The Next Step: No. 3, 22 January 1988

VICTORY TO THE PALESTINIANS! ans ins Support our fighting , El fund pay the next step- 3 for your tns Revolutionary Communist Party Weekly 22 January 1988 Pandora Anderso

ALTON

Women are under pressure from the 'Fergie Factor. The media celebrations over her pregnancy John Sturrock endorse the Tory campaign to force every woman to accept the role of obedient mother and housewife. Liberal MP David Alton's Bill to restrict access to abortion, which comes up in the commons this week, is another attempt to keep women in the chains of domestic slavery.

Unlike the Duchess of York, most women don't have access to state-financed nannies and a multi-millionaire mother-in-law.

They cannot have children and keep up a round of holidays in the sun and weekends on the skislopes. Instead, their role as child-rearers and skivvies in the home brands women as cheap labour in the workplace and second class citizens in society.

And things are getting worse.

Hardly a week now passes without the authorities using women's position in the family as the excuse for further insults and attacks. • Nurses and women ancillary workers are starting to take strike action against Tory cuts in the health service. The Tories have had to drop their first attempt to slash nurses' wages.

But Margaret Thatcher has made it clear that the nurses don't

STOP THE

BILL

FREEDOM

FOR WOMEN

services. have sex After the Alliance: Time for a real opposition - See pages 8 and 9 40p

REAL

deserve decent pay because, she says, most of them are young women who are only working to fill in time before they go off to get married and have children.

Any nurses who do as Thatcher suggests will join the millions of women who now have to care for the sick, the young and the elderly at home, to make up for Tory cuts in health and welfare • Last week two British courts ruled that women must either be faithful wives who should submit to their husbands, or unmarried hussies who are fair game for any man. Mr Justice Owen announced that a 12-year old rape victim could be described as asking for trouble. And a bench of magistrates in Gwent acquitted a man of committing indecent assault on his wife, after deciding that the defendant who had tied the woman up tormented her for 90 minutes with a vibrator and forced her to was 'only trying to save his marriage'. Women are the first victims of the Tories attempt to impose their reactionary morality. We should respond by fighting back for women's right to full equality.

Control over pregnancy lies at the centre of women's position in the family and society. The lack (continued on page 2

ON Saturday thousands of people joineu local demonstrations around the oooose the atest County Lo legal attack on access to Liberal MP David Alton's Bill to cut the legal time-imit for aborton from 28 to 18 weeks comes up for its second reading in the house of commons this Friday. There is a lot of talk about Alton accepting an eventual compromise of a 24-week limit.

Whether the parlamentan wheeler-dealers cook up such a remains the same. We oppose

A ECOLO S.

and demand that every woman facilities as early as possible and as late as necessary.

TERRIFY

As the day of the commons debate approaches, the antiabortion lobby has been busy creating a climate sympathetic to Alton's offensive against women's rights. The newspapers are full of opinion polls purporting to demonstrate sora puonic support tor nis bill.

On Sunday the press printed culogies to novert warver, tne Oxford student who last year useu une law ana une media to try to force his former girlfriend into abandoning her planned abortion. He lost in court, but apparently won the battle to terrify the woman out of her rights; she was too traumatised by the press witch-hunt to go ahead with the abortion. The baby is now living with the smug and self-righteous

DAYSCHOOL

RIGHTS

Date: Sunday 24 January N19 (Archway tube) Registration starts at 9.45am

SESSIONS INCLUDE:

Women and the family - the root of the women's oppression • The way to fight free creche and accommodation.

Registration costs £4 waged/ £2 unwaged 2 • 22 January 1988

ABORTION RIGHTS

AS EARLY AS POSSIBLE

AS LATE AS NECESSARY

Carver, while the reluctant mother has drooped out of college and gone into hiding to ever, the moralists have proved wille to aestroy a wollall s life in order to bolster their abortion rights. If the Alton Bill many more women driven to despair by unwanted pregnancies.

DAYSCHOOL

The forces backing Alton even include some leading figures on the left of the Labour Party such as like Ronnie Campbell, a member of the Campaign Group of MPs and a practising Catholic. It is going to take a big and militant campaign of resistance to defeat the allparty anti-abortion lobby. Last Saturday's local demonstrations were a start.

The two London marches against Alton this Thursday will be the next step. To take the work out a clear strategy for dayschool on women's rights organised wy te Revolucionary Communist Party this Sunday.

The slogan initiated by our supporters, for the right to an abortion 'As early as possible, as late as necessary' has now been taken up by many in the Fight the Alton Bill campaign.

It is a demand which we need to popularise as widelv as possible in the decisive weeks

MARCH AGAINST ALTON

Thursday 21 January 12 noon: Assemble for National Students' Demonstration, at University of London Union, Malet Street WC1. March to Victoria Embankment. From 6.30pm: Assemble for Women's Torchlit Procession at Lincoln's Inn Fields. March to Victoria Embankment.

FIGHT FOR WOMEN'S

Place: Caxton House, 129 St John's Way, London problem • The rise of the moral right • Health and ethics (led by woman doctor) • Marxist theory of Transport from major cities available, along with For further details, contact Janice Bryan on (01) 729 0414

ABORTION

tom a snortel which moonlichi from Hulses moonlighting at the first?'

nurses are moonlighting. pay for it London, explained do agency in because it was so bad.

SEVEN-DAY

get our hands on. student nurse. can't buy clothes. on NHS pay.? recently issued of trying to so long as they

SIDEATHAM

A

FIGHT

FOR

ABO

•David Alton on yer bike, we will fight for women's rights."

Last Saturday 700 women's rights campaigners marched, sang and chanted their way from Clapham Common to Brixton. The South London march was one of many anti- Alton protests all over Britain.

peaking in Weybridge last Norman Tebbit accused nurses of cheating the National Health Service by moonlighting as agency nurses when they are supposed to be off-duty. "How many nurses, he asked, 'now use the extra time off working week, we have given them, to working at the hospital down the road whilst the that hospital The answer is that nearly all They do it because the pittance they receive for a full-time job in the NHS is not enough to live on. If they need a pair of shoes or a new coat, they must take extra work to at Middlesex Hospital in central why lighting is so common: "You can guarantee that 75 per cent of NHS nurses do agency nursing on the side, or they' ve got some other job going. I have three jobs myself. I am a nurse on a ward. Sometimes I work in a geriatric hospital, which for students is also low-paid. I also work in a health food restaurant on my days off. I did have another job washing up in a restaurant, but I've just packed it undermine puone nurses at a "Nurses will do anything we can doing a seven-day week. You work health service cuts. for a whole month without a day off, because you can't afford not £4500 is the NHS rate for a In London that means you can't go out and you You can just of about buy your food! All you want is a normal life where you've got enough to pay for your train ticket in the morning, and a sandwich at blood lunchtime. But you won't get that Sheffield, Leeds, Health service managers know to get them back. that moonlighting is the only way anybody can afford to be an NHS nurse. Bloomsbury health authority circular to nursing staff which stopped short ban after-hours working. Instead, managers warned nurses not to let it interfere with near professional standards. They don't thousands mind if nurses are working their marched in fingers to the bone when 'off-duty" are bright and Revolutionary Stop Comunanst Party Alton

LEEI

Bill

KTION

GHT

on demand.

N TEBBIT BRANDS NURSES

NHS-the moonlight zone

NURSES NEED TO UNITE WITH OTHER HEALTH WORKERS

chirpy on the ward next day.

PICOS

Tebbit's speech was designed to sympathy for when health time are vegmamg organised in opposition to low pay, miserable working conditions, and Two weeks ago 39 night nurses North Manchester General Hospital took strike action against government plans to end unsocial hours payments. The departmen health and social security backed down and agreed to review its proposals. When management withdrew their meal allowances, transfusion workers in and lascow Edinburgh took disruptive action In Edinburgh last week, than 2000 hospital staff, including members of the no-strike Royal College of Nursing, joined a day of action against low pay and cuts.

Next day 150 ancillary workers came out at Gogaburn Hospita Edinburgh. On Monday, health workers privatisation of hospital services in the Glasgow area. As we go to

REAL

FREEDOM

Continued from page 1 of such control condemns women to unpaid drudgery inside the home and an inferior status outside it. That's why we must prioritise demands to alleviate the burden of child-bearing and child-rearing - for free 24-hour nurseries, free and safe contraception, and free abortion The campaign to stop Alton's anti-abortion Bill should provide a focus for everybody who wants to liberate women from their oppression today. The Revolutionary Communist Party's dayschool on women's rights this Sunday will be discussing the best way to beat the 'Fergie Factor' and fight for real freedom.

o she real bainior the dole quete? staff at Hill End 30 Psychiatric Hospital have been on strike for five days in protest against the suspension of two union representatives. Thousands of London's health workers look set to take part in a city-wide day of action in February The willingness of desperate nurses and other health workers to take to the streets has caught the government hop. and on the the threatened

DIOSDCCLE

Thatcher's blue-eyed health boss John Moore. Favourable media coverage has helped them. But that won't last for ever. the tne conteis continue authorities will follow Tebbit's lead and start raking up the dirt in an attempt to isolate health workers from wider support. Management are already trying to exploit the division between health service professionals anc ancillary staff. To counteract this we need a strategy to fight for decent pay for all health service employees, whether they work in a technician's white coat or Building for cleaners overalls. coordinated action across union lines must be our first priority.

the next step

Revolutionary Communist Party weekly No 3 There can be no prospect of peace in the Middle East until the Palestinian people have achieved self-determination.

That is the central lesson of the renewed unrest in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Support for a Palestinian homeland has been asserted by all shades of political opinion in Britain during the past few weeks. After his well-publicised confrontation with an Israeli colonel in a Palestinian refugee camp, even Tory foreign announced that 'there has to be self-determination for these people, and the violence we have seen in recent weeks will continue as long as this state of limbo is here. But Palestinian self-determination is an easy phrase, which means very different things in the mouths of different people. For Mellor. the Tories, the Labour Party and much of the British lett. it means creatine some sort of autonomous zone for the Palestinians alongside Israel. For us, it means the destruction of the Zionist state of Israel and the unification of the entire Palestinian nation.

Israel can only exist by oppressing Palestine. It could not have come into being at the end of the Second World War without driving the Palestinians off their land and robbing them of their national rights. It could not last a day if the Palestinians achieved democracy. The Israeli state is an unstable anu articial enuity which has survived for 40 years through the systematic use of violence and discrimination against Palestinians. To secure the corders it imposed on a hostile Arab world, Israel has nad to launch an endiess round of wars, invasions and raids azainst nelenoours who harbour or sympathise with the Palestinians. The permanent war footing on which Israel stands is not simply the result of over-zealous government policy; it is the only possible way of life for a state whose oppression in the Middle East.

The current wave of Israeli repression in the occupied territories fits into a wellestablished pattern. The idea of a Zionist state on Palestinian United Nations in 1947, after the British colonialists handed over their Palestinian mandate to the international body. ine UN proposed the partition of Palestine between independent Jewish and Arab states much the same idea as British politicians claim to support today. But there could be no compromise between the Zionist settlers and the the next step the next step

PALESTINE

Palestinians, who both sought sovereignty over me same arca Before Israel even came into existence in 1948, the Zionists were expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes. As soon as Israel was created it went to war with the Arabs, quickly occupying an area far larger than that desionated by the un. and killing off any idea of a Palestinian homeland. From 1948-66, Palestinians caught within Israel were subject to military law.They had been converted into an oppressed minority within their own land. Other Palestinians Middle East. Yet the very existence of these people outside Israel's control, and their proud identification as Palestinians, presented a threat to the stability of the Zionist state. In 1967 Israel attacked its Arab neighbours and occupied the rest of ralesune, seizing me west Bank from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt. It immediately began creating settlements of Israeli zealots, to cut off the West Bank from the wider Afab world. They are still there today, outposts of Israeli power backed by the state see bace 5. In 1973 Israel went to war again. In 1978 Israeli forces Hivauca acuanon to crack down on Palestinian strongholds.

They have maintained a presence there ever since. in 1982 Israel launched a fullscale invasion of Lebanon to drive out Palestinian freedom fighters. The Israelis bulldozed through to the suburbs of Berut and presided over the massacre of thousands of Palestinians by Christian militias in the refugee camps 00202 200eAnG between all of these acts of Istaell Daroarism, many short and bloody raids on Palestinian camps and targets as far away as Tunisia. Today, Palestinians who have lived all their lives within the Green Line of pre-1967 Israel are still denied equal rights.

They cannot own any of the per cent of the land which is controlled by the Jewish National Fund. They are not entitled to the same welfare benefits as Israeli Jews. And they suffer harsh discrimination in the job and housing markets.

