As if four years were not bad en What the Tories want

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IF YOU thought the last four years were bad, the next five if Thatcher gets back will make them seem like a Mediterranean cruise.

The Tories have produced an arrogant package of plans which make not the slightest concession to the interests of the working class.

And they are relying on the salesmanship of Saatchi and Saatchi, the usual deluge of slanted coverage from the gutter press and television, and the lack of credibility of the Labour and TUC leaders to neutralise or even allow them to win over some of their potential victims.

For the hardline Tory loyalists there is a "robust" mixture of the 'three Ps" - Prisons, Police and Privatisation, with the "three Bs" - Ballots, Bombs and the "right to Buy" Together they make up a prescription for some of the nastiest medicine on offer since before the NHS was set up.

Significantly few of those prosperous folk who will buy the medicine intend taking any of it themselves, but look to Thatcher's gang to force it down the throats of the working class.

Centrepiece of a Manifesto which exudes complacency at the "achievements'" of the Tory government is a promise of further rich pickings for the prosperous middle class and for bigger speculators from further bout of privatisation.

" JOHN HARRIS. Gusto The motto 'if it moves, privatise it; if not, close it down", which has lain behind the Thatcher offensive on nationalised industry and public services, will be applied with gusto.

Industry Secretary Patrick Jenkin has confirmed that if reelected the Tories plan to flog off at least half the surviving elements of the British Steel Corporation, along with a lai chunk of British Leyland incli ing the highly profitable Jagu Land Rover, Unipart and Tri and Bus divisions.

On top of this the Tor promise to hive off Rolls Roy British Telecom, British A ways, British Shipbuilders a as many airports'as possible.

This extension of what i effectively new 'licences print money" in virtually fo proof profitable ventur follows on the Tory sale of Cal and Wireless, Associated Briti Ports, British Aerospar Britoil, British Rail Hote Amersham International a the National Freight Corpor tion.

In each of these cases t Tories sold off profital concerns at incredibly low pric for private speculators to makr killing, and for capitalist ins tutions subsequently to secu fat dividends. Cable and Wil less shares, for example, we sold off by the Tories at 168p share: 2½ years later they stal at an astonishing 415p. Ame sham International shares ha nearly doubled in price.

Despite populist nonsense Tory propaganda, the shares these concerns have not, for tl most part, wound up in tl the hands of the employees, but the vaults of big shareholders.

In British Aerospace, 1 ies ce, LiTind are to es, ble ish ils, nd ra¡he ble 'es ea stiIre rend erve large shareholders own over 60% of non-government shares; only 3.1% of capital is owned through employees' shares. In Amersham International 92 shareholders own 64.5% of the company.

Even in the "star" case of the National Freight Corporation, while employees (mainly from middle management upwards) hold 83% of the total shares, the banks hold the bulk of the firm's capital, and drew out a cool £8.3 million in interest payments in the first seven months of trading — nine times the total dividend!

With the sole exception of the computer firm ICL, the 'hived off" firms have been disposed of by the Tories in such a way as to ensure a sharp increase in profit figures - and. thus a healthy handout for their wealthy owners.

The stock market killing has been achieved at the expense of tens of thousands of jobs axed in efforts to make the firms attractive to investors and heavy subsidies from the government.

This same process has already begun in BL, British Airways, British Shipbuilders and British Telecom. Workers at Heathrow and other airports appear to be next in the firing line.

Chill warning

But those outside the named corporations should not. breathe the Tor nandeso ne words for them too. There are to be moves to draw private capital into the National Bus Company and introduce competition and private capital into the gas and electricity industry.

British Rail is to suffer the cold hand of Toryism, with a chill warning that "we shall examine ways of decentralising BR and bringing in private enterprise to serve railway customers."

For workers in other state industries, too, there is good reason to be alarmed, as the Tories promise the arrival of squads of Michael Edwardes clones to smash up existing conditions and trade structures: "those ised industries which car privatised or organis smaller and more efficie will be given top management and requi work to clear guidelines.

Council services - 1 larly refuse collection -come increasingly und auctioneer's hammer; and NHS too a deadly combine middle class "voluntary o ations' and attempts "services like laundry, a and hospital cleaning competitive tender" prom bitter struggle in the next to defend standards of and care, and protec already inadequate 81 staffing , levels against erosion.

IT IS estimated that million people belong Tory Party. They havedemocratic structure decide policy.

Thatcher was elec leader by the 277 Tory in 1975. She appoints: chairman, and all senior officials. She may notr ignore Tory conferer policies, which have : authority.

Representative bodithe Tory Party are "me advisory to the leader, constitutionally can do likes" (John Cole, BBC Tory leader, Thatcher is subject to restraint a control than the leader i other political organiss calling itself democrat (Robert McKenzie).

And Tories lecture unions on democracy!

1o back up employers i the public and private sec their war on wages, R conditions and staffing the Tories pledge themse a new round of anti-union lation even more wide-it than the Prior and Tebbit i

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to do to us next like a sick joke of a morning, there are predicttionalpot be d as ; units mality ed to articuare to r the in the ion of ganis› put tering ut to ises a period ervice the Fillary arther ! the no pal MPs the pe i in ely rho • she ; As 'less Fany ion he ough, The Manifesto follows on and builds upon Tebbit's Green Paper last autumn, and proposes to impose:

•Ballots for the election union governing bodies.

