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we sta es go unchecked The polictes wie fight tor end slapped on it. When he inally caught them he proseuted the owners for no less than 7 separate offences, including welve violations of the Woodvorking Machine Regulations, und instructed the MSC to close lown the scheme.

But the Health and Safety Executive is grossly understaffed and has also been the recent victim of government cuts. So much so that in a recent memorandum to the Employment Secretary, the Health and Safety Commission warned that government cuts now threatened its ability to discharge its statutory obligations under the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act.

In any case the MSC is supposed to have its own system for safeguarding young workers. Its area boards upon which trade union nominees sit are supposed to investigate schemes. In fact the MSC defended the YOP scheme against a variety of criticisms on the grounds that its monitoring procedure would eliminate the abuse of 'cheap labour' , "job substitution' and inadequate non-existent training:

Yet an article in the New Statesman of May 1981 revealed that the MSC had built up a backlog of 11,982 schemes that had not even been visited. In the same month an internal report by MSC officials conceded precisely what it was denying in public, 'the expansion of YOP and the relatively small number of staff have shown us it is not possible to maintain a monitoring prond Join the 20p Where we stand Liabour Socialist Fight Party for ORGANISER polars

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Allies against Beria: Khruschev (holding potato) and smiling Malenkov. At Stalin's funeral: Khruschev (right) next to Beria and Chou En Lai Organiser ho.138 301983 -1953— THE arrest on July 9 1953 of the head of Stalin's secret police, Lavrenti Beria, marked a change in the methods, if not the underlying politics, of the ruling Soviet bureaucracy.

Beria had risen to Politburo rank in Stalin's party and headed successive bloody purges in the closing years of the war.

At the time of Stalin's death in March 1953 he was the most powerful singie figure in the bureaucracy, standing at the head of the MVD-MGB which had branches and men in every organisation and department in the country.

He controlled the guards who' protected the Kremlin, along with all the members of the Soviet government and the Party Presidium. Under his command were the frontier guards and ten divisions of MVD troops which had been moved in close to the capital at the time of Stalin's funeral. He had a vast network of spies and informers.

Beria himself clearly intended Georgian Communist Party, charged with stamping out "deviations" inside the Party organisation.

In 1934 he was elected to the CPSU Central Committee as Stalin began what was to be an escalating series of mass purges and show trials which were further to wipe out the old Bolsheviks who had fought alongside Lenin and Trotsky in 1917.

It should be remembered that even by the 1930s the Party of Stalin bore little relationship to the revolutionary party that had overthrown capitalism in the October revolution.

By 1928, fewer than 10% of the Party's membership were veterans of 1917. And the working class element too had been crushed. Whereas in 1930, 49% of the membership had been workers, by 1934 this had fallen to 9.3%. In Lenin's party in 1923 only 23% of factory directors had been party members: Stalin's party of careerists saw that figure rise to nearly branch of the centre; you will have to study it carefully and remember well all the questions and answers which the court might ask... Your future will depend on how the trial goes and its results... If you manage to endure it you will save your head and we will feed and clothe you at the government's cost until your death."

With such techniques, and special 1934 legislation provide for trials to be held in secret without defending counsel (later to be used against Beria in 1953) Stalin's selected victims were framed up and forced to "confess" to the most bizarre plots.

The main Moscow Trials took place in 1937 and 1938. They decimated any remaining possible opposition to Stalin -and turned the ''Trotskyfascists" into scapegoats for immense economic probiems in the Soviet Union.

Behind the facade of the Show Trials went truly massive arrests, imprisonments and exe. cutions and the extension of the