Pensioners Cuts!

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PENSIONER IFI Thatcher's lory government nas only been in office a few weeks. But already working class men, women and children are feeling the impact of their attacks.

*PRICES: The Tories have scrapped even the pretence of controlling prices, by abolishing the Price Commission.

Already increases in milk, bread, gas, electricity, fares and postage have been announced. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.

The Tory budget will raise tax on virtually everything you buy in the shops. The Common Market will add still more to food prices.

And the huge increases in oil prices will send petrol prices and the prices of all goods and services rocketing upwards in the next few months. Tight family budgets will be stretched beyond endurance.

*JOBS: Tory policies have already begun to boost unemployment, with the axing of 22,000 jobs in the Civil Service and the freezing of jobs in local authorities.

The spending cuts still to come in the public sector will fall with particular violence on women workers, large numbers of whom work in these areas.

As the recession grows, and smaller firms and factories are closed down or "rationalised", thousands upon thousands of women will find themselves driver out of the workforce and into the isolation of the home.

*CUTS: The Tory budget will proceed ruthlessly to step up the Labour government's cuts in spending on education, nurseries, health care and other essential public services.

All these attacks hit women in particular-whether by throwing them directly out of work or by forcing women in the home to carry an increased burden of childcare, and nursing the sick and the elderly for whom no state facilities MUST STAY EN OUR- say to hospital are avallable.

The cuts are intended to lessen the taxes paid by big business and top managers and enable them to cream off fat profits at the expense of working class men and women.

But while the Tories-a government of businessmen, bankers and speculators-rush on with these attacks, what alternative are workers offered by the Labour leadership?

The main reason Labour lost the election was because under Wilson and Callaghan, the last Labour government had carried out similar policies and cut the standard of living of nearly every working class family.

They fought tooth and nail to make private industry profitable at the expense of the workers that put them in office. They imposed three years of wage controls; they threw 1½ million onto the dole; they allowed prices to double in five years; they cut the public services.

Now Callaghan comes along and announces that the Labour Party will oppose any section of workers that fights to prevent the Tories carrying out their attacks.

And the trade union leaders, one after another, announce their wish to talk to Thatcher and 'discuss' the Tories' plans to bring in new laws against the unions.

When these so-called "leaders" talk in these terms they are not speaking for their members. The huge series of pay strikes throughout the winter, in which hundreds of thousands of men and women took action and eventually destroyed Callaghan's pay limits, show that the working class is ready to defend its living standards, its jobs and its basic rights.

The last Tory government, under Heath, was brought down by the working class in 1974. Thatcher, too, must be brought down.

This requires the building of an FOR THE UNBROOKI ANNA WALSH

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NUPE NUPE PHOTO: Mark Rusher, says:

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