•Periodical decisions on whether unions should have party political funds. . •Curbs on the legal immunities of unions to call strikes without a prior ballot of those concerned.

•Steps to "ensure that individual members are freely and effectively able to decide for themselves whether or not to pay the political leyy."

agreements i. breach • 'Adequate procedure essential services 'breach of which would deprive industrial action of immunity."

In short, the Tory proposals amount to a wholesale, forcible, rewriting of union rulebooks; the making of another very large category of industrial action -that without ballot endorsement - unlawful; and undisguised attempts to smash the financial basis of the Labour Party as the political voice of the trade union movement by changing the present "contractHo ouc situation on the political levy to ''contracting in' Supremely confident in the power of the Tory press and mass media under conditions where mass unemployment and chronic misleadership has weakened the solidarity of the trade union movement, Tebbit and the cabinet head-bangers plainly believe now would be a more fruitful time to experiment once again with pre-strike ballots - a move which failed disastrously in Heath's Industrial Relations Act. which fix rates of pay lowest wage earners.

Halved

Beyond the industrial front, the counterpart of the privatisation bonanza is the "sale of the CeLLUN provisions.

Their manifesto boasts that this has brought 'The largest transfer of property from the State to the individual. No less than half a million council houses and flats were sold in the last Parliament to the people who live in them."

The other side to this is that the halving of government investment in new housing and cash limits on councils have cut public housebuilding by more than half from 107,000 in 1978 to 52,300 in 1982. The result is that while the Tories boast of having sold off 500,000 council houses, only 181,000 new homes have been built to take their place.

Thus Thatcher could equally boast of hitting the 800,000 figure for those households in overcrowded conditions, with another 800,000 in shared accommodation. The number of thousand homeless is not known.

And while the council homes that have been sold at knockdown prices are generally the better and more modern buildings, the huge cuts in housing subsidies and council finance have brought a growing crisis in repairs to existing housing stock.

In total there are 1.2 million unfit dwellings, housing an estimated 5 million people -Tory talk of while the Tory slump has 400,000 building workers on dole!

Unabashed, the Tories promise even more of the same: bigger discounts for longterm tenants who choose to buy, and other schemes to extend this grand plan to destroy the structure of council-rented accommodation - forcing more and more young working class families into the clutches of plundering private (Tory) landlords, or onto the treadmill of mortgage payments as house prices begin to soar once again.

Vouchers

With over 3 million on the dole, and the prospect of more unemployment the longer the foste fatay in troperty ming. festo talk of a democracy" seems more than ever like a sick joke to all but the most well-heeled and smug sections of the middle class.

So, too, does the Tory defence of the "right of parents to spend their own money on educating their children" their Shr keith Joseph Cipled brainchild of the education "voucher" system, means in reality a further boost for private education at the expense of state provision.

Even more appalling to tens of thousands of hard-pressed working class women must be the prospect of their already desperate housing situation being exacerbated by the need to care at home for elderly or sick relatives for whom the NHS makes no provision.

War-whoops

The Tories have consistently boasted of their successes in ble whooping references to the alklands war, through which this country has recaptured luch of her old bride": there re dire warnings of the fiendish lans of the Soviet Union; basts of the level (£16 billion lis year) to which military pending has been raised, and romises of more bombs and lissiles to come.

The manifesto swaggers over le squalid premeditated SAS lurders in the Iranian Embassy ege, and the callous indifferace with which Thatcher's ang allowed the Irish hunger rikers to die. It exults in the ,000 extra cops recruited in ngland and Wales alone since 979, points to the gigantic ates of pay these thugs in blue ow receive, and promises them ven more sweeping powers to arass ordinary people under le provisions of the Police and riminal Evidence Bill.

Having driven up the prison opulation to a staggering 44,000 Tory manifesto promises • to build more prisons! hey propose to complete ten ew prisons allowing another ,800 working class people to be locked up; and an opening on jobs front is offered to would-be screws, who will be taken on to hold the kevs and batter the Vast перина inmates.

To appease the racist elements of the 'hang 'em, flog 'em, lock 'em up' brigade, the manifesto combines a ritualistic opposition to "racial discrimination" with a bragging assertion of the effectiveness of racist laws which have ensured that:

'Since 1979 immigration for settlement has dropped sharply to the lowest level since control of immigration from the Commonwealth began more than 20 years ago."

The same government has presided over à soaring level of deportations and a rising tide of violent racist attacks on black people in the social crisis promoted by its policies of slump and the destruction of the welfare state.

'Conservatives reject Labour's contention that the State can and should do everything", proclaim the Tories. Yet their four years in office and their plans for another five show that with the state machinery in their hands the party of t capitalist class can mould ever very much to their own interes - and reap rich rewards fro doing so.

Half-baked

The repeated failure oF decades of the trade union a Labour leaderships to recogni the power and the nature this state machinery, their uto ian and ill-conceived attempts utilise it to legislate socialis inch-by-inch and the catas ophic and half-baked they have brought the worki class, are part of the reas Thatcher can hope to cash in ! the disillusion and demorat ation of the labour movement.

The immediate answer to so disillusion with Labou programme and leadership mu e to contront workers with d brutal reality of the Tory blu print for the next five years.

Only the biggest possit Labour vote, coupled wi preparations to fight on af the election, oner any gunm 11. - - 1 - 19-of hope of resisting the To steamrolier.