The Next Step: No. 2, 26 April 1985

Women's rights the nextstep Revolutionary Communist Party weekly • 26 April 1985 • down the tube Enoch Powell's Bill to ban embryo experiments is part of the Tory drive to restrict women's access to abortion and contraception • Turn to page 4

THE POWELL BILL MEANS...

Kinnock and the left p6,7 Provocation in the pits p3 The truth about the IRA p5 Sex reforms in South Africa p8 2

tnS Revolutionary Communist Party weekly • 26 April 1985 • No 2 Family life One thing Margaret Thatcher and Neil Kinnock agree on is the sanctity marriage and the family.

BOTT

contributed to 'VIP tips for married bliss' in the latest edition of the British Medical Association's handbook Getting married.

'In the end', writes Thatcher, 'the warmth of family and keeping YOUr relationship bright and alive will mean more to you than anything else.' According to Kinnock, a political career involves a lot of time spent away from the family but it should always be possible to maintain closeness and familiarity with day-to-day happenings at home. •Warmth' was one thing missing from the Hurst household on a south London council estate earlier this year. Thirty-one year old Helen and Natasha (11) and Michael(13) all died from hypothermia after being overcome by gas fumes. The heating system on the estate was always breaking down and the Labour council was five months behind on a renovation Staying alive and scheme. keeping together is a struggle for many single-parent families in Thatcher's Britain, especially if they are black. 'Closeness and familiarity' have been difficult to maintain for the Maguire family over the past decade. Anne and Patrick Maguire have just been released after 10 years in prison on charges of handling explosives. Their two teenage sons also received custodial sentences and their daughter was left to grow up without her parents. The charges were based on the forced confession of a relative (subsequently retracted) and forensic (subsequently discredited). They had with any any never Connectors republican organisation and have constantly proclaimed their innocence. But as people the togetherness of their rich family has never been of much concern to the British establishment.

Blaming Nature The more the British ruling class destroys ordinary families, the more its political leaders and hack journalists are enlisted to proclaim the virtues of family life. To judge by the media, the British way of life is under threat from surrogate mothers, teenagers on the pill, carriers of AIDS, and football hooligans. The common themes running through all the moral panics are the elevation of the family, parental responsibility and respect for law and order. At a time of mass unemployment and social instahility the new morality serves a useful purpose for the establishment. The success of the moral campaigners means that evils resulting from the capitalist system are blamed on nature, not the way society is run. It is easier to target gays or Millwall supporters than to identify the hidden hand of capitalist market forces that condemns millions to a life of hopelessness. The family plays a key role in maintaining social stability for the ruling class. Family values provide a conservative alternative to collective action. Throughout the miners' strike the press praised any scab who returned to work and put family before union and class. A nation of families is a collection of private individuals. As atomised individuals workers are no threat to the system. The bosses aim to make the Publisher Revolutionary Communist Party, BM RCP, London WIN 3XX © Copyright Printer Morning Litho Printers Ltd (TU), 439 North Woolwich Road, London E16 America, Asia and Southern Africa f27 • Australasia £32 • Libraries, institutions £30 All cheques payable to Junius Publications Ltd.

Circulation 01-729 3771 2O the next step • 26 April 1985 family a mechanism for self-control of the working class. It was Labour leader James have Callaghan who first raised the banner of the family the auring campaign. But Thatcher has made the issue her own over the past five years.

"Think about the family' she told her that ministers, as she set up a special family policy group'. Thatcher's aim encourage personal responsibility and a sense of individual self-respect. This was necessary to compensate for the destruction of welfare services recommended by the Tory think tank in 1982. Since then many of these recommendations have been carried through. Women carry the can The new morality is good business. The Tories have saved billions by making the individual rather than society responsible for looking after children and the sick, caring for the elderly, the mentally ill and the handicapped. The responsible family carries the burden for cuts in the health and local authority service, eleanor services. The new morality has encouraged attacks on homosexuals, restrictions on doctors prescribing the pill and researching into embryos. It has created a climate in which conformity is acceptable experimentation a crime. Censorship has been extended to cover sex education and even medical research. This morality has gained acceptance in the most unlikely quarters. Sections of the women's movement have adopted many of the assumptions of the new morality. tests fashionable in feminist circles to denounce have promiscuity and to extol the virtues of motherhood. The main victims of the new morality are women. Women carry the burden of the increased work inside the family. A heavier load in the home reduces women's capacity to get work and participate in the wider life of society outside. Restrictions on access to contraception and abortion reduce women s freedom to escape from the drudgery of child-bearing and child-rearing.

too, carry the burden of the cares of holding the family together under the pressures of the recession. These pressures make many women the victims of domestic violence, leading to divorce and family breakdown.

These are the realities of family life behind the platitudes churned out by Thatcher and Kinnock. For many, family relationships are a source of affection and intimacy and fulfilment. But the pressures of decaying capitalism are turning the family into a nrison for many neone esnecialiv for women. Communists are often accused of being anti-family. We are not against the family as such, but we are against its use as a prison to control the working class and restrict the rights of women.

The most effective way to oppose the new moralists and their backward-looking family ideology is by fighting to defend women's rights. The immediate focus of that struggle is the resistance to the Powell Bill (see page 4). The national demons- 27 April tration occasion on which to stand up against the whole drive by the British establishment to divide and demoralise the working class and to drive women back into the home.

Annual subscrintion rates • Britain and Ireland 919e Eurone f24 e Middle Fast and North Africa 626 Newsdesk 01-729 3771 Correspondence to The Editor, the next step, BCM JPLTD, London WIN 3XX. ISSN 0144 350 X 26 April 1985. Registered as a newspaper at the Post Office.

1979 election was to and become courts and the union. Women, more than 100 miners: give us names, solicitor for three days.

nothing else to do.' imnortoni management suspended US. bank.' Miners in jail, on the dole Locked up and locked out *I was sent to prison on remand and did three weeks in solitary.' This young miner has to remain anonymous because he is still facing serious charges in the courts and the possibility of a longer stretch in prison. Last week he spoke to tns about the police, the Like every miner who ended up behind bars and out of a job, John X played an active role in the strike. He was picked up in a mass swoop by the police which pulled in initiative *The police used the usual tactics. They got one lad in, then they got other names. They were telling people "we'll give you bail if you any names". People were confessing to things they hadn't done. They told me I was going to get life imprisonment.'

The police wouldn't let John speak to a and the When he did, it didn't do John much good. He got 15 weeks on remand in prison. He spent three weeks in solitary confinement with no explanation: That was hell, it really was. I thought I'd go off my head talking to myself. I had no contact with anybody for three weeks. I had to eat my food in my cell and I got one shower the whole time I was in there. I got exercise every three days for 15 minutes. They gave me a bible to read — it's quite readable when you've The day before the miners returned to work and three days before he got out of prison, John got a letter telling him he was suspended from work. When he complained couldn't that he be said fair pay they enough, you're sacked'. John is living on donations from men at his pit. But he thinks that it shouldn't be up to his fellow miners to pay him out of their wages: 'It was the union who called us out on strike and it was the union who sent us picketing so it should be the union who pays us. I can't see why they called the levy unless it was just an excuse to get the union leadership out of having to pay The unions's still got millions in the John is counting the days until he's up in jobs back. court again. He thinks he'll be sent back to jail. Jailed miners are counting the weeks and years before they get out of prison. Sacked miners are looking ahead to a grim future on the dole. The miners' leaders are putting the past behind them and deserting the men who paid a heavy price for fighting for their jobs.

Many sacked miners are counting on their local officials or the government arbitration body Acas to do a deal with the pit manager.

They have given up waiting for the national leadership to launch a campaign to get them reinstated. Last week the NUM executive threw out a motion from the Kent area demanding a national campaign and conference in defence of the sacked men. There was only one vote in support of Kent's Scottish

TUC.

NUM

At the leaders Mick McGahey and George Bolton could only offer their 207 sacked members goodwill and moral support.

Sacked miners everywhere are still being refused unemployment and social security benefits by the department of employment

DHSS.

They are relying on collections and loans to get by. The authorities are still undecided about whether the miners' strike is over. Sacked miners are expected to live on air until they make their minds up. The NUM is putting them off with vague promises of a national trust fund some time in the future. Jailed and sacked miners deserve solidarlty not sympatny irom tne labour movement.

They are not ordinary prisoners. They were arrested because they were prepared to take on the employers, the government, the courts and the police to defend their jobs, They were their dignity and their class.

charged with extraordinary offences such as riotous assembly and conspiracy under laws enacted to defend the employers' class. They were sentenced to long terms of imprison ment by the bosses' courts to teach the rest of the working class a lesson. They have earned the right to demand special treatment from the labour movement. Support the campaign demanding: • Amnesty for all prisoners of the class war • Reinstatement for every victimised miner • All-out union support for the prisoners.

Members of the civil service union, the CPSA, should organise in their branches to pay out full benefits to imprisoned and victimised miners and their families until they get their Send details of successful motions, donations and messages of support to BM RCP, London WCIN 3XX. Make cheques payable to Class war prisoners

"They're giving the miners hell' W e've had six weeks of hell and we can't take any more, Jud Roberts from Askern colliery in Yorkshire told us last week.

The coal board is out to provoke militants into action so that they can isolate and victimise them. Joan Phillips reports from the coalfields. *Every day there's somebody having a go says lan from Westoe in South at you, Shields. Last week miners at Askern and Westoe put their foot down management provocation and came out on strike. This week they are back at work thanks to the efforts of their union leaders.

The NUM has submitted to the coal board's regime of terror at national, area and local level. The result is that the militant minority are hitting out in isolation while the majority of miners have become demoralised. Many feel that nothing can be done to defend jobs, wages and conditions. But a lot could be done if only the miners' leaders would get their act together. Miners need a national strategy to resist the coal boara clampaown • The transfer trap *From now on they're going to transfer you and transfer you until you get sick of moving and pack it in yourself, says Mick from Miners are moving round the rrickley. coalfields like commuters. The militants are being sent packing to short-life pits and Two hard time. miners who given transferred to Armthorpe from Brodsworth in the Doncaster area were told: 'You might have been underground fitters at Brodsworth, but here you're pit top fitters with pit top pay'. Last Friday they packed their bags again and returned to Brodsworth to face an uncertain future. • The slippery slope •Jobs are disappearing like hot cakes,' according to one miner from Bates colliery in Northumberland where 280 jobs are on the line. More than 1200 more are up for the axe in the north east coalfield and more than a quarter of the area's 22 000 miners have decided to take the money and run. Last week every Brodsworth miner got 'personal message' from the colliery manager telling them that to make Brodsworth a viable pit' 520 jobs had to go through transfers and voluntary redundancies.

At Frickley, where the men got the same message a week earlier, the NUM has told its members to get out while the going is good.

