IN A COUNCIL by-election in Barrow-in-Furness last week the Tories suffered a mammoth 23 per cent swing against them, to lose a safe seat. It was just a small indication of the extent of Tory unpopularity and the electoral defeats being stored up for the Tories in the council and European elections this year.
John Major's cynical and ill-fated "back to basics' campaign was partially designed to give the Tories a popular cutting edge when their economic policies are crashing and living standards falling.
VAT on fuel, the new council tax assessments, mass unemployment, and the huge tax rises and benefit cuts to come in April are all feeding widespread popular resentment.
The unmistakeable evidence of general social decay and breakdown - crumbling infrastructure, rampant poverty and soaring crime rates - help reinforce the public perception of a government that has been derailed by its own ideology.
But Major's attempts to divert attention from these problems by a nostalgic The government has made a humiliating climb-down over the compulsory tests built in to their reactionary National Curriculum.
The curriculum will be limited to English, maths and science up to the age of 14. Compulsory history and geography A widely supported teachers' boycott of the tests has forced hated Education Secretary John Patten to accept Sir Ron Dearing's report criticising the proposals.
The report said that the scheme had 'gone over the top', reducing the amount of time teachers can spend helping children to learn.
Strip down the memory lane of a mythical golden age have gone seriously wrong. The 'moral crusade' element of the back to basics capaign has been overturned by the hypocrisy of Major's own ministers and their parliamentary aides. As the Tim Yeo affair and Patten's climbdown on the national curriculum shows, 'Back to basics' morality collides with deep social changes which have occurred over more than 30 years. Hysterical As a result, Major's "big idea' to reunite the Tory ranks last been reduced to little more than hysterical cals for a crackdown on crime _ so long as it is petty crime rather than multi-million pound fraud - and a renewed onslaught on social welfare. That's the reason for the Tory attack on single mothers, involving a battery of measures including the cruel fiasco of the Child Support Agency. Yet despite their deep unpopularity, despite evidence of the long term social damage they are doing, and despite the unravelling of "back to basics' the Tory anti-welfare steam roller i driving on relentlessly They are determined to undermine key fundamentals of the welfare state. This is Knuckles rapped: Patten The collapse over the tests is a big blow against the National Curriculum. introduced in 1987. The curriculum stresses grammar, arithmetic and the rote learning of facts against previous attempts to give children the skills to critically assess the world around education. port. October has this attack. past two weeks. them.
The collapse also registers a big victory for leftwingers in the teaching unions. One mark of the new confidence teachers have acquired is the election of Carole Regan, a leader of the Socialist Teachers Alliance, as Vice-President of the National Union of Teachers.
NUT members have also voted almost unanimously to keep up the boycott of the remaining tests.
It seems likely however that teachers will have to fight for the united boycott to remain. The NUSAWT and nonTUC ATL leaders will be eager to get back to normal. Socialists must support the teachers fight for the education our children deserve. a long term process, but as the budget measures showed, it is gathering pace.
Every aspect of the welfare state is in peril - unemployment and social security benefits, pensions, the NHS, housing and the right to free higher and secondary Defence of the welfare state is now a key task for the labour movement for a whole period. It will be a long and difficult fight, though one in which the workers' movement starts out with a large majority of public opinion already in supceeds.
But instead of tapping in to this support and recognising the need to step up the fight, the Labour leadership is once more passive and quiescent in the face of Consensus One reason is the tacit economic con- policies. sensus between Labour and Tory leaders, so rightly exposed by Bryan Gould in the Labour's John Smith and Gordon Brown are so scared of saying anything which might be seen as a spending commitment for a future Labour government • that they are plunged into silence.
The Labour leadership has effectively found. given up the fight for full employment By Jake Farrier Long-time revolutionary Marxist Patrick Sikorski and two other class struggle leaders won positions on the National Executive of the RMT transport union last week. Elected secretary of the union's London Transport District Council. Sikorski's victory comes shortly after Underground bosses attempted to sack him following a verbal altercation with a local manager after putting up a notice for a union meeting to discuss the sacking of another member. and the welfare state because it has renounced any economic alternative to the crude free market ideology of the Tories.
The economic policies of the Labour leadership are a major obstacle to a sustained fightback against the attack on the welfare state.
Although it will be the struggle of public service workers and users of welfare services which will determine the outcome, the political and ideological fight over the economy is an important determinant of how that struggle proA forthright socialist challenge to the capitalist market system would reinforce those fighting the Tory offensive.
It is now a key task for the left of the labour movement, inside and outside the Labour Party, to break the economic consensus over deflationary, anti-welfare There is widespread anger and frustration over Labour's feeble performance at every level of the labour movement.
The fight against the economic consensus must be taken both into the unions and the Labour Party, where even in this period, a broad audience for an alternative to free market economics can be Support for Pat and another victimised tube worker, Ray Stelzner. was widespread. The RMT's appeal in their de: fence was circulated to working class organisations worldwide by Socialist Outlook and the süpport of the TUC's general council members was gained by RMT leader Jimmy Knapp. ' Selzner and Sikorski were reinstated on the tube only after a four-to-one ballot victory led to a one-day strike on the Underground line they worked on, and the threat to ballot the whole network. This is a welcome victory for the left at a time when victories are few and far between.
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 55, January 15 1994, Page 3