RUIN

Exports up, BUT A LUNCH HOUR mass meeting at London's Royal Dock on Thursday shouted down Jack Dash time after time, when he called for the 1,600 men suspended by ine London Dock Labour Board after attending unofficial union meeting to ahead with their appeals backed by trade union officers'.

Dockers shouted it was too late to appeal as these had to be lodged within three days of suspension notice.

Danny Lyons, member of the Portworkers' Liaison Committee, complained miserably that the suspensions 'could poison the atmosphere surrounding , the docks on the implementation of this (the Devlin) report'.

The whole point is that the suspensions are the first step the implementation of the Devlin report.

When Dash moved the recommendation of the Liaison committee it was defeated, and a from the floor, including one for cheer went up.

came the call. support. some dockers began drifting back The dockers also decided work a number of the conflicting resolutions B/OSL FILE a strike, which had very strong overtime, piece work and night working. were made by mass meetings of the Blue Union members in London.

To say that these men were led astray by a handful of agitators is to repeat the old anticommunist smear so beloved by the Fleet Street press and reactionary elements. To suggest that we attack the Communist Party with more vigour than the employers is nothing more than a lie. We reproduce the policy of the Socialist Labour League on the docks which the Newsletter' published on January 16 of this year before the Devlin Commission began. We stand by this policy entirely. ill firms on the docks must be nationalized, with control over their working by the dockers' own representation at every level. - These representatives would be responsible for all working conditions and discipline, and would themselves be subject to the control of men at work, who would elect them and have the right to recall them.) e believe that the only way to ensure proper working conditions on the docks is by the application of this policy which, as everyone can see, is directed mainly against the employers. We criticise the Communist Party only in so far as they retreat from the right wing of the Transport & General Workers' Union. By The Editor WHILE Wilson basks in the Scilly Isles, the government drifts towards disaster. With Callaghan's 'Little Budget' wiping out what fragments remained of Labour's election promises, the Labour leaders give up all pretence of being anything more than servants of the banks.

Unemployment, already beginning to rise been given fresh impetus by the reduction in on education, housing and roads.

No wonder the Financial Times' Washington correspondent can say of U.S. reaction: 'The Administration has in fact been deeply impressed by the willingness of a Labour government to throw away or defer cherished social measures in defence of the pound'.

Wilson and company

are totally committed to serving big business in its time of crisis. They have to convince international financial circles that they are ready to go into action against those workers and their families who elected them last October.

This is the significance of the Devlin Report.

Each time sproslation on devaluation of the pound is renewed,: Wilson steps up his protestations that he has no such intentions and Callaghan gives another twist to the deflationary screw.

But it is noteworthy that the pressure on sterling continued well after the latest Series of cuts were announced.

No choice When Wilson told the world of his 'permanent decision' not to devalue, everybody laughed.

World financiers know that the choice is no longer in his hands. Even the July trade figures, with their carefully organised statistical accident of a jump in exports, hardly touched the foreign exchanges.

In any case, the falling off in world markets as a whole cannot but intensify the longterm problems of British capital.

The international monetary crisis poses special problems for the British ruling class. As the last ruins of their Empire East of Suez crumble, they will be unable to resist decisions being taken which will finish the City of London as a banking and trading centre.

Confidence in the pound car ot possibly be maintaine sell-out liner trains soon?

NEXT week the executive committee of the National Union of Railwaymen will meet to discuss the question of introduction of liner trains by early next year.

If such a proposal goes through it will most surely mean, in practice, the de-nationalization of British Rail. Private hauliers will be given access to the 'linertrain terminals.

The Board is said to have given certain assurances, but there are widespread fears on the railways that liner-trains will mean the laying off of many men.

The executive committee of the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen has empowered its leadership to negotiate for increased pay in exchange for more flexible manning arrangements. THIS WEEK Devlin report Fight rent icreases now in July, has expenditure even on the word of honour of an ex-Boy Scout. The autumn crisis for sterling will almost certainly force devaluation of a currency based on reserves, 90 per cent of which are borrowed from foreign banks.