• Pricing miners out of work •We're on a day wage now, f80 a week, no bonus, no water money, no money for shift David is a miner at reports, no nothing.' Askern. Last week 72 miners at his pit refused to work a new face until manage- The pit ment paid them bonus money.

manager decided that if one unit wouldn't work nobody would work and locked everybody out. The union officials worked hard to get the men back to work. At a meeting with colliery manager Buxton the day after the strike started, branch officials agreed to order the facemen to return to work immediatelv But their powers persuasion were no match for the men's anger. "They told the union that they didn't care what their recommendation was, they weren't going back to work until they got their bonus agreement, reports Jud Roberts.

The Askern men are back at work but they are angry at the union's readiness to toe the management line. • Broken promises *Agreements are being broken right, left and centre and it's causing real aggravation,' says Pete from Yorkshire Main.

The coal board is removing customs and practices built up over many years. Decrees and ultimatums have taken their place: •We were told "there's four shifts - if you don't do it you're out" and that was it.' (Tony, Keresley, Midlands)

ACTION

Pit provocations 'Management are walking all over us: Jud Roberts, Askern, Yorkshire 'Management came along and said "we're not going to pay you your f16 for filling out shift reports, but you've got to keep doing it".

Things are coming to a head.' (Nigel, Frickley, Yorkshire) *Nothing was said, they just stopped our half an hour riding time.' (Kevin, Betteshanger, Kent) • Crackdown 'Management are getting away with murder, says lan from Hatfield. 'Last Friday they hauled one man into the office after he was caught picking coal and threatened him with the sack.' The week before management at Frickley showed what they meant by natural wastage when they sacked a miner for the same thing. The coal board has hired private security firms to do its dirty work: They sit their vans watching. Sometimes they In stand at the shaft side at the end of a shift. If you come out with a little bag of coal you've

SCARGILL COOKS THE BOOKS

Who rules? ARTHUR SCARGILL'S RESPONSE to the problems the NUM faced during the strike is to change the union rules. The new draft rulebook is up for approval at the NUM's special rules revision conference in July. But bureaucratic manipulation is no substitute for political leadership. Scargill's rule changes are an excuse for avoiding real problems and the action required to tackle them. The new rules • Specify that the union president has no casting vote 'in any capacity'. This will allow Scargill to remain in office for life without standing for re-election. Scargill's decision Management is out to discipline the militants. Last week at Westoe in South Shields the whole pit walked out in protest at the sacking of strike activist Kevin Smoult for alleged assault on a working miner. The men were out for 24 hours before the union got them back to work. Kevin Smoult's fate will be decided at a meeting this week between the area management and the Activists have been everywnere hauled before management answer charges of 'gross industrial misconduct' "They strip you down, make you look like a pillock, and make you miss a shift, said Martin from Rossington. • Striking back 'You have a job finding a union man these days,' says Michael from Brodsworth. The union machine has fallen apart in many pits.

Union officials are keeping their heads down and pulling up very lite recistance management attacks. One miner from Bold to put himself out of arm's reach of his members reflects a lack of confidence in his leadership and policies. The consequence is to make the union leadership even less accountable to the rank and file.

Require a thirds of majority conference delegates, executive members and individual members of the NUM before any national official can be removed from office. This puts the appointment of area officials under national control and enshrines the principle that union officials should be appointed and not elected. It avoids confronting the problems that are a barrier to uniting the union in moderate areas like Nottinghamshire.

• Arm the national executive with power to call out any area or areas on official strike This ignores the central lesson of the strike - the need to win all-out national action through a political campaign among the rank and file. • Indemnify union officials from court fines and legal action and forbid any member from taking the union to court without first going through an elaborate grievance procedure Anv militant wants the hosses courts kept out of union affairs, but the NUM leaders' position would be stronger if they stopped resorting to the courts to resolve internal union conflicts.

• Create a new category of 'associate members' which include women's con support group members othe 'persons who in the opinion of the national executive committee are suitable to be said that the strike had opened a lot of miners' eyes: 'Before it seemed like the union was militant. The strike changed all that and they let us down. It's not that the union has changed, it's just that now we can see that we've got problems whereas before it seemed alright.' Many miners were disenchanted with the union at the end of the strike, but now they are becoming cynical. To stop the rot we've got to reorganise the union and regroup our forces: • We must make sure that any action we take in response to provocation is coordinated at a national level and that we win the arguments guarantee all-out to support. necessar Miners are rightly wary of calls for lightning strikes at individual pits after 12 months which exposed the folly of area-by-area action. We need to strike hard and fast, but we need to strike together. • We need a national strategy and a national lead to combat the bosses' closure and transfer programme. Many miners have fallen into the redundancy trap because they can see no fight coming from the union. But the miners did not fight for a year to be told by their union officials to get out before the going gets rougher. Rank and file miners must make all redundancies a practical

OODOS BOR TO

reality. • Don't let them pick us off section by section.

We must get together in mass meetings in every pit to ensure maximum unity.

We must match the coal board in its • contempt for past procedure and its disregard for the rule book. NUM officials are advising us to use Acas and the courts to enforce local agreements. We know that we cannot expect anything from the courts except a kick in the Teeth. Phone in information about what is going on in your pit to Joan Phillips on 01-729 3771 and find out what is being organised in your area. associate members'. The new membership category will not give women a vote and it will not allow them to stand for election to union positions. The miners' leaders didn't let women have any say in the running of the strike when it really mattered and the new rule merely formalises The bureaucratic control imposed on the women's groups.

ine new rules have already provoked a backlash from the moderate areas and laid the union open to attacks from the right.

They should be rejected by the rank and file who have no interest in perpetuating the rule of leaders who are not fit to lead.

The f in vour pocket is worth more in ours. If vor really want to see your money work invest it in the weekly tns. Rush donations to BM RCP, London WIN 3XX. Cheques payable to RCP Association. Special thanks this week to Tom Richardson, Middlesborough and Jerry Moss, London the neyt sten 26 Anri 1095m?

his week Enoch Powell's Unborn Children (Protection) Bill looks set of its stage parliamentary life. Powell wants to ban experiments on embryos, while Dame Mary Warnock wants the test-tube baby business to be tightly controlled. Although Powell's Bill probably won't become law, everybody is talking about embryo rights.

But what about women's rights?

Louise Brown, the world's first test-tube baby, was greeted as a great achievement back in 1978, but she was a real threat to the Contraception had long establishment. separated sex from child-bearing. The new separated technology now Artificial child-bearing from sex. in-vitro fertilisation and insemination, motherhood opened up the surrogate possibility of any woman having any man's baby. These scientific advances threatened the whole basis of family life.

background of public *Against and the Warnock concern excitement commission was set up in 1982. Its report was published last summer and legislation expected shortly. its proposals Warnock's object was to work out a way that the new technology could be used to enhance rather than undermine the family.

The Tories are keen to promote the family to look after all the crumbling welfare state. They also look to the family to provide order and stability in a society increasingly disrupted by conflict.

The family is a boon for the bosses, but it condemns women to the burden of work in the home and forces them to accept secondrate jobs outside it. The new morality fostered by Warnock and propagated more reinforce stridently by seeks women's inferior position in society.

The Warnock committee recommended a ban on experiments on embryos after 14 days, a ban on commercial surrogacy and a new definition of parental rights. But its attempt to establish principles only exposed the hypocrisy of conventional morality.

• The sanctity of life Warnock claimed that a society which had no inhibiting limits, especially in the areas concerned, with which we have been questions of birth and death, of the setting up of families, and the valuing of human life, would be a society without moral scruples' It sometimes seems that the only sort of life that is sacred to the British establishment is that of embryos in test-tubes. The power of the British ruling class is based on its success in liquidating millions of lives in its wars of conquest and exploitation around the world. Today its moral scruples are easily suspended when it comes to the sailors in the Belgrano or teenage joy-riders in West Belfast. The thousands through industrial wrecked every veal accidents merit not a fraction of the concern given to a few microscopic cells.

A glance at recent history is sufficient to make clear that nobody's life is sacred if they stand in the way of the ruling class. The the proclaims sanctity of estanlichment embryo life only to deny rights to women.

• Embryo rights held long The Warnock committee discussions on the fraught question of when does life begin?' It concluded that 'although the questions of when life or personhood of fact begin appear to be questions susceptible to straightforward answers, we hold that the answers to such questions in fact are amalgams of factual and moral judgements'. The hardline moralists believe that life begins at the moment of conception, but the pragmatists settled on the arbitrary different 14-day limit. in practice considerations govern who is deemed to be a person. Many people who uphold the rights of the embryo concede that abortion is 4 O the next step • 26 April 1985

EVENTS

Powell and Warnock justified on the grounds of rape or if severe congenital abnormality is diagnosed early in pregnancy. It is common practice for babies born with abnormalities which would lead being mentally retarded, them incontinent and unable to walk, to be allowed to die. In other words social, not metaphysical or scientific factors, really decide who lives and who dies It is absurd to talk of the rights of the embryo. Rights only have any meaning for individuals in society. Human life as we know it can only begin at birth, a fact acknowledged in practice, if not in theory, all but the . fundamentalist by most theologians. The only point in endowing the embryo with rights is to deny the rights of Keep it in the family: Dame Mary Warnock is worried that womb-leasing will break up happy homes

CAMPAIGNING AGAINST POWELL

Abortion is the issue SATURDAY'S national demonstration against the Powell Bill is a step forward in the fight for women's rights. Yet when the Bill was first debated in the House of Commons in February the only protest was organised by revolutionary communists. It was not until the Bill was going through its National committee stages That Ahartion Campaign began to move into action on the issue. Why the delay?

When Nac supporters at a meeting in Leeds were invited to join the early protests against Powell, they refused. They argued that the issues at stake were confused. Some maintained that 'male doctors experimenting on embryos from women's bodies' was as bad as 'male doctors trying to control women's fertility'. In fact there is nothing confusing about the Powell Bill: It is a straightforward attempt to elevate the rights of embryos over the rights of women as part of a wider drive to tie women more securely to the family. The confusion is entirely in Nac and the wider women's movement of which it is a part. Nac has been in hiding since it split with the Women's Reproductive Rights Campaign in October 1983. But the forces of right-wing reaction have not called a truce Embryos don't have rights the woman, in whom this clot of cells is located, to dislodge it by any means including the morning after pill, the coil, or by a later abortion. This indeed is the whole object of the debate about embryo rights.

• The dignity of women According to Warnock it is inconsistent with human dignity that a woman should use her uterus for financial profit and treat it as an incubator for someone else's child.

The report considers it liable to mora objection' that 'people should treat others as a means to their own ends, and that this becomes positively exploitative when financial interests are involved".

