The common touch CLAPHAM NEWS-OBSI AFRAID TO GO OUT im ALONE EMANUEL, ON PARA

work with the consultants, continues:

"The workers' nominee is given the same basic training as the regular work-study men receive, ( and takes part, with them in making studies on the shop floor and in compiling time standards.

'He remains a member of his normal working group throughout the period of his secondment to the WOrkstudy team, drawing neither more nor less pay than he did before, and after work study in the section has been completed he returns to his normal duties.

'He thus remains a nominee of the workers throughout, able to keep informed about what is going on in terms which they will understand. Since he receives neither additional pay nor advancement he cannot be suspected of having been "bought" by the management.' A number of points follow from this description.

As the worker is trained the same as the consultants, he can only arrive at the same time for jobs as them so they are not worried that he might give his mates better times for the work.

Also, the nominee is usually 'fed' material to report back to his section which will the scene as nrable a light as possible.

Further, nominee certainly go through the workstudy course, but the sultants really bothered whether he understood it or not.

It is sufficient for them if merely hangs about the place and appears to be in touch with what is going on. Afterwards, when final times have been set, queries from workers can be answered:

Your representative was present at all times during timing and all results were fully confirmed by him and finally agreed on the basis of mutuality:

One other point. It is not true that all workers involved in work study return to the shop floor.

Some get a 'pay off' in the job permanently in the fem s work-study department. Many 'militants' have anded up-this warome workers accept the position of 'nominee' knowing that this may well be the outcome. Others, for genuinely wanting to fight their members have got into such a rut looking at all issues in "bread-andbutter' terms that they are completely disorientated when faced with a cleverly planned attack based on a government backing.

BBC 1 London. 5.50 News and weather.

6.00 WORLD CUP GRANDSTAND.

Bulgarla, Uruguay v Israel. THE DOCTORS. 7.30 NOT IN 'A Yap In The Night'.

weather.

ELECTION BROADCAST. Liberal Party.

adventures of Superman. 5.45 News.

5.55 WORLD CUP 1970.

by Benny Hill.

astrologer.

CALLAN. 'God Help Your Friends'. marriage.

ELECTORS. Liberal Party. 1.49 .35 Crossroads.

.30 London. 8.00 do. 10.00 Pour 5.55 her. weather day as part of the massive economies being effected in British television the last original Wednesday Play was transmitted on BBC-1.

Reflecting the declined standard of achievement of this series it nevertheless marked the end of a stage in British television.

Called 'Chariot of Fire' and concerned with a pathetic 59 year old man who has spent 20 of the last 30 years in jail for sexually fondling small boys, it was written by Tony Parker. Parker has probably given more to understanding a section of the people we find it most dificuit to bear than almost any other man alive.

For nine years he has laboured silently listening. He has listened to and recorded people confusedly accounting their lives of pain, persecution, unhappiness and misery.

People who steal, who are imprisoned for expressing the sexual aberrations which live in all of us, people who have wandered through the indignities of the so-called welfare services and then stumbled out into a worse chaos; people whose lives make no more sense to them.

Tony Parker has written these lives into book after book revelations.

The down-and-out, the persistent and usually petty offender against the capitalist laws of property, the victims of social and family processes the effects of which become more crippling as their origins become more obscure.

These are the contemporary and customarily silent victims of hundreds of years of repression and dispossession, puritanism and greed with whom Parker has spent so many hours.

He tape records, in fact, hundreds of hours with the subject; he carefully transcribes and edits the tapes and then adds the most sparing linking or descriptive narrative, to make books like "The Unknown Citizen', 'Five Women', 'The Twisting Lane, 'People of the Streets' 'A Man of Good Abilities', "The Courage of His Convictions', and his recent study of Britain's only prison given over to psychiatric investigation.

He has been likened to Mayhew who tried to characterize the London poor at the end of the 19th century; he has recently been compared to Dickens; these comparisons in no way flatter his achievement, but in some ways illuminate it.

He has raised documentary writing to an art form; his insight and perception have turned the humdrum tiny horrors into the living experience which moulds and forms He has slowly and patiently Pees and returnees veiled account of the journey which enriches all our understanding.

Because of his gentle persistence and refusal to moralize, and New 7.00 TI Baron. madame weathe: people who normally go unheard become witnesses to their own lives. He also steadfastly refuses to draw conclusions for us, preferring to leave his accounts open for scrutiny, but outside any explicit theoretical framework.

His work is full of the detail and 'complexity of the often shattered personality and there is nothing of the reformer about him.

In his occasional appearances on television there is rather a bleakness which suggests someone who consistently. exposes himself to so much unhappiness that he can see no way out.

During one 'Line-Up' interview he was asked 'Well, what do you propose we do with these people?' i.e. recidivists, sexual offenders, the hundreds thousands of petty criminals in the society who make up the WESTWARD: London. 5.30 Deather. 6.35 Crossroads. 7.30 Treasure hunt. 7.30 London. 8.00 Baron. 9.00 London. 1.00 Weather.

