Tories destroy food to keep up

Workers Press no. 1028, 22 March 1973 · scan page 4

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THE IAI_ AAN SHr 21600 • Election of a Labour government which must be forced to nationalize the port, shipping, container and haulage industries without compensation and under workers' control. GET YOUR BOOKS, PERIODICALS AND NEWSPAPERS FROM THE paperbacks centre PAPERBACKS CENTRE 28 charlotte st london wl NOW OPEN Monday 1o hursday 9 am.-6 p.m Fridays (late niaht opening) 9 a.m. -7.30 p.m. Saturdays 9 a.m.-5 p.m. AN ex-Labour Minister rocked consumers yesterday with the disclosure that the Tory government is buying up food and destroying it to keep prices artificially high.

Douglas Jay, MP, told a meeting of the Common Market Safeguards Campaign that the government had set up a special buying board for the purpose.

He accused them of 'buying up food in the home market in competition with the British housewife, so as to keep prices up, and then either storing it or deliberately mixing chemical with it so as to make it unfit for human consumption'.

Jay said that the Tories were already applying the system to beef, the product about which recent price hikes caused a public outery.

He said: "The junior minister at the ministry said in Parliament on March 7 that he had to give "an assurance against market collapse" in beef prices. So he had arranged for beef to be "sold into intervention"-that in Brussels language means mixed with chemicals and destroyed.' Jay also claimed that under the terms of Britain's entry into the EEC the Tories had imposed an import tax on mutton and lamb from outside the Common Market which was to rise to 20 per cent, agreed to abolish the bacon subsidy, agreed to stop subsidising the price of sugar and agreed to an EEC ruling which allows the continued export of beef.