Vote Labour: Fight for socialist policies! JOHN MAJOR's cabinet are desperate Every opinion poll forecasts a Tory disaster in the coming local elections.
Even staunch Tory supporters have been rejecting Major's policy of axing schools, old people's homes and social services to pay for tax cuts in the next general election.
Even the promise of tax cuts has been discredited, with 20 separate tax increases since the 1992 election and living standards plunging as the latest cuts in mortgage tax relief kick in.
The old stand-by of privatisation, too, has been thoroughly undermined by the scandalous profiteering of privatised utilities, the sky-high salaries of their directors, and the unpopularity of rail and Post Office privatisation.
Law and order has been neutered as a political weapon by the extreme right wing line of Tony Blair's Labour Party, and the mounting evidence that crime is linked to the social and economic decay of post-Thatcher Britain.
So whatever next? Predictably, the bankrupt party of that 'nice' Mr Major has wheeled out one of the oldest cannons in the Tory arsenal: racism. Architect of immigration laws: Home Secretary Michael Howard A full seven months before the next Queen's Speech in the autumn, ministers leaked to the media the fact that they are planning a new crackdown on illegal immigrants'.
In fact the legislation would target not immigration - which previous racist Tory laws have reduced to an insignificant trickle, causing misery among divided families - but asylum seekers, who have already been victimised in the Asylum Act two years ago.
Hundreds of innocent
asylum seekers, refugees from wars and dictatorships around the world, are currently incarcerated in grim prisons like Campsfield near Oxford. Bosnian refugees already face the closure of the miserable handful of reception centres, and the slashing of government funds for their support.
The Tories want to make it even harder to get into Britain - so they can make it easier for themselves to win racist votes.
This is a sick, cynical trick by a desperate and reactionary Party. The council elections offer workers a welcome chance to throw some of them out of office now: we'll have to wait a little longer to kick out the rest.
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 81, April 8 1995, Page 2