life.
Far from being a coincidence, these attacks form part of a campaign by right-wing forces to whip up panic and confusion amongst parents, teachers and workers as to the source of the crisis in education.
This campaign comes at a time when the entire education system is under attack and reeling from the blows of the economic crisis and the attacks of the Wilson Government.
FEWER TEACHERS And every day the educational press is filled with stories about the cuts being planned by local duenonties. education committee of Dudley. for instance, has recommended that the metropolitan borough should employ 246 fewer teachers in its schools than at present, despite the "School of shame", screamed the headlines of the Evening News (15 October), referring to William Tyndale Junior School in Islington. Are Our Schools?", demanded Rhodes Boyson, MP and Black Paper fanatic, from the centre-pages of the Daily Telegraph next day. Other papers were meanwhile pillorying Chris Searle, an East London teacher victimised in 1971, for allowing his working class pupils to express their feelings about The Labour controlled cent.
How Red Dudley's primary school population is expected to grow by 300 and the secondary roll by 600. In other words, Dudley's schools will be faced with classes of over 40.
This piece of news appeared exactly one week after the Labour Party Conference had called on the Government to commit itself to a maximum class size of 25 by 1980.
Chancellor Dennis Healey has also revealed that he plans to cut a further £1,250 million from public spending - including an estimated £500 million from education - over the next five years.
All of this contrasts with the TUC demand prior to Healey's April hatchet work for an increase of £975 million on public spending. The pattern is clear: over a two-year span, £258 million has been cut back during a period when the price of school equipment to Solutions to the crisis in the not be found outside of a solution to the overall crisis of British capitalism. Teach ers alone are in no position to achieve this Yet last week's IS-dominated Rank and File Conference on the cuts tell predictably into the sectoral bear-trap. The main document called for the building of 'effective links between schools', in the utopian belief that 'at the point at which the Union refuses to sanction further action it is the strength of the school links that have been built up that will determine how the fight develops.
WORKING CLASS This effectively ignores the prob lem that the only way to protect spending on education and other social services is to take the fight against the cuts into the rest of the working class. Hence, as at the MCAPP Conference, the bulk of the IS-dominated Rank & File are against the unifving demand of a
tion of occupied houses, and the smashing up of one house while the occupants were out-and a vicious propaganda I TACUGHT HOME V/AS our side.' before they moved out. red weekly 23 october 1975 'As a seaman I was in a trade union but I just tended to drift along with things. I now think more people should fight. If I see any injustice again I will fight it. I'd never fought for anything till now, but if I had gone to prison for defending our right to a home I would still know that justice was on That's what Mr Callaghan, married with a three-year-old daughter, and nowworking as an assistant schoolkeeper, had to say after the victorious outcome of the three-year-old struggle at Elgin Avenue in London. Despite a year of physical harassment by the Greater London Council-which involved the cutting off of gas, the threatened demolicampaign in the press against 'unlawful" squatting, the 200 squatters of Elgin Avenue finally won all their demands.
Families have been rehoused into proper council tenancies, and single people and childless couples have been given alternative short-life accommodation-all inspected by the squatters themselves to see whether it was suitable social services SQUATTING sion for advancing it. We agree-so