Lib-Lab budget

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Any worker who expects that Dennis Healey's "giveaway" Budget will put more money in the pay packet is in for a nasty surprise.

Despite the much advertised tax cuts, the combined effects of the Budget and two other measures of Healey's policy mean that for thousands of workers take home pay will stay the same or even go down.

The Budget's raising of the lower tax limit and the introduction of a new lower rate of tax means that some low paid workers should be relieved of paying tax altogether and all taxpayers should pay an average of £2 a week less.

But at the same time national insurance contributions have been raised under the new system which begins this month, and child tax allowances have been ended, to be replaced by new child benefits payable in twoparent families to the mother.

As a result, a male married worker with two children making average earnings, will find his pay packet will contain an extra 7½p, though his wife can collect another f2.

For a low paid worker on £35 a week take home pay will actually go down by 66p a week.

The abolition of child aliowance will mean that workers at this level of income will now be paying income tax whereas before the budget they would not have done so!

Whereas for average and low paid workers the overall proportion of earnings taken by the state in tax will be less after the Budget than it was immediately before, it will still be a good deal more than it was after last year's budget and nearly twice as much as it was in March 1974.

gone up For a worker on half the national average earnings the overai tax rate has gone up from 6.6% in March 1974 to 12.5% now.

For a worker on average earnings it has gone up in the same period from 16.5% to 26.1%.

Lollipops

As the capitalists' friend Economist pointed out:

"Together with the small businessmen, the small investor goes away with many of the lollipops from this Budget"

And that of course is in line with the politics of the Budget.

It is a coalition budget designed to cement Labour's alliance with the Liberal Party who demanded sops for small capitalists and incentives to collaborationist profit-sharing schemes, on which Healey also dutifully obliged.

The tax reductions, which for many will prove to be illusory, are nonetheless designed by Healey as Healey some sugar to sweeten the pill of a further stage of wage control.

Despite Healey's recent reticence on this subject it emerged during the Budget debate that all the economic predictions made by Healey depend on the growth of earnings in the next year being 7%.

And that implies that Healey is aiming to restrict increases in basic rates to about 4% in a Phase 4 of wage controls.

Break coalition

The "giveaway" budget is thus no more than a Lib-Lab giveaway to small business from the pockets of the workers.

Labour Party members and trade unionists must demand Labour MPs vote against these measures, and fight to break the reactionary Lib-Lab coalition that*| spawned them.

ff Bidwell Posters, leaflets and badges advertising the "Carnival Against the Nazis' organised by the Anti-Nazi League are being churned out by the thousand and distributed to workers and youth.

The Anti-Nazi League has set itself the objective of organising "on the widest possible scale against the propaganda and activities of the Nazis in Britain today" in order "to alert the people of this country to the growing menace of the New Nazis"

To this end it has thrown wide its doors to any personalities from the worlds of politics, sport, entertainment or the arts who "irrespective of other political differences" agree to unite to oppose the Nazis.

Can this approach yield the desired results? It is possible to defeat and destroy fascism through propaganda?

While the fascists feed off frustration at real material problems unemployment, housing shortages and social service cuts, can a diverse grouping of well-intentioned Liberals, football managers, Labourites and academics provide a clear answer?

All the evidence so far confirms our view that they cannot.

Prominent among the sponsors of the ANL, for instance, is Tribunite 'left' MP Sidney Bidwell who joined four other Labourites and five Tories in signing a Parliamentary Select Committee report proposing stringent racialist measures to