It is impossible to over estimate the implications for the working class movement.

It implies an all-out attack on living standards built up since the war, and taken for granted by millions of workers, especcially the young ones. It is inconceivable without a high level of unemployment.

Subservience

It Will demand. trom the Labour leaders and their 'left' hangers-on an even lower standard of subservience to the bosses.. A 'national' coalition government would be required, as in 1931.

The British workers will not accept these attacks without fighting back. But the question is: Who can organise the counter attack?

The Communist Party, whose theories of peaceful roads to socialism' lead them to look for alliance with Wilson?

"Tribune', which still regards Wilson as its leader?

The union leaders, entangled in a thousand package deals and procedural agreements?

The coming struggles in Britain can only be prepared by those who recognise that they spring from a fundamental crisis of world capitalism.

The Socialist Labour League and the Young Socialists, building a Marxist leadership to take the working class to power are alone ready for the period now opening up in Britain. control FOLLOWING in the footsteps of the Labour government, Communist Party members are supporting reactionary moves against immigrants.

Less than a week after more stringent methods of immigration control were announced by the Labour government, Stalinists in a London Electrical Trades Union branch voted against a resolution calling for 'complete freedom for people to come and go as they please'.

The resolution, moved in the East Ham Branch of the union last Wednesday, was carried by 10 votes to six, with six abstentions.

Members and sympathisers of the Communist Party voted against the motion which said immigration control 'opened the gates to the growth of racialism and fascism', and could 'only succeed in splitting workers, leaving them open to greater exploitation and attacks by big business.

WAR STRATEGY prosecuting of this barbaric venture.

U.S. strategy, if it can be called that, has always rested on an obsessional assumption that air superiority, plus mobility provided by helcopters, would automatically ensure victory on the ground.

This was true in the early period of the anti-guerrilla war when the Vietcong was on the defensive. But since 1961, the relationship of forces has changed rapidly.

The rapid and continuing depletion of South Vietnamese forces by casualties and desertions, and the virtual failure to increase spectacularly the size of the Southern Army, has forced the U.S. to recast its policy in the field.

FIRST PHASE The first phase of this policy was the bombing of North Vietnam and the sending of an abortive peace mission, led Any doubt that Davies was sent to Hanoi to wrest concessions from Ho Chin Minh has been effectively dispelled in the July 26 'Newsweek':

'British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, and Foreign Secretary, Michael Stewart, told Humphrey that left-wing Labour MP, Harold Davies', 'peace mission' to Hanoi had produced only 'disillusionment' Davies reported, Wilson said, that the North Vietnamese leaders think they are winning, and that he came away convinced that the only, , way to get them to the conference table is to punish them militarily until they are ready to negotiate? (our emphasis)

Even Tribune was forced to reveal recently that this 'punishment' includes everything from the bombing of bridges to the destruction of sanatoria and even leper hospitals.

• Mradalay SURMA When this policy failed, Johnson and Macnamara began to supplement South Vietnamese troops with Americans.

The U.S. High Command consoled itself with the beliefnow proved untenable-that its position was impregnable or at least invulnerable, because its main strength was located in the coastal towns protected and supplied by the most powerful fleet in the world.

HARSH LOGIC

Soon the harsh logic of the war—that the occupation of the interior was the key to the situationmade itself felt as convoy alle and relet column alter anothe ot the south vietnamese troops began to disappear in a series of battles and ambushes.

The main theatre of war remains the central highlands -and it is here that the deci sive battles of the will be fought Sooner r later the Ameri cans will have comparauve salery and secur tv or the coastal garnsons te do battle with the vletcong vay that the into Dien Bien Phu and with the same disastrous results.

This inexorable trend is best exemplified by the present three month old battle around Duc Co and for the control of Route 19 between Que Nhon on the coast and Cambodia.

President Johnson's dramatic reversal of previous policy in favour of an all-round war is pregnant with the same historic defeat that befell France-and yet paradoxically the entire world position of U.S. imperialism drives him to a greater and deeper involvement from which he cannot withdraw.

FORMOSA SOUTH EAST