If this principle was followed the whole Chrle Black (reller) over the last 18 months. The Tories have put the squeeze on the health service, with the result that women have increasingly been forced to turn to the private sector for The moralists have swung the abortions. climate of opinion in favour of the family and against abortion. Motherhood has fashionable cause than become a more abortion even in feminist circles. But where was Nac when women needed it?

At Nac's tenth anniversary rally in March the campaign's leaders explained that they had been busy in the miners' strike, their supporters had drifted away and they had no money. Now the miners' strike is over and the left is looking around for new issues, the Powell Bill provides a useful focus.

The problem is that Nac's narrow approach is no match for the wide ranging right-wing attack.

The thrust of Nac's criticism of Powell is that his proposal will make it more difficult for infertile women to conceive. As a leading Nac representative puts it 'we oppose the Bill because it damages an important technique that has brought hope to many childless people'. Yet the real aim of the whole embryo debate is not to deter pregnancies, but to create a climate of opinion within which it will become increasingly difficult capitalist system of exploitation would collapse. Warnock is perturbed at the idea of a woman's womb being used as an incubator for someone else's child. But is this not the experience of working class women? One of the main functions of women in capitalist society is to produce a new generation of workers who can be exploited for financial gain. One of the main functions of marriage and the working class family is that the woman's uterus should be of service to the ruling class, in the same way as the rest of her anatomy. Enoch Powell's Unborn Children (Protection) Bill, which got its second reading in February, is an attempt to preempt Warnock. It proposes a ban on 'pure embryo research and regulations that all doctors carrying out in-vitro fertilisation must get the written permission of the secretary of state before implanting a named woman with an embryo. Bill aims to give rights to Powell's embryos from conception, with the implication that post-coital contraception and abortion could be deemed illegal Although it won a majority on its second reading (44 Labour MPs backed Powell) there was never much chance of it becoming law. Its role has been to stir up prejudices about evil scientists cloning embryos or creating hybrids or otherwise tampering with the species. Two million people signed a petition to parliament backing Powell's stance Now that Powell has created the right climate the way is clear for new legislation along the lines recommended by Warnock The whole debate is a threat to women's rights because it celebrates women's role in the family. Those who support Powell do so in the name of motherhood and family Most of his opponents uphold values. embryo experimentation on the grounds that this will overcome the problems of infertility and allow all women the fulfilment of childbirth. The only effective response to Warnock, Powell and the whole debate is to fight for women's right to contraception and free abortion on demand, to free them from the tyranny of family life.

Kate Marshall for women to avoid or terminate them In its desire to please Giversi Nac continually misses the supporters, central point. Nac emphasises that the Bill's provisions constitute an invasion of privacy confidentiality' and and doctor-patient reprimands Powell for his 'attempt to preempt any sensible and rational discussion' of the Warnock recommendations. Our point naf are not interested in any is that we discussions of any recommendations that can only result in further restrictions on limited access to women's contraception and abortion.

We welcome Nac's belated decision to ioin the resistance to the Powell Bill. But we hope that Nac supporters will recognise that to defeat whatever measures follow its demise, we will need to fight on a wider front, for free abortion on demand and nothing less. Ann Burtor

IRISH WAR REPORTS

he IRA is a bunch of 'brutal, T barbaric' terrorists which does not have the support nationalists in Northern Ireland and is not the force it once was, according to the latest Royal Ulster Constabulary report week. published But publication of the republican roll of honour, listing the fallen IRA volunteers of the last 16 years, indicates the IRA's true status as a flourishing national liberation movement with deep roots inte community. The RUC's yearly report, penned by chief constable Sir Jack Hermon, claims that 'terrorist violence' in Northern Ireland is now at its lowest level since 1970. Only 64 people died "the troubles' last year, In compared to 467 deaths in the peak year of 1972 and the 77 killed in 1983. claims that the number of IRA bombings also been and snooungs reduced. The RUC report tries to rebuff the notion that the nationalist community increasingly alienated from the Northern Ireland state and willing to back the IRA.

On the contrary, Hermon asserts, there has been a substantial increase in the number of Catholics joining the British security fight the republican forces to against movement. War as normal Hermon's tone reflects the swageering limited success which Crown forces have recently achieved against the IRA. In the 15 months up to March, 15 IRA volunteers were gunned down in an RUC/SAS shootto-kill campaign a casualty rate not matched since the mid-seventies.

The drop in the level of IRA activity has allowed the British authorities to introduce measures which they hope can give Northern Ireland the appearance of a 'normal' part of the United Kingdom. Shoppers can now enter Belfast's city centre without being searched. And the RUC has replaced the British Army as the public face of the security forces But British boasts about the 'decline' of

IRA

the amount

TO M

propaganda hased on twisted facts and carefully massaged statistics. The IRA today is a more efficient outfit than the force of the early seventies. It is capable of achieving results with less effort. Almost half of the casualties in the Irish War last year were members of the Army, the Ulster Defence Regiment and the RUC, assassinated by the

IRA.

After the spectacular mortar attack on the RUC station at Newry, which killed nine Loyalist officers in February, the RUC insisted that it was tightening up to ensure the IRA never achieved such success again.

Yet this month the republican movement went back and bombed the Newry court house, killing an RUC man and a security officer. Behind the facade of normality which the British authorities have tried to erect, the republican threat to British rule in Northern Ireland means the Crown forces still have to act as an army of colonial occupation. The troops who once manned the security gates in the centre of Belfast have merely moved and set up armoured pill boxes across the hills of South Armagh. And the RUC men proudly patrolling the streets of Belfast and Derry would not dare set foot outside their barracks without the constant companionship of British troops dodging from corner to corner in a ring around the police. Republican roll of honour How has the IRA managed to sustain its campaign against the British war machine since 1969? If Hermon was right about Catholic acceptance of the Northern Ireland state and willingness to join the RUC, the republican movement would have collapsed long ago. But Hermon is wrong, and he it. knows community The nationalist recognises Northern Ireland as an artificial British creation, set up to deny the Irish people their right to national independence.

Nationalists hate the British and Loyalist IRA-fact and fiction forces which enforce their oppression. In the ghettos of West Belfast and Derry's Bogside, and in the Catholic towns which line the Catholic Border, they give their support to the IRA as force in the the leading freedom. This week brings the anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, the battle from which the

IRA

ROCCUS

anniversary is always an occasion for the republican movement to remember its dead A brief survey of the roll of honour which nationas lists volunteers killed since 1969 shows the IRA's durability and breadth of support.

The roll of honour exposes the British myth that republican soldiers are a handful of hardened 'men of violence' who steal across the Border from the Irish Republic in the dead of night, plant a few bombs and Hermon run Then naCk majority of the 255 republicans listed were young, working class people who lived their sharply whole lives under British tyranny in the cities of Northern Ireland. Keeping the faith Every section of the nationalist working class has given blood for the cause of Irish freedom. The republican women of Cumann na mBan, while rarely serving on the front line of the war, have lost 10 volunteers. But Ther most nouicease connoion tone armed struggle is that made by Irish youth.

Many of the IRA volunteers shot down by British and Loyalist guns were in their teens The twentes more than

LABOUR AND RACISM

ANGRY BLACKS demanding the right to organise separate black sections called a protest outside the headquarters during this week's meeting of the national executive. Black activists want their own sections and they want more black parliamentary candidates in winnable seats.

delegates on the committees that select candidates and representation national executive. sections have threatened a mass withdrawal of black votes from Labour if they don't get their way. The Labour leadership has taken a hard line against black sections, dismissing them as 'divisive. Neil Kinnock fears that putting blacks up for parliament in marginal seats will cost the party white votes. Kinnock's reactionary line has been supported by the union leaders and the Militant Tendency.

Right-wing Labour MP Andrew Faulds labelled black section activists as lunatics' for suggesting that his constituency was ripe for a black MP.

Faulds insisted that a black candidate would "lose the seat', and that 'with a majority of 3300 we can't monkey about.

organised union votes to crush the black proposal at last sections conference. National agent David Hughes has told constituencies that their selection of candidates will be ruled invalid if unofficial black sections are involved.

Black protests that the Labour Party has failed to fight racism either outside or inside are entirely iustified. But black Ite ranks sections are no solution to the problem.

15 years old. just Irish hundreds fight for Britain. emerged. The godfathers'. mothers, bolt-holes The appeals movement to for help. of resistance will ring hollow.

average age resistance Black section blues Party Labour party, not its policies. They want its restrICTS the organisational Supporters of black the left's challenge. mass of black people. Warley East Kinnock year's party Defending made British working class. republican prisoners in the H-Blocks is 25 One of the three IRA men executed in cold blood by the SAS in Strabane this year was The involvement of nationalist youths in the republican movement reflects the popular and energetic support for the war against Thousands of nationalists look to the men and women of the republican movement to protect their communities from both British terror and criminal harassment. The RUC report highlights the IRA's punishment of criminals as indicating that 'nothing less than broken limbs and battered bodies satisfies the power lust of the paramilitary see things Nationalists differently. A recent letter to West Belfast's Andersonstown News, signed by 'Lenadoon *the - republican tor take action against the Lenadoon hoods' who had burnt down a local community centre. The women of West Belfast have seen too many of their children and homes battered and burnt by the forces of British law and order to turn to the RUC The nationalist community in Northern Ireland puts its faith in the hands of the heroic young freedom fighters who have defended their people against the British men of violence for almost 16 years. While that faith remains, and the IRA's struggle continues, Britain's boasts about the decline Mick Hume The IRA mortar attack on Newry police station blew the cover on British lies about declining republican Labour's support for immigration controls and racist police have not been raised in the black sections debate. The arguments are all about the organisational structures of the The Labour left has promoted black sections as a gesture towards fighting racism and cleaning up Labour's image. But the left fight against racism to the manoeuvres inside Labour Party. This bureaucratic approach leaves the issue of black representation open to manipulation by the right. In east London Peter Shore has manipulated representatives of the Bangladeshi community to ward off Black sections may provide committees and careers for a handful of black activists.

But they provide no solution to the problems of discrimination and repression facing the A letter from a black section activist to this month's London Labour Briefing admits the 'sad reality' that the black person in the street cared little' about the Greater London Labour Party's vote against black sections.

The majority of blacks do not care how many black MPs the Labour Party can put on parade. They care how many blacks have been deported by Labour governments and how many have been terrorised by police forces funded by Labour councils.

black rights means campaigning against the Labour Party and its accommodation to the racists who have blacks an isolated section of the

THE

PROPAGANDA

WAR

OUR VAL'S FASCIST FATHER

Two days is a long time in royal politics.

On Monday 15 April everybody was attacking Princess Michael of Kent for having a father in Hitler's SS. By Wednesday the same pundits were leaping to her defence. At first the establishment didn't mind the press slagging off the most unBritish and unorthodox member of the royal family. But when people started asking if all of 'Britain's favourite family' weren't just a bunch of foreigners with fascist friends, the powers that be declared the matter closed. Michael is a strange name for a princess.

