Defend postmen's anti-Tory battle

La Labour IT HAS taken only seven months for the Tory government of Heath to arouse greater hatred and opposition to its Ministers and policies than any government in the experience of the vast majority of the people.

Every working-class family is now seriously affected by the runaway price increases in every type of product and in all services. Soon the cuts in the National Health Service, together with the ending of supplies of school milk and meals, will redouble the hardship for the millions of lower-paid Decimalization will be made the excuse for new price increases in every single field. Next will come the Common Market, with steep food price increases.

And like a great black cloud in the background looms the threat of unemployment. The Tories are pursuing ruthlessly their policy of letting unprofitable firms go to the wall. One factory after another is closing down, thousands more workers go on the dole every month and soon the government will no doubt announce cuts in redundancy payments.

Young married couples are faced with a more and more impossible situation. Fewer houses are being built, rents and rates are increasing and hire purchase credit is restricted by government policy.

Meanwhile, through the Treasury evidence submitted to the power workers' court of inquiry, the government announces its intention of imposing severe wage restraint, with the main aim of ensuring higher profits. Now everybody knows what the Tories mean by the 'national interest.

The anti-trade-union laws are the chosen instrument for disarming the working-class movement for these and even more severe attacks in the immediate future.

Now the Post Office workers are going into battle against the Tories for a wage increase which, even if won in full, would provide 106,000 postmen with less than £18 a week.

At stake in the Post Office strike is not just the wage of the postal worker, but the future of the anti-union laws and the future of every working-class family in Britain. With support from the working-class movement, the Post Office workers can defeat the government and this would give the signal for a great leap forward in the fight to bring them down.

The Labour Party leaders, the trade union leaders of the right and the left, and the Communist Party, all ignore this pressing question. They will not raise the issue of bringing down the Tory government and replacing it with a Labour government pledged to socialist policies. Why? Why is it only the Socialist Labour League which has always insisted that the essential fight is to force the Tories to resign?

According to Wilson, we should wait four-and-a-half years and then vote. According to Feather, we must persuade Heath and Carr to withdraw their Bill and co-operate with the TUC. According to the Stalinists, we can force the Tories by pressure to change their minds about bringing in the Bill.

All this is dangerous nonsense and it helps the Tories to hammer through their plans. They will ignore all appeals and mere protests. They will have to be brought down. The only only solution to the problems of British capitalism is to break the working class as an independent trade union and political force.

It Is elther that, or a workers' government which introduces socialism.

The Labourites and Stalinists do not raise the question of bringing down the Tory government, because they cannot face these choices. They are parties of reform, of collaboration between classes. The last Labour government tried to impose a capitalist solution through anti-union laws, and failed in June 1969.

Not a single worker, not a single working-class housewife, can entertain the idea of leaving the Tories in to last their full term, till 1975! This is also the growing opinion among lower-middle-class and professional people, as they experience Tory reaction on all fronts. The mass movement will have to force the Tories out and a Labour government in.

Only a Labour government, and not just trade union struggle, will be able to do what is necessary, i.e., to restore every one of the cuts made by the Tory government, to ensure to every worker the right to a job, to stop all factory closures, and to repeal the anti-union laws immediately.

By nationalizing the banks, insurance companies and building societies, abolishing the sfock exchange and establishing state control of all exports and imports, a programme of stabilizing prices would begin immediately.

A mass movement strong enough to bring down the Tories will insist on the carrying out of these policies.

The Labour Ministers would elther carry them out and break from the capitalists they have always served, or make way for a new leadesrhip. That Is the way it will be posed.

A Labour government imposed by a mass movement ot the working class, with definite class objectives, is a totally different proposition from past Labour governments which have served capitalism.

The mass movement strong enough to remove the Tories will itself prevent factory closures and impose nationalization under workers' control and without compensation. As the Tory upper and middle classes try to organize against these necessary measures, the trade unions and factory committees, housewives and tenants' organizations, will have to work out methods of seif-defence. The youth will be ready in hundreds of thousands to fight the employers, just as they were in France 1968.

Will such a movement tolerate a treacherous government of the type led by Wilson from 1964 to 1968?

The state power cannot be left in the hands of the Tories and the employing class. They use it only to impose historic defeats on the working class. They are rich upper-class businessmen completely remote from the mass of the people. They use their power to treat ordinary people as pawns in their game of increasing the millions of pounds profit made every day by their class. They are attacking every basic right won by the British working class for the sake of these profits.

The British working class needs a Labour government as an instrument to defend itself against this enemy, and to turn on to the attack. Through the experience of such a government, brought into power by the strength of the working class itself, the workers will build the new, revolutionary leadership necessary to put an end to the capitalist system.

Marxists in Britain have always advocated the election of a Labour government, in order to hasten the final rejection THOUSANDS of Post Office workers eager to union throughout Britain at the weekend.

No such enthusiasm for the fight was shown by their union leaders.

With only two days to go before all 230,000 postmen, telecommunications workers, clerical and other stati stop work desperately playing down the political implications of the strike call.

It was "sad and repugnant' to have to take strike action, union secretary Tom Jackson told at least 2,000 W Midlands members in Birmingham yesterday.

He would 'go anywhere and talk to anybody' in a bid to settle the dispute.

More than 3,000 NW members • heard UPW assistant secretary Norman Stag bewail the fact that a strike was 'the only effective course of action left open', and would be the severest test in the union's Pattern Other rallies followed the pattern set at the 10,000strong White City stadium meeting in London on Friday night, with militancy strong but union leaders carefully avoiding any statement or implication that their fight was against the government.

Yet the Tory front bench and its loyal supporters in the: Fleet St press are already whipping up the middle-class and unorganized workers against In the apparent hope of softening the collective Tory heart, union leaders are even tiptoeing around rank-and-file demands for a firm commitment to the £3 claim.

In Birmingham, a spokesman for workers at the city's Post Office headquarters was enthusiastically applauded when he told the rally that if Jackson and the UPW executive came back with less than £3 'they will get the same sort reception here that lan Paisley would get in Dublin'.

Silence

Although Jackson's appeal for conciliation to Employment Minister Robert Carr claims differences between the UPW's £3 claim and the Post Office's £1-£1 13s offer are 'very small, there was no breaking the government's stony silence yesterday.

None is likely, even if Jackson adopts a , well-publicized round-the-clock vigil by his Clapham office telephone until midnight tomorrow.

The government clearly intends 8 per cent in the Post Office to be the follow-up to the 10 per cent at which it is confident the Wilberforce inquiry, meeting in public for the first time today, will hold the power workers' increase.

NATIONAL TORY SECURITY MATIONAL £1,250 January FOURTEEN days to the end of the month and the fund stands at £366 7s. 10d. It is urgent that we step up the fight to complete the target.

enormous role today. Our principled stand against MeasuredDay Work has strengthened the car workers in their battle at Our demand for a General Strike to defeat the Torles is seen by more and more trade unionists as the only way to force the Tory government to resign. The postmen are now posed with taking a lead in this fight.

We must keep this paper right out in front. Help us go all out for January's Appeal Fund. Collect extra this month for the special fund of £1,000 needed for the Alexandra Palace Rally.

We are relying on you to raise everything you can. Immediately, post all your donations to:

186a Clapham High Street, London, Sw4.

CAMBRIDGE UNIMERSILY Hospi YOUNG coRT LIBERALS Some of the 3,000 demonstrators In London. Lectures boycott after Dutschke demonstration SEVERAL thousand students from a dozen universities and colleges marched through London yesterday afternoon protesting against the Tory decision to expel former W German student leader Rudi Dutschke from Britain.

ling out!', the demonstators REPORTER hemmed in by a large force of police, placed every three yards along the route engage in extended discus-toured government offices sions of the Dutschke case, in Whitehall before rallying at Trafalgar Square.

The meeting was addressed by Labour front-benchers Michael Foot and Judith Haut, Pot and the fev. tast 'Private Eye' satirist Oestreicher.

Cambridge students, 400 of whom travelled to don for the National Union of Students-backed march, will continue to demonstrate against the Home Office decision on Dutschke today with a complete boycott of all normal lectures.

Instead - supported b nany lecturers - thev will lembers fear Hall brought to a head a number of anxieties about the future which have been increasingly affecting morale of the staff The POEU, he says, is *opposed to "hiving off" particularly of profitable activities'.

MAUDE Chanting 'Rudi in, Maud- BY A WORKERS PRESS or in a teach-in sponsored by the Cambridge Students' Union.

BANK of England governor Sir Leslie O'Brien expressed support for Tory wages policy in an interview on BBC Radio's 'World This Weekend'. There were signs that the government was working against inflation, he said, adding: 'And certainly there are great hopes that they will work even more effectively'.

All levels of staff will be discouraged by the belief that if a particular service succeeds 'the chances of it being transferred to private ownership are thereby increased.

Statistics quoted in the letter show a 31 per cent productivity rise over the past five years. ing the maximum.

By taking on and defeating the postmen, the Tories hope to strike another blow against the working class and take another step towards imposing Such a victory would also soften up sections of public employees in preparation for hiving off profitable sections of the state-owned industries to private enterprise.

Private employers can hardly wait to get their hands on the lucrative télecommunications section.

10pc return In the ten years up to 1973, over £5,000m of public money has been poured into it, yielding an annual return on capital investment of nearl ten per cent.

In 1969, this section made a £l6m profit, while productivity has soared at four times the national average. This is in contrast to the labour-intensive postal services, where productivity has sagged leading to a loss of £25m in the same year.

While the succulent morsels will be devoured by courtesy of the Heath gang, postal services will become the arena for productivity speed-up, redundancy and savage resistance to any improvement in the abysmal wage levels. that postal workers are furious that their modest wage claims have been and continue to be blamed for rocketing postal rates. the Amalgamated Union of Engineers and Foundryworkers has passed a resolution backing the rally and the Charter of Basic Rights of the All Trades Unions Alliance. They have also called on the AEF N London district committee to support the rally.