Those who eke out an existence in the occupied territories fare even worse under Israeli rule. They are used as a boo of chean migrant labour, shipped behind me creen Line and out again each day to do the dirty work of Israeli society. They are subject to a pass law system Publisher Revolutionary Communist Party, BM RCP, London WC1N 3XX © copyright Printer Morning Litho Printers Ltd (TU), 439 North Woolwich Road, London E16 Annual subscription rates • Britain and Northern Ireland E26 • Europe and Irish Republic £34• North Africa and Middle East (aidi) 254 Americas, Asid central and soutnern Amrica (airmail) ts Australasia, Japan (airmail) t40 Outside curope - All destinations (surface mail) £33.

All cheques payable to Junius Publications Ltd.

Circulation 01-729 3771. Newsdesk 01-729 3771. Correspondence to The Editor, the next step, BCM JPLTD, London WC1N 3XX.

ISSN 0144 350X22 January 1988. Registered as a newspaper at the Post Office.

Editor: Mick Hume on the South African model. No Palestinian from the occupied territories can spend a night behind the Green Line without a pass. If caught there without one, Palestinian workers face up to a year in an Israeli jail.

On top of this discrimination, Palestinians in the occupied territories suffer the attentions of Israel's iron fist' policy, which has inflicted so much death and injury over the past six weeks. The political and economic viability of the Israeli state depends upon the continued subjugation of the Palestinians.

The panic caused by the spread of the recent protests behind the Green Line reflects the mortal threat which the Palestinians pose to the existence of ever part 01 Israel. The Western states are well-aware of this fact. America and Britain have propped up Israel as their local policeman in the Middle East. They need Istaen suns to maintain tel influence in the region. Thus Thatcher and Reagan have no hesitation in condemning Palestinians who resist Israeli oppression as 'terrorists'.

The support of Western statesmen for Palestinian 'selfdetermination' must be understood in this context. The West's much-hyped Middle East peace process is designed to divert the Palestinian struggle homeland, auspices of Jordan's King Hussein for the massacre of many Palestinians in the Black September of 1970. The aim of these British and American initiatives is to reconcile the Palestinians to the existence of the Israeli state. trying to persuade the oppressed people that their Bison me messensane Gaza could become a Palestinian 'nation'. Yet while Pre Bave the state of Israel stands, Palestinians can be nothing more than a subject people.

We should not fall for the utpourings of sympathy for th Palestinians from the hypocrites of the British 90 political establishment. When it comes to the question of Israel's survival, they are all was typically quick to qualify his criticisms of Israeli tactics by declaring himself to be 'a candid friend of Israel. Anybody who wants to see freedom for the Palestinians can be no friend of the state which lives on their backs. When we say *Self-determination for the Palestinian people', we do not mean it as a public relations gesture or a diplomatic trick; we mean it. towards security relations shows contined speculators.

'STRENGTH'

stands this scale. other crisis. that the among probably under the himself responsible inefficiency figures) make anyway. . They are The US tinancial

ABSENCE

stuff of corridors government the deep-seated In bang te trade figures exposed

US TRADE FIGURES

Holding their breath igures announced last Friday showed a drop in the US trade deficit for November. Euphoric financial commentators nounced unis as a crucial mist step solving the economic imbalances which are destabilising the world economy and upsetting between the capitalist powers. Yet the very fact that the leaders of the Western world held their collective breath for a week awaiting the release of a single statistic confirms that the economi crisis is beyond their control. It how short-term trends, normally to spivish market With the December figures still to come the 1987 US trade deficit $159.1 billion. The November deficit of $13.2 billion represents a fall of $4.5 billion on the previous month's record high Few expected an improvement of The week prior to the announcement was dominated by efforts to the markets tor Ronald Reagan kicked off with a speech in Cleveland, Ohio claiming deficit is "sign strength and proof of worldwide confidence in the US economy.

This carried little conviction even his own staff. Other commentators tried to cam speculation by arguing that the of the US

-COLDUS

bureau (which compiles the trade and "seasonal factors' the numbers meaningless The attitude quickly changed to an unconvincing pose of told-you-so confidence when the surprise fall was announced markets had good reason to be relieved by Friday's tall in the monthly trade deficit. A run on the dollar caused by bad trade figures would mean heavy tor currency osse speculators and portfolio investors.

For holders of dollars and dollar bonds it would mean a further fall in the real value of their assets.

Shareholders stand to lose if the US authorities raise interest rates to defend a falling dollar. Money moves out of shares in response to higher rates of interest elsewhere.

The widespread panic about one month's trade figures might be an accurate reflection of the world view of New York money-men.

Such an outlook, however, is not which effective government policy is made. The fact that it has now spread to the of Western power betrays the absence of any genuine initiatives to tackle problems apparent in the world economy.

Since the October crash, Western rulers have made great show of economic cooperation, particularly But the outcome of the talks held between Reagan and his Japanese counterpart Noboru Takeshita before the pays these

COT

WORRIES ON WALL STREET

attempts at a united rescue operation The leaders of the two biggest capitalist announced powers rescue plan allowing CoaT use special drawing America to rights (SDRs) from Inter- •UBe Monetary national Fund. These are a form of international reserve available to currency problem countries". America will swap SDRs for yen to replenish its declining foreign currency reserves.

which will allow more central bank intervention in the money markets to protect the dollar.

FRICTION

The agreement is supposed to be a cooperative venture, yet it serves to emphasise the tensions prevailing the capitalist nations. Nobody believes that it is anything more than a short-term palliative. More than $100 billion will be needed in 1988 to support the dollar at its present level.

The deal allows for only $9 billion. The fact that only two world powers growing conviction in the US establishment that a 'group of two should run world financial affairs. This rankles among European spokesmen, who concentrated their fire on a concession allowing US Japanese building access to projects. And recriminations continue between the USA anc Japan. While Reagan was applauding the concession on construction projects. his own Lauccore Clayton, Yeutter consentative demned it as inadequate and threatened retaliation. The instability and friction which dominate economic debate today that happens to the US trade deficit this month

OEHEAL.

recessional. pressures are on the rise.

Europe faces a particularly lean time in 1988. European producers cannot afford to lose markets to US rivals exploiting a lower dollar.

Behind the claims about successful aajustment poncies is a lamillal story - the manoeuvres by each power to ensure somebody else ot a collapsing une brice capitalist order. Tony Kennedy 22 January 1988 • 3

round 80 Conservative A against the government's attempt

CEUSTI

Richard Shepherd's Bill to reform the Official Secrets Act. dignified dissidents anese about the Only Daramentary Thatcher has to opposition that contend with these days. government, however, is in no mood to relax its drive to increase the repressive powers of the state.

Shepherd's proposed alterations to the Act didn t amount to much.

Yet they were sufficient to provoke the first-ever example of government imposing a three-line whip instructing Tory MPs to kill off a private member's Bill.

BUGGED

Thatcher intends to introduce new legislation to reform' the Official Secrets Act herself later But this will be to Las val. strengthen state censorship, not reduce it. The Tories' aim is to redefine lacuide

SCCULILY

permit MI5 and the Special Branch to monitor those elements considered likely to challenge the government's detence and foreign policies' (Independent, 11 January).

In Britain's political pracuice police

LOSCO

burgled groups such as CND and solidarity Irish campaigns, connrmed by former spy Wright in Spycatcher. But these underhand operations are now be made tO state policy. The Tories are to beef up MIS still further through the appointment of a new director to replace blamed for Sir Anthony bungling the Peter Wright affair.

Patrick Walker has been promoted - to take Duff's place, over the heads of several more senior officers. Usually MI5 chiefs come from K Branch - which deals primarily with countering Soviet espionage. Over the last few years, 4 • 22 January 1988 PETER BILLIERE WITH THE SAS IN ADEN, 1964: NOW HIS METHODS WILL BE USED AT HOME

TORIES INCREASE STATE POWERS

THATCHER'S

SECRET ARMY

The Tories are taking advantage of the lack of external opposition to tool up the state security services for the real battles to come at home and abroad, reports Andy Clarkson however, it has been superseded by F Branch, which is responsible for the domestic surveillance of British Tory radicals, trade unionists and other first-ever boss from F Branch. are Similarly. Metropolitan Police chief, spent 15 years of his career inside Special Branch and Scotland Yard's Anti- The Terrorist Squad. These appointments indicate Thatcher's growing concern with internal security and politicising British policing.

The government's new detensiveness about criticisms of its foreign policy is revealing. Publicly the Tories pretend that Britain's overseas role is about pursuing peace and reedom throughout the world. What have they got to hide about its future intentions? One military recent provides a clue.

TERRORISTS

Lieutenant-General Peter de la Billiere has been made General Officer Commanding of the South- LU east Military District. Billiere has seen action with the terrorists of the Special Air Service in Korea.

Malaya and Oman. Between 1978 and 1983 he was director of the SAS regiment. He was then sent to land forces and Falklands until 1985. appointment to such a senior post Peter is the first for an officer who has no experience commanding any unit in the British army of the Rhine, where the majority troops are currently deployed.

Billiere's new position gives him command over deployment force - 5 Airborne Brigade based Billiere's experience in covert SAS operations around the world is just what the government needs to run

MIS

out-of-area military operations in the third world. government powers to criticisms of its foreign policy on the way, and a former SAS man in the driving overseas intervention forces, the that preparing for a more aggressive Walker is MIS's approach to keeping the Jack flying Middle East.

DIRTY

Billiere's appointment also gives him powers to provide aid to the civil authorities Britain. unrest doesn't seriously expect the polite rebels in her own party to remain her only opponents at home for long. Over the last few years the militarisation of Britain's machinery has proceeded apace.

Greater censorship powers and state surveillance are just part of the picture. The police nowadays operate like a Continental paraappointment military force. can't cope, the Tories can call in the SAS Warfare Wing'. This terror gang was used to smash a Peterneac prison siege last October - the first time the SAS had been sent in quell a Britain. With Billiere's appointconfirmed, forces will come under the direct control of an old SAS hand in such the a crIsIs. While public attention focuses on Billiere's little parliamentary disputes about private member's government ready for the real struggles ahead.

They are moving away from all of Britain's the old conventions political military operations, towards the rapid new tactics veillance and dirty fighting.

at Aldershot. have to match their preparations for the battle over Britain's future. A few dozen Tory will not wets protection from the masked men With censor secret army. former Sea. as the chair awarded the (1974), the did how so honoured? Sean Was between When the signed seat of Britain's in Dublin. Thatcher Union like areas in the event of Thatcher state And where they reached and 'Counter Revolutionary with Valera (another these armed

CONSELLO!

sate estate known number three. Bills, the Tory state getting the about nonand set-piece systematic sur- We innovative provide MIS agents of Thatcher's SEAN MacBRIDE Rebel turned statesman he death last week of Amnesty and International founder

IRA

leader Sean hypocrisy on both sides of the Irish The establishment in Dublin and London praised to the skies a man who their predecessors had hunted and imprisoned when he fought for Irish freedom In MacBride's latter years, world Labour powers East and West showered him however, with decorations for his work oiling the cogs of international diplomacy of Amnesty International and the United Nations commissioner for Namibia. He was was Nobel Peace Prize finally Prize Lenin Peace (1977) and the American Medal of Justice (1978). Yet according to his obituary in The Times, the British viewed the young MacBride as 'a sinister and ruthless extremist during his IRA years. So be evel COmE LU the son of John MacBride, executed for his part in the Dublin Rising of Easter 1916, and indefatigable republican Maud Gonne. He fought in the Tan War for Irish independence from Britain and was jailed by the British at the age of 14.

Partition Treaty 1921, the republican movement split and civil war soon broke out between supporters and opponents of the deal with Britain.

MacBride backed the anti-Treaty posts forces, and was persecuted by the British-backed Free State regime groups. the

IRA

His Yet MacBride, like most of his generation of republican leaders, eventually grew to fear the masses an accommodation After a British imperialism. brief stint as IRA chief of staff, he more accepted the limitations of the Twenty-six Counties state in 1937 which when Dublin premier Eamon de leading former anti-Treatyite) passed new 1946 MacBride was fully involved in the internal man politics of Britain's Southern Irish and formed the shortlived Clann na Poblachta as •Partition party Irish Freedom Movement Rally

NO MORE BLOODY SUNDAYS!

Speakers: Mick Hume and Derry activist 7.30pm Friday 29 January Caxton House, 129 St John's Way London N19 (Archway tube) Followed by a benefit disco Admission (rally and disco) £3/£1.50 unemployed In 1948 MacBride became a statesman as the South's foreign In office, he combined republican gestures in public with private advances to the imperialists.

MacBride rejected Nato membership, only to seek a bilateral militar agreement with the USA. He piloted through the South's formal declaration of an Irish republic in 1949. The London, government in unimpressed and was assured the British establishment that Dublin remained under its According British to cabinet minutes, declaring that Ireland had broken free of Britain in 1949, he also held a secret meeting with Northern Ireland premier Lord Brookeborough at Stormont Castle.

the symbol of Unionist power on Irish soil. MacBride fell from office in after he broke with health minister Noel Browne who had dared to introduce a state-funded maternity welfare service against the wishes of the Catholic hierarchy.

