holding down wages, creating mass unemployment (as at British Steel) - this is what the Tory government has in store for the 1980s. Whole areas of the country are to be reduced to the industrial wastelands of the thirties. power and strength of the trade unions seen, most recently, in the 100,000 strong steelworkers' strike. Despite threats, police brutality, witch-hunts in the press, that strike has halted the Tory offensive dead in its tracks.
EMPLOYMENT BILL Workers on March 9th demonstration show their attitude to the Tory government win.
POLICE
No doubt, if the strike had been outcry would have been more muted.
hand to lay in". • CAST IN STEEL.
to private firms - and the support drummed up from other unions such as the miners - has driven the government and its press lackeys into a frenzy. After all, they might but the police have also been told to pull no punches. As Winston Campbell, ISTC picket from Rotherham, put it: "The government has given the police a free In fact, the Tory government has given the police the green light to use "intimidation' and other criminal charges freely against pickets. The results have not been pleasant. Dozens have been arrested, carted off to the courts and fined.
Many more have been subjected to police thuggery. At Sheerness, for example, women pickets - wives of striking steelworkers- were punched and kicked, and at Castle Bromwich, Birmingham, the assaults were so serious that the ISTC issued a formal complaint against the police for injuries inflicted on 4 pickets.
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Not only has a major press barrage been directed against the pickets