So the royals call her 'Our Val after the Valkyries, a gang of big blonde furies who marauded their way through Germanic legend. It's the Windsors' way of letting her know that foreign, Catholic divorcees can't really be part of the orb and sceptre set.

Buckingham Palace wasn't too bothered about the initial story on Val's Nazi connections, because the royals don't think much of her background or behaviour either. The six-foot blonde and stylish princess lacks the horse-faced looks of British royalty and is considered a pushy, vulgar upstart. Only days before the SS story broke she demeaned herself by opening a 'Little Chef greasy spoon motorway cafe. The woman was obviously in need of a right royal spanking, and the Hitler connection was as good a stick as any to beat her with. Things started to get out of hand when the wider implications of the scandal became apparent. If Val was under suspicion for being German, what about the rest of the royals? One glance at their family tree shows that the people who are supposed to embody the great British nation are all 'bloody foreigners". Even worse, - with the notable exception most of them of Phil the Greek - are Germans.

Next it became clear that Princess Michael was far from unusual in being a royal with a fascist skeleton in her cupboard. In the appeasement years of the thirties the royal family, like the whole British establishment, had strong affinities with fascism in both Britain and Germany.

Like Val's father they were sympathetic to the fascists' anti-communism. The Oueen's uncle was a staunch admirer of Hitler, first as King Edward the eighth and later, after he abdicated, as the Duke of Windsor. Last week The Sunday Times revealed that an uncle of Prince Charles had been a leading SS officer. This was all too much for the defenders of British democracy, who immediately backtracked and tried to play down the 'Nazi Princess' story.

Every pillar of the British establishment stepped forward to protest that Val was innocent. Apparently, she had always believed that her father was a concentration camp victim who escaped into Austria in true Sound of Music style, pushing his family across the Alps in a wheelbarrow.

Anyway, he had only been an honorary' SS member - a previously unheard of distinction presumably awarded for community service. Everybody, from the editor of The Times to left-wing MP Eric Heffer, insisted Val could not be blamed for the sins of her father. The establishment can't have its cake and eat it. Perhaps the sins of a father should not be visited on his children but then neither should his property and power. A gang of thieves which claims the hereditary right to rule can't complain when embarrassing questions are asked about their forebears. Those who live by the genes, fall by the genes.

the next step 26 April 1985 0 5

issatisfaction with the Tories has led to a revival of the Labour Party in the opinion polls. The media have set about presenting Kinnock should Thatcher minister blunder. Back in February The Economist, the house journal of British big business, congratulated Kinnock as the British politician who had Ronald learned most before policy. pulling Hage reckoned that Kinnock 'in office would have to do a MacDonald or a Mitterrand, accepting good government of Britain from the IMF (International Monetary Fund)'. In other words, Kinnock has satisfied the pundits that he is just like social democratic party leaders in Britain in the thirties and France in the eighties.

He could be relied upon to do as he was told if called upon to run the country.

The Economist demanded that 'the modern, non-collecuvist, markel-compandie programme that many Labour politicians mutter about hetween themselves had better come out of the closet, soon'. In recent weeks a stream of 'market-compatible' policies have come pouring out of Labour's closet.

• Labour's March 'alternative budget' posed reflation to the modest tune of £5 billion.

This was the same amount as Edward Heath and £1 billion more than the SDP. Shadow chancellor Roy Hattersley argued that it was important to be realistic and to 'fight the budget on the government's ground rather than on the Labour Party's'. He meant that the Labour Party should demonstrate that its budget could positive contribution makea capitalism, rather than argue its benefits for ordinary people. • Labour's jobs and industry campaign was launched at the beginning of the month by Kinnock, the three Johns (Prescott, Smith and Cunningham) and singer Billy Bragg. It offers to modernise industry and services, to promote education and training, and to encourage a partnership between unions and management level. This commodly Thatcher's enthusiasm for new technology, Heath's plans for rebuilding the sewers and David Owen's affection for co-ops. It adds Kinnock's own company unionism in the workplace.

• Labour's new realism is also the dominant theme in the party's new policies for education and social security, announced last week. There will be no major increase in spending to restore the cuts imposed by the Tories.

Kinnock's distinctive feature as a Labour Party leader is that he is not waiting until he hecomes nrime minister to declare his commit.

ment to running the system. He reckons that gíven Labour's catastrophic electoral decline, the party's only hope is to admit openly that it will take whatever nars measures are necessar to salvage the British economy. He hopes that this approach will win votes from the upwardly mobile to compensate for declining working class support. According to shadow housing minister Jack Straw, 'Labour must have an ideology robust 6O the next step 26 April 1985 as a suitable tall-back prime make a major Reagan abOu The Economist perhaps pro- British scheme combines affinity for Japanese-style as an alternative party of government.

Kinnocks Labour and the left loyal critics The more banana skins Margaret Thatcher steps on, the more the establishment needs to promote Neil Kinnock as an alternative prime minister. The more Kinnock shows his commitment to saving the British economy and crushing the left, the more likely Labour is to be accepted Under his thumb: moving left to right, Tony Benn, Ken Livingstone, Militant's Derek Hatton, Ted Knight, David Blunkett (accompanied by Willis of the TUC) enough to meet the ch the video-recorder and This means adopting alternalive way or ma It also means taking a in the Labour Party w Labour's tradi With socialism. Witch-hunters Kinnock has had the le became party leader a the beginning of the y floated the rumour th challenge Kinnock fo sole object of discredi ary leader. I'm too c conceded Benn, reti fray. Benn's attempt pro-Nato foreign poli of Denis Healey an trounced on the natio round of reselection without a single up: wingers and a numbe The main victim of the left has been the Mili Militant has done stakes. Its former Brighton Kemptown number of seats wh hopeful - East Kilbri East, Glasgow Provan second and more oft Militant, its members local parties it Mansfield and Newca executive is set to end Coventry Militant M conduct of the genera constituency. The Kir Coordinating Comm role in the witch-hur Militant documents t In Liverpool the munist Party and noi Labour Party have a Militant allegations corruption, favourit bureaucratic manipu allegations may well b are commonplace in charges are being dir part of a campaign b win middle class appr robust enough to sm face of the left inside The leadership's confronted the left wit either break out a succumb. The left's r direction of its earlier Thatcher's first victor in 1983 the left sustai of artificial campaign These were ine vea change the constitutio electoral college to ele mandatory reselectic over who should writ

llenge of double glazing.

policies which offer an aging British capitalism.

tough line against those o are publicly identified ional commitment to new broom t on the run ever since he the 1983 conference. At ar the Labour leadership t Tony Benn intended to the leadership with the ing the left's parliamentd for that sort of thing' ing wounded from the to challenge Labour's y, now firmly in the grip I the right, have been al executive. The current has proceeded so far et to established rightof setbacks to the left. leadership's purge on the ant Tendency. badly in the reselection indidate Rod Fitch in was ditched and in a re its candidates were le, Woolwich, Gateshead - they were pushed into Worse for n third place. have been expelled from ith Wales, Blackburn, tle. This week's national rse scathing criticisms of Dave Nellist over his election campaign in his nock-supporting Labour tee has played a leading even leaking internal the gutter press iberal Party, the Com- -Militant sections of the denounced the Militant he council. To discredit ave been circulated of in job allocation, ation and racism. The true, but such practices Labour councils. These cted against Militant as the Labour leadership to val by showing that it is sh the most conspicuous he Labour Party. urch to the right has ı a difficult choice. It can fight or dig in and sponse has followed the ctivity. In the years from in 1979 to her landslide ed itself through a series inside the Labour Party. of the movements to 1 of the party, to form an t the leader, to introduce for MPs and disputes the manifesto. The high point was Benn's (unsuccessful) campaign for the deputy leadership in 1981. The left largely ignored the important issues in the real world outside the Labour Party - unemployment, the riots, the war in Ireland. The left became inward looking and isolated.

The more direct Tory attacks on the labour movement following the 1983 election fiasco further the put the Kinnock shifted the leadership towards the middle ground, the defend the threatened institutions of the old The result movement. Kinnock pulled the whole Labour machine towards the centre, he dragged the left along.

The left's inability to break out of Labour's fatal embrace meant that it moved further and further away from the working class. The left's role in local government allegiance to the official labour increasingly leads it into conflict with the needs of workers. Socialist productivity schemes For the past year the left has mobilised around calls to. 'save the GLC and the metropolitan 'defend counties, or to the councils'. In recent weeks left union officials in the threatened Labour councils have linked up in a national body. Yet all the practical activity the proposed by local government stewards is posed in terms of defending the Labour councils and Labour councillors, not in terms of the immediate defence of jobs and conditions. in the identifies with the employers more than it does with the workers. Over the past five years the left has become heavily dependent on Labour councils for jobs and grants for its projects.

In the early eighties the left-backed Labour councils avoided central government cuts by raising the rates. This allowed them to maintain services by imposing a heavier rate burden on local people. Since the Tories have closed this loophole by introducing rate-capping, Labour councils have come up with another way out — 'creative accounting'. This savings through improving and manipulating the accounts.

productivity The end result of these manoeuvres has been a steady deterioration of wages and conditions for council workers and the erosion of council services. The policy of not filling job vacancies has effectively burden on the remaining workers.

The policies of Labour councils have led them into a series ot conflicts workforces. Last year there were strikes in several left-run London Sheffield, Wakefield and St Helens. These often led to left-wing councillors and their camp followers accusing local government unions of frustrating their socialist intentions.

councils have presented measures to reduce costs and cut jobs - such as the decentralisation of services - Workers' resistance has been condemned as backward-looking narrow trade unionism.

The new productivity scheme introduced by Sheffield Labour council has been promoted as a progressive initiative in harmonising terms for another •cerensive condemned left turned inwards to was that initiatives. shows how its movement rate-capped shop The left's defenceless Labour councils the lefi positive goal, party member' railways, roads, means making efficiency and Labour's plans cut jobs and intensified the with their boroughs and business Labour what it was toid nesian package manual and staff workers and bringing together councillors and unions in committees at every level. One industrial relations journal commented that the proposed committees might in described contexT circles. In industry such schemes are being introduced by Japanese and American firms in collaboration with right-wing unions such as They have been elect caus by the left as intensifying exploitation. Yet in local government such measures are being promoted by leftwing Labour councils as pioneering socialist The capitulation of the left Labour councils at the first hint of confrontation with the Tories and the courts over rate-capping should come as no surprise. It is consistent with the left's record of running the councils according to the capitalist principles of efficiency and productivity, and their record as employers provide second-rate services and offer thirdrate pay and conditions to their workers. As Ken Livingstone and David Blunkett squabble with John McDonnell and Ted Knight over the best way of manoeuvring out of the mess that they have got themselves into, council workers and people who rely on council services are left to defend themselves against the drastic Tory cuts that are already being felt at local level.