MacBride told the Dail (Irish parliament) that he was bound to give obedience to the rulings of our Church and of our hierarchy.

NICHE

As a former foreign minister with increasingly conservative views, he the international dipniche on lomacy circuit. The Great Powers tried to use his radical credentials in he could where exert restraining influence over left-wing national liberation organisations, and human rights

BOYCHCHEL

MacBride also tried to apply this approach to the renewed struggle in Ireland after 1969. He insisted that the conflict in the North should be seen as a war rather than a *law and order' problem, and upheld right of

IRA

prisoners to political status. But he refused to support the armed struggle against Britain, and called on republicans to pursue more 'constitutional' methods.

1977 he tried to arrange ceasefire agreement including the and the Loyalist paramilitary gangs. MacBride's last initiative showed how far he had lowered his political horizons since his militant youth MacBride principles are designed sectarian LO Contal employment practices within the Northern Ireland state, by persuading US financiers to refuse to invest in companies which won't hire Catholics. This scheme portrays the American ruling class, has terrorised oppressed peoples around the world, as a potential progress in lorce Ireland. the com- CabLure. promised and confused outlook of a who gave up imperialist struggle for a seat in the cabinet rooms and conference halls of the old order. Jackie Reynolds the next step

EYE-WITNESS REPORT FROM THE WEST BANK

ISRAELI SETTLERS

ON PALESTINIAN SOIL

Daniel Nassim and Carol Meghji report from the Israeli settlements whose our Vaaleh is not a name you find among the Will holiday companies in your high-street travel agents. It is a tourist firm with a difference. It arranges governmentsponsored tours around the Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, in the hope of convincing Jewish visitors to emigrate to these colonial outposts on Palestinian

SOTT

ror une visitors, une our Vaaleh sight-seeing trips are cheap - 10 shekels (£3) a head.

But the Zionist settlements which they visit have cost the Palestinian people their homes, their land and

LO CORES.

'It's safer than New York City.

At least here you know who the bad guy is. Pinhas Hayim is the Mazcir (manager) of the El David settlement in what he 'northern Judea' and what we call occupied Palestine, taken by the Israelis during the 1967 Six Day War. He manages according to one simple rule: if they're Palestinians, You have to respect they're bad. and suspect the Arabs at the same music Be says as al means be aware of the respect' dangers from hostile Palestinians.

About five minutes drive from El David is the Palestinian village of Zaatera. The people of Zaatera have good reason to resent the settlers of El David, who have built on land stolen from the Palestinian village.

LICENCE

For the 68 000 Jewish settlers on West Bank, the suspecting the Arabs' means having a licence to harass every Palestinian. Heavily armed settlers often enter Zaatera to ensure everything is in order.

They boast about forcing terrorists to leave their homes.

The Israeli authorities have done all they can to make it easy for the settlers to pick on Palestinians.

For example, the number plates of cars belonging to Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza are conveniently colour-coded easy harassment by settlers and the Israeli army. West Bank number are blue and Gazan ones plates grey. They also have a code letter in Hebrew to indicate the town of registration. Settlers have standard Israell yellow number plates.

Even during relatively periods El David has two or three soldiers reserve on permanent duty, prowling the settlement with Üzi submachine guns dangling from their side. They are on a month or military reserve duty done by every Israeli male up to the age of about 55. At night the settlers do their own guard duty. Palestinians could be forgiven for not noticing ditterence. las Weck settlers shot dead a 16-year old Palestinian youth in Beiten village near Ramallah.

OUTPOST

The presence of the soldiers exposes the lie that the settlers are freelance religious fanatics. David only Call

SUL VIVC

massive support from the Israeli The road which leads to El stale. purpose-built by the DaveWas authorities after the settlement was established in 1982. The 19 families who live in temporary caravans inside El David's wire-surrounded compound also benefit from heavy subsidies ol rents and SLalt *It's economical to be mortgages. out here, says Pinhas Hayım.

El David is a purely political Israeli outpost power There is no occupied Palestine. for economic settlement's existence. Most of the inhabitants work in Jerusalem. The settlement itself only controls a few hundred pistachio and olive trees, taken from the Palestinians.

half of the land in the West Bank for exclusive Jewish use. Pinhas Hayim boasted that the settlement would soon expand to 130 families in permanent housing, the next step calls

"PLO

for

JERÜSALEM

Main road quiet Jewish area Arab area of To Tel Aviv

ISRAEL

with Gilo and invited us to come and join in them. To listen to his sales pitch, the you would think he was flogging villas in Spain. time-share declined his invitation to join the jolly throng of Israeli oppressors.

The Jewish settlements, Israeli flags fluttering in the wind, percued suategically tops of the West Bank. From there they can keep a close eye on the Palestinian towns and villages in the valleys below. Leading settlers try to convince the Tour Vaaleh WHILE ISRAELI TROOPS PROWL THE BORDER BETWEEN THE WEST BANK AND JERUSALEM'S OLD CITY, To Ramallah Bethlehem settlement, legal on the hillmachine gun on guard duty. inhabitants rob and terrorise Palestinians in the occupied West Bank West Israel's as Shimon Peres, tinian rights. which line Old City Jordan valley To Jericho the the edge of the Bethlehem Jerusalem'

WEST BANK

occupation day-trippers that they get on well with their Palestinian neighbours.

In Tekoa, El David's bigger parent professor Dr Eduardo Recanati joked with the tourists that his settlement did not even need a fence. He neglected to mention the rolls of razor wire on the hillside around the settlement.

about said it was so safe in Tekoa that he had even forgotten the ammunition clip for his sublast night's the West Bank. beat the After the Israelis occupied the Bank in 1967, the site on when lekoa now stanas spent bu years as an Israeli army camp.

When the troops moved out, the armed israell settlers moved in They got permission to take ove local agents from then the detenc minister, and now the leader of the Israeli Labour Party who makes hypocritical noises to the Western press about protecting Paleswas a Labour government of began the settlement in 1967, establishing the Gush Etzion block in the centre of the West Bank and sponsoring a settlements along - surrounding the Palestinian population of the West Bank with a ring of Jewish settlers.

At the same time, fortified Jewish settlements sprang up to encircle Arab East Jerusalem. Since then, Jewish-only suburbs of the ancient city have been extended to Arab town of in the south and Ramallah in the north. Bethlehem of practically a suburb boasted tour-guide Bruce, a resident of Tekoa.

Gilo is the largest and southernmost suburb of Jerusalem, which looms over Bethlehem. According to Bruce, it was "built on territory that was liberated from Jordanian 1967.

LOSSE

words, the land was occupied by Israel in 1967, and it has since been turned into a settlement to police the local Palestinians. One Gilo settler explained the purpose of the suburb: "Gilo was built to serve as a butter between Jerusalem and Bethlehem and all that lies behind it."

It sounded as if she was talking biblical arriving from Bethlehem; in fact she was referring to the Palestinian population of the southern half of settlement tour ends in Jerusalem. The Old City, also captured in 1967, is divided into four quarters: Armenian, Christian, Today Jewish Jewish and Muslim. settlers are invading the Old City as they have the West Bank proper.

The Jewish quarter is strikingly different from the other areas.

It is far more affluent than itsneighbours. As you enter Israeli soldiers search your bags. But the Israeli settlers are not satisfied with their rich enclave. They are now spreading well beyond the confines of the traditional Jewish quarter.

Several Yeshivot (religious seminaries) have been established in the Muslim quarter. Armed students some in traditional black Jewish garb and others wearing Israeli regularly - SuroIus doraks. their Palestinian neighbours.

The Jerusalem settlers are defended by the paramilitary border police rather than the army. They patrol narrow alleys wielding clubs and carrying automatic rifles.

SIEGE

threat to Arabs has

A BOLICE

in the Muslim recently arrived quarter. Ariel Sharon. Israel's hawkish trade industri minister, has bought a house in the area, setting an example to other settlers. Sharon's home is instants Menorah recognisable by the (traditional Jewish candelabra) on and by the electrified the top metal grille on the windows. His house-warming party was attended Israeli dignitaries including prime minister Yitzhak Shamir. Since Sharon arrived, the Israelis have drafted an extra 300 police into the Muslim quarter. They maintain a permanent checkpoint next to Sharon's house, and take every opportunıty to harass the local population.

The settlers, backed by the iron fist of the Israeli state, have altered the geography of the entire West Bank to suit their purposes. They have dubbed this area of Palestine *Judea and Samaria, and littered it with Israeli roads, Israeli and exclusively Jewish Lo wIIs. tracts of land. All of the major Israeli political parties have supported the settlement

-DIU

West gramme in the occupied Bank and Gaza. The Zionist state of Israel has annexed both areas in everything but name Yet the settlements can only survive as garrisons under siege They are a testament to the imposed and unstable character of the Pales- Cove tinian people. A policy of changing place names and erecting barbed cannot suppress the Palestinians' desire to be free of their Israeli oppressors. As the battles of the last six weeks have shown agam, violence of the Israeli army and the settlers only sparks more determined resistance among the Palestinians. Jewish visitors invited to join the settlements may start out as tourists; but once esconced in the compounds, they join the ranks of semi-official sraell terrorists 22 January 1988 • 5

BEHIND THE HYPE ABOUT BOOM-TOWN 'CRAWLEY

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF AN

'ECONOMIC MIRACLE'

Crawley in Sussex hit the headlines last week when its official unemployment *rate dropped below three per cent - the lowest in Britain since the early seventies. The media hailed boom-town Crawley as proof of 'Thatcher's economic miracle'. Andrew Calcutt went to investigate, and found a grim picture of low-pay, migrant labour, temporary work and homelessness Jobs, but no homes THOUSANDS of unemployed people have 'got on their bikes' to Crawley from around Britain and Ireland. Hundreds more are arriving to fill the vacancies at Gatwick airport's second passenger terminal, due to open in March. But most of Crawley's new starters can hardly afford to keep a roof over their heads.

Jobs on offer include assembly work, driving, part-time cleaning and catering, and office temping.

Few pay more than £120 a week gross, and many employers offer less than f75 after stoppages.

Housing is scarce, and low-paid workers are forced to compete for accommodation with a smaller number of better-paid newcomers.

House prices have spiralled so that anyone earning less than €12 000 a year doesn't stand a chance of a mortgage. Private rented accommodation is hard to come by and so expensive even well-paid air hostesses share fiveto-a-house like students.

Council houses are like gold dust. The borough council's stock of 12 000 properties is full, and the Labour council refuses to defy Tory restrictions on new house bulloing. All Crawieys workers need decent housing, whether they are newcomers or second or third generation "Crawleyites'. But the council would rather close the gates to outsiders than lose sight of the neat and tidy new town It always planned for. Squeezed out of the private rented sector and barred from council housing, some "immigrants' from the North are sleeping i ten Cars re departure lounge at Gatwick.

Many more have been forced into expensive digs, which account for at least half their wages. In boomtown Crawley they can 'have a new job for a New Year'. But they can't have a home to go with it Crawley's success story" shows that even when it claims to be booming, the capitalist system wrecks the lives of the people who have to work in it. Crawley's mini-boom is likely to be shortlived in any case. The Tories claim it is proof of the resurgence of the British economy. In fact, the peculiarities of Crawley's accelerated growth confirm Britain s overall decline as an economic power. The expansion of nearby Gatwick airport, now the second busiest in the world, is the single most important factor in Crawley's mini-boom. It generated service sector jobs and drew new companies to the area. The fact that most of the new arrivals are involved in electrical engineering and electronics sounds impressively hi-tech. But many of Crawley's electronics companies are small outfits using a few lowpaid workers to turn out cheap, consumer-oriented products such as hearing aids. Some of the more sophisticated ones are foreignowned firms making up kits from other people's technology. MEL is the largest single employer in the area, producing up-market communications systems. It is a subsidiary of Dutch-owned Philips Industries. Most of the bigger British manufacturing companies survive on fat defence contracts Handed out through the British governeat. Crawley's burst of economic activity is dominated by the service sector, reliant on foreign technology, and propped up by British state spending. In all these respects, the Crawley mini-boom is like the rest of the British economy: weak and vulnerable to the impact of the approaching international economic recession.

6 • 22 January 1988 12 midnight: Steve is asleep on the overnight work bus from Liverpool, en route for Crawley. He, and all signed on for a two-week stint as cleaners at Gatwick airport. They will receive f2.50 an hour, and accommodation. It's shared hardly a living wage; but they are ine lucky ones. waiting list of unemployed people who want to board this bus.

2am: George is not so lucky. After all working day as labourer in Crawley, followed by an eight-hour cleaning shift al Gatwick, he has kipped down in the airport lounge. For the third night running, the police move him on. Exhausted, George walks up and down the airport concourse.

Two months ago with the intention of Crawley gelung cnougn moncy to start d business back home Midlands. Now he decides to give up both his jobs, and take the next train home. 4am: Gloria wakes up when her baby starts crying. She is fed up with being trapped in the home, but there's only nursery in crawley of jobs and plenty plenty child-minders. But I can't get a job that would pay enough for one.

