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From International Socialism, No. 60, July 1973, p. 2.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg, with thanks to Paul Blackledge.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
World prices continue to zoom upwards. Raw material prices have risen by 76% per cent over the last 12 months according to the Economist’s indicator. The increases in the last month were 4.7 per cent for fibres, 8.7 per cent for foodstuffs and 13.2 per cent for metals. US wheat prices are up 85 per cent in 12 months and soyabean prices up by 300 per cent and all the indicators are of continuing rises. The Secretary-General of the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation is predicting world shortages of wheat and rice and the US government is seeking powers to forbid exports of key agricultural commodities except where guaranteed by existing deals.
Prices of manufactured goods are now catching up. In the US, before Nixon’s temporary total price freeze, they were rising at a rate corresponding to 16 per cent a year. In Britain a big batch of increases of between 5 and 10 per cent is now going through the price commission and there are more and more in the pipeline as raw material cost increases are passed on. The visible trade deficit reached an all-time record in May, £209 million, in spite of rising exports.
Meanwhile the TUC talks on. Just before the last Downing Street meeting Vic Feather made a slight threatening noise. ‘The government have their timetable,’ he said, ‘but we also have ours. Unless we can see specific progress when we meet the Prime Minister next week, then the signs point to a rejection by Congress of the government’s inequitable policy.’ Reassurances from Barber that anything at all was open to discussion were sufficient to silence further references to ‘inequitable policy’. However the AUEW decision to pull Hugh Scanlon out of the talks, notwithstanding his vehement arguments to the contrary, will make matters much more difficult both for Feather and for Heath.
In spite of the TUC’s flunkeyism, accelerated inflation makes it more and more likely that Heath’s Phase Three will be as unsuccessful as Nixon’s. Whatever deal is cooked up – and the amendment of the Industrial Relations Act which will be part of it will be bruited about as a great victory – the prospects of successful enforcement are cut across by the realisation that real wages are declining. Already, retail sales are slowing down. Of course there are no automatic victories. Everything depends on the self-confidence and determination of militants. The job of revolutionaries is to reinforce these and to persistently expose the fraud of capitalist incomes policies. We are cutting with the grain.
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Last updated on 23.9.2013