TWENTY YEARS AGO...

...in the New Worker


THE NATIONAL Union of Teachers has criticised the Labour Party’s new education policy because it does not promise better pay and conditions.
Unveiled this week, Labour’s election manifesto is very thin on genuine proposals. The promises on nursery places have been heard before, comments about giving education priority over tax cuts is not a commitment to more money for schools.
Proposals for a new Education Standards Council merely acquiesce to the Tory’s regular bleatings about standards.
One vice-president of an NUT association in the Midlands was very critical. “Labour should be saying that it will repeal the worst aspects of the Tory’s education reform act”, she told the New Worker.
“There’s nothing in the programme about restoring teachers’ full negotiating rights. It may already be Labour policy, but it has to be in there if Labour wants to win teachers”.

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THE GORBACHOV leadership is begging for imperialist aid as the country faces famine and starvation this winter. Despite a bumper harvest Soviet citizens face starvation following the collapse of the transport and distribution network due to the dismantling of central planning and introduction of the market economy in the republics.
In the Russian Federation the anti-communist republican government passed the first measures to break up the collective farms and restore private land ownership, while leagues of descendants of former landlords and nobility are holding meetings to establish their claim to land and property confiscated after the October Revolution.
A law permitting workers’ committees to control the distribution of food and other essentials and the right to try black marketers is unlikely to be effective against the muscle of the spivs and gangsters who have mushroomed in Leningrad and Moscow.