UNEMPLOYMENT is at a thirty year high. One and a quarter million are officially registered as out of work - 5.2 per cent of the working population. In industrial heartlands like Tyneside, Wearside and Merseyside the shadows of the Thirties have taken on a stark reality with unemployment running at over 10 per cent. 165,000 school leavers are without jobs.
INFLATION is now outstripping earnings even according to Government figures. The Retail Price Index rose 26.3 per cent in the year ended mid-July, while average earnings showed an increase of only 25.4 per cent. When taxation and insurance payments are taken into account, the fall in the real value of wages is far higher. Even the Confederation of British Industry calculates a 7.3 per cent fall in real incomes over the last nine months.
PRODUCTION itself is now running at a level below that during the three day week.
The response of the Labour Government has been the Healey measures and the launching of a vicious propaganda campaign against trade unionists who oppose the £6 limit. Wilson set the tone of the £2 million 'antiinflation' campaign last Wednesday night on television with a call to 'resist the militants", latter twentieth century devils who 'seek to cash in on the difficulties every family, every industry, every factory will face.
As for the leadership of the TUC, they have backed the Government right down the line. Not content with watching living standards fall and jobs disappear, the TUC claims the credit (!) for the £6 plan and will oppose any settlement in excess of this figure' With an acute sense of irony the TUC's August information broadsheet, Labour, is headlined "TUC plan leads the fight to save jobs'. But the only place the f6 limit and the Healey measures are leading the working class is to the greatest cuts in its living standards for forty years. SERIOUS DEFEAT Unless these measures are defeated and incomes policy smashed, the working class wil suffer a serious defeat. The result will be the return of a Tory Government so reactionary that it will make Heath's last administration look benevolent by comparison (see page 8).
That is the sorry state to which the bureaucratic misleaders of the labour movement have led the working class - a movement that successfully smashed the Tory Government's incomes policy and ensured the return of a Labour Government in February 1974 through their solidarity with the miners' strike. it looks as if the miners themselves will vote to accept their executive's recommendations DEMONSTRATE TO DEMAND the dropping of all charges against the Eldon Square pickets Monday 1 September 5•3 N. IRELAND 5-7% 8•0% WALES AUG 14 AUG 13 AUD I4 RUG TO ~ 3-8% 5-8 2-2% SOUTH WESTERN AUG 14 AUG T 2-8% 5•0% Unemployment distribution, on the eve of the TUC conference.
in other words the £6 limit.
But though it is disoriented, the working class is far from defeated. The possibility of a fight back being launched exists even at the Trades Union Congress. million votes could be cast against these wagecut plans, including the votes of the second largest union, the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers. On top of this hundreds of thousands of rank and file workers know Labour's measures are a fraud, and millions more could be won to active opposition through a campaign in the workers' movement for an alternative, socialist way to deal with the OPPOSITION Indeed, several motions submitted to the TUC by the annual conferences of unions supporting the £6 limit point in that direction and are in flat opposition to Government policy. The National and Local Government Officers' Association, the National Union of Public Employees, and the Association of Teachers in Technical Institutions amongst others all have motions down opposing any cuts in public expenditure. Yet Healey has lopped hundreds of millions off social services spending already. NUPE also has a motion down for a £40 minimum wage. the unions launched a serious campaign for such a figure, low as it is, it would both destroy the £6 limit and show in practice that Now the best way to improve the position of the low paid is not by sacrifices in the national interest' but by independent working class action.
ADJUSTED JORTHERN 4•7% 6•0% Hence.
2-7% 4•1% E.MIDLANDS AUG "74 AUG "75 2-3% 3-8% W. MIDLANDS EAST ANGLIA AUD 14 A00 13 4•4% 2•2% 3-7% SOUTH EAST Labour Government AUG 14 AUG 75 1•6% 3-0% apparatus.
As many as three If The possibility of united action against Wilson's Tory policies is there. But it is Murray and Jones, not Scanlon and the 'lefts" who will make the running at the TUC conferThis is because even when the 'lefts" do argue for a different programme such as Scargill's call for an integrated energy plan, Buckton's stress on a fully nationalised integrated transport plan, or all the general demands for an end to cuts in the welfare services and a crash house building programme - they nowhere spell out how and by whom such plans are going to be drawn up, and how ist society. the workers are going to force their implementation in the face of opposition from any pro-capitalist government including the present NOT INTEGRATED These 'plans' are not integrated into the day-to-day struggles of the working class to defend jobs and living standards, but are nice ideas to be accepted by a more amenable capitalist government some time in the future and to be implemented by the capitalist state "Planning' for the lefts remains a futile attempt to knock the crises off capitalism without challenging capitalist rule itself. House.
But the question of planning, of an alternative programme to that of Wilson, is decisive In the absence of a clear alternative around which to organise action, Wilson's demagogic statements will have an impact.
It is undoubtedly true that in the present situation a decisive struggle against Wilson's capitalist policies would have the effect of unseating the Government. In this situation the workers' movement has to develop a concrete alternative to the present Government; and the present crisis is so serious that no alternative will convince anyone or actually stimulate struggle unless it comes to terms with the fundamental organisation of capitalHUFF & PUFF If the TUC was a class struggle body, it would be precisely these questions that this week's Congress would be discussing. As it is various right-wing leaders will make speeches defending incomes policy - - ably supported Dy Jack Jones — wile tne ers treaten to huff and puff and blow down Wilson's policie: without giving off anything but hot air. A few useful motions which militants can use to good effect may emerge, but in general the bourgeoisie won't be losing too much sleep over next week's theatrics at Blackpool Opera