Labour in every constituency • Vote Labour in every constituency • Vote L since March 1990. It is now much-fiddled official figures. On the basis of calculation used before Tories took office in 1979, the total would be 3.6 million.
The consensus of some 23 forecasters universities, think-tanks, and banks, is that unemployment will continue to rise in 1992, averaging 2.7 million (official; or 3.8 million real over the year Manufacturing output fell 4.5% in 1991; fixed investment building machinery, and so n) fell 11.5 pe cent. and the experts expect it to fall further The human cost was put into gun for every 100,000 people For every 100,000 people who lose their deaths increase i 5,000. mental separate survey found that workers made redundant and Tamilies had visit hospital or a doctor 20% more often after they lost their jobs. crime, violence, and despair on the streets of Tory Britain Yet those who have jobs in Britain work longer hours than anywhere Many of them else Western Europe. desperately overworked: Britain only country in the EC with no law to limit working hours. As Karl Marx put it in Capital, "The condemnation of one part of the working class to enforced idleness by overwork of the other part, and of enriching the individual capitalists", The standard work weel should be reduced by law to 35 hours. And. beyond that. millions of jobs urgently neec doin New houses need to be built, old houses and flats need repair. Tens of thousands are homeless the streets, hundreds of thousands crammed shoddy accommodation. YOL only 35,000 homes are being built for rent by councils and housing associations in 1991-2.
• Unly e pcr cent of Britain's children under three have places in publicly-funded nurseries, compared to 44% in Denmark • In the Health Service, the number of nurses has decreased • while the number of managers has risen 1800%! Ancillary jobs have been privatised and cut the National Childbirth Trust officially advises pregnant women to take cleaning materials to hospital with them so that they can clean and themselves, to avoid infection. The Whittington Hospital in North London plans to stop giving patients an evening meal, providing only soup instead.
• Schools and colleges need repairs for their buildings, teachers for Libraries need more books -some local authorities have lopped buying any new books nd longer opening hours • More buses and trains, and more workers, are needed for public transport.
• Despite all the Tories' claims, their regime has produced no boom in new. contrary: the British share of exports in information technology 970 to 4% in 1984. Britain now d from 9% it consistently imports more manufactured goods than it exports.
THE JOBS THAT need workers should be done by the workers who need jobs! To put together workers with jobs, just two things are needed:
A programme of training and re-training at trade union rates of pay.
• Democratic public control of the "commanding heights" of which allows strategic planning of major investments in housing, childcare. health. transport, new technologies, and so on.
Central to that democratic planning should be a conversion programme for the factories and skilled workers working on military projects which should now be cut back. That military skilled, high-tech manufacturing as Britain still scrapped, the skilled workers sent off to seok jobs in Disneyland, McDonalds, or Chessington Zoo, then it will send this country spiralling down further towards the status of an offshore Buropean site for minor low-wage production and rentier speculation.
THE TORIES SAY that nationalisation and control of industry and credit are shown to be outdated and inefficient by the economic failure of Eastern Europe. That Because it was a bureaucratic corruption, Inertia, alienation, and petty empire-building. No wonder it was ineflicient.
• It was also greatly overcentralised. No working-class Eastern Europe, proposes such ultra-centralisation.
At present major strategic investment decisions are made partly by the flows and whirls of the City's "casino cconomy party by shand-pul industrialists, bankers, servants, and politicians. . It is a crazy system - and one which is well on track to destroy the Earth's ecology We want to replace that crazy system accountable. democratic, environmentallyconscious planning. Millions of economic decisions would still be made through the market or by local democracy.
The ruling Corporation of the City of London, no socialists they, are now protesting bitterly regulation or privatisation of further London buses, because, they say, it will lead to worse public ransport delays. The Thatcher/Reagan deresuraton and privausanon has produced not efliciency but chaos.
The selling-off of state enterprises has brought gains tc their bosses, who have voted themselves huge pay rises, and to the middle-class people who bought shares cut-price. It has and the sold-off enterprises have shown smaller improvements in productivity industries which remain in public ownership!
THE TORIES ALSO say that we can't afford even small improvements services, such as official Labour proposes. They will bring tax increases and trigger price inflation.
This is a lie, too • Despite all their cuts in public services, the Tories have increased taxes for most people. They have reduced income tax -a little for most people, a lot for the rich - but increased taxes. like VAT and poll tax, which hit found for public services and for training and education without ny tax rise at all, just by cutting other parts of state spending on saved on The much What the Tories spent Falklands war and its follow-up clear up and maintenance on all the hospitals in Britain.
• Taxes should be taken from the rich! Today the elective tax rate for the well-off is often lower than for the poor. each extra pound in wakes tax National Insurance (9p), loss housing benefit Family Credit (up to 46p), and loss of other benefits. The well-off lose only 25p or 40p in income tax they are exempt from National Insurancel), and maybe even that if they have skilled tax Labour's official policy of making the well-off pay National Insurance, and raising the top income tax rate to 50%0, should be only a start.
WOULDN'T INCREASED SPENDING and increased employment pull in more imnoris and worsen Britain's balance of payments Wouldn't Government policy of vigorous state intervention, favouring the Probably, too, the German and would. Swedish capitalists who are telling their workers that they are the best-paid, and the bestEurope, so they must accept elsewhere, can put some force behind their threats too. As long as working-class movements limit themselves to national arenas, and capital develops international strategies, powers-that-be can always make such threats.
Sometimes they are bluffing If "too much" public services bring economic ruin, more rather than the better French German, or Scandinavian level?
are bluffing, the answer must be for working-class novements to internationally with international demands campaigns, so that one country's cannot be played off level up workers' rights and conditions across Europe, and to week across the continent, would be a start.
WORKING WOMEN'S CONDITIONS and rights have worsened Women still carn only 68% of men's wages; 80% of Britain's part-time workers -the vast majority of them women - earn less than the "decency threshold" o £3.25 per hour.
Basic rights such as holiday and matemity leave and pay are denied to part-timers "nor for training or promotion. Indeed, the vast majority of women full-time workers are an hour) is a welcome step to particularly, out of the poverty trap. But we want that raised as soon as possible -and definitely within the lifetime of one Labour zovernment - to two thirds he average male wage The proposals to offer all 3-5 year olds who need it will again give a boost to women, enabling them to play a more equal role in society. We must hold Labour to this pledge once in government, and fight any attempts to backtrack on this.
Labour also promises to implement EC directives on paternity leave, parental and mily leave, and equity tor should be only the start of a and benefits not just for women workers. but for all workers; the minimum from which to build. THE TORIES ARE resorting to 71% of them are black. racism in their attempt to win the general election. By trying to people pose a threat to their jobs and right to housing, they hope to stop workers reasing was tac real culprits for rising and homelessness are the Tories themselves, and their friends in The Tories don't care about the colour of their workforce - it vas Enoch Powell who, rory minisier, appelico for wes Indians to come and work in the Abuses in the Police harassment is endemic in the black community: one in avo black yout were stoppa Dy police last year, and, by the age of 21, one in 10 black youth have ocon to prison. Since 1980.
people have died in custody or due to police actions • no-one has ever been charged.
The Tories' latest dose of racism is the Asylum Bill, under those fleeing and seeking asylum will be fingerprinted; appeals against rerusar or asyrum nave to be lodged within 48 hours; in some circumstances there will