Press FINANCIAL TIMES Gang By Patrick Spilling

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don Road, Oxford, which for this week only has become the Marxist headquarters in Britain.

In their crumpled suits and white leather shoes, they look a cut above the scruffier colleagues from the gutter press who have been rifling the dustbins, haranguing the milkmen, and badgering the neighbours.

Ty crews roam Oxford, setting up their cameras outside the homes of people thought to have left-wing tendencies and filming anyone going in or out.

The Daily Mail rings its list of well-known trouble-makers in Oxford several times a day to see if it can persuade any of them to join in the mole-hunt. 'They are not in' , becomes the most widely-used sentence of the week.

Photographers shoot thousands of frames of women going in and out of Cowley, in the hope that they will catch that exclusive picture of Red Steph; or one of the other 'she-moles' (as they had inevitably been dubbed).

In the event the company hands her to them on a plate by telling Stephanie Grant that she must wait outside the industrial relations office for 15 minutes. Outside the industrial relations office is also where the world's press had gathered in the hope of a scrap.

In the event the company hands her to them on a plate by telling Stephanie Grant that she must wait outside the industrial relations office for 15 minutes. Outside the industrial relations office is also where the world's press has gathered in the hope of a scrap.

The Oxford Mail, irritated by the fact that it has run a low-key story about 14 people being dismissed on the same day as the Coventry Evening Telegraph splashes an exclusive story about 'red infiltrators' tries to make up in decibels what it lacks in speed.

On Friday 12th its lead article begins: 'Far Left fanatics from the Socialist League, which is dedicated to the revolutionary overthrow of the British way of life.." . Its editorial rages about 'the policy and action of the jackboot"

The same report quotes Patrick Gray, chair of Oxford East Labour Party, saying, 'You get undergraduates studying something really obscure who have a miraculous conversion and decide to become dockers .. or miners. After a couple of years they revert to form"

Patrick Gray should know. He gained a degree from Oxford University before getting a job on Cowley's production line. About a year or two ago he reverted to form and took up a better-paid job, more like academic life.

Right-wing Labourite John Power, his own victimisation at Cowley long forgotten, is speaking as an expert on 'the ultra left' • Roger Rosewell, the former IS (SWP) organiser, is disinterred from his SDP cell to recite his familiar tale of atrocities. Thev seem to be harder and harder to remember.

He informs the world that revolutionaries are told that they must turn up to work on time, work hard, not take days off sick when they are not sick. Most sinister of all, they must make friends with their workmates. Ugh, makes you shudder.

The new bait for the press is the fact that half of those sacked are women. It is the women's houses that most reporters camp outside. It is the women who take the largest part of the press broadside.

The speed with which the sacked workers learn to close their windows and simply not answer the door or phone makes the press squad angrier and more frustrated. They prowl the

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THE STORY so far: Pritchards took over the mobile gardening contract from Wandsworth Council, after a series of bitter disputes between unions and the Tory council over privatisation. The council claimed that the Pritchards tender would save £35,000 a year.

The only way Pritchards could Gerry Byrne reports on the action by gardeners and dustmen in the Tories' 'model' local authority day, sick pay, or pension. They also had to sign an undertaking see where these productivity creases can come from. 40 casual workers - mainly black - who sign away their employment rights each week, are sacked from August 15. The dust are back at work after the one-day strike, trying to operate the new rotas, but the issue is likely to explode again at any time. NUPE PRIATE CONTLACTORS OU OF PAL RITIES SIVISION VS-SN S3 b-gone Organiser, 8 August 1983