As Tories attack wages Top men's salaries

we TEN GOOD reasons for fighting to fi rce the Tory government to resign were li ted by Labour leader Harold Wilson in Bloomsbury speech at the weekend.

The Tory attack on Forced momentum at, the selling after Decimal Day, of Mersey docks?

Cereals, meat and 'minor milk products' will be first hit scheme which load whole burden of food working-class WORKERS in Liverpool charged Not that this will hit too the government this weekend with Stop - level executives, whose salaries attempting to break up the Mersey last year got their biggest Docks and Habour Board and forcing it to sell its most lucrative consultinvestments to private enterprise.

The accusations follow the . ted executives rose by 10.3 per Tories' decision to starve the ent for 1969-1970 comparec Board-now facing a £5 million vith 8.2 per cent the yeai loss-of state aid and hints in the Liverpool press that the Board would be willing to lease its berths on a longterm basis. salary • not It seems to me that the Board is in for the PostOffice treatment, Mike Black, ETU convenor and Board worker, told the Workers Press.

Association that Tory policies "I think the Board is being told by the government, "we won't give you any money, workers in industry and their make what economies you can and sell most the lucrative assets to the shipowners"!

Lease His remarks are given credibility by Robert Edwards, nti-union laws sought t the port's director general who was recently quoted in the Liverpool Daily Post' urging shipowners using berths to lease them long-term and build their own loading and unloading sheds. 'We may get some cargo handling companies to invest their own money in their facifamilies who earnings, whoilson name heir lities on a long-term basis,' Edwards added in his press which exposet to about statement.

Many workers, said Mr Black, see this as an indication that the Board is ready to hive off its most profitable section to private firms, close down the rest and concentrate on building container docks like the one at Seaforth at the North end of the port. he ever do not need that These moves would certainly meet the aproval of the government which is pursuing a similar policy in most of the nationalized industries.

Workers claim that the Films spark ABOUT 60 civil rights suporters marched from Sheperd's Bush to Wormwood Scrubs prison in London yesterday in protest against the conditions Irish prisoners in British jails. French teachers in education SECONDARY school teachers throughout France are due to start a 48-hour strike this morning against excessive hours of work, oversize classes and the government's refusal to recruit sufficient qualified staff.

reply from calise Educa.

tion Minister which was printed and osted up in a number of schools at the end of last accused the main union involved (SNES) of calling a strike while nego. iations promising satisfac tory results were still under way.

The teachers are the latest among many stands finsui pueric spendwages and conditions.

Provocations The attacks on education go hand-in-hand with provocations by fascists against left-wing students in universities and technical colleges.

At the Centre of Legal Traning at Assas, Paris, several dozen students were beaten with iron bars The police - who are usually on the spot immediately to arrest anyone suspected even of possessing O'Sullivan was being kept in 'monstrous conditions' while he served a seven-year senanswer cuts copies of the paper-were absent throughout the attack.

And at the University of Toulouse last week the notorious CRS riot police, armed with clubs and teargas, were sent into the campus to attack left-wing students who had barricaded themselves against attacks by members of an extreme right-wing organization.

Ordaz

hands over PRESIDENT Ordaz of Mexico tomorrow ends his six year term and hands over to successor Luis Echeverria Alvarez.

Both belong to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (the PRI) which • has dominated Mexican politics for the last Five of the last seven Mexican Presidents served as Interior Ministers responsible for repressions against students, workers and peasants, which reached a climax in the 1968 gunning of a giant Mexico City student demonstration.

Hall, comments on the Charter.

Behind the protest strike of 6,000 Post Office workers in Glasgow last Wednesday over the dismissal of Lord Hall by the Tory government was the determination of postal workers to achieve their £3 increase in wages.

The UPW rank and file have no illusions that their claim can be won without a stubborn strike. Within an hour of notice from our London headquarters that the protest strike should take place, all work at sorting offices, public counters and telephonists, stopped.

The protest continued into the following day when the Savings Bank at Cowglen stopped for an hour and in other areas Post Office engineers staged stoppages.

Post Office workers, like other sections of the working class, must fight to defeat the Tories in their attempts to sell off profitable parts of the nationalized industries to private enterprise, and this is what is WEATHER ENGLAND and Wales will be cloudy with occasional rain but also a few bright periods.

Scotland, except the N, and N Ireland will be cloudy with occasional rain but with bright periods in the W.

N Scotland will be cloudy with behind the sacking of Lord Hall.

The Giro bank, the DATA Processing Service and the Telephone system are very profitable, but their money making has been built up at the expense of the general postal system which still operates with old buildings ánd low wages.

The reformist policy of Wilson was to snip away at the postal services and to push up prices. This inevitably brought further losses. Now the Tories mean to operate the Heath solution, which is to deal with the problem by attacking the standards achieved by workers.

Enoch Powell, speaking in Glasgow a week ago, spelled out what the government is about.

He said that of course there would be no question of compensating the Post Office for its lost services.

The answer of the trade unions must be that a future socialist government will nationalize all ancillary industries, such as telephone firms which operate a tight monopoly supplying the Post Office, without compensation. • I think that the Charter of Basic Rights as proposed by the All Trades Unions Alliance contains the clauses which must be fought for against the Tory threat. The one-hour stoppage of Post Office workers is an indication, to all those who say it can't be done, that workers will respond to a Board's financial crisis is self-inflicted. Charges, they say, have been held deliberately at low levels to benefit the shipowners who dominate the Board's membership.

'For example, they charge a mere 2s 6d a day for laying a cable onto a ship in graving dock and it costs the paltry sum of 12s 6d to hire a land-crane for a day,' said Mr Black.

Even shipowners have commented on the port's low charges.

Mr H. F. Hunt of J. T. Fletcher Shipping remarked recently that despite the proposed 20 per cent increase in rates, Liverpool's charges at 18s 6d a ton were still only half those of the Port of London.

Commented Mr Black: 'By keeping these charges low the Board has made no provision for the present, let alone the future.

"They have financed themselves by loans from the open market and they now have a capital debt of £83 million. In 1968-1969 income was in excess of £18 million and expenditure was £14 million but a loss was incurred after payments of interest.

*The Board, in fact, were hoping for nationalization of the kind that left the most profitable sectors in private hands and allowed public development of the sectors thạt were losing money, he said.

Caught

'But, as Edwards has said, the Board has, been caught between two policies-the proposed nationalization policy of the Labour government and its replacement by the Tories' policy of ruthlessness to concerns that are in debt.' There are now two solutions to the financial crisis of the port: the plunder of the Board's assets by private companies, drastic redundancies among the direct labour force and the wholesale closure of the South end of the dock which employs 2,000 dockers; or the nationalization of the port under workers' control and its development under public accountability.

'We realize the situation is now very serious and that the acts of this government will have a far-reaching affect in