Tam: Dave never wakes up without remembering the down from Stockton-on-Tees: 28 1980. For Letoper seven years, has As a handyman/forklift lodgings. truck driver, he takes 'home' £100 a week - nowhere near enough to get a mortgage. "The council don't want to know you. I don't want to Duty Free WORKERS WHO COME TO GATWICK FIND THE STREETS ARE PAVED WITH FILTH I've got nearly 30 years to go.

, have just Che's worked there here is a long live on that round here. builder's came, especially shops. the pubs.' me down. - one wIse be in prison."

HOOT.

forked out council One *There are him with a list of day he came more unan work hard for it. Ived stay in lodgings, but I guess I'll be here until I retire. I'm 36 now, so 8am: Cathy (42) starts work in a newsagent near the town centre.

she arrived in Crawley 20 years ago. 'I was part of the new intake from London. I get £2.20 an hour. It adds to my husband's wages. £200 a week sounds good but you can't There's less to do here now than when I for the Kies There's nothing here except shoe The dance hall is closed.

Some of the youth clubs are closed.

There's a roller disco but not everyone wants that. So they go to 10am: Tina is having a row with her landlady. Her restrictions get day work every ecause I don't get enough to live I've earned some independence. But I might as well on. Darren's money running out. In one week, he has £120 for bed and breakfast. In the nick of time, the Citizens Advice Bureau provided cheaper ot accommodation (£40 a week plus a council house. bills). He hopes he'll be fixed up by tonight. He will take a driving job at f2.75 an hour, even though his transit accommodation bills will eat up back more than half his pay packet.

building 2pm: 'You don't get much and you Kentish lown. Teresa Jackie have just started their cleaning shift at Gatwick. A new starter asks Jackie to take her asked — downstairs to the office. Jackie says she's sorry but management

SQUEEZING PROFITS OUT OF SWEATED LABOUR

are on her back and she's got to get We've lost time already. here's too much to do. 4pm: When Mark came to Crawley to work for a contract cleaner, he left a wife and baby behind in Wales. He wants to set up home here. But a council official has just warned him that this isn't the place to come.' There's no hope of 6pm: Gerry slams the door of the which has brought him 30 miles from a Crawley site to bedsit in North London. The site is not unionised.

and Gerry works on the lump - £30 a day, cash in hand, no questions - and no compensation or benefit if he breaks a leg.

8pm: Ray and Tony are sitting in BJs bar on Crawley High Street.

They came out with enough money for three drinks each. They say days off from their cleaning jobs at Gatwick are just 'dead days' in the lifeless boom-town. 10pm: Day and night, management They always keep tabs on you. even look to see if you give out extra milk sachets.' Carmen works for one of the fast food franchises in Gatwick village. She is tired of listening *to announcements for people landing from exciting I'm places. stuck here all night". 12 midnight: George lies awake in parents home ir Birmingham. He knows he'll have to go back to Crawley soon. It's the only place where he can get work.

the next step

BLACK

PEOPLE AND

THE LEFT

SUPERINTENDENT Bill Ganley made a successful bid for his 15 minutes with an 'off the cuff' remark about black people being responsible for 99 percent of crime in the Harlesden area. Inevitably, muen was said. but what was of most interest to me was the response of that mass of people called 'the black community of which I am a member. Not surprisingly, it was not uniformiv critica of what Ganley said because after a wee ack community, are not The assumption that we are all churned out with factory-preset politics and only to undervalue our capacity to achieve. The left and the right are constantly telling us what We are we must think. told our struggle is just part of a class struggle; we are told that we must unite: and we are told that we must be separate to survive. There are black people in the Conservative Party and black people in the Labour Party, and they all no doubt passionately believe that their choice is the right one. The Tories promote selfreliance and individuality.

Their ethos appeals to many black people who icel ual the Labour rarty has merely fostered an attitude of dependence. Labour had, until recently, managed to present an image that led many black people to think that they were the only hope for us.

But the Black Sections fiasco made it a little clearer that Labour could not help us. And of course for years many of us have -cause wee not believe it makes the slightest bit of difference we now have four black virs yet te on is sull allowed to print and Ganley can say what he likes about black people.

When we move away from party politics to street level, we find that things are not well. Those of us who work in socalled community groups are no more united than anyone else. Many such groups claim to speak for the black community. Everywhere you turn there is a meeting or a campaign going on. Yet when I go I see the same faces, or no faces at all sometimes, looking a little more fed-up each time. There is a sense of despair haunting the left like a persistent ghost. Some people say things are not as bad as that. If so, why are the murderers of innocent black people Sill serving mue ponce force and in No 10 Downing Street? Maybe people just do not care anymore. Maybe most people feel that all they can do is look after number one. Or maybe the left needs to take a long, hard look at what it believes in and how it goes about getting its message across. David North-west London the next step

SCARGILL:

BRITISH COAL and the UDM are doing everything to disrupt the NUM election At Bolsover they have forced us to hold the ballot in the bus shelter. At Cotgrave we have been pushed out of the foyer, whereas the UDM are still allowed to ballot at the pit. I agree with your call for a vote for Scargill. It is the only option for the Notts lads who stuck with the strike to the end. Scargill will win easily in Notts because all of us in the NUM are committed. We know he's been beaten by management, and they know it too. Yet if we voted for Walsh that would be saying that everything we've done in the past was wrong. Scargill was put in with a huge majority (70.3 per cent). He promised everything and the rank and file believed it. But in the next ballot, on pay, Scargill was defeated, mainly due to an 80 per cent vote against him in Notts. If Scargill had have been like Saltley Gates - we could have lived off the reputation for 10 years. So it is not Scargill's fault that we lost out. It is the fault of the membership. I hate to blame miners, but they are not the praetorian guard. Some bottle out when it comes to the crunch.

Dave Cotgrave pit Artionary Stop Party the OMEN Alton ED Bil

ORTION

NEED

RIGHTS ET

ALTON AND

ABORTION

AT Fight the Alton Bill meetings, a number of women have opposed grounds that his Bill will be forced to return to Jackstreet abortions. Ine prospect of untold agony in some grimy basement

'OUR ONLY OPTION'

got the support it would

ABORT

• RIGHTS

Party

WOMEN

ABORTIO

BACKSTREET

is a frightening one. But abortions does nothing to counteract te populal idea that women are best anything else they do should play second fiddle to that role. Even if we managed to get letters page

ABO

PHONE

01-729 0414

FIGHT

thousands of people marching in sympathy against the return of backstreet abortions, Alton's supporters could counter this by introducing more repressive legislation for our own good, eg, they could seek to place a care order on any woman who endangers her own health and threatens the "life' of an unborn fetus. It may sound far-fetched, but in California today that is what the right are trying to do If we don't go on to the offensive and convince people that women should have the right to control their own fertility, society, and especially doctors, will make it extremely hard to achieve abortions up to 18 weeks, let alone 28 weeks. Suke Carey Oxford

POLICE

MARASSMenT

SPICH UPOL

CHANAN SINGH WINS

I AM writing to tell you about the successful outcome of a campaign covered in the pages of tns last year, and supported by members of Workers Against Racism in Bristol. Two years ago there was a man betweer myself and my brothers and a group of racists, which resulted in a number of serious inturies. voicalv. no charges were brought But my father, Chanan Singh, was charged with malicious wounding. There present at the incident, but as leader of the sikh • •

SPYING ON

THE HOMELESS

I READ in tos recently of Camden council's repatriation of homeless Irish families. Since then, I have learnt that Lambeth special snoop squads' to visit bed and breaktast hotels late at night (10pm-12 midnight) or early in the morning (5. 7am). Their task is to check that rooms which the council is paying for are being slept in ov the homeless person(s) they've been allocated to.

If a room is found unoccupied, the booking is cancelled. Questions are asked later.

EXPOSE TOKENISM

YOUR paper has a record of pointing out that token do no good and at worst create the seace Tor c backlash. In the context of the Clause 28 attack on lesbians and gays, you should point out that the shortcomings of lifestyle politics/positive images and all that have allowed the right to make gains among working class people. Write to: tns POLICe HaRaSSMen David Rourke cHanan on the assumption that Sikhs carry ceremonial swords - to the pub! After two years of great distress and expense, and a lot of campaigning by the Sikh community, the Campaion Against Racisi Laws and Workers Against finally thrown out of court before Xmas. There wasn't enough evidence for the trial to last more than a tew hours - let alone the week-long proceedings which the police were eagerly anticipating I wish success to others in their campaigns Shamshair Singh Bristol Meanwhile, the people concerned are on the streets again, looking for accommodation. This policing by council officials is another attack on the homeless by yet No doubt Lambeth councillors would justify it by saying that their budget is being cut and that they have to ensure that money spent is wellspent. But in colluding with the Tories against homeless people, they are showing us what they - Tory stooges. Health visitor South London In the past, you have argued that just because the Tories say one thing, It does not mean we have to say the opposite. It is still the case that fighting for lesbian and gay rights means takine on the set. obsessed left as well as the raving right. Christopher Crouch End Write to tns

BCM JPLTD,

WC1N 3XX

22 January 1988 • 7

MAN A THE END

OF THE OFFICIAL

STEEL: LIGHTWEIGHT AND LOSER

LABOUR IN LIMBO

he leaders of the Liberal Democratic parties have worked fever- Social and to ishly since Thursday rescue their merger project.

But, as the Guardian observed, *There aren't many second chances in politics. The policy document All, Choices for drawn up for the proposed new •Voices and party and approved by David Steel and Robert Maclennan, shocked many Liberals and some Social Democrats with its enthusiasm for nuclear and power, its suggestion that VAT be missiles Trident children's clothes, food, fuel and newspapers and its imposed call for an end to mortgage tax of frantic in a series Wednesday reliet. document was rapidly abandoned meetings and a special committee established to draw up a less contentious platform of platitudes to give some coherence to the "Social and Liberal Democrats.

programmatic name constitution had provoked a split proposed new The on the negotiating committee even before the major policy debacle.

Steel and Maclennan are trying hard to cobble something together.

8 • 22 January 1988 The substantial body of Alliance media already rallied to help resuscitate the supporters the merger project. But everybody agrees that the leadership careers two uncharismaticpolitical lightweights are likely to these of While the merger be shortlived. fiasco given a temporary to David Owen's anti-merger SDP rump, the electoral prospects of any of the centre party fragments, or in combination, alone appear dim.

FINISHED

marked Wednesday culmination of trends towards the Black disintegration of the Alliance since its poor performance in last June's general election, when its share of the vote fell from 25 percent in 1983 to 23 percent and it returned the to Westminster with its number of MPs reduced from 27 to 22. We can draw three conclusions from the events of the past six months.

confirm project launched by the Alliance in they 1981 of 'breaking the mould' and First, and force in British politics is finished.

a new creating Second, the demise of the Alliance shows that the strategy of reviving the Labour Party by turning it into ill for the emergence of a how any defiantly separatist centre party can now seriously

OPPOSITION

an SD Mark IT', or by pursuing the quest for pacts or deals with the Alliance, is doomed. woeful ineffectiveness of all the has opposition confirms the urgency of building a mainstream real opposition to the Thatcher regime as it pushes its offensive ahead on every front. The Alliance has proved a fairly shortlived political phenomenon.

boost As a formal pact between the Liberals and the Social Democrats it lasted from 1981 to 1987, but its back to the now go origins elections of 1974 the Liberals won the seventies. 19 and 18 per cent of the popular vote, a dramatic advance on their the seven percent share in 1970, which had been a typically poor post-war performance. After Edward Heath's servative voters registered their many ment. protest by voting Liberal. The SDP emerged out of the tensions that mounted in the Labour Party the late that the through ground middle as a defensive unpopularity and wage controls. 'Yesterday's chaotic events...bode convincing opposition to thirdterm Thatcherism? (Independent) It is hard to see how any merged, cobbled up, or indeed challenge for government in the next general election.? (Guardian) Third, the parties midgeneral two 1979 the After "winter letting four years of Downing traditiona - Tory Consucceeded lett seventies and erupted after its 1979 defeat. Asthe left consolidated its position in the ministers party, the right was thrown on the Jenkins, the the of reSUIC of the Labour government's public spending cuts launch the SDP. The affinity between the Labour right and the

MACLENNAN: BACK TO OBSCURITY

In a common mood of despondency and ill-co exasperation at the extraordinary ineptitude leaders David Steel and Robert Maclennan, t writers of Britain's most influential dailies la pronounced the merger project a dead duck Mike Freeman assesses the significance of the demise of the Alliance Liberals was demonstrated in the Lib-Lab pact in 1977 and 1978, through which David Steel helped and to keep James Callaghan in office.