Forlorn hope opportunism has rendered before Kinnock's onslaught.

retreat is well illustrated by its response to the leadership's jobs and industry campaign. This campaign, which proclaimed to the delight of the media that 'profits are not a dirty word but a was 'welcomed' by Labour Herald, the voice (still) of Livingstone and Knight, considered that the deserved the wholehearted support of every pains cap or any ense o government spending homes and hospitals, complained that it did not 'explain how these will be paid for'. But the answer is elementary: by the same people who always have to pay for the working class. condition for Labour's reflation would be at best even deeper cuts in living standards than we experienced under the last Labour government, and at worst, a war. Militant's only concern about Kinnock's proposals for a new social contract is that 'on the past record big business has been less than willing to cooperate with a socialist government'. Militant wants to know 'why should they start now?' The answer is that with a servile Labour leader like Kinnock and house-trained left like Houscualicu

ICEL

would be confident that a future Labour government could be relied on to do Labour Herald too has its criticisms. But it is optimistic that Kinnock's 'pro-capitalist, Keycan be transformed into a socialist programme. "Let us hope', its editors conclude their survey of Kinnock's 'that in the course of debating them, Labour's economic pundits can be persuaded to make forlorn. The quality give support widely produced by leadership means of the defend the political levy.

who Anti-Apartheid Movement. support for political parties.

= Tto Militant. paying out for the Labour Party.

campaign the Tories parliament' is successful.

but The road. Under becoming another Militant, big Labour Party policies, have existed in Britain for decades.

some fundamental changes. This is the hope that has sustained generation after generation of the Labour left, but never has it seemed so more reactionary the Labour leadership becomes, the more the Labour left is reduced to the role of its feeble apologist. It will - with fraternal criticisms of course — to every anti-working class policy upwardly mobile Labour's The left's slavish loyalty to the Labour Party machine is evident in the current campaigns to political levy One striking illustration of the extent of this deference to the Labour Party on the British left is the fact that the Socialist Workers' Party, which is formally independent of Labour, is also campaigning to Socialist Worker repeats the bureaucrats' fraudulent claims that if the political levy to Labour is lost then unions will lose the right to contribute to organisation.

like the National Abortion Campaign or the A glance at section 17 of the Trade Union Act 1984 confirms that it refers only to union Recognising the fact that few workers would knowingly waste their hard-earned cash on an organisation as useless as the Labour Party, the bureaucrats have tried to confuse the issue by pretendins that what is at stake is the general right of unions to spend money on political campaigns It is not. The aim of the act is to prevent unions from financing the Labour Party unless they have a mandate from their members to do so.

But the SWP's support for Labour's levy goes further than its endorsement of the bureaucrats' cynical schemes to con union members into Socialist Worker is worried that Labour will lose substantial part of its income' if this attack on major political opposition What use was the 'Tories' major political opposition in parliament' to the miners in their 12-month battle for jobs?

What has Her Majesty's loyal opposition ever done to help the four million people on the dole? What has the parliamentary Labour Party done to defend the rights of women, black people. the Irish and all the other victims of the Tory government? When people take matters into their own hands and fight back the Labour Yet the Party is the first to condemn them.

whole of the left from the entrists to the antiparliamentarians of the SWP is united in the campaign to keep this deadbeat show on the Kinnock the Labour Partv has adjusted to the new climate of the eighties by class party. With middle Hattersley and Healey at the policy controls and Kinnock fronting the media presentation, Labour has become little different from the SDP/Liberal Alliance or the Tory wets.

The left's heroes have either gone over to the Kinnock camp (Livingstone) or are left out on a limb (Scargill, Benn). The degeneration of the creates better prospects for building a genuine working class party than Mike Freeman Photographs by Chris Black (reflex) the next sten 026 Anril 198507

he Afrikaner burnt to T blacks in Uitenhage last Friday was the first white victim of the battle raging between the black masses and the South African state. The killing shocked white South Africa more than nine months of riots and repression in black townships and squatters' camps. It brought home the vulnerable position of five million European settlers trying to keep 23 million blacks under the heel of apartheid.

South African premier PW Botha has rushed through reforms in an attempt to contain black anger and placate Western critics.

Last week he lifted the ban on inter-racial sex and mixed marriage from South African values. Botha hopes to take the pressure off at home and abroad by removing the most offensive symbols of white But such gestures can only supremacy. increase the tensions threatening to tear the apartheid system apart. The sex laws were never central to the way apartheid works. Their repeal touches on the issues at stake in the current struggles: the pass laws, forced resettlement and the systematic denial of political rights to blacks. The reform will be welcomed by thousands of mixed couples suffered persecunon, exile. But it will not satisfy black workers' full demands for social equality. 'Separate development' Botha has very limited scope for reforming South apartheid. African developed on the basis of the system of *separate development for blacks. much tampering with undermine the foundations of the white regime and its big business backers.

After the Second World War the South African ruling class institutionalised white domination through a system of laws and regulations. The white establishment needed a system which would make black labour available for exploitation while excluding the black from masses 'Separate development' achieved these aims through creating black homelands. Blacks were only allowed out of their assigned areas to go to work for the whites. The infamous pass laws were introduced to police blacks movements in white areas.

The white regime brought in an extensive system of repression to back up 'separate development'. It banned black trade unions and political parties. restrict education development. And it enforced segregation in the most mundane aspects of life, through petty rules regulating things like the use of public toilets, transport, and park benches, and access beaches, to entertainment Apartheid soon dictated everything about South African society, from the structure of the capitalist economy to who you could go to bed with. The ban on inter-racial sex under the Mixed Marriages Act (1949) and the Immorality Amendment Act (1950) was primarily of ideological importance. helped to cohere the Afrikaner community around the principle of white supremacy. By linking the issue of segregation to sex, racism was turned into a question of national morality. The barbarity of apartheid has allowed South African capitalism to develop into a But apartheid also involves major power. major risks for the South establishment. Institutionalised oppression has made for permanent political instability.

A vast security apparatus is needed to administer repression on a day-to-day basis.

The smallest industrial dispute threatens to become a major political conflict. From a capitalist point of view the apartheid system is far from ideal It is volatile inefficient and exnensive The threat of black revolt built into apartheid explains the growing pressure for 8O the next step 26 April 1985 South Africa death by

ONLY.

ALLEENLIK VIR D

VAN BLANKES:

IDOLOPHU YASI

- a major departure

UKUSETYENZIS

MHLOPE BODWA.

barely business community. workers, who have imprisonment and and polllical economic capitalism Too

BRAZIL

apartheid would political life. he up by It introduced 'Bantu black intellectual sport and future. had come export earnings third of the workforce, African below the poverty line. dictatorship. Paulo.

INTERNATIONAL

CITY OF PORT ELIZABETH

NOTICE

FOR THE USE OF WHITE PERSONS

BY ORDER.

STAD PORT ELIZABETH

KENNISGEWING

ISAZ

PW Botha reform from Western investors and the local January South in Africa's top five business federations, whose affiliates employ 80 per cent of the country's immediate called concession of full citizenship rights to all blacks, an end to evictions and an end to state interference in trade union affairs.

The international business community is protesting against the growing social and cost apartheid Foreign o1 investors complain that, due to the rigidities apartheid imposes on the labour market, black South African workers' wages are higher than those paid in countries like Singapore or Taiwan. The impact of the The carnival is over AFTER TANCREDO NEVES - chaos?

The problems of finding a suitable successor for the president who died this week expose the fragility of democracy in Brazil..

untimelv departure of Neves is a major blow to the Brazilian establishment.

Elected in January by an electoral college set military dictator Joao Figueiredo, Neves' brief was to oversee the delicate process of returning Brazil to civilian rule after 21 years of military dictatorship. His half a century of experience in moderate democratic politics made Neves the ideal man for the job. But he did not get much of a chance to warm to his task. Hours before his inauguration he collapsed and was rushed off to hospital. With Neves gone Brazil's experiment in democracy faces an uncertain The demand for a return to civilian rule from Western bankers and politicians, in response to Brazil's profound After five political and economic crisis.

years of recession Brazil has totted up over $100 billion worth of debts to Western banks, making it the world's biggest debtor nation. Last year almost half the country's on servicing - went

ITS

enormous debt. Brazilian society has been devastated by this transfer of wealth to Western coffers. Unemployment effects one and half the country's workers and peasants live on or The Brazilian establishment has become increasingly worried about the mass unrest provoked by the crisis. Last year millions of workers took to the streets demanding better wages, social reform and an end to military Hven the powertul Cathollc church was forced to adopt radical postures under popular pressure. Liberation theology is flourishing in the shanty-towns of Sao The military regime found itself isolated Botha at the crossroads recession in South Africa has highlighted the need for new methods to raise profits and cut out waste. Unemployment now stands at 20 per Constate borrowing have shot up investment is declining. business leaders who know something must be done to stop the rot are flocking around the anti-apartheid banner.

Botha came to power in 1978 determined to introduce major changes. strategy' aimed to free the labour market from unnecessary bureaucratic strictures, stabilise labour relations, co-opt a layer of middle class blacks and 'coloureds, provocative symbols Temove supremacy. Botha has made a number of changes involving trade union rights and petty apartheid. But he has failed to legislate black aspirations for democracy out of Today black resistance is more existence. widespread and determined than at any time since the Soweto riots of 1976.

The token reforms of the past few years have served to deepen black indignation and to fuel the struggle for real change. Blacks have responded to Botha's attempts to coopt black middle class officials by organising attacks on puppet councillors and local government offices. The elections to the new 'coloured' chamber widely boycotted. Black collaborators have been given no quarter by the masses.

The current upheaval has exposed the contradictions of the reform strategy. Real impossible reforms are African capitalism depends oppression of blacks. All the establishment as left-wing parties and independent trade unions mushroomed. For the first time since the coup of 1964, Brazil's rulers were forced to respond to mass pressure. The military repeatedly reneged on payments due to the banks and put off implementing the drastic demanded economic measures international bankers. The return to democracy was initiated by the military regime itself, prompting from politicians and bankers. parliamentary democracy, hoped to create parties and politicians which could contain the masses and win a measure of approval for popular austerity measures. The military announced plans for bringing back civilian government.

