Stop the fish war

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'WE will have to use the power of appointment' said Labour front-bencher Robin Cook, 'if we are going to undo the opposition to our policies that we will face as a result of appointments made by Mrs. Thatcher over the past three years.' And the Sunday Times speculated that a Labour government might sack the Tories' new appointment as Bank of England governor, Robin Leigh-Pember.ton.

The appointment was the latest in a series of moves to fill top jobs in the permanent state machine with : reliable Thatcherites. 'Insistence on the complexity of policy issues, by the former governor, Gordon Richardson, is reported by the Financial Times 'not always to have gone down well in Downing Street?

According to the Observer, at meetings with Thatcher Richardson 'would hardly be in the door when she would loose off at him floods of abuse. Then he would say: "Err, Prime Minister, if I might... but he would be silenced by another salvo.' Leigh-Pemberton has no training in banking or economics. Eton, Grenadier Guards, legal practice, and several years as a Tory county councillor are his background.. His current colleagues at the National Westminster bank, trying to say a good word for him to the FT, described him as 'the bank's figurehead', *frightfully good with TORY right-wingers, whose rebellion on December 17 brought the deteat of 1M Y Bank people'. An FT editorial coldly described the appointment as 'surprising and regrettable' But Leigh-Pemberton calls himself unabashedly 'right of centre', and has promised to 'resist the devaluation of the pound which is (wisely or otherwise) part of Labour's economic plans.

Would a Labour government do better with a governor in the mould of Richardson? The FT's warm tribute to him tells us: 'His influence was almost certainly felt in the Leigh-Pemberton decision Mr. Denis by Healey to introduce stock appreciation for tax purposes in 1974' fa decision which virtually exempted firms from paying corporation tax), 'also in the lifting of business rent controls.

'And when the Treasury was holding back Mr. Healey on the introduction of money supply targets' -the centrepiece of monetarism 'the Governor ... egged him on.' Such a role for the Governor of the Bank of England . was not unprecedented. In his memoirs Harold Wilson has described events in November 1964. The pound was sinking on the money markets. "That night we had our most desperate meeting with the Govenor of the Bank (then Lord Cromer). Claiming that our failure to act in accordance with his advice had precipitated the crisis, he was now demanding all-round cuts in expenditure, regardless of social or even economic priorities, and fundamental changes in some of the Chancellor's economic announcements.

'Not for the first time, I -said we had now reached the situation where a newly elected Government with a JOHN HARRIS mandate from the people was being told, not so much by the Governor of the Bank of England but by international speculators, that the policies on which we had fought the election could not be implemented; that the Government was to he forrad inta tha arontion of Tory policies to which it was fundamentally opposed. The Governor confirmed that that was, in fact, the case...

So what's the answer?

CH DIEN plex inclúding the Governor of the Bank of England, top civil servants, and nationalised industry bosses is the bulwark of conservatism that Tony Benn rightly paints it as, then sterner talk from ministers across committee tables will not deal with it.

The minimum democratic policy for a Labour government should be the direct election of all the top officials. But it looks like even Cook's modest moves to sack a Governor. Lord Denning has publicly called for judges to rule illegal the abolition of the House of Lords.

Such moves would prepare the way for the backbone of the permanent state machine — the armed forces hierarchy — to move against any radical Labour government in the name of 'defending the constitution ' The whole team of entrenched Tories - in the bureaucracy, in the forces, in the judiciary, in the monarchy and the House of Lords - holding power whoever holds office, needs to be swept away and replaced by decentralised, direct administration by elected and recallable delegates. THE growing protectionism and nationalism of world capitalism erupted this week into a 'fishing war' between Denmark, Britain and Norway.

Denmark rejected an EEC ministers decision demarcating fishing zones and Danish fishermen are planning to sail into British waters in defiance of the decision. The British navy and RAF are patrolling to defend the property rights of British capitalism. And Norway has declared a dispute wit both Britain and Denmark Nature was contructed without regard to the prejudices of 'national interest' ', and capitalism has been unable to make the sea private property. Yet it cannot design a rational plan for the use of the sea, either, and it cannot decisively sunersede its outdated national frontiers to organise economic activi on the world, or at the least continental, scale that modern productive forces require.

The world is not short of natural resources to br developed, and especiall not of resources in the oceans: Not lack of sea space, but the 8! stem of production for private profit, is at the root of the 'fish war' , as of the dozens of other moves to economic nationalism launched in the current recession.

Socialists can take no responsibility for the sea. grabbing ambitions of an of the national fishing industries. International working class unity, and the fight for a socialist and doman atio unitod namn an nıo Europe, should be our answer.