The priorities of the Tories

Scan page 2

IN 1978-9 public spending was about the same for health and social services, or for education, as for the armed forces. In 1984-5 the armed forces will get £1.6 billion more than health and social services, and £3.6 billion more than education.

On the armed forces the government spends £6 a week for In 1978-9 public expenditure on housing was nearly twice that on police and prisons. By 1984-5 the Tories will have neatly reversed the relationship: police and prisons will claim Between 1979 and 1983 the workforce in education went down 7 per cent. More school dinner ladies than steelworkers lost their jobs. Meanwhile police and prison staff increased in Comparing the civil service and the armed forces, you get the same picture. Between 1979 and 1983 civil service numbers declined (despite the big increase in workload at DHSS and Department of Employment offices caused by higher unemployment); the armed forces increased.

Despite all their rhetoric, the Tories have not been rolling back the frontier of the state. Public spending has risen steadily since 1979. What has changed is the direction of public spending, and the contours of the state.

The Tories can find £3 billion to wage the South Atlantic war and sustain 'Fortress Falklands' up to 1986-7. They cannot find £2 billion required to meet TUC proposals for the health service (from 1983-4 to 1985-6), which would maintain They can find perhaps £12 billion for Trident. For the same cost we could have 450 new district hospitals. Instead, hospitThey can also find £37 billion a year for social security -unwillingly, but not as unwillingly as all that, because they know that the army of unemployed is helping them pursue The other change that the Tories have worked in public spending is to shift the ratio of capital to current spending In 1978.9 £16 was spent on capital projects for every £100 current public expenditure; in 1984-5, £9 will be spent.

It is this aspect of Thatcherite policy which has aroused dissent from many capitalists and dissatisfied Tories: slash back further on education or health, they say, and restart the construction projects which offer fat profits to private Partly, the Tories do aim to reduce public spending (only they have not succeeded). But much more fundamentally their Both increases in public spending (on armed forces, police and prisons, social security snoopers, etc.) and decreases serve It is this perspective which allows the Tories to look complacently on the galloping decline of British manufacturing industry. To beat down the working class sufficiently will be a painful process, they think - but once it is done, British capit alism can rise again, as a cheap labour area. Britain in Europe can be the equivalent of Mexico in North America or South Dogma? Voodoo economics? Maybe. But the capitalist critics of Thatcherism have not yet found any capitalist alternative. It was the Wilson/Callaghan government which pioneered monetarism and public service cuts, not Thatcher; and Mitterrand's regime in France is now set on the same road The real alternative is a working class fightback: to resist cuts now and to win a new sort of state, based on collective ownership of the economy and on workers' control.

Paper of Socialist Students in NOLS. 1 postage from Andy Bennett, c/o DSU, Wing themselves from Liverpool City Council's defiance of the Tory government.

True, David Blunkett and Ken Livingstone have said (quietly) that they will give every child, woman and man in Britain. "moral support" But behind the scenes they have been pressurising Liverpool to back down. nearly twice as much as housing.

They argue that the 'real' fight is not now but next year. Those who want to numbers by 7 per cent.