Labour right took much of the blame for the than cuts, for the industrial unrest of the prospects through at the for and of discontent, into Margaret Thatcher the the Under leadership of Tony Benn, the left Street stepped up the pressure on the Labour Party machine. When the in getting its constitutional reforms through at election, conferences in 1980 and 1981, David Owen, Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers — all former Labour - linked up with Roy senior figure from the earlier Wilson adminmost istrations, who now returned from a spell as president of the EEC, to The Gang Four' rapidly joined David Steel's Liberals in a provisional electoral 'As things now stand government can reasonably forward to a fourth term, the only serious oppos coming from within its ranks.' (Financial I pact which was consolidated as the 1983 general election approached Backed by a sympathetic media by by-election encouraged successes, the Alliance won a share of the vote just two per cent lower The 1983. Labour's in break major for next electior appeared promising. the Alliance materialise. event promise failed to Despite a spectacular by-election victory for the SDP in Greenwich only a few months before the 1987 specufuelled which lations about a major realignment of British politics, when June came the Alliance was squeezed between the two old parties. The votes had hardly been counted before Steel public started squabble about the way forward Owen for the Alliance and plunged both parties into a period of protracted internal strife. The result has been a split in the SP and the merger talks between the remains of the

SDP and the scarcely less fractious Liberals that culminated in Black Wednesday. Of the original Gang of Four only Owen and Williams remain in active politics - and they are bitter enemies on opposite sides of the SDP split. Maclennan the emerged from 25 years of obscurity as a right-wing Labour MP to fill ok the gap left by the departing Owen last summer. He seems set for an vith early return to his former lowtion The Alliance was a product of the profile role. impact of the early phase of the own recession on the British mes) classes.

CLING

expressed the professional, and white-collar workers to the many emergence of economic insecurity, polarisation social disliked the policies of austerity conflict. and confrontation first attempted by Heath in with pursued left in the Labour Party.

welfare services, and policies expansion was taken over by the In Thatcherite and turned to

SDP

fashioned Labour their cealed roots Alliance e leader t Thursday

KINNOCK: 'EAR TRUMPET

eighties. On the one hand, Owen to appeal to was keen the 'popular capitalism, by displaying by influenced a robust commitment to the free play of market forces. On the traditional Labour sympathies for other, he the caring services. But the image of the good doctor as a composite of Thatcher and Kinnock lacked market policies appeared irreleconviction. vant to both capital and labour.

middle reconcile with capitalism of difficulties response managerial class and These sections of society Maclennan and the seventies, much greater consistency and determination by Thatcher in the eighties. They also rejected what they regarded as the even militant extremism of the Bennite In face of cuts in expenditure on mass capitalism. rising unemployment, violent strikes and decentralisation inner-city riots, many middle class people sought to cling on to the that had methods prevailed in the years of post-war Liberal Party. Their stability. heroes were Keynes and Beveridge, the inspirers of the welfare state, both Liberals whose programme Labour and accepted for 30 years by the Tories.

seventies crisis-ridden The began Tories consensus question the post-war of coglas the monetarism, while the Bennite left voters promoted the more radical state interventionism of the Alternative The Liberals, Economic Strategy. the Labour right and then the SDP tried to cling on to old orthodoxy.

DEAD-WEIGHT

«Left, For all their claims to be radical innovators, the founders of the oldremarkably early had Their outlook. wrangle with the Labour Party over their decision to name their think-tank after the historian RH many legacy whose politicians regarded Tawney, revealed their deep the same dead-weight own, tradition. Unfortunately for them, they lacked the secure base of electoral support that has kept the despite its Party going, Labour decaying roots. tha of policy disrupted the merger process last problems week are not simply the results of Ine personality conflicts, but go back to in

SDP

the emergence the seventies. pol- Labour right-wing Anthony The writer Crosland formed a link between and itician Keynes and Beveridge and today's SDP. In his influential writings in redefined Crosland socialism to mean acceptance of fifties, the the capitalist system, rejection of class and a woolly commitment to freedom, equality and compassion.

In the climate of expansion that prevailed in the post-war decades, he believed in expanding public rejected spending and he controls and anti-union legislation.

in the Wilson Yet as a minister seventies, the Crosland came around to acceptgovernments ing all these measures. resistance abandoned Denis Healey's welfare cuts in 1976 finally he declared that 'this is nonsense, we must do it.' Owen and Maclennan and the rest have tried but Crosland's approach to the even more difficult to adapt climate of the eighties. Owen's classic formulation of the SDP programme as embodying "toughness and tenderness' was an attempt to adjust the politics of the fifties to the conditions voters of values win can wanted to appeal to working class. effect *social SDP's polarisation originally which It was the strain of trying to emergence commitment to concern for ordinary people that created such which for the team drafted Voices and Choices for All' last week. The effect of nearly nine years of Thatcher rule has been to shift the terms of this debate decisively to the advantage of voters of the capitalist camp. The feeble unael heen particular pressure to deter any has further defections to the Owen camp by showing that he can be

PINK

doctor. the tougher than Hence the thrust of the document was to show that the new party pink would not hesitate to take harsh measures in the interests of British At the same time, it included all the token references to last and popular launch participation that are required to appease the community activists on the more radical wing of the "Tough and tender' became vicious and vacuous and the document had to be abandoned.

DIVERGING

the ol Alliance reflect the instability of its problems policy One base of electoral support.

recent survey shows that Alliance are concentrated in the salaried (professionals and managers) and in the intermediate classes (clerical and sales workers and foremen) (Anthony Heath and •Social Sarah K McDonald, Future of the Change and the Political Quarterly, September/December 1987). But these are heterogeneous social groups diverging sharply often interests and attitudes. with Many Alliance supporters are public sector professionals, such as teachers, lecturers, local governusually who are ment workers, trade union members and also own The outlook of their own homes. towards the these people tends "tender' aspect of Owen's policies and may well be in line with some of the more radical views of the Liberals on issues such as nuclear coll power, nuclear other weapons, politics. Many Alliance voters work in the private munity sector, in industry and services, and are unlikely to be trade union Their views towards the 'tough' end of the members. especially spectrum, economy, matters such as the Owen defence, and trade union legislation.

TENSIONS

both Labour Tories have heartlands of electoral While Alliance strong base of support in any social support, supporters alienated from the other parties, class. but they have little to unite them and the Alliance has failed to project a single unifying policy theme. The social tensions in the wage contrase generader of their evident are Alliance Greenwich, a successful public Rosie activists. When he consultant and relations yuppie image of the SDP. Owenite, abrasive ground between her and Michael much to sco difficult Meadowcroft, former Liberal MP in Leeds and a prominent figure in pragmatic the merger talks. He is a veteran activist pathies for nuclear disarmament community British and Northern Ireland. The Alliance has reached the end of the road because establishment does not at present need a Tory Party Mark II and because Owen and Steel have failed to displace Labour as a force that the of sort of support government The British middle classes lack ately needed. This is how the cohesion necessary to sustain a centre party like the Alliance. The after it was formed: economic continuing instability has been to intensify the •The lines class along provoked the The of the Alliance. major beneficiaries of this process have been the Tories, who have dominated British politics over the history. past decade largely because of the ember 1981) ineptitude of the contenders for the title of opposition party. However, Labour too has benefited from the alienation of increasing numbers Tories Thatcher circumstances where the Alliance the eroded trom failed to win their allegiance. This ensured that Labour survived last new June as the major opposition party Labour 'You can win an election with a win ar flag and you can election with a pink rose, but you cannot win an election with an ear trumpet Thus spoke Tony Benn the on commenting •Labour week, Kinnock's listens campaign. As a matter of of fact, Kinnock conclusively demonstrated last June that a pink flag and pink rose and a slick campaign are not enough to win an election.

Yet the 'Labour listens' events are the Labour on stage prolong another drive to June's disastrous attempt to win leadership's support for Labour by making the party more acceptable to middle class public opinion. More than six months after the election defeat Labour politicians can take no great satisfaction from the demise of the Alliance because is based strategy Alliance-type entire their around adopting intellectual Labour circles the post-election debate still In policies. centres on the terms of any future pact with the Alliance (see Bob •Popular and others, Accumulation and Left Strategy, New Left Flexible Capitalism, September/October 1987). The collapse of the Alliance Review can only come as something of a Labour's to disappointment myopic strategists.

RANCOROUS

politicians As long as Labour are preoccupied with drawing up their own version of Voices and - something similar is likely to emerge from the policy Choices' review now in progress — then the that the only right effective parliamentary opposition pundits are Thatcher will come backbenches and the house to tend The only alternative on Tory of lords. is left Prescott's rancorous tour of the the on from offer campaigning country against leadership deputy and the lacks be may Barnes, MP for an the typifies common symwith from withdrawal British the Hattersley by offering cut-price party cards to union members.

This seems unlikely to generate the to the tendencies mass resistance desper Is SO that we assessed the system. prospects for the Alliance shortly British the of electoral system may give the SDPvagaries Any Liberal Alliance some short-term prospects. But the dynamics of the class struggle in Britain will soon consign the SDP to the dustbin of Novstep, next Our prognosis has been fully vindicated by events. The vigorous coherent implementation capitalist programme by successive regimes has drastically ground on which the Alliance tried to found a middle the that the fact Party has decisively The party. abandoned its working class base, in an attempt to revive its electoral fortunes on similar foundations to the Alliance, means that we can prognosis grim extend our to Labour.

RESISTANCE

At a time when trends towards recession are accelerating throughout the capitalist world, further class polarisation is inevitable. Yet the traditional party of the British labour movement has rejected any attempt to challenge the capitalist system from the point of view o the working class. It has abandonec any concern to represent working of an interests in favour classes middle class Labour may survive as an SDP the to appeal Mark II, and it may even win an accident major election if some befalls the Tories. But it has moved too far from its working class roots to be able to play its traditional between labour movement and the British mediator role as Labour's days establishment. the party of the British working The collapse of the Alliance and class are over. the incapacity of Labour to offer resistance to the underline the urgency for a real any opposition movement. The broad lines such a movement must follow are clear. At a time of capitalist crisis it must be clearly founded on an anti-capitalist programme, one which articulates the connection between resistance to attacks from and the struggle for a better form and employers The potential social base of such a of society. clear is also movement Although there are significant working class. divisions and conflicts within the from the John the for Roy which must the combated as a priority. cass, crisis expose the common interests of towards workers in fighting the capitalist have built a When we powerful working class movement, then we can sway the middle classes to our side, on our terms.

the makes other strategy working class the victim of the notorious instability of the middle classes and their tendency towards compromising with capitalism.

The Revolutionary Communist Party was founded in the same year We celebrate the as the Alliance. demise of the Alliance this week and look forward to the demise of But finally the Labour Party is a task we Labour defeating either incompetence of the Labour leave to cannot its leadership or even less to enemies on the right. This is a task we must accomplish ourselves in the process of building a working class alternative to Labourism. We began this task through The Red general initiative in the election campaign in 1987, and we Front intend to carry it forward in 1988.

the as

OWEN: BITTER

Tories the government the 22 January 1988 • 9

THE POLL TAX

Before Xmas left wingers in Edinburgh held a conference wilen agreea to campaign tor five demands: 1. Regional Labour parties to instruct their councils to refuse to cooperate in its 2. District Labour parties to to cooperate in its implementation; 3. All Labour councils to refuse to prosecute non-payers: 4. All trade unions to refuse to cooperate in its 5. Tenants' groups, anti-poll tax unions, resuens associations community groups and Labour parties to organise locally for areas and to urge noncollection by the councils.

Labour councillor Tony Kinder explained the campaign's approach. conferenceon December called was because not only had we general election, not only had we lost the battle over the budget in Edinburgh district, but many people felt that the local Labour leadership particularly on the district council, and many of our MPs, were not prepared to use the Scottish locus of a fightback after the general election to beat the poll tax. *The trades council held a meeting on the poll tax and three positions were The proposed support for the "Stop It" campaign. The left put a position of non-payment and non-collection by regional councils and noncooperation by local authority and The soft left supported non-payment but didn't call for non-collection and noncooperation by regional councils.

The soft-left position won out.

Carol Taggart

TONY KINDER

"Lothian council regional recruiting people to collect the poll tax and to prepare the poll register between April October. The existing position of the Lothian regional Labour Party and therefore otthe council Labour group is not one that we should oppose collection of the poll LaX of member Lothian regional council supports the poll tax. What civices us is now we should deleat it. But there is also no member of the Lothian regional council group would of tho the instructions against regional Labour Party. So the real debate isn't within the group. It is in party branches and constituencies.

That is the level of people we have to persuade that it is possible to successfully mount the campaign not to pay, not to collect and not to cooperate with the poll tax.

'When the regional Labour Party, against my best wishes, decided to go along the road of the first stages of implementing the poll tax, I was not very happy. We had the choice. We could either vote against the Lothian regional Labour Party, which in my mind meant resigning from the council I'm a delegate because implement their policy; could live to fight another day. So sure am I that we will build up a 10 • 22 January 1988 right the Tory tax mass campaign of opposition to poll tax defeat the prepared to stav as a member of the council and to fight another day.

'We think we've been successi use mere is more and more support for the principles around which we organised the conference.