Establishment spokesmen new climate promoung a conciliation and new political leaders. But democratisation was dangerous for the Brazilian ruling class. If it held popular elections the left-wing parties would be returned with a massive majority, a development which would only intensify political instability. Faced with this dilemma Figueiredo opted for a 'staggered' return to democrac Popular elections were postponed and Neves was elected by a carefully chosen electoral college. Neves had steered a careful course between the military and its civilian opponents throughout his long career in Brazilian politics. high regard as an Equally importantly, the military regarded him as completely reliable. This consensus in support of Neves' candidature made him the for man ideal the establishment needed done. He was selected to build a popular alliance supporting the Brazilian state, in preparation for future elections. Neves had already made some progress in this direction before he took to expenditure and foreign and foreign Political and mOIC establishment. reforms and His total The gun-toung and wearing thin. of white inter-racial sex is sin. not of parliament were With because South on the by the and shorter hours. after some Western and Brazilian By restoring Brazil's rulers and peasants government Took to of national always going to be serve to Western financiers. The masses held him in untainted democrat. difficult job the can offer are gestures which have virtually no effect on the lives of black people. Far from stabilising society, the reform strategy has made blacks more keenly aware that apartheid cannot be reformed - it must be destroyed. Botha's total strategy now looks like a total mess for the white To make matters worse for the regime, the the black struggles have brought the prospect of a white backlash.

whites of Uitenhage demanding revenge last week were a grim warning to Botha that white patience is Reforms which are seen to challenge the foundations of the Afrikaner tradition have done little to endear Botha to the white working class. The repeal of the sex laws has become a target of white outrage against a government seen to be 'soft on blacks'. Such reforms challenge the basic beliefs of a community raised in the conviction that The South African establishment and its Western backers may sentimental about traditional apartheid values when their power is at stake. But white workers, already shaken by the effects of recession, don't take kindly to a government which seems to be reneging on the principles of the Afrikaner way of life.

Western bankers and investors breathing down his neck, black resistance on the rise and Afrikaners watching his every move, Botha has got himself into a very tight corner. The crisis of the South African ruling class is only just beginning.

Sabena Norton his sick bed, winning the support of the Communist Party for his economic policies.

Neves' death on Sunday leaves Brazil's rulers high and dry. Since January hundreds of thousands of metal and public sector workers have gone on strike for better pay Before his untimely departure Neves was trying hard to stitch up a deal with their union leaders. But now the Brazilian establishment is stuck without a presentable mediator. The democratisation scheme has gone awry. The bosses and bankers will have to look for another way to get their harsh economic measures through while keeping control of the angry workers With no obvious candidate to take over the shaky reins of government, ruling class has only two options. It can bring forward popular elections and risk the arrival of a radical government. Or it can reestablish military dictatorship, and re-create the crisis conditions of last year with even less room to manoeuvre. Either way Neves will no longer be around to reconcile the working class to the dictatorship of the Charles Longford

REVIEWS

PONTING

THE RIGHT

TO KNOW

THE INSIDE STORY OF

THE BELGRANO AFFAIR

CLIVEM

PONTING

A sign of the times Clive Ponting, The right to know, Sphere Books 1985, €2.50 Clive Ponting provides a detailed account of the Belgrano affair. He goes through the movements ol the nms conqueror belore, during and arter Ils attack on the Argentinian cruiser on 1 May 1982.

He follows on through the subsequent government cover-up and his own role - and that of Labour MP Tam Dalyell - in bringing the whole business out in the open. Yet much of this storv is already familiar and he adds little new.

Ponting himself is much more interesting than the Belgrano story. Ponting was a successful civil servant who balked at Thatcher's determination to policise tne states administrative macninery He nae no doection to oursuino outuy une interests of the British state. Indeed he was personally congratulated by the prime minister for his diligence and awarded the OBE for cutting

HIP-HOP

Lost Poets The Last Poets, Shaw Theatre Following the re-release of their records by Celluloid and their recent London appearances, the 'legendary' Last Poets have been celebrated as the godfathers of rap and the founders of the whole culture of hip-hop. Seeing them last week revealed their virtuositv in delivering the slick patter of street-wise black America. Their range of nace and raviam shows un manv imitators of the ilk of Gary Bird as a decidedly second-rate experience. The Last Poets are fast, flash and effortlessly polished. Yet lhe Last Poets once had a different reputation. They were a band of militant black Muslims fresh out of the New York ghettos at the turn of the seventies. Their first two albums Oh my people (1969) and This is madness (1972) made them famous as the angriest and most violent expression of the black power revolt. They called themselves The last Poets hecause after them came the revolution he ast Pets nave survived, but the hopes of that revolution were crushed by the ferocious repression of the US state Shot to pleces: no more Black Panthers, no more soul waste in the armed forces. He did not object to the war with Argentina or even to the sinking of the Belgrano. But what he could not stomach was the government lying to parliament about it.

man tallen among ronune was nones! thieves, born-again Buddhist working for unscrupulous Tory politicians. Ponting believes in the ethos of the civil service. In his book he proposes a relormea Unicial secrets AcTIO make government more fair and open. But Thatcher has no more use for open government than she has for Clive Ponting. Turning the civil service into a political arm of the Tory government is a key aspect of Thatcher's reorganisation of the British establishment for conditions of class war. As a of conscience Ponting could not adjust himself to misleading the public as part of his daily routine. Ponting's integrity may appear naive in such a senior civil servant. You would think that it was obvious from the record of history that it was a major function of senior civil servants and politicians to lie through their teeth most of the time. But the strength of the British establishment is that so many of its functionaries really believe in their own ideology of honesty and service. It was Thatcher's drive to replace that traditional code with naked cynicism that drove Ponting to leak his story to Dalyell. Ponting, loyal, liberal (he was a founder member of the SDP) but dubious about the resolute approach, is a symbol of our times. He personifies the loss of nerve among many traditional establishment figures about the aggressive line now being pursued by the Tory government. It is a sobering thought that a bunch Clive Ponting, wallies like Lord of harmless Stockton and the Bishon of Durham have caused Thatcher more aggravation than the combined forces of the Labour Party and the SDP/Liberal Alliance. Andy Clarkson machine and the callous indifference of white America There is little trace in their current work of the explosive anger of 'White man's got a god complex' or of the anguished screams of "This is madness". Yet there is a link. The early Poets tocused their revolt on the high-tech America of buck. For the Poets, and the the almighty generation of black radicals who followed the murder of Malcolm X and the the annihilation of the Black Panthers, racism was a distortion of the American dream, not a pillar of US capitalism Liberation lay through opening people's minds, not through taking on the svstem. The climate of reaction in Reagan's America has closed many minds and sent the Poets retreating into musticism and ecology. The anti-nuke postures of the Poets' recent concerts oo cown wel with the sort of white The Poets' iberals they once so despised.

controversial repudiation of the pill simply carries a stage further many liberals backward-looking hostility to technology and their general accommodation to reaction. Today their concerts end up with appeals for funds for Ethiopia and the revolution they once proclamed ike propnets crying in the wilderness is now long forgotten. The

OLALK PANTHER

rap is still good, but the soul is gone Mick Kennedy

PARTY

FEMINISM ON FILM

Not so thrilling Marleen Gorris director, Broken mirrors, Netherlands 1984. subtitles. Screen on the Green In 1982 Marleen Gorris made her name with A question of suence, a radical teminist classic in which working class women trample to death a man in a ritualistic act of liberation. Gorris has lost none of her talent for ritual and suspense. But in Broken mirrors the boot is on the other foot.

The women in this film are prostitutes in the Happy House, a downtown Amsterdam brothel.

Thev bear their brute customers with a mixture of contempt and resignation. Meanwhile a sadistic male killer chains up nis latest vicum to watch ne die of starvation, capturing the various stages of her ordeal on polaroid film. The two strands of the plot merge as another male stabs and almost disembowels one of the women at the Happy House. The faceless killer turns up too and gets chased away by the two main characters, Diane and Doria, who have finally decided they've had enough. The gruesome tale is superbly presented. But its portrayal of women as the impotent victims of man's relish of female suffering borders on the This time there is no revenge, no masochistic. carnival of the oppressed, just almost contented submission. The only gestures of defiance occur when the faceless killer's victim decides to stop talking to him and when Diane and Doria finally leave the scene of their degradation. The humour which made Gorris' first work so and aggro refreshing have been blotted out in an orgy of selfdestruction. The radical feminist obsession with the symbols of women's oppression has wound up in a blind and pretty revolting alley.

Sabena Norton

PALESTINE

Zionists and wolves N Aruri ed, Occupation: Israel over Palestine. Zed Books 1984 Heiny Srour director, Leila and the wolves, 1985.

Gate Notting Hill Israel over Palestine examines the barbarous military and legal apparatus which Israel has used to contain Palestinian resistance in the occupied West Bank since it annexed the territory during the Six Day War of 1967. Israeli land confiscation and economic restrictions have reduced working and middle class Palestinians to a reserve army of migrant labour, drafted in to supply the Israeli economy and subject to apartheid-style pass laws. This has made the West Bank more volatile than ever. The book details the strategy of colonisation and legal repression which Israel has developed to keep the lid on the West Bank. The dispersal and defeat of the Palestinian people remains the objective of Israeli strategy. Expansion and repression are vital for a state based on the liquidation of the Palestinian nation. Israel over Palestine is flawed by its failure to recognise that the interests of the Israeli state and masses cannot be those of the Pestinian reconciled. In the concluding chapter Muhammad Halaj argues that 'Israel must understand that its long-range interests, as well as the national rights of the Palestinians, require not substitutes for Palestinian freedom but alternatives to Israel occupation'. In reality Israel knows that its interests will always depend on denying Palestin ians their freedom. Srour's ambitious film cantures one Hein v aspect of the resistance of the Palestinian masses.

A collage of documentary footage and fictional scenes, Leila and the wolves describes women's role in 65 years of anti-British and anti-Israeli After fighting. ts message is disconcerting decades of struggle women still remain in the background. We see glimnses of their potential ir the heroic women fighters, guns and dynamite concealed in veils and baskets Kut while the mer lead and fight, women are still left to cope with the consequences of war on the home front.

A chorus of women veiled in black sitting on the sea-shore appears throughout the film as a silent symbol of women's oppression. In the end they throw off their veils - a hopeful, but very which underlines Heiny restrained gesture Srour's cautious optimism about the prospects for Palestinian women Despite its dumsv use o symbolism, Leila and the wolves is worth seeing for that optimism Simon Jay Junius publications Theminers Oui day will come 000000000000000000•••••••* Out now - the pamphlet that tells it like it was in the miners' strike. Our day will come looks at different aspects of the miners' battle for jobs, from the problem of Nottinghamshire to Arthur Scargill's strike strategy. It tackles the failures of leadership that undermined effective action and points a new way forward for miners and other workers to take on the bosses and win. Pp 57 50p plus 30p p&p A handbook for trade unionists

TAKING

Mike Freeman

CONTROL

£2.95 plus 85p p&p

THE

ROOTS

RACISM

OF £1.95 plus 40p p&p

WORKERS AGAINST RACISI

An antiimperialist's gude to

HAR

£2.95 plus 50p p&p £1.95 plus Real reedom 50p p&p

POWER

30p plus 25p p&p

OST PART

BCM JPLTD, London Available from

WIN 3XX

Cheques payable to Junius Publications Ltd; five or more copies post free. the next step 0 26 April 1985 0 9

LETTER SSTEPPING

No civil service merger At their May conferences the Civil and Public Servants Association and the Society of Civil and Public Servants will be voting on whether to accept merger terms. If accepted the plan will then go to a ballot. My advice to ins readers in the civil service is to oppose this amalgamation. Militants usually support mergers because they overcome sectional rivalries strengthen the unions. But this different. The CPSA main v represents clerical and typing grades while the SCPS represents executive and managerial grades, short of the top civil servants. The merger means including workers with people who represent the employers in the same union.

