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Tony Benn has made this appeal to the unemployed Chesterfield through a local unemployed paper IF all those who have been denied work in Chesterfield were to get together you could be a very powerful force for good in the town.

How can you do it?

I would like to propose a fivestage plan to mobilise that strength and make it effective.

First, could you compile a full list of all the skills, interests and experience of those who are now on the dole, so that everyone knew what each person can do, or would really like to do?

Second, using those skills could you then draw up - with the help of others - a list of all the jobs that need to be done in Chesterfield to meet its most urgent needs?

Third, could you then produce a Chesterfield Plan that would fit your skills to meet those needs and make some sort of an estimate of what it might cost to do so?

Copies.

Fourth, when you have discussed them together, could you get a few copies typed and duplicated and launch the plan at a press conference, as the start of a campaign to win public support for it, from trade unions and other community groups?

Fifth, could you make it clear that the unemployed have 11,000 votes of their own to put behind that plan and intend to use them to get the plan accepted?

I pledge my full support for such a project. and to get it publicised.

It might be called the 'Free Workers Group' and it would have to be organised outside the Manpower Services Commission because they will not alloi any serious discussion to take place, on the orders of the government.

Such a plan might capture the imagination of the people of Chesterfield by challenging them to help end the crime of unemployment.

But it could also do more than that.

It would help to build up the self-confidence of those who have become apathetic or hopeless, and do not yet realise what a wide range of talents they have, which are now being wasted.

In the Soviet Union greatest priority is placed in the industrial sector on the achievement of growth at virtually any cost. Operation within these criteria means inevitably that very little or no weight is placed upon regard for the environment.

Industry is called upon to utilise all its resources «to increase production and often making no provision for the safe disposal of the increasing amounts of poisonous wastes the USSR and tell lies about what goes on in Russia because Tony Benn with Neil Kinnock in Chesterfield The country has a very serious acid rain problem, estimated to cause s500 million worth of damage annually in the agricultural sector alone.

In one 160,000 square mile area west of Moscow 15% of the harvest suffers from the effects of rain-washed acid in the soil. Officials claim that most acid rain does not originate in the main from Soviet industry. They claim that prevailing easterly winds bring over their country the industrial emissions from factories in Europe.

No blame can be attached to the Europeans for enormous discharges of toxic wastes into major lakes and rivers.

About two hundred miles to the east at Zapovozhe on the lower reaches of the Onieper river, farmers complained that toxic emissions from magnesium-titanium plant were killing their crops for miles around. The February 8 edition of the Party daily, Pravda, reported that in the river itself fish stocks were severely depleted and pointed to acid rain as the cause.

Apparently Soviet press and public opinion have been stirred out of years of complacency by the poisoning of two of its most important lakes. Lake Ladoga near Leningrad and Lake Baikal in Siberia may have been irreparably contaminated by the discharges of pulp mills on their banks. BALLOT papers for a new general secretary of the TGWU will go out on March 12, and the result will be announced on June 28.

The main declared candidates are Ron Todd, identified with