HOW MR WATKINS HAD A 'LEARNING $40,000 A MONTH

PIN-UP MR HEATH Japan's Premier Tanaka Who said nobody loves Ted Heath? We can reveal that Premier Tanaka, the Tory leader of Japan, has three photographs on his office wall. One is of Emperor Hirohito, the other is the Empress and lastly ... yes, you guessed it, Heath. People are starting to ask questions...• CAUTIONARY TALE A cautionary tale about coalition politics-right-wing Labour style-trom Monday's London 'Evening Standard'.

An interview with Sir lan Horobin, admittedly 'about as right wing a Conservative as it's possible to be', revealed that he entered politics on the invitation of Philip Snowden, the Labour Chancellor who, with Ramsay MacDonald, deserted to the National government in 1931.

When the whole country was going bust in 1931, he [Snowden] said would I like to fight a seat', Horobin told 'Standard' columnist Valerie Jenkins. I took a 15,000 ordinary majority. Extra- socialist majority to a 15,000 As an earnest of the rightwing views Snowden found so sympathetic, the former MP admits wanting to restore the death penalty and destroy 'The Guardian' newspaper. His racial opinions can be deduced from the comment: 'Half England's black and the rest knocked down.' Such opinions are, course, no bar to being lionized by the Beaverbrook press —in fact Horobin's just the sort of hero they need now.

So despite the somewhat abrupt manner of his disappearance from public life in 1962 (he was jailed for three years for homosexual practices), the publication of a new book of poems is the occasion for a whole-page interview in the 'Standard'.

The exact purpose of the interview is not clear, although Horobin does let drop a heavy hint that he wouldn't mind Philip Snowden: Invitation. coming back from exile in Tangier to take up the life peerage his jailing deprived him of Il years ago. 'All my experience and knowledge 1s thrown away, complains the one-time Parliamentary secretary at the Ministry of Power.

As a child he was dandled on the knee of W. B. Yeats, the right-wing Irish poet who was later to join the fascist Blueshirts. He was educated at Highgate School and Cambridge. His sister Norah was for 20 years headmistress of the pukka girls' public school, Roedean.

The introduction to his new book is written by PoetLaureate Sir John Betjeman.

• Another interesting sidelight from the interview iS that Horobin was the 'pet pupil' at Cambridge of economist John Maynard Keynes, of whose theories the reformists have made so much use in attempting to confuse the working class in the period following the last war. After the Watts riots of August 1965, in Los Angeles, the United States Federal Government, business corporations and trade union bureaucracy rushed in to "pacify' the black population.

All the tensions were to be eased away by a few timely reforms.

The Watts Labour Community Action Committee was set up under the direction of a pushing entrepreneur called Ted Watkins.

At its peak this organization was turning over $30m from supermarket chain, five manpower training programmes, a chain of service stations and restaurants and a construction company.

The Federal Government had almost entirely subsidized work-training programmes, community-improvement projects ike in 'WICAC'S first youth programmes and And it was the government and its hired business consultants who came up with the bright idea of black-owned supermarkets.

The notion was that black people would be happier in black-owned shops-and, besides, they would be bought up dirt-cheap from white owners anxious to move out of Watts.

The unions joined in. Together with the Federal Government's Small Business Administration, the United Auto Workers and the Teamsters' Union put up $900,000 for the project.

And the United Auto Workers paid Watkins' salary.

,But, after an initial boost, sales rapidly declined. Neither service nor prices were any better in black-owned supermarkets than they had been in white-owned supermarkets.

Within a short time the supermarket chain was losing $40,000 a month.

Then Watkins ran into trouble at his WLCAC work camp at Saugus, California, 35 miles from Watts, which has been set up in 1969 with the help of a $2.6m, two-year grant from the US Labour Department.

The Labour Department's 1971 review gave the camp a glowing report and last year the grant was raised to $1.5m a year to train 300 black ghetto youth in a trade.

But the bubble was soon to burst.

This year's Federal Review showed that the camp had no known personnel policies, no Above: Mr Ted Watkins, an entrepreneur who took up the direction of the Watts Labour Community Action Committee. Below: A WLAC supermarket—an abortive attempt to give the impression that black people would be happier in black-owned supermarkets. regular reports of expenditure, no job descriptions and no staff-training officer. Only 170 of the camp's 300 student places were filled.

The main course-carpentry and auto-mechanics-had not prepared a single student for job certification or apprenticeship.

Labour Department chopped off the Saugus programme forthwith. Now the supermarket chain gone bankrupt.

And, deciding to cut its losses, the United Auto Workers has stopped paying Watkins' salary.

The Watts reform programme had failed.

But these collapses should not be described as failures, according to Watkins. They should, he says, be called 'learning experiences'.