This would create a state of affairs such as exists in Nalgo where workers' independent initiative is constantly thwarted presence of their bosses in the union.

It's true that there has been some joint action between the two unions in pay and anti-cuts campaigns. But it's also true that when CPSA members have come out on Post office con job You mentioned the postal dispute at the Mount Pleasant sorting office in last week's article on ballots which was very useful. But what's going on? Tension has been mounting in sorting offices everywhere with our union officials locked in negotiations with management at both national and local level. In March talks about the introduction of the new Improved Working Methods

(IWM)

and staffing — the introduction of part-timers — broke down. Postmen and women at Mount Pleasant thought that the talking stopped and the fight was on. They walked out. Action of this kind is the only weapon that workers have to defend their jobs and living standards. What went wrong Mount Pleasant that leadership undermined workers' fight. I was on leave when the action started, but eager to find out what secondary or solidarity action was planned I phoned the UCW HQ in London. The union official on the oiner end of the none toe me the posties want to spread the action, but we are Anti-racist desperadoes The GLC is not the only Labour council to adopt desperado tactics to tackle the racısts.

Leeds Labour council has joined the club of left-wing councils who have a policy of evicting racist tenants found guilty of racial They've got real harassmen though as one incident this week proved.

Makhan Singh, a single Asian living on Hunslet council estate, was arrested after complaining to the police and the council about threats from his white neighbours and smashed windows. Instead of confronting the racists who attack black people like Makhan the council is leaving it up to the courts. The courts have never done anything for black people except find them guilty.

This time was no different.

Makhan Singh, not his racist neighbours, was found guilty of criminal damage. So what is the council going to do now - evict Makhan? When questioned, the city housing aid officer Trevor Lincoln said that it was not the council's job to say what the police should do. The council couldn't criticise the police or argue with the court's verdict because this would have called into question its whole approach of relying on the police and the courts to dispense justice We need to confront the racists to blacks. with our own organisations and not rely on the courts, the police or the council.

Simon Lewis Leeds 10 G the next step 26 April 1985 and one is by the CPSA chlef Alistair Graham their own, SCS members have disciplined them. The current financial management initiative' and the review doing our best to contain it'. In the fine British trade tradition leadership did just this and settled the matter over a boardroom table. UCW leader Alan Tuffin got what he wanted: one Monta membership to accept the IM at the national delegate Needless to say, management got what it wanted: Alan Tuffin on his knees. Back in the boardroom in London the bosses are planning their battle strategy. Step one is flexible softening up the workforce quality of service campaign. This means a series of talks and videos to persuade postal had workers that the business efficiency of the post office must come first.

this campaign that it is organised during worktime to make sure that postal workers attend. We must learn the most important

UCW

lesson of the miners' struggle: we cannot fight for our jobs and living standards if we wilto accept the logic of the bosses' arguments.

We must fight for what we need - jobs and a living wage accepting what they say they can afford.

Woman postie Manchester Victimised I've been an EETPU shop Manchester Royal Infirmary for 17 years.

Last Wednesday Thursday all 83 EETPU members in the hospital came out on strike demanding my problems reinstatement. As part of my job as a health and safety rep I was inspecting the oil used in the air conditioning system that services the operating theatre. The oil was sub-standard, which fits in with the general pattern of bad health and safety standards in the hospital. I complained to various levels of management and got nowhere fast. In their opinion it wasn't important. Out of frustration I ended up swearing at one of the managers. I told 15 April him he was being stupid and putting people's lives in danger. I was suspended immediately on full pay. They told me 'we don't want you you'll around because investigations'. Into what?

council My members have been great, but I can't cav the came for the local Tabour councillor Ken Collis who also happens to be a senior manager at the hospital. He hasn't said a word. The lads say they will stay out until I get my job back. My suspension is part of a more general attack on union organisation at the hospital. No doubt management are out to undermine us before they really go for the cute that kill Bill Turner

EETPU

Manchester Royal Infirmary the rank and file. merger among Many

CPSA

recognise that they managers with the bosses. Paul Foster London personnel unionism the the persuade conference in May. Benefit Attendance Card s About Claiming Benefit through claiming unemployment benefit es shown on the right. Please bring Costa del Dole So precious is unemployed textile and not be conned into believe. steward at I got the boot and on that one guide us to that day. Pat Kehoe Huddersfield, West Yorkshire namper our

BCM JPITD

management' are proposing to delegate the power to hire and fire down to SCPS members at line management level.

The bureaucrats from far right to broad left in both unions are all in favour of the merger because it will make their positions more secure. Left wingers in the CPSA who once campaigned for a more democratic union have accepted proposals to appoint rather than elect full-time officials.

These measures will merely reinforce the grip of the officials and make them less accountable to There is a strong feeling against the

CPSA

members. Many people recognise the dangers of having your supervisor in your union, perhaps as the office representative or branch secretary.

are willing cooperate with SCS members to oppose cuts and win decent pay and conditions. But supervisors and cannot be considered to be reliable allies. Our aim should be to turn the CPSA into a fighting union, not link it up UB40z

INITIALS

Then nest on I have just been sent a letter from the department of health and social security that shows up just how callous the Tories are and what lies in store for those they have thrown out of work. 1 am 25 years old and an My circumstances, like those of a lot of other working class youth, forced me to take bed and breakfast accommodation. Bed and breakfast lodgings, I would like to inform your readers, are similar in most cases to Salvation Army hostels (dosshouses).

We are hardly living it up on the Torquay riviera as the Tory gutter press would have us Even this basic accommodation is too much to give us workers on the dole. From the 29 April, next week, Tory overlord for health Norman Fowler, has decreed that we have four weeks (some hope!) to get a job or we become homeless. The Tories often say that they are worried about the mess that their system has created (ie us). In practice they treat us with utter contempt. In fact they should tremble with worry about the unemployed because the more they spit on us the greater becomes our will for revenge, day will surely come. Congratulations on your weekly, it will help Write to London WCIN 3XX

OUT

Is there no bottom to the well of talent that is Norman Willis? The TUC general secretary came to his job with a reputation as a teller of 'hilarious' stories and a public bar song and dance artiste. Now Willis, backed by the Grimethorpe colliery band and the GCHQ union choir, has cut a disc — 'a protest song'. Given the TUC's traitorous role in the miners' strike and the struggle over union recognition at GCHQ, perhaps Norman should have stuck to the song which first earned him notoriety as a crooner — I'm the man, the very fat man, wot waters the workers' beer'.

The Bishop of Durham is not the only public figure with doubts about whether Christianity is the good thing it was made out to be. The father, the son and the holy ghost have now joined Clive Ponting and Ted Heath on the black list of establishment rebels compiled by John Gummer, paranoid chair of the Tory Party "The doctrine of the Trinity is worrying,' declares Gummer in a heretical outburst in The Spectator. Why? Not because it is difficult to understand', but because it doesn't help the prime minister with the coal strike. The man has clearly taken leave of his senses. Labour Party member Jack Kane is waiting for a letter. He's been waiting seven months. Jack is the 'umpire in the conciliation process between the Scottish coal board and the NUM. When his position fell due for renewal last September, Jack wrote off asking why notice of his reappointment (and retainer fee) hadn't arrived. The board sent him a few quid but no reappointment letter.

Scottish NUM officials are distraught that Jilted Jack, their treasured 'independent arbiter', has not had his letter. They seem rather less perturbed that 207 of their members have had letters from the board - terse, one-sentence notes which hepin *You are hereby summarily dismissed from your employment with the National Coal Board..?. According to a piece in this month's edition of the Communist Party journal Marxism Today, 'to be liberal' is to be 'weak, equivocating, untheorised, unmaterialist and, of course, bourgeois'. "But, it continues, 'right now we need all the liberals we can get. Imagine the rousing chorus of the Internationale at the close of the party's coming congress: 'Arise, ye starvelings from your slumber, arise ye weak, equivocating, untheorised, bourgeois liberals...". The recent fuss about the royal family's politics has missed the interesting consequences of the queen's intervention in the miners' strike. You may recall that her majesty made some disparaging remarks about the miners to Paul Routledge, labour editor at The Times, who foolishly reproduced her comments in print and embarrassed the establishment no end. This week Routledge paid the price for his treasonable act, when he was sent into exile to become The Times' man in Singapore.

The royal attitude to strikes has not been forgotten by Yorkshire miners either. The organisers of a Save the Children Fund fete to be graced by Princess Anne in Dinnington, near Rotherham, report that the mining community has snapped up only 500 of the 4000 tickets at £2.50 a throw a clear case of the working class having more sense than money.

REPORTS

Fight NHS cuts This week the TUC launched a week of action against privatisation in the health service to put localised action in a national The 'action' is restricted to a perspecuve series of rallies to put the case for keeping out the private contractors and keeping NHS services in-house. But health workers everywhere know from bitter experience mean job that in-house tenders harder work and lower living standards.

Nupe steward George Risling is proud of keeping tne launary services Wakefield's Stanley Royd hospital. At the end of last year Nupe and Cohse signed a new agreement involving five job losses and cuts in bonuses from 40 to 33 percent. Now management wants blood - a 25 per cent bonus - and the unions are powerless to resist. The same pattern has been repeated at hospitals across Britain.

Health workers' anti-cuts action is being union officials who undermined by prepared to make sacrifices to keep the private contractors out. • Leeds: Health workers facing drastic cuts in wages and working conditions have taken Scottish rail action 'One day's strike is not enough,' said Partick railworker John McBrinn after last week's demonstration of solidarity with the 1250 workers whose jobs are threatened as a result of the proposed closure of British Rail's Caley engineering workshops near Glasgow. Railworkers throughout Scotland came out on a 24-hour strike despite management attempts to use the law to prevent the action from taking place. that the rank and file will support the fight for jobs, McBrinn told tns, leaders are too busy saving their own skins to do what they are paid for.'

Railworkers' leader Jimmy Knapp told the Scottish TUC last week that he wanted to see solidarity from other workers. But he has done little to mobilise action in his own union. In Scotland the lead came from the rank and file, not from the union leaders. 'At Knapp and Scottish first the wouldn't even make the action official", says McBrinn, 'it was only under great pressure from below that they agreed even to have the day of action.' After the day of action the threat still hangs over BREL Caley. Union officials are mobilise local trying to Struggle for steel jobs Discussions are continuing this week between unions and management at the Tinsley Park special steels plant in Sheffield which is threatened with closure and the loss of more than 1000 jobs. The trouble is that the union is trying to come up with an alternative plan for management rather than mobilising workers resistance to the ration- Plant boss John Pennington has assured the union that the facts and figures necessary to prepare an alternative plan will be made available. Sheffield council's employment department has allocated f15 000 to assist the union campaign and their experts are busily trying to work out how to solve all the firm's problems of profitability, productivity and shrinking markets. The danger of this approach is that it ties workers' livelihoods to the viability of the company. What if the union experts discover that the only way to save the plant is to accept large-scale redundancies and cuts in wages and working conditions? They have already cooperated in cutting the workforce in half over the last three years. By getting together with the bosses to work out a survival plan for the firm the unions are dragging the workers down the slippery slope to redundancy. action against all tenders.

bids "competitive'. Scarsdale losses, voluntary redundancies. • Newcastle: cent. tender, but when worktorce. are areas. on 17 April in the English workshops •The day of action shows nute union leaders shopkeepers, jobs reports: Their union officials have shown less determination.

Nupe and Cohse have been sitting on the Eastern health authority tendering subcommittee, discussing how to make in-house • Chesterfield: Last week cleaning staff at hospital came out on strike against management's privatisation plans i he rejected joint union in-house tender had involved cuts in hours from 2500 to 1400 and are taking statt Domeste 'guerrilla action' against the in-house tender involving wage cuts of between 33 and 77 per unions had previously beer involved in negotiations over the in-house management's terms became clear it was rejected outright by the Health workers must reject the idea that any in-house tender is better than a private contract, and oppose all cuts, coordinating rank and file action among hospitals and Kerry Dean businessmen, politicians and church leaders against the closure. This ineffectual sort of campaign has already paved the way for closure at Shildon and elsewhere. But if we build instead on the militant defiance of the law displayed by thousands of railworkers and link up with workers - we could really put some pressure on the BR bosses.

Cathy Barrett National Unior

SCOTLAND

There is another alternative. Ninety per cent of the Tinsley Park workers turned out to a mass meeting at Sheffield city hall two weeks ago and voted unanimously to fight the closure. White-collar workers at the plant have agreed to support any action against closure. Workers at Scunthorpe and other plants in the area have given their backing. If the workers make it clear that come first and determine to take whatever action is necessary to defend them, they can make the bosses back down. The first step is to get the union officials' noses out of the bosses' account books.

Stan Meeds 01-729 3771 Deadline for news and Monday 9am Debate Embryo rights and women's rights Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child and Life versus Revolutionary Communist Party and a communist doctor Friday 26 April 7.30pm Holborn Library London WCI (nearest O Holborn) Demonstration Anti-Powell Bill protest Saturday 27 April 1pm Lincoln Inn Fields, London WC2 Join the KCPS Detend abortion and contraception rights' contingent Conference Moral panics and women's rights AIDS and the family, embryos and abortion, battered babies and the courts, hooligans and the police Plus evening social. Creche available Saturday l June I0am-pn Polytechnic of Central London New Cavendish Street, WI Phone 01-729 0414 for details Meetings Irish Freedom Movement rallies

REMEMBER BOBBY SANDS!

London Central Library Manchester Treede Thursday 2 May 7.30pm Leeds Trades Club students' union Savile Mount. Leeds 7 Revolutionary Communist Party Conference

PREPARING

POWER

Take EnS regularly Get tns every week for a year f19 in Britain or Ireland Cheques/POs payable to For full subscription rates see page 2 Name Address Start my subscripti

COME ALONG!

Supporters Birmingham Bradford Brighton Bristol Cardiff. Coventry Edinburgh ulasgow . Hackney Huddersfield Leeds. Liverpool Manchester. Newcastle North London Nottingham Pontefract Sheffield South London Sunderland Wakefield 01-729 0414 Join up! If you supporter, Name.. Friday 10 May 7.30pm Address Fieldway Crescent NS (off Holloway Road) Phone Saturday 4 Mav 5.30pm Manchester university Phone 01-729 0414 Register now! their grip youth Preparing '85 Take over political London aims to provide them. 19-26 July the much more. Be there! April After April RCP Association, send to Phone 01-729 0414 for further details Every week supporters of tns meet to talk about the paper and plan action in the local area. Al present we meel in Thursday Thursday . Thursday Thursday . Thursday Thursday Thursday . Thursday Wednesday • Thursday Thursda . Thursday Thursday Wednesday Wednesday Thursday Thursday . Thursday Wednesday Thursday Thursday For details see tns sellers in your area or phone would like more information about the ROP or would like to become til vur name and address on the form below Send to BM RCP. London WIN 3XX The rulers of the Western world are losing While Africa starves and the of Europe languish on the dole Reagan and Thatcher can only prepare for Star Wars and nuclear wars.

week for Power discussion and debate about how we can After the before its too late miners' defeat many people are looking for problems of coltonste recession and reaction. Preparing for Power It's about politics in Britain and abroad, the women's movement. movement, Ireland and racism and much, £10 waged/£7 unwaged £15 waged/£12 unwaged Make cheques/POs payable to BM RCP, London WIN 3XX the next step 26 April 1985 0 11

Where will America strike next?

ne nonon that every nira world struggle, whether in El Salvador, Angola or the Philippines, "another Vietnam" to be avoided at all costs.' absure according to a special survey of 'the legacy of Vietnam' published last week influential US magazine Newsweek.

The tenth anniversary of the fall of Saigon has provoked sober American reflections on its greatest ever military defeat and on the subsequent decline of US power. It has led to renewed assertions of determination to use its military might to crush any threat to its interests in any part of the globe. When the Vietcong seized the Vietnamese capital in April 1975 they brought to an end 10 US years of large-scale South East Asia. In the interference in course of the long and bloody war US forces devastated vast areas of the subcontinent and killed several million people. They used chemical defoliants to destroy crops and saturation bombing and napalm to destroy people. The final defeat of the US forces by the Vietnamese people was a triumph of a popular and resourceful anti-imperialist resistance movement over a vastly more powerful adversary. The Vietnam war was a catastrophe for the USA. It lost 57 000 men in a cause which became so unpopular at home that it shook the whole American establishment. The farreaching crisis caused by the war led to the downfall of two presidents. precipitate withdrawal from undermined American prestige not only in South East Asia but around the world. If the mighty USA could not deal with a peasantbased resistance movement backward country, how could it still claim to be the world's policeman? The Vietnam trauma taught the USA to adopt a more circumspect approach to overseas military entanglements. Since Vietnam America's rulers have tried to minimise direct militarv intervention in favour of exercising influence indirectly Yet the decline in US through local allies. economic power has forced Washington to compensate by raising its military profile around the world. The use of the rapid deployment force' in the Gulf in 1980, the invasion of Grenada in 1983, and the despatch of the sixth fleet to Lebanon last year were all signs of the USA's new combativeness. The problem confronting the USA is that so many of the world's troublespots exploding are overstretching its diplomatic and military capacities. The question haunting the people of several Third World countries is - will they be next? • Central America Reagan has turned local conflicts in El Salvador and Nicaragua into a major focus of US foreign policy. In El Salvador the USA has backed a corrupt and unpopular regime resistance movement against a popular whose guerrilla forces now substantial areas of the country. Nicaragua the

USA

backed reactionary guerrillas COntra against the popular Sandinista government which overthrew the detested US-backed Somoza regime in 1979. In both countries Reagan has backed a loser in his crusade to smash 'communism' (in reality a negligible force) throughout Central America.

After five years of US-financed and trained terror in Central America, the antiimperialist forces in El Salvador are thriving and the Sandinista government in Nicaragua survives. This leaves Reagan with only two ontions. He can cal retreat and face another humiliation. Or he can call in the marines and risk another Vietnam, in a region much closer to home.

desperate the USA becomes, the reason the people of Central America have to fear that they may be in line for the 'Apocalypse now' treatment.

tns Ten years after Vietnam prejudice' in the American military The USA's Vietnam small once, • Middle East America's influence over the Middle East suffered an irreversible setback with the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979. Since then matters have gone from bad to Israel's abortive intervention in Lebanon has cast doubt on the ability of America's ConTrOl In only remaining agent in the region to the safeguard US interests in this vital strategic fighting The growth area. of movements throughout the Middle East presents a major threat to domination. The recession has sparked off social unrest which threatens to uproot the moderate regimes which Washington could once rely on to uphold American interests.

The USA's inglorious intervention in Lebanon ended with the killing of 242 US marines in a Beirut suicide bomb attack during September 1983. This incident confirmed that there was little that the USA could do to shore up a loyal regime in Lebanon short of full-blown unpredictable consequences. But what will the USA do if the Iran/Iraq conflict spreads The more and causes wider disruption in the Gulf? It more will have no alternative but to go in - and go in hard. The big stick: the guns of USS New Jersey represent US diplomacy in the eighties • SouthEast Asia worse. militant Islamic Western Marcos A C12 the 20.000 People's Army increasingly insurgents. with War probably soldiers. In South East Asia, today the world's main growth area, the USA has been edged out by Japan. The current furore over Japanese imports to America shows US products are no match for Japan in the American market.

never mind in the Far East. Even developing nations like Singapore and Malaysia have begun to edge the USA out of its former markets in the region. A developing network winning. of economic and political relations between Japan, China and the major markets of the region is a further blow to US influence.

America's main partner in South East dictatorship the Philippines, may not last much longer. The guerrillas of the left-wing New While engaged in an are successful WaT the government. Large tracts of the southern island Mindanao are in the hands of the Yet the USA maintains vital military installations in the Philippines. The collapse of the Marcos regime would blow a hole in US global strategy, a hole that could rule. American only be filled by at nome To compensate for its loss of influence around the world the USA is rearming fast.

By exploiting America's continuing lead in military technology Reagan hopes to regain the initiative in world affairs.

This is the drive behind Star Wars. Reagan's strategic defence initiative' helps the USA to keep its rivals in check by introducing a new level of conflict at which the USA has a chance of America's turn to space is measure of its weakness on earth. It shows that America's survival as a world power has become dependent on its military hardware.

Vietnam the Ten years after USA has become a weaker but a potentially more vicious force America's decline creates the danger of more invasions and wars, it also presents great opportunities for the working Western class movement domination of the world is crumbling Rivalry and conflict are undermining the cohesion of the Western powers and limiting their capacity to crush resistance to their Britain, whose decline is far more advanced than that of the USA, is one of the weakest links in the imperialist chain. The chain can be broken if we take on the enemy