EMERGENCY PROCLAIMED IN CEYLON

when he says: "The union is asking for more money than in the past, and the TA has never had less money to give'.

There are lessons for all workers to learn out of this strike. For British workers, especially those in public transport and the docks, the advantage of fighting as an industry-wide unit dramatically underlined in the total paralysis of the New York transport system.

Advantageous

This would be of far more advantage than the garage by garage struggle that now London transport for better wages and conditions. For dockers in Britain the fight against Devlin and for nationalization of the docks can better be waged through unity of the 'Blue' (National Amalgamated Stevedores and Dockers) and 'White' (Transport and General Workers' Union) trade unionists under a leadership opposed to the sell-out policies of the old labour bureaucracy.

For American and British workers there are clear political lessons to be learned. The crisis of world capitalism will leave no country and group of workers untouched.

The struggle against the bosses can only be further developed in a political struggle. In Britain this must mean a struggle against imperialist policies of the Labour Party leadership and a struggle to develop an alternative leadership committed to carrying through the most revolutionary measures against the capitalist class. One thing they must surely learn from this strike is the need to join in the lobby of Parliament on January 26 in order to defeat the Labour government's intentions of introducing anti-trade union legislation.

In the US militant trade unionists must clearly understand that the continuation of struggle on the purely economic lines of trade unionism can no longer avail them of any gains. T clamped a curfew and proclaimed ay emergyake • HE nine-month-old government of Dudley Senanayake (the third since 1958) after violent anti-Tamil demonstrations in Colombo, led by the Lanka Sama Samaja Party and Sri Lanka Freedom Party, resulted in the shooting of a Buddhist monk and the wounding of several demonstrators.

As usual, these political bankrupts, unable to pose a progressive socialist alternative to the present regime, appealed to the basest and most racialist prejudices of the Colombo mob when the government sanctioned the use of Tamil as an official language in the predominantly Tamil provinces in the north and east.

This gesture of the government in relation to the Tamils is not as generous as it seems.

Shaky alliance

In fact, it is a political manoeuvre to cement the shaky alliance of the United National Party and the Federal (Tamil, bourgeois, communalist) Parties, which constitute the present coalition government.

This concession to the Tamil petty bourgeois is part of the preparatory moves of the government for an attack against the working Class whose standard of living has continued to decline precipitously.

The racialists, today led by renegades from Trotskyist movement, want to reinstate the jaded Sri Lanka Freedom PartyLanka Sama Samaja Party coalition, and think that the most effective way to overthrow the government is to drive a wedge between the Sinhalese United National Party and the Tamil Federalists.

Little do they realise that this campaign has a logic of its own which will lead not to the return of the 1964 coalition-but to a more right-wing dictatorship: in short, to a non-parliamentary regime.