SOUTHERN : London. days are desk. 700 run, Day, 30, Crime desk.

London. 8.00 Avengers. 9.00 London. 1.00 Weather. 'Concern • and controabove except: 5.38-5.45 Peter. 5.55-6315 Scene Arthur. Enchanted house. 4.35 London. London. 8.00 Saint. 9.00 London. Weather.

GRANADA: 11.00-11.57 London. Encore university challenge. London. 5.25 Newsview. 5.45 don. 7.00 London. 8.00 Baron. London.

TYNE TEES: 11.00 .London. 4.17 Stories of Tuktu. 4.35 London. 5.30 Today. 5.45 London. 8.00 Avengers. 9.00 London. 1.10 News. 1.12 Epilogue.

Raw deal?

London. Parker.

bulk of the prison population.

His answer was: 'The alternative to prison is not-prison. I look forward to the day when a judge sentences an offender to a long period of freedom and refuses to let him back inside In that remark lies the kernel of the position many artists and writers, mutatis mutandis They they are forced to hold. have no illusions about reforms, they see clearly that capitalism cannot reform itself to any historical or human effect; but they go no further. They prescribe the impossible in the full knowledge that it is so.

Some are now making the revolutionary connection; a few making it as far as the revolutionary party. Mostly, however, they still remain isolated-often in great personal suffering and sometimes desperately flailing The BBC 'Doomwatch' team:(left to right) SIMON OATES as John Ridge, WENDY HALL as Pat Hunnisett.

about for relief from the contradictory forces at work in them.

Unlike the books, the television play was not an artistic success.

It was treated with cautious and even respectful reticence by the bourgeois press because it dealt with a subject so laden with implications. It also did it in a way which clearly announced that its author had seen things they had better not look at too closely.

It was dramatically stilted and didn't emerge from those creative levels in which a genuine work of art is forged. Its concern with the middle-class lady Voluntary Associate was also pure BBC fodder and didn't get anywhere near its target of the meaning of involvement with the man concerned.

Unlike his earlier film 'Some Women' (originally called 'Five Women' and only transmitted by the BBC after protracted hassling and eventual censorship), 'Chariot of Fire' did not contain that density and compression of language and action common to the best plays.

But like Parker's other work it did attempt to confront a taboo, to confront an aspect of the hidden and forbidden reality. And that, atter all, is one of the great functions of art; to find the lost reality from which we are alienated and to recreate it inescapably before us.

Not all such attempts will be successful; some will clearly distort and confuse more than they reveal. It's not to be forgotten too that the bourgeoisie owns and controls all art and the means of dissemination and will attempt to pass off its own historical necessities as fixed, permanent and for-all-time features of the human experience.

But equally the relationship between the artist and the class who manipulate and exploit his comfortable one. The process is a conflict too, and new understandings are constantly emerging from it.

The attempt to incorporate insights and creative analyses threatening to its stability and continuance is a constant and necessary preoccupation of the ruling class and its delegates. Another example from television can illuminate this process.

One of the fundamental features of capitalism is its total inability prevent the forms of technology necessary to it from further bringing it into conflict with the working class.

Since Marx and Engels analysed this process there are many examples of liberal and radical groups discovering it for the first time and totally missing its Currently, the question of capitalist pollution, its hideous forms, is receiving a big boost in the papers and on television.

That's not to say that the symptoms with which the new discoverers of these evils of the profit system are concerned are not real and major catastrophes.

They most certainly are. The point, however, is to see the massive attempt by the media of the capitalist class to incorporate the warnings and the protesters who make them, into the old forms - to prevent, in other words, the development of this argument to its conclusion as a weapon of struggles.

'Doomwatch', the drama series on BBC television, is exactly such an attempt.

Currently at the end of its second series, it is scheduled to return in the autumn. It concerns the doings of 'Doomwatch', a secret and high-powered government department whose job is the detection and prevention of scientific and technological developments likely to speed the coming doomsday.

We are shown a team of excellently qualified, intelligent, humanitarian, hard-minded men, civil servants but no mere slaves of convention or due-process, who constantly monitor and intervene throughout the scientific and industrial complex to ensure that the people and a decent, humane life shall be protected in the course of 'progress'.

Dramas about human babies being cultivated in laboratory wombs in order that their hearts may eventually be transplanted into, the body of the scientist's son, about the use of bugging devices and tape-recordings to discredit the militant unofficial leadership of workers in a factory, are only two af the episodes screened.

In the latter case, the Doomwatch team in the form of its leader Dr Quist, intervened to ensure that the strike leaders should be enabled to carry out their action without being discredited in front of their members! Why?

Well, it was argued, management revealed to be using such foul methods could only lead to real class conflict!

