Tighter g ose bet?

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LOOKING at a recent report on pay and pay increases by the (Labour Research October 1983) I was reminded of the old adage, "One rule for the rich, another for the poor."

Last year we had a 6% pay norm, this year the Tories are trying to enforce one of 3% -but on whom? Figures from 1982 show that five men picked up over £1 million each and one just under that.

David Sainsbury, treasurer of the SDP, • got £4,763,873; Timothy Sainsbury, Conservative MP for Hove, got £1½½ million. Ten men gave themselves total rises of more than £100,000 each. Then we have seven UK company directors receiving £250,000 or more, and another 28 directors being : paid more than f125,000. (Perhaps it is needless to say that all the above are men).

In the first three years of Tory rule the inflation rate rose by 49%, "average workers' earnings" increased by 43%, thus resulting in a drop in their standard of living - whilst the pay of Britain's highest paid rose by 93%. Not only have these directors benefited from greatly increased pay, but the effects of Tory budgets since 1979, in cutting top tax rates from 83% to 60%, have massively boosted their incomes.

What about the rest of us, then, up against a government legislating • to merease the income divide? On 21 November changes in the method of calculating old age pensions will deprive OAP couples of £1.20 a week.

The practice of uprating benefits in line with the forecast annual rise in prices is now abandoned. The link now is with the annual inflation rate shown in the Retail Price Index on the date when new scales are announced. All this means that many benefits to be paid out in November will rise by only 3.7% - the annual inflation rate recorded for May - instead of 6%, the forecast inflation rate for November.

This latest Act is, of course, only the latest in a series of measures introduced by the Tories to attack the working class, and in particular its weakest members. Already Britain's pensioners are among the worst off in Europe, and the situation looks like getting worse.

Relate all this to the continuing attacks on he social and welfare services : and you get a horrific picture of what Tory Britain in the late 1980s will look like unless the labour movement rouses itself into e fierce fightback against this hard-faced government of the rich for the super rich. THE largest demonstration in recent years over an individual deportation case took place in Birmingham last Saturday, 8 October.

1,000 people marched through the city to demand that the Home Office drops its case against Mohammad Idrish. The march was called by his union, NALGO, as part of a campaign agreed at its annual conference. Despite patchy organisation and little central direction by the union, members came from as far away as Glasgow.

Attempts to restrict the politics of the march to "NALGO says Mohammad stays" failed as most people took up the slogan "Stop the deportations" and "Smash the racist laws". But although a relative success, the attendance shows how far there is to go in educating trade unionists in the importance of fighting deportations.

Defence Campaign members felt it marked an important step forward for the campaign. The fight continues around the other planks of NALGO's policy, to ger work on the deportation blackea and for a national day of indus. trial action if a deportation order is served.

Further details from Barry Lovejoy, 30 Antrobus Road, Birmingham 21. 021-523 8923.