Crisis Tuc

Scan page 1

THE LEADERS of the TUC have stood idly by for four and let the Tories batter the labour movement and turn Britain into the worst hell-hole of the advanced ci ist world - into the Hong Kong of Western Europe.

Legless Len and friends want to crawl to Tebbit...

The slump and Thatcherism - which follows the slump like plague following famine - have • already destroved much that the labour movement achieved over many years.

We have mass, unemployment. Whole communities laid waste. Cities like Liverpool devastated. Working class youth are being driven into 19th century conditions under YTS schemes (see report on p.4-5).

Social services have been savagely cut. Two rounds of vicious anti-union legislation have been brought in, and a third is being prepared.

The welfare state - the greatest achievement of the reforming labour movement - is now targeted for the bulldozers by demolition-squad Toryism.

The election of June 9 gave the Tories a full five years to continue the job they started in 1979. The hidden manifesto they didn't dare put to the electorate then is now being unveiled a piece at a time.

The offensive is being stepped up. The dole is to be cut below subsistence level. Thatcher now talks of a continuous round of anti-union legislation, with new laws about every two years in the period ahead.

And what do legless Len and years try to pitalMurray away as if he were a fawning dog whose spittle was spoiling the shine on his bover boots.

While Murray eagerly insisted that the TUC leaders' talks with Tebbit had been "constructive and quite fruitful", Tebbit told the press "that if the TUC wanted talks with the government its leaders would have to take the initiative in asking for them...

"He had in no way changed his attitude towards relations with the unions" , reported the Morning Star (August 19).

The TUC Congress next week is expected formally to overtrun the no-talks-with-Tebbit policy, already reversed in practice.

Arthur Scargill rightly says that talking to the Tories is like having a friendly chat with the hangman about the sort of rope he should buy to string you up with. What do the would-be quislings and collaborators like Murray say about that? A personal on-the-spot report from Jeremy Corbyn MP, who is on tour of Nicaragua IN JUNE 1979 the people of Nicaragua achieved what many had considered to be the impossible dream. Over forty years of US backed dictatorship was brought to an end by the Sandinista victory.

Since then the efforts at deblocked by a private enterprise refusal to trade with the Revolutionary Government. The shortages pile up and the tension grows.

American financed and backed 'Contra' forces are active on both the Costa Rican and Honduran frontiers and news has just come in of the deaths of fifteen "Campesinos" in the north following an attack on their transport.

The demands of defence ot the revolution obviously have to take priority in the allocation of resources by the government. But the achievements are impressive in every field - in health, education and in popular involvement in running the Reagan popular organisations, trade unions, women's organisations, past, health care was a luxury and public health care of scant importance beside the need to fill the coffers of the Somoza family. Now each Barrio (neighbourhood) has a series of local committees who deal with the collective needs of defence, public health, education and housing.

In one very poor Barrio we were able to visit, 472 families had divided themselves into 25 committees and are working together to transform ten acres of former Somoza land into a decent place to live. Their current problems are to get running water put in each house, and to ensure that the school has sufficient chairs for