And that had to be prevented at all costs. So the collaboration of the strike leader was ensured and management was bullied into seeing where its own best, if long-term, interests lay.

The whole series indeed has been characterized by what might be called the classic British 'absorption effect'.

It's admitted there are real problems, but don't worry because we're on to it. You may not know that we are, you may not see us looking after you, but Doomwatch is there and can be seen to be taking care of everything.

Elitist and reactionary, the programmes are based precisely in an area of reality that is most revolutionary in its implications. But their effect is to pacity: to mollify and to lull us back into an untroubled sleep.

Their writers and directors, of course, would all claim exactly the opposite-that they're trying to wake us up to the dangers.

And that's a measure of the crazed condition in which capitalism tries to keep us.

For a while the Wednesday Play was a spot where writers and directors could make original and creative one-off contributions about reality; its demise has been gradual, but with its final going television drama has at last been almost totally re-routed towards the massive trivialization and lies of most series and serials. THE GREAT Tory Clapham have shown that most women in Common rape saga is plough- not cross the Common alone ing on regardless. Regardless, after dark-which proves that is, of the fact that it is whatever you want it to prove. based on nothing more than The fact that Clapham is a hot (and thin) air.

Inevitably, Friday's edition of the "Clapham News-Observer' splashed across its front page the headline shown above.

The 'local survey', as Workers Press readers will remember, is a phoney attempt to whip • up 'law-and-order' sentiment, masterminded by the local Tory candidate, William Shelton.

This particular Tory scare was thoroughly exposed in Thursday's The Tories, as we pointed out at the time, have no evidence that lone women have been attacked on the Common retheir survey vidence of anything of the kind.

A similar survey taken at any time in the past 50 years would FRED KIRSCH, the Kent USA university psychology student who has been touring Europe speaking at meetings against President Nixon's Indo-China policy, returned to the United States yesterday. He had little to show for his tour.

Low point of his four-day visit to Britain, organized by the revisionist fortnightly paper 'Red Mole', , was a rally in Trafalgar Square attended by less than 100 people, apart from the usual by-standers.

Kirsch's irritation with his British sponsors is understandable: he gave up his 35-hour-aweek Job as a bus driver-he is 'working his way' through Kent State-in order to come on the tour.

He was on the university campus on May 4 when National Guard troops opened fire on the students. He was, he says, less than four feet away from Jettry Milled in the massacre one of the four students He was disappointed not only in his treatment by the 'moles' of the Pabloite International Marxist Group, but by their Belgian counter-parts, who turned out only 200 to hear him speak in Ghenk.

'I was going on to Paris, but I don't think its worth bothering now, he said. I'm going back to the States where the struggle really is.' Though he gave interviews to a number of newspapers on • his arrival at London Airport : to begin his British tour, Kirsch found an almost total black-out of his remarks.

The 'red moles' of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, in the absence of press publicity, brought out only 77 people on the demonstration which • followed the Trafalgar Square rally —99,923 of the 100,000 supporters they claimed two years ago seem to have disappeared. their right senses would rather marginal constituency, the election is only three weeks away and 'law and order' is one of the main planks in the Tory programme has nothing to do with it, of course.

Or so Shelton would ently have us believe.

To quote the 'News-Observer': 'Although the Conservatives are concentrating on law and order in the coming General Election, Mr Shelton maintains it is a coincidence that his local survey on crime should be published now. "We do not intend to make local crime an election issue", he said.' Shelton ought to know about these things. He's a director of Coleman Prentice and Varley, the advertising firm which ran the 1964 Tory election campaign. The slogan then was 'You've never had it so good'.

Short notice can hardly explain the poor turn-out on Saturday, as Kirsch's visit is known to have been discussed at a VSC meeting 18 days before.

Can it be that the VSC has finally found its true level of support? Judging from the complacent smile decorating the face of leading revisionist Pat Jordan on Saturday, this would indeed seem to be the case.

40504.35-205 Polynesian full-backs THE SMITH regime in Rhodesia recently announced new measures to prevent coloured and Asian people buying houses in white suburbs.

Segregation is to be intensified, in order, says President Dupont, to 'protect and maintain residential property values'.

N. Makanda has explained in detail each Thursday in Workers Press how segregation in Rhodesia was started by Whitehall as an essential part of colonial rule, but Rhodesian apartheid - in sport at - least—ls apparently insuficiently complete for the liking of the S African authorities.

I would like about the Fill in the form below and send to NATIONAL SECRETARY, SOCIALIST LABOUR LEAGUE, 186A CLAPHAM HIGH ST, LONDON SW4.

Name .

Address need not apply Last week, the Rhodesia University College rugby team was all set when authorities found their scrum half was Chinese.

The tour has been cancelled, though the S African Minister of the Interior denies refusing entry to any Chinese scrum halves recently.

SOCIALIST LABOUR LEAGUE