BETRAY THE NHS pay outrage

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Tadworth children's hospital have produced outrage even from But if Norman Fowler and the Tory government get their way, there will ore hospitals shut. Closures of geriatric hospitals may cause tess outcry than 'Tadworth, but no less human misery. :The current NHS pay offer of 7½% for nurses and 6% for ancillaries, with 42% next ar, is due to be funded in large part by health service cuts. And if the offer is accepted will be a blow to health service trade unionism that will make further closures much Acceptance will mean that health workers have been so worn out by seven months' ibs-and-drabs tactics from their leaders that they settle for a deal worse than the prepus offer. (The current offer withdraws five months' back pay included in the previous NUPE and ASTMS have recommended rejection. But you would hardly guess it. The iders of these unions have organised no campaign like Arthur Scargill did for the iners' strike ballot. They have done nothing to rally and convince the members, noing to show them that the leadership is ready and willing to pursue its paper policy of out action. It is down to rank and file militants to organise and to push the leaders All the more so in unions like CoHSE, where the executive will decide a recommendion only on the eve of the union's special conference on December 14. The consultation is due to be completed by the TUC Health Service Committee seting on December 15. Every day that remains needs to be used to argue the case for jection and all-out strike (with emergency cover) in the New Year for the full 12% And certainly they will HE MOVES to close continue to operate on the ie Fleet Street press. good bourgeois principle be many that free trade virtue is a a closure fine thing, but in a wicked world protectionism is necessary.

Daggers The EEC and the US are sier for the Tories.

at daggers drawn over steel exports, and agriculture too. The EEC is tightening still further its ie). restrictions on textile imSports, demanding a 10 per cent cut from Hong Kong, South Korea, and Macao.

A Bill has been proposed in the US Congress mainly directed against to action. Japan - which by 1985 would ban sales in the US of mass-market cars not mostly US-manufactured.

The most widely-publicised of the new protectionist measures is France's decree that videotape rim.

recorder imports (mostly from Japan) must be processed through a tiny customs post in inland Poitiers, but more significant are the quarrels over the trade on newer industrial powers like Brazil, Mexico, and South Korea.

The US and the EEC are trying to block cheap impors from these countries, and at the same time demanding that they reduce their severe import contruls and tariffs.

The foreign debt crises of the Third World countries, however, leave them no choice: to get themInhour monomant landaun haun inined official before the GATT talks.

'If someone had told you a couple of years ago that unemployment would be 10 per cent, that the steel industry would be running at 45 per cent of capacity (the latest figure now is 36%), that farm income would have dropped 40 per cent in three years, that automobile sales would be running" at half the 1979 rate... what would you have anticipated the state of our trade relations would be?' The slump provokes protectionism... and, in