I think a further example of the success we're having is that the right wing in the Labour Party feel the need to manulacture a locabased "Stop It" purpose of which is to head off meaningful susagainst the poll tax.

CUDGELS

'We don't have any bourgeois impatience pace at which the working class movement picks up the cudgels in order to fight and win the battle.

We recognise that, with the lack of confidence prevailing tax many sections of the working class,

BOLT

what people need confidence built up so that they can successfully defeat the poll tax.

That isn't done by merely raising the the banner of illegality and saying No please flock to it. People have got to believe they can actually win on the question of the poll tax, and that takes whole learning how it is possible to win.

*The left in Edinburgh, in posing a strategy that could stop the poll tax, is calling the tune for the March Scottish Party conference. that unless knows advocate a campaign of payment, non-collection and noncooperation then the poll tax will go ahead. It is my view that as the campaign against increases in strength and looks more and more likely of winning then will Lothian Labour Party reassess its position and perhaps advise members of the council to alter the towards one of non-cooperation and therefore non-collection of the poll tax. But these are all battles that exist in the future and I have every confidence that we will arrive at the position where the poll tax is not implemented in Lothian region.

TWO VIEWS

FROM THE

SCOTTISH LEFT

Tony Kinder is a Labour member of Lothian regional council, involved in a new left-wing initiative against the poll tax. Derek Owen is vice-convenor of the Scottish Federation of Socialist Teachers, and a member of the Smash the Poll Tax Campaign initiated by RCP supporters in Glasgow last year. Carol Taggart spoke to both about the way to stop The Smash the Poll Tax that I'm Campaign was set up last the SPTC are: very first and foremost refuse to comply wiw poil lax legislation, and defend those harassed by the state for non payment; . A working class campaign: the campaign must be based campaign, the will involve community groups, the unemployed, housewives and trade unionists in united working class action against the poll tax; 3. United action by council petitworkers and the community: with ERe council workers are in a position to block implementation of the poll tax if they have the support of the rest of the working class who will have to pay it. Derek Owen spoke our or work their opposition to the poll tax in Glasgow. on-payment and implementation of working class. the Poll Tax Campaign believes that only action by effectively itself can stop the approach of Tony Kinder's group, focused on lobbying Labour Party Every delegate bodies, cannot beat the Tories.

"The openly official "Stop It", campaign, gesture which exists not to stop the poll tax but to stop effective action against it. At a recent trade union the poll tax meeting in Glasgow the proposer of a motion to affiliate to "Stop It" concentrated on regional "irresponsibility" Nalgo illegal take action position poll tax. "The Labour spokesman, Donald Dewar, says he doesn't want to commit the party to a campaign of non-payment because of the possible consequences of it for jobs and services and the potential hardship which

TO SMASH

doing October. The three principles of 1. Break the Tory law: we must on working class resistance. It who WIll take tax legislation.

HUH"

of the tax are necessary to defend the The Smash the working class poll tax. The

BONES OWEN

Labour Party Labour is a token civil payment condemning the calling to "incite" its members to the

ACCISE

Party's Scottish could for Come

HOW

with individuals who end up in debt. This is just a hypocritical excuse for nothing. If the Labour leadership is so concerned about causing hardship to council workers and the community, then why are councils cutting jobs and why are they setting up the machinery to impose the Tory poll tax on Scottish people? •Strathclyde regional council has only just finished advertising for officers to set up and maintain the poll tax Lan. register. The administrative officers run the canvass are required to be of determined but tactful disposition". If people don't cooperate with the Labour council's "tactful" snoopers, the police will be used to back them up. We cannot expect Labour leaders who will use the law against workers like this to stand against the poll are "Then there's the soft left. The Coordinating Committee held a conference on the poll tax in Glasgow on 16 January. One item on the agenda was the "feasibility of disobedience noncampaign". Edinburgh district councillor Paolo Vestri, who chaired the conference, argued that the "threat of non-payment adds to problems of implementation" But the LCC can't scare the Tories off by making an empty "threat" to support non-payment. The left in the

HOW.

councils tried a similar bluff over rate-capping; the Tories called their 01 bluff and the opposition crumbled.

The LCC have already refused to endorse non-implementation of the tax by regional councils, which that they signals are not serols about effective action the Labour he fact is that and the councils have leadership proved willing to carry out the cuts implement poll tax procedures at the Tories' bidding They have put the Labour Party's "responsible" reputation and its position in local government before interests working class Tony Kinder's group has people. recognised some of the problems Labour's existing approach.

But they are still bogged down in the old ways. The focus of Kinder's group is on pressurising the councils and the Labour Party. It is planning local government TODDIes or conference (at which the Neil Kinnock), the attraction Scottish Labour conference and Lothian regional council. This is a waste or time — and worse, it car demoralise and demobilise working class opposition to the poll Kinder says workers need to have their confidence rebuilt. But we cannot do that by turning them into a stage army, which stands around as spectators while the campaign centres on bureaucratic manoeuvres in the council chamber and the constituency meeting.

RESIGN

*Tony Kinder says he is confident that the campaign inside the Labour Party will succeed eventually - in "It'll be alright on the other words, night." Meanwhile the Labour councils are getting on with the job of imposing the poll tax. My view is that we need to switch the focus to organising action in the working class. Labour councillors who want to stop the poll tax ought to resign from the Labour groups and help such a campaign. *Local government workers are in key position to block the implementation of the poll tax, and there are thousands of others who looking for a way to avoid paying the/Tory penalty. The left needs a campaign to argue these people for coordinated direct action against the law. And that must mean taking action against the Labour councils who are doing the dirty Tories" work, than rather refusing to oppose these bodies in the hope that they might one day have a change of heart. "The battle against the poll tax is not in the future. A campaign of nonwill payment not materialise April 1989, when the poll tax comes in. The time to organise resistance is before the • Tories the machinery in place. That is the aim the Smash the Poll Tax Campaign, and we are not prepared to entrust it to the Labour Party which helped get us into this mess.

the next step

he 'no mandate argument arises out of theories poor electoral performance in Scotland. Left wingers claim that this means that they have no right to implement their policies north of the border.

In these circumstances, the al gument Contucs. democratic alternative for Scotland devolved assembly. Devolution supported was parties which around three Scottish quarters votes June 1987. For the Labour Party, the no mandate' argument is a weak and dangerous ploy. of English votes since 1951. Does this mean, ask the Tories, Labour is admitting it had no mandate in England throughout the 11 years of Labour governments in the sixties and seventies?

This embarrassing observation is why the Labour Leason cadersm Has tougal say or using the "no mandate argument in the past. Neil Kinnock and Donald of relinquishing Dewar are way Labour's right to form a future British government on the strength or us scotusa seals for tae sake or d majority in an Edinburgh assembly.

The fact that many leading Labour figures have finally set aside their doubts and plumped for shouting 'no mandate' reflects their recognition that their party unlikely to win power in Westminster in the foreseeable future.

Thus for Labour, 'no mandate' is an sign of defeatism and pessimism.

What does it mean for the Scottish working class?

ARMCHAIR

The 'no mandate argument is not really an argument at all. it Is an assertion that most Scottish people don't much like Margaret Thatcher or many of her policies.

It offers slogans for armchair anti-.

Tories. instead of strategies tor Tories have aCOs for mandate poll tax the Scotland, declared a delegate at Scottish SDECa. November. 'People in ference in Scotland do not want it.' This is hardly news to the lories; nor wil it shake them from their course.

They are not interested in what working class people want, and they cannot be shamed in this way into dropping policies which they consider necessary for British capitalism. Scottish workers can mandate' *no take up argument, turn their backs and refuse to recognise the Tories' right to govern. But Thatcher will go on governing regardless. nearish establishment has never allowed pleas about mandates to interfere left-wing In recent years, the next step

SCOTS AGAINST THE TORIES

'NO MANDATE

MEANS

NO ACTION

Should we argue that the Tories have 'no mandate' in Scotland?

In edited extracts from a new book, Is There a Scottish Solution?, Mick Hume and Derek Owen examine the consequences of this popular left-wing position opinion poll watchers have pointed out that a majority of British people opposed the siting of Cruise missiles, supported the existence of the Greater London Council, were and thought that the withdraw from Northern Ireland.

Yet the government has welcomed gholished the Gle une missiles. backed PW Botha's racist regime by in South Africa and prosecuted the war in ireland. The British rulno in class only deters to the democratic wishes of the people' when it suits do so. The 'no mandate approach of arguing that the Tories are not playing fair will not force them to do anything. about the rules, only about who LudE rules. They will do whatever 1s ensure that they remam mn control, waewer une) have a formal mandate or not.

WORKPLACE

example. If an individual employer decides workers redundant, and they vote to reject his scheme, he clearly has "no mandate to implement it. But he is unlikely to comply with the workers wishes. He will fight them to force the sackings through, and if necessary bring in outside help from te ponce and courts to nemp him win. The workers cannot win by sitting at home saying 'we don't Their only hope is to want it. organise to win outside support of no

COD-

Tories today. £3.95 plus 80p p&p Available from Junius Publications, BCM JPLtd, London WC1N 3XX Cheques payable to Junius Publications Ltd their own to resist the employer's redundancy package. That is also the approach the Scottish working class needs to beat back the Tory government's attacks. against apartheid Parroting 'no response to each new Tory offensive reduces working class activists to echoing the existing state of public opinion, instead militant resistance. action. What if the Tories did have the left's treasured mandate, and had won 51 percent of Scottish votes? Would socialists were obliged to submit to the poll tax, accept spending cuts and put up with the militarisation They do not care of the police? Our attitude to such formal expressions of democracy should match that of our enemies.

Even if Thatcher won 90 per cent of the vote, socialists would still have a responsibility and a right to fight for the real interests of the working class. ruling class to hundreds Scotland an challenging the Setting about that task is a far positive energies than pursuing the utopia of a mandate for our aims. In the immediate term, who gets what in society is decided by the struggle between classes. not on the basis of percentage points in a poll. The no mandate waste an opportunity for Scots to give a lead to other workers.

OUT ON FRIDAY

Can the campaign for a devolved assembly solve any of the serious problems facing the Scottish working class in Thatcher's third term? This book examines the arguments for an assembly from a Marxist perspective, and points out the problems with the campaign's approach. It identifies the best way for Scots to take on the Using assembly Scottish MarCel concentrate the Scottish ment. It can win Britain of militancy. led the British support workers cisewnere. country mandate in and file nationwide miners, mobilising "No mandate' is a slogan for no that mean that drifted back to

ISOLATION

worth The lack of responsiveness of the of the needs for ruling argument state. strongest workers' of approach threatens to

IS THERE A

SCOTTISH

SOLUTION?

The working class and the assembly debate Mick Hume and Derek Owen the anti-Tory vote in Scotland as a lustification for an local to administer allairs to AlLO WILL retreat from the field of battle. It means saying: We have the most coherent base of opposition to the theret or government. we are going to opt out of the battle against the Tories in Britain, and issues. This is a shabby abdication of the role which recent events have given movement the In struggle against the Tory governflies the face of everything we should have learned about the way a group of workers Scotland is not the only place in with proud tradition Areas such as South Wales or Yorkshire can also claim to have working class in important confrontations.

Yet to win lasung gams, workers rom te militant areas need to mobilise from moderate *no When militant areas have fought in isolation, they have often suffered defeat.

The miners' disputes of 1972 and 1974.

for example, were won through all- British action. Militants toured the people picketing and winning solidarity. In 1984, Yorkshire and Scotland were the first areas to declare the miners' strike official.

But the failure to organise a rank campaign to fight for support helped to consolidate divisions among the particularly in Nottingine go-l-alone amtude of the militant areas helped to isolate them from moderate areas and undermined the potential for vital solidarity action. The result was that the strike failed to stop the miners скопошу, work, and the union suffered a heavy defeat.

If the most left-wing regions of Britain adopted the 'no mandate attitude and turned inwards to look after local matters, it would mean the best militants retreating into splendid isolation. Again, it is this the contrasting approach of the British establishfact ment. It is unimaginable that the class would its keep forces while battles raged elsewhere. When one part of its system is under threat, the state moves in to prop things up. During the miners' strike, the too Tories did not leave the country coppers of the mining areas to battle alone; they sent their firstclass thugs from the Metropolitan Police into Yorkshire, and moved the hard men from the Scottish cities out to the pit villages. The Slogans mean ana part capitalists do not divide the power of their state

THILE

geographical pieces. They wield it as one weapon against the working class. and they always ensure tha blade is at the sharpest cutting edge. By contrast, the no mandate' approach of separating from Scotland British politics means locking up our battlehardened Scottish brigades in their barracks, cut off from workers elsewhere. ruling class fears the Tane prospect of fighting on more than The Thatcher one tront at once government has taken great care over the past nine years to pick out its targets and tackle them one at a time. The early introduction of the poll tax in Scotland, for example, is an attempt to limit the extent of opposition exploitative TO

ENTS

by picking off the Has ure. Scottish working class imposing the tax England and Wales. If we respond with arguments like mandate' "Scotland is special, we walk into the Tories divide-and-conquer trap. Many Scottish workers are cynical about the 01

OTOSUCCES

winning support for action from in England, whom they think have been bought off by Thatcherism. But we should be wary of falling for Tory hype about a yuppie culture down South. Conditions in the North of England, Wales and the inner cities are at least as bad as in Scotland.

Even the South-east is not merely the stronghold of estate agents and stockbrokers the media would have us believe. Indeed, the majority of the British working class now lives in the South.

Many of these workers do vote Tory or Alliance. But the trend towards moderation among the Southern working class largely from their negative experience of the official labour movement. They are still workers, who live under the same tyranny as all those who survive by selling their labour-power. They are always just a week away from the dole and the breadline. It would be image of

00S BLO

relative prosperity to obscure the that every worker from Ipswich to Aberdeen shares interest in challenging exploitation, whether they recognise it today or not. Let's not forget how recently the media assured us that young miners and their families were now preoccupied with their mortgages, cars, and Spanish holidays to go on strike. Shortly afterwards those men and women became the shock troops of the fiercest class battle Britain had seen for 60 years.

OPPOSITE

as no mandate Scottish workers turning their backs on the rest of Britain But Scots standing alone. cannot afford to write off such a of large and powerful group potential allies as the English working class. Instead, activists from a militant area like Scotland need to develop a strategy which can win others over to the anti- Tory cause. "No mandate may sound good in speeches; but it can do nobody but the Tory splitters any good on the battleground of modern British politics. The 'no mandate' argument is the precise opposite of the attitude which the Scottish working class needs. It is divisive, and a recipe for docility. Scottish people cannot afford a political leadership which 'Scotland sits back and repeats says no' while the Tories get on with imposing their policies. No matter what election results and opinion polls say, we do not accept that the ruling class has the right to . exploit or oppress workers in any of the British isles. Our objective should be to seek to maximise active opposition to the Tories on every front. 22 January 1988 • 11

AIDS ACROSS

'One in 61 New York babies born with Aids' typical of the media on both sides of the Atlantic.

n War! - a new US film release a planeload of Americans crash on a Caribbean island that is being used as a training camp for international terrorists.

he survivors soon learn of the terrorists plans to send a special brigade of alluring men infected with Aids to 'spread their charms" US popthe unwitting ulation. This may be the kind of sick fantasy to be expected from a low-budget like Troma outfit Films (which brought us the classic Surf Nazis Must Die). But in a country which has had an old Bmovie actor for president for the past seven years, reality mirrors bad cinema. be outdone. American press scooped Hollywood with its recent allegation that spread was USA by throughout ine. 'international terrorist' of a type - French-Canadian airline say Dugas. steward. Gaetan Chronicle Francisco reporter Randy Shilts makes this claim in his new book, And the Band Played On. Apparently Dugas, dubbed "patient zero', was identified by 40 of the first 240 Aids cases as the source. Shilts claims that Dugas continued to have an average of 250 sexual liasions a year until he died in 1984, in the full knowledge that he carried the contagious Aids scare stories abound in the American media. Under the headline Aids bank bandit busted, Rupert Murdoch's New York Post recently reported the arrest or arug addict David Hodge, who was known for telling bank clerks that he had 'Aids and nothing to lose while pulling off his record 29 bank jobs in six months. Again, the Post tells of the 'Killers in our midst, when three young brothers returned to their Florida school amid protesting parents. most calculated Ine however. shock stories. heterosexuals of the danger of contracting the Aids virus. Typical are the Samantha sweats it out stories magazine sunday accounts of the worries of young white heterosexuals.

'DOOMED

When Dr Harold Jaffe, chief epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control told the third international conference on Aids last June that there were no signs of a major or rapid spread of Aids heterosexuals he press coverage. For virtually no most people,' said Jaffe, 'the risk of Aids is essentially zero. Is the disease going to sweep into the heterosexual population, like Africa? I don't see it." The New York Times put a small item on the speech on page 17: on Its ront page was tac insurance companies plans to reduce life assurance for those refusing to take Aids blood tests.

The New York Post and the New York Dailr News didn't bother to cite Jaffe at all, but did manage to report on the doomed dentist' who contracted Aids from a patient.

The Los Angeles Times, however.

endorsed Jaffe's assessment: *Aids is not spreading at the anticipated rate among non-drug using heterosexual Americans. As a consequence mered clowne consensus among leading medical scientists that the threat of Aids to population.

WICE

serious, has been exaggerated.

FACTS

What are the facts about Aids in the USA? There is undoubtedly a serious epidemic. Up to the end of 1987 nearly 50 000 Americans had developed full-blown Aids half of these were dead. The USA contains more than 70 percent of the world's reported cases than 90 per cent of US sufferers are gay men intravenous drug users. Ihe rest include recipients of contaminated blood transfusions 12 • 22 January 1988 often the haemophiliacs - and infants of Aids carriers - mainly of drug an users. The proportion of heterosexual cases declined between 1986 San and 1987, from 6.8 per cent to 4.3 per cent. that appears the infection Is slowing and within the high-risk categories.

Screenings military applicants, blood donors and sexually active heterosexuals over two vears showed no increase in the incidence of Aids (Journal of Commerce, 23 June 1987). According to the CDC, whereas New York and California have highest incidence of Aids, York ranks near the bottom in the growth rate of the disease. October the CDC reported that the spread of the virus had slowed dramatically among homosexual men in San Francisco.

POVERTY

The spread blacks and Hispanics in povertystricken inner-city distinctive leature ol America. The ghettos of New York and Los Angeles house recent immigrants from third world regions with significant numbers Aids such Cases. Caribbean. extreme poverty of US inner-city areas and the prevalence of drug abuse conditions not far removed from those of the third world. Though they make up just 17 percent of the population, blacks and Hispanics account for 39 percent of the nation's Aids cases. chilling statistic is that one black dies in the USA of Aids every two (Wall Street got hours 4 November 1987). The shockingly high incidence of HIV antibodies (not Aids) in babies born in New York is closely related to the high level of drug abuse in the decaying inner-city areas. More than half of New York Cvs zoo ou arug addies infected with the virus. According to the latest figures provided by York City's department of New health. intravenous drug users now account for 53 per cent of the city's Aids-related deaths since while homosexual and bisexual men account for 38 percent of deaths. Not all of those who shoot drugs are equally at risk → the more impoverished addicts who share needles are the ones who contract the Aids virus.

NEEDLES

Only seven percent of all New York's Aids cases are women, but while 73 percent of these women are black or Hispanic, and most are drug users. Of the 1200 women in New York with Aids, 90 percent are either drug users or have sexual partners who shoot drugs. Even though venereal diseases and other infections picked up female prostitutes are likely to make them more vulnerable to the Aids virus, it appears that dirty needles are the main avenue of More Aids HIV infection. Of the children born with Aids and in the USA, some 80 per cent are black or Hispanic. Eighty percent of New York's 220 children with mainly both outside the New of Aids among areas Aids in the to public health Another Journal, are 1982; Aids are the What the a diversion from over Trangate cial crash. has vehicle for poor promotion of been a consistent Reagan theme.

been reluctant to has advertisement of condoms.

THE NEW BEDSIDE MANNER FOR SUSPECTED AIDS VICTIMS IN THE USA

offspring of has been the Reagan administration's response to Aids?

in chaos. president has president's welcomed the panic about Aids as Dr Eugene controversies vice-chairman, and provided a convenient stepping up economic' traditional all- American family values which has disease. Yet the American establishment explicit sex education or the open The Reagan regime has proved even Aids epidemic. more reluctant to provide adequate Those funding for research into Aids and panic and Dr Michael Fitzpatrick for care for Aids victims.

The administration's policy on Aids is widely recognised as being The chairman of the Aids commission. Mayberry. and the Woodrow Myers. have both resigned, complaining about factional squabbling on the board of 13 that advises on the "medical, legal, ethical, social and the implications Civil rights and public health groups have filed law suits, charging that the commission does not represent those sections of Aids which

SOCICL

currently bearing the brunt of the campaigning for more government funds for Aids are

PANICS AND

heterosexual spread often inclined to exaggerate the risk and thus to increase public anxiety. Yet they have undoubtedly the cynicism of an exposed administration which likes to stir the panic but refuses to finance research and treatment. Speculating that by 1991 New York hospital costs of treating Aids will run to $2.

billion a year, a New York Daily News editorial argues that the Aids commission is underfunded and understaffed: Challenger commission spent $3m investigating the deaths of seven people.

The commission, in elect $950 000 investigating spending the deaths from Aids of 24 070 Americans. The public debate over Aids in the USA is often reduced to an the next step

THE ATLANTIC

proclaimed the Independent last week in a headline On these pages James Malone reports on the American Aids New York scare hits Britain assesses the risks of in Britain argument about Werner nation's young people should be from sexual urged activity or be encouraged to use The churches, in COrCOLS. remarkable display of ecumenical which stretches from unity Judaism through diverse Christian denominations to Islam, preach abstinence and proclaim homosexuality an abomination.

When some liberal clergymen in cities under particular threat from Aids have accepted the need for some sex education and advice about hardliners the down. rapidly clamped month, Cardinal John O'Connor caused a furore over his refusal to allow instruction about condoms in Alas caucaton programmies In schools, hospitals and youth programmes of the Archdiocese of despite the qualified York approval of the mention of the evil rubbers by his fellow bishops.

ABSTINENCE

William Bennett, the US education has published 500000 secretary, copies of an education handbook on Aids for high schools. message is that abstinence is the only solution. 'Promoting the use can suggest COCO is teenagers that adults expect them 'THE high proportion of babies born with Aids in New York shows that the disease is now as great a threat to Western societv as it has already proved to be in Africa and as much of a danger to heterosexuals as it is to homosexuals.' This is the extraordinary first sentence of a front page article entitled Risk facing heterosexuals accelerates' in last Thursday's Independent, written by medical editor Oliver Gillie. The high incidence of HIV antibodies (not Aids!) in New York babies shows that the virus is a serious problem among the impoverished drug abusers who are concentrated in the city's ghettos. Gillie's first conclusion convergence of the pattern of Aids infection in the West with that in Africa - does not fit the evidence. In New York, the vast majority of Aids victims acquire contact or through sharing contaminated needles. In Africa, it seems that heterosexual contact, often with prostitutes, is probably the most important route of transmission.

DIFFERENCES

A major conference on Aids and sex in Bloomington, Indiana last month revealed an expert consensus radically different from the judgement of the Independent's medical editor: the next step

REPRESSION IN THE USA

the

L'S DRANT

Newsweek To Car The Ep have Last

PRESS SCARES KEEP THE POT

OF PREJUDICE BOILING

to engage in sexual intercourse, says Bennett. officials are hostile to measures to prevent Aids. His promote the Aids panic. The New York board of education recently bought 1.5m pairs of disposable gloves, at a cost of nearly $50 000, for every school in the city as a *The meeting highlighted, yet again, the profound differences that exist in the pattern of HIV transmission in Africa and North America.' (The Lancet, 2/9 January, 1988) Dr Donn Des Jarlais, a New York authority, particularly pointed out that among more than 10 000 cases of Aids reported in the city, only 20 could be attributed to infection acquired from prostitutes.

UNSUPPORTED

Gillie's second conclusion is equally unsupported by the epidemiological evidence — particularly in Britain. A detailed breakdown of British Aids cases, published in the British Medical Journal Delore Amas reveals the true extent of the risk of heterosexual spread ("Surveillance of Aids in the United Kingdom', BMJ, 5 December 1987). The authors survey all cases of Aids in the United Kingdom up to the end of August last year. A total of 1012 cases included 32 in which the virus was beneved to nave been contracted heterosexually.

Of these 10 were foreign residents who acquired Aids abroad and simply came to Britain for treatment. The remaining 22 cases included 15 (five men and 10 women) who were believed to have contracted Aids overseas, mainly in Africa. This leaves a total of seven people, five women and two men, who are believed to have contracted Aids through 'safeguard' against teachers catching Aids. great condom reached the floor of the senate in October, conservative North Carolina, held up an explicit safe sex comic book produced by the way Men s hearn crisis In New York. Helms denounced the use of federal funds

KIDS

groups, and the senate agreed by 94 votes to two that federal funds for

WITH

any educational efforts must stress

AIDS

abstinence homosexuality or drug abuse.

television networks dom adverts.

MANDATORY

The government-sponsored panic over Aids has increase in state repression.

major erupted over whether or not people should undergo mandatory testing Aids virus. Reagan announced his decision to institute mandatory testing for all THOSe T residence visas in Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Massachusetts, has they are happy to surance companies in his state to impose Louisiana have made the test a requirement for couples who want to marry. The Methodist Hospital heterosexual contact in Britain.

on how the unfortunate seven acquired HIV infection. The five women included a prostitute, the wife of a haemophiliac patient, whose partner was bisexual, and one whose partner was a drug *who had many partners' — no details are given about the other.

In other words virtually all of the handful of people who have contracted Aids heterosexually in Britain have been the sexual partners of those in clearly identifiable high-risk categories.

WOMEN

The British survey breaks down the 22 indigenous heterosexual cases by year of presentation. The first case was in 1982, there were four in 1982, three in 1983, four in 1985, six in 1986 and four up to the end of August last year.

These figures would not suggest an accelerating risk of heterosexual transmission.

Later in his article Gillie concedes that women make up only three percent of Aids cases in Britain. 'But, he continues, infected with the virus, but do not yet have the disease, the proportion of women is considerably greater — eight per cent, showing that the disease is spreading among heterosexuals.

Here allne conuses two quite tests for debate endorsed Helms, Jesse from Republican

DETENTION

mandatory testing. for such cent) of New people working traditionally prudish still aTe to broadcast conwanted to move legitimised an controversy has sition 64, Last May, senator syphilis, applying for permanent-

USA

the questa Dukakis, governor of allowed in- HIV tests. Illinois and quarantine laws The survey gives further details transmission. one who had African partners, one abuser'. The two men included one highly improbable. "among those who are known to be epidemiology. in Houston, Texas has instituted The American Medical Association has of prisoners and would-be immigrants.

It seems that government propaganda has convinced many to accept A poll in New in June revealed that large majorities (over 70 per Yorkers would favour requiring tests for Aids of couples planning to get married, with food in restaurants, people going into the armed services, patients entering hospitals and immigrants who

USA.

-Ene Newsday reported that the results resembled those of nationwide polls.

There is a continuing clamour for compulsory detention of carriers of the Aids virus. In California last proposals OtTOCUCE Sion 64, rere defeat, propothe defeated.

WCIC

Helms stil advocates quarantine: "We did it back with we did it with other I ne diseases and nobody ever raised a about it. So far, nationally, there have been only a handful of individual quarantine orders, mostly against male and female prostitutes. But since 1985.

nine states have amended their old passed new ones empowering health officials to isolate people with Aids who credit distinct things — a higher incidence of HIV infection among women and heterosexual Most women who are HIV positive acquired the virus through using contaminated needles tr inject drugs. Some were infected gay by blood transfusions, and some of those included in the ligures are female babies of HIV positive mothers, usually drug abusers.

Like many commentator desperate to inflate the risk of heterosexual transmission, Gillie lumps all these together to create the impression of an impending heterosexual epidemic. In fact the by incidence of HIV infection among women, acquired heterosexually in Britain, is not significantly higher than the number of cases of Aids acquired in this way. The American experience would suggest tat an acceleraling heterosexual spread in Britain is

PREJUDICES

The fact that a respected medical journalist in a reputable newspaper can be so influenced by the prejudices generated by the Aids panic is a frightening indication of the irrationality that now dominates public discussion of the disease. The crisis of the Western ruling class is now so profound that it can no longer face the truth even in matters of

SUMMER OF FEAR

Living with AIDS in ALl. *endanger other people's health' and 'only as a last resort. North Carolina's law enables officials to limit indefinitely the freedom of movement or action' with a communicable of people disease. Nevada's have laws provisions for charges of attempted prostitutes who continue to work after learning they are infected with Aids.

Discrimination against Aids victims is widespread. Employees lose jobs, children are turned from school, people lose health insurance. But whether people hear stories about 'Aids bank bandits', 'killer kids' or doctors with Aids, the main victims of discrimination are those whom the public blame as the source of the disease - gay men.

SODOMY

American homosexuals lost key legal case in June 1986 when Supreme Court ruled the Bowers v Hardwick constitutional right to privacy did not extend to homosexual relations.

Supreme Georgia sodomy law forbidding all people to engage in oral or anal sex, saying that it could be used to prosecute such conduct between homosexuals, even in the privacy of their homes. The court did not say the same law could be enforced against heterosexuals. Massachusetts, a Bill to In prevent discrimination agains homosexuals in jobs, housing, and public places, first introduced to the state legislature in 1973, was stalled yet again in December. A bloc of conservative legislators, fundamentalist Christians and Catholics opposes the Bill on the grounds that it amounts to official approval of homosexuality and will thus contribute to the spread of Aids

SLEDGEHAMMER

'Queer-bashers" in America have put the establishment's anti- The message into National Gay and Lesbian Task Force reports that incidents of anti-gay violence increased from 2042 in 1985 to 4940 1n Witnesses at the trial of 17-year old Terry Kerr for the murder of Harry Wayne Watson in Kalamazoo. Michigan last year said that Kerr had bragged about killing a 'fag smashing his head with a sledgehammer. jury found Kerr not guilty on all counts, and the trial judge, in an unusual move, denounced the verdict, saying Kerr deserved to be convicted of first degree murder. The fact that Aids in the USA mainly affects gay men, blacks and Hispanics is reflected in the reassertion of traditional anti-gay and racist prejudices in all discussion of Aids. This situation highlights the fact Aids fighting the oppressive conditions which allow it to spread in these sections of society. While demanding more resources for all aspects of Aids, resistance to the Aids scaremongering, and the climate of reaction and repression which it the top must be cucoul aaes priority for the American left.

22 January 1988 • 13

f there is one issue that has struck fear in the left it is surely It is immigration. rethink and a new strategy....

That so little headway has been

CEC

immigration owes a great deal to the strength of British racism, but from the also anachronistic frame of reterence on the issue. The task now is not to try and reverse history, but to outline principles for a non-racist, non-sexist policy that start from today....Our starting the reality is the right of government to define its citizenship (nationality law) and entitled to come into the country to policy). live (immigration people involved in anti-racist politics oppose all such controls.

This is an understandable viewpoint given past experience. It is hard believe that nondiscriminatory alternatives could possibly exist.

HYPOTHETICAL

Yet this approach is wrong.

argue that the rights of British citizenship should apply which is evervone in the world what the no controls'

BOSILOS

means, is to fly in the face of all reality. The 'no controls' position is no use when it comes to effective politics. mastead or locusingon racism and injustice in existing law, on which the government is vulnerable and against which powerful allies can be won, the argument is switched to hypothetical questions about whether Britain can cope with a major This increase in population. where racists want to take the argument. It is why most black people's organisations have rejected the 'no controls position. In the face of human anguish caused by the oresent laws, utoplamisin is d luxury they cannot afford.

ne right to citizenship is a fundamental human Nationality confers the basic rights of citizenship, including the right to live in a country, to leave it and return....The 1981 Nationality Act...consolidated the discrimination of previous immigration Acts into nationality law. In its place, we need a new law of citizenship and the 1948 Nationality suitably amended,

ACL

provide foundation. it will have to establish a single category of citizenship guaranteeing equal Inf 14 • 22 January 1988 A race to exclusion rights for all those who hold a British passport. Under the 1948 Act, the principal qualifications for nationality were either birth in British territory or by a British These principles, Do Cult have been shattered by subsequent laws, need to be re-established....

left's Once it is clear who is entitled to of citizenship the job of working out the principles on which a nonracist immigration policy could be based is much easier. should either be full citizens of Those any Britain not. are...would be free from immigration controls. policy for those who are not British Some citizens should be clear applied consistently, regardless of race, without hidden rules imposed by immigration officials..

Controls should go no further than the amnesty would be important to give illegal residents an opportunity of the to break out exploitation which dominate their lives... In order to break out of the To framework of seeing everything in exclusion and control, terms of responsibility for immigration should be taken away from the home office, Britain's ministry for internal affairs. cannot be both the guardian of civil liberties and the main agent for excluding and hunting down immigrants...

HUMAN

Recently, campaigns deportations have Churches are giving sanctuary. is Schools have campaigned against the expulsion of parents of their pupils. Some trade unions, notably Nalgo, have organised strations to resist the deportation of their members. What is particularly important about these is the support they have won from white people. This right. has been done by focusing on the impact of racist laws on individual human beings.... They have argued that it doesn't have to be like this, highlighting the contribution that racial those under threat make to the lives of their communities....The campaigns show support that can be won for the cause of racial justice. could lesson which the left desperately needs (Reprinted from Marxism Today, January 1988) atiol which British People

WRO

Immigration and tear and on a 'new strategy'. proposal seems to be to replace the 1981 Nationality Act with the 1948 Nationality Act. If our task is 'not The home office to try and reverse history, surely we dusting off 40-year old parliamentary Acts. appears to be to pour scorn on those anti-racists who oppose all immigagainst ration controls. mushroomed (wnich IS upneid racists demoncontrols.

'SWAMPING'

The Marxism argues that opposing all immigswitching the argument to hypo- Britain can cope the popular from stories about This is a the centrepiece of their propaganda.

British authorities immigration declare their right of any define... who into the country to live.'

From this perspective, all immigration whom the Britain. ook, Mactaggart, Misrahi and Rahman urge us to 'rethink" our 'anachronistic' ideas on immigration and to embark Yet their main then working should forget aboul The main concern of Cook et al the with the They argue that such a position Workers Against Racism) flies 'in the face of all really, plays inenthe hate or prevents: "effective Britain. politics. Instead, they support a policy of non-racist immigration Today article ration controls helps the racists, by What you thetical questions about whether realistic policy increase in population. In fact the looking from. Tories did not need any assistance anu-racists to make scare immigrants "swamping the British way of life" controls.

CRE

Whether we like it or not, the immigration attempt grounds brand black people as an alien threat to us all is the focus of the debate. The one natory. response really guaranteed to aid the racists is to agree with them that the government has the right to decide how many immigrants British capitalism can 'cope with' Yet Cook et al appear proud to this support position: 'Our starting point is the government entitled to come tell them cannot live. The Marxism Today authors are looking at immigration through the eyes of the British government.

The opposing does controls indeed 'fly in the face of all reality"; but so does proposing non-racist non-existent controls. The British ruling class needs racist immigration regulations having to protect its system. Immigration central point controls exist to police the flow of labour from the third world, and to keep out immigrant workers for consequences British Under declining economy no longer has any use.

Immigration controls are also the territory foundation stones of racism within They legitimise the

DEBATING IMMIGRATION CONTROLS

WHICH WAY AGAINST

RACIST LAWS?

The Tories have won support for their immigration policies and prompted many on the left to rethink their own attitudes. In the latest issue of Marxism Today, the theoretical journal of the Communist Party, Dave Cook, Fiona Mactaggart, Bernard Misrahi and Habib Rahman argue for a new strategy on immigration. We print edited extracts, together with a reply from Kenan Malik of Workers Against Racism Aflight from reality treatment of blacks as second class citizens by the government, the police and employers. They are a vital aid to the establishment in dividing the working class, and equal providing black scapegoats against which the white population's anger over social problems can be directed.

From the point of view of the however, class, unrealistic to believe that we can main defend our interests by accepting need for some of sort immigration control. Such approach can only mean siding government against immigrants. It implies an acceptance of the idea that foreign workers are to blame for problems such as for it? unemployment and bad housing in This is a crucial political which will seriously impede the ability of the working the class to take on the establishment at home. Over the past nine years we should have learnt something about the way the Tories use antidivert feeling to attention from the responsibility of the capitalist system for our problems.

naive consider to be depends on which side of the class divide you are For the British state, it is only has realistic to have racist immigration The Tories understand this. The home office tried to block the investigation service on the by definition immigration controls are discrimiand the working class For movement, it is only realistic to oppose all immigration controls and to refuse to tailor our demands to. what our exploiters say their system can afford. That is why our starting point is the opposite of Cook et al — we reiect the right of the British state to interfere in the lives of working class people and to where they can or

CONSEQUENCES

1500 Marxism Today writers refuse to accept that there are only two realistic attitudes to immig ration, and go off in search of the of non unite way But racist immigration controls.

how conceded the racists - the right of the state to police immigration their own proposals nave reacuonal them the law proposed by Cook et al, those born in British British parents or would qualify for a British left's passport and be 'guaranteed equal rights. Presumably, then, those of us unlucky enough to have the wrong parents or be born in the wrong place, will be ineligible for treatment

VET

They also argue that familiar. responsibility for immigration should be removed from the home office since it cannot be both the guardian of civil liberties and the excluding and 101 hunting down immigrants'. Since when has the home office been the of our liberties? And defender would the authors accept immig rants being "hunted down' so long other government takes responsibility

WISHFUL

Far from being a "new strategy" proposals trom Cook et a smack of the tired old politics of wishful thinking: •We wish the government wouldn't be so racist.

we wish it supported anti-racist laws, we wish it would defend the rights of black people, we wish it would defend civil liberties.' Their trust the potential of the racist state results in nothing more than a radica version of firm but fair' controls.

It is not surprising that Thatcher won support for her racist policies when the left can provide no alternative. Finally, Cook et al argue that opposition to all immigration controls prevents 'effective politics that most black people's organisations have rejected the "no controls" "luxury they cannot afford'.

many prominent anti-deportation campaigns - Muhammed Idrish. Metso Moncrieffe, George Roucou - have been fought, and won, or