fails to go through Silkin can blame of the the failure of the not to be left out, moved in as if to show solidarity with Judge McKinnon whose sympathetic remarks from the bench to fascist leader Kingsley Read provoked such a stir recently.

Indications

Judge Wild, sitting in Cambridge Crown Court, fined two Libyan students for assault after a fight:

"This all came about because you were drunk and it is a pity that you did not have the decency to stand up and admit it.

"But then, as people about the courts know, people of your origin never admit anything; well, hardly anything" he declared.

These are only the latest open indications of a racialist offensive by these open agents of the bourgeoisie.

The offensive is feeding on the falling living standards and mass unemployment consciously created by the Lib-Lab government in the name of boosting the profits of private industry.

Cynical trick

And rather than change these policies, Labour leaders are now playing the cynical trick of simply blaming the Tories and the NF for the violence.

The Tories in turn have now stooped even lower and accused the coalition government of creating the problem by allowing black youth to remain on the dole-as if the Tories' own policies would not massively boost unemployment and racialist violence!

Workers must respond to this sharpening situation. Poverty and unemployment must be fought by an end to wage controls and the defence of alt jobs through work sharing on full pay and the implementation of a crash programme of public works.

Such a policy demands a break in the Lib-Lab coalition.

At the same time the immigrant communities must be protected against fascist attack.

Workers' defence squads must be built wherever the fascists are active in order to guard the lives and property , of immigrant workers as well as protecting labour movement organisations and meetings. PHOTO: John Sturrock, Report PHOTO on the recalcitrant EEC. has so far refused to agree to The reason that the EEC THE KAZ1 PHOTO: Laurence Sparham IFL ga want the British to use the measure simply as a way of increasing farmers' incomes.

This is because in the rest politically difficult; and doubly so if it were being opposed by a British government which had been able to achieve the same result through devaluing the green pound and producing a much lower increase in shop prices than would be needed in the rest of Europe.

This, as yet, incomplete story, is a new illustration of how the political problems created for capitalist governments by the economic crisis lead them not to cooperate with each other but to try to cut each others' throats.

Other figures released last week showed up another aspect of the world capitalist crisis-the extreme problems of the steel industry.

Steel production in the 29 most important capitalist producing countries fell by over 4% in 1977.

It has fallen over 12% since the last peak in 1974. Production today is in fact scarcely higher than it was a decade ago.

While production in capitalist countries has fallen, it has continued to expand in the bureaucratised workers states, despite their growing economic problems.

One significant result of that is that while in 1973 the USA was the world's largest steel producer, (with an output of 137 million tons) in the last two years it has been dramatically overtaken by the Last year the Soviet Union produced 147 million tons of steel compared with 113 million in the USA and 102 millión in Japan.

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increase prices to consumers by 12% and to producers by