IT’S SLICK, BUT NOT WHAT LABOUR NEEDS

GLICK. Glossy. Gaily coloured. Thumb-indexed. A high-power advertising job. That’s the Labour Party’s electicn pamphlet ‘The Future Labour Offers YOU.’ But is the policy side as striking as the timse!? Will this programme win the General Election?

Can Labour’s leaders fulfil the promisc made by Hugh Gaitskell in his foreword and build ‘a Britain where-—with . . . jobs for all and the full use of modern technology—production expands year by year and the growing wealth is fairly shared throughout the nation’?

Can they fulfil all the other promises set forth in red, ; ; green and a choice variety of types?

The PROMISE of a better life all round. The PROMISE of better housing. The PROMISE that the ‘doors of opportunity’ in education are to be opened.

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The PROMISE that old age pensions are to rise (but only by 10s. a week). The PROMISE that new hospitals are to be built and Health Service charges reduced.

The PROMISE that the cost of living is to be kept ‘steady’. The PROMISE that the housewife is to be protected against ‘rigged prices, against profitcering and against unfair trading practices’.

Above all, the PROMISE that the first objective of a Labour government will be to ‘restore full employment and to preserve full employment’.

But when we ask how ail this is to be carried out, we find that the cover is not the only glossy thing about this pamphlet.

The foundation for ‘Labour’s bold programme for social progress’ will be laid by replacing ‘Tory stagnation’ by ‘conAS WE WOULD HAVE WRITTEN IT critical of the new Labour Party pamphlet, ‘The Future Labour Offers YOU’. Workers wiil ask: ‘Could you have done better? What have you to put in its place? What is YOUR policy for beating the Tories?’

Fair enough. Next week The Newsletter will put forward a General Ekction policy for Labour as we think it should be presented.

Ano‘her articfe next week will discuss the potlifical evolution of Councilor John Lawrence, and his decision to join the Communist Party.

trolled expansion’. How js that expansion to come about? Here the pamphlet has only vague phrases to offer.

‘Expansion’ is to be guaranteed by the use of the Budget and ‘key controls’—as if the present state of the British economy were just the result of government manipulation.

The truth which this pamphlet avoids is that unemployment and the piling up of surplus stocks are features of a capitalist economy which can no longer find markets so easily as at the height of the post-war boom.

And capitalist investment is slowing down because employers no longer sce guaranteed profits.

If the pamphlet were honest it would say that there are only two roads to expansion: through finding markets and profits— or through scrapping capitalism and planning the economy on socialist lines.

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The first road is blocked. The second means a real struggle (Continued an back page) . —an cee NEW BUS CUTS MEAN HARDER WORK FOR