JOBS will be an election issue. Leading Labour speakers have aimed their fire at the threat to jobs contained in the Tories' industrial strategy of massive spending cuts and an end to state handouts to industry.
This may seem a sick joke to the aURO already jobless under Labour. But Callaghan and Co feel no Leading Tories make threat seem real enough. In a Daily Telegraph article last week Jock Bruce-Gardyne MP called for: an end to automatic ises in pensions and social security benefits; a one-year freeze in Civil Service and local government recruitment; cutting spending on job centres "job-creating schemes; axing housing subsidies and aid to private industry; and cutting spending on aid to deprived inner city areas.
OI this could dismissed as kite-flying rant by a more than usually loony Tory right-winger.
But it is official Conservative policy to trim some £3 billion from the subsidies and grants to Socialist Challenge 5 April 1979, page 4 tered. by the Department of Industry, and to cut National Enterprise down to a simple holding com pany for those state sharehold. ings in lame duck' firms that cannot find private all sounds Edward Heath was returned in 1970 with similar policies of big LaX and spending government withdrawal from the tax cuts would make investment ROTC profitable capital, and lead to economic growth. In fact, happened was that the boom never got beyond the stage of -frantic speculation.
Before his government was brought down by the miners, Heath had nationalised Leyland and Rolls-Royce, passed the laws which provided the basis for massive handouts to private business.
So the whole De intended to keep their party rank-and-file happy, rather like Labour leaders' occasional talk of socialism? Only up to a point.
True, the wilder fantasies of capital.
the As for direct aid to industry, Board what would be left today of bulam s producuve capaciy and export-earning potential if big firms like Leyland had been buvers. left to go to the wall? familiar. If this also has the effect of saving jobs, dole-queues growing quite cuts, fast, another plank in the strategy of ast the big capital;
co-operation of the trade union leaders in policing their rank and file.
for The same role is played by aspects of government's legislation which many Tories modify, such as the Employment Protection Act.
But that does not mean that a Thatcher government's market programme would go and the same way as Heath's, or so easily. ism' is the small business, lower estate middle class Tory rank and file.
Tory These people can afford the simply price of Callaghan-Heath style 'class-collaboration' less easily than big business, whether in the shape of higher taxes or legislation.
They might not be so easily side srine barga labour forced him or stopping the 'U-turn'. so that is also useful for cuts, and ADOUTH buy the the political alternative.
Labour COnUSCO would like to working class as well.
*free most of The base of "Thatcherpolicies class.
the socialist protecHve labour Callaghan Finally, the position of the movement under Thatcher Government would not be just a re-run of the fight against Heath's policies which to make After the Concordat, the unemployment, opposition would find it harder to present itself as The tax-cutting, anti-bureaucracy ideology of Thatcherism has a potent appeal not only to the lower middle-class but to of the Labour's savage attack on its own roots, and the revolutionary left's failure to make the its opportunities, means that there is an absence within the labour movement of any systematic body of ideas with a mass base, that could legitimise class struggle in the way that Thatcherism legitimises attacks on the working That means that the fight for alternative to is central to the against Thatcher's Tories promise no teddy bears' picnic
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