turned up last Friday night to jeer French fascist leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, speaking at London's Charing Cross Hotel. Le Pen was in Britain for a Europe-wide fascist meeting, as well as taking time out to cultivate well-heeled rightwing Tories. 'Monsieur Le Pen thinks he's misunderstood in Britain' said an aide. Le Pen's problem was that he was understood only too well. French socialists, trade unions and immigrant workers plan a huge anti-lascist demonstration in Paris on 1 May. WHILE Terry Fields and Dave Nellist and dozens more socialists are being witch-hunted and expelled. Robert Maxwell, scab, capitalist and crook died a member of the Labour cocted malicious stories of alleged cor ruption involving to witchhunt Arthur Scargill and Peter Heathfield, their own Mirror Group pension funds were being systematically plundered of hundreds of millions, and the company's own bank balances raided to prop up Maxwell's private interests.
While banks and finance houses foreclose on loans to recession-hit small businesses, and building societies repossess ever more family homes as soon as their owner fall into arrears, huge consortia of international banks from three continents admit lending Maxwell over ti. billion without proper security much of it may never be recovered.
The ramifications of the Maxwell scandal are reverberating more strongly throughout the capitalist world a month after he died in mysterious circumstanAs Tony Benn points out, if a similar scandal had taken place in a Soviet bank or industry it would have peted in the press as a failure of comKinnock's team has held back calls for Maxwelf's expulsion In fact it is yet another failure of capitalism - one of a growing line of embarrassing recent fiascos that have in cluded the collapse of Polly Peckand the BCCI scandal: the Maxwell debacle, with clear signs of top-level fraud, includes strong elements of the Guinness case.
Ex-cronies
All of a sudden, Maxwell's cronies all or whom enough to pick up their directors' fees Opened. pening. 1985 precisely workers' all of them keep them out of jail. were ready Printed tv Tridant Press. Edenbridge. Kent. Published by Idolare Ltd, 377 City Road, London EC IV and look the other way as he fleeced the company, or who actively helped him in sacking staff, attacking unions and asset-stripping, are rushing to disclaim any responsibility for what hap accounts. Likethetop Nazis after the war, we now hear them claim that they were only carrying out orders, or didn't know what was really hap This is the sorry story from the Mirror Pension Fund trustees, who were installed by Maxwell after he took over the campany in to enable him to sipworkers saving from this pool savings Maxwell himself took the chair of the pension fund: by the time he died there was just one token union representative, massively outnumbered by Maxwell's top managers and dogsbodies. Now throw up their hands and weep crocodile tears in the hope it will Control The Mirror is not unique. Most private pension funds have little or no trade union supervision, allowing management in many cases to decide how to invest and use their employees savings Mirror Group pensioners are belatedly demanding a majority on a revamped pensions board - while management try to fob them off with many of the spineless old executives watched the millions disappear into Maxwell's chosen companies and Of course the unions must step up the fight for workers control over pension funds. But while the Labour Party of Kinnock and Maxwell seeks to exorcise the spirit of socialism, here is a stark reminder that the privatised pension plans shamelessly boosted by Thatcher at huge cost to the taxpayer are not a reliable alternative to a decent state earnings related pension scheme.
Corruption
Now Gerald Kaufmann is back from Maxwell's funeral, Labour chiefs are trying without conviction to put some political space between themselves and the corrupt tycoon For years successive right wing Labour and trade union leaders have obstructed socialists who called tor Maxwell's expulsion from the party and from his union membership in ASTMS (now MSF). Now they must reap the consequences The left must demand the party spell out a socialist alternative to i a crisis-ridden capitalist system that is dragging down with it the hopes and dreams of millions of workers and pensioners.
PEN THE
SMASS VAL