[changes - p3private and public sector. Thatcher is…]

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changes - p3private and public sector.

Thatcher is allowed to push unemployment through the 3 million mark while the TUC talks in polite terms about a powerful alliance of public sector workers. Such an alliance is desperately needed, but will it ever get off the ground? Championed by people like Sidney Weighell who has just called off a national rail strike and sacrificed tens of thousands of jobs in the process it is likely to remain a dead letter despite Thatcher's 4% Plan These are the leaders the employers often see when they pick their battleground and plan their strategy.

But that does not mean they are right. These leaders are not the working class.

The leaders are running scared, but workers face the pressure every day.

Last Monday's decision, alongside the reshuffle, to raise the Minimum Lending Rate, ensures that far from the economic crisis easing, it will get worse and inflation will rise.

Tiger

But Thatcher is riding a tiger. The working class, particularly those most directly in Thatcher's firing line, are frustrated and angry. Hoover workers have voted to resist the wage cut. BL workers are spoiling for a fight with Edwardes over the wage review. And they reflect the mood of the working class as a whole.

The workers remain trapped in a crisis of working class leadership. But this may well not be enough to save the Tories over the coming months.

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Socialist Organiser. 17 September 198/ Page 2 arkan campaign boosted taken to court, the Combine struggle with the boost it by lan MeLeish AFTER six months of frustration, worry and abuse that Glasgow tenants have suffered during a rent strike (some of the abuse has been so bad that one old woman in Cambuslang Rent Office collapsed with a heart attack), the Scottish Tenants Organisation has at last announced that it will firmly fight the rent strike.

It could well be too late. fight back is being organised by all the local tenants' associations through the Cambuslang Tenants' Action Combine..

The plans for action already worked out include:

1) Contacting NALGO making sure they know what has happened and finding out what they intend to do.

2) Organising a meeting between the Combine and Glasgow District Labour Group.

4) Organising a mass public meeting to work out further action.

Sadly lacking from the proposals so far is yet another promise made by the STO and the GTC right at the start - the assurance that if anyone is threatened with court action, then the protest would be escalated into an all out rent strike.

The struggle is at a very low point at present, but this latest attack must be turned THE campaign by Turkish socialist Dogan Tarkan against deportation to Turkey got a boost last weck at the TUC fire Brigades Union president Bill Deal spoke to the Congress on Dogan Tarkan's case. And a petition supporting Dogan Tarkan was signed by Joe Marino, Jack Collins, Tom Jackson, Arthur Scargill, George Guy, Lawrence Daly, Bob Wright, and others.

Many British MPs have also backed Dogan Tark?. is have five members of ihe Danish parliament. Support has come from the Indian Workers Association and Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers. Among labour movement bodies taking up the campaign has been the Labour Party International Committee, CLPs in Ashford and Nottingham, Southwark, Leicester and Oxford Trades Councils and a telegran to the Home Office from NUPE, Neath Hospital. Nearly 1,800 have signed the petition.

Dogan Tarkan spoke at the Turkey Solidarity Campaign rally in London last Saturday, and the TSC is campaigning for him. Unfortunately the Campaign for the Defence of Democratic Rights in Turkey so far is not campaigning for Dogan Tarkan, though at the CDDRT rally last week Ernie Roberts said he would take up the issue in Parliament.

Torture Support is still urgent -within days or weeks Dogan Tarkan could be deported, to face torture and possibly execution at the hands of Turkey's military rulers.

Contact: Friends

Dogan Tarkan, BM Box 5965, London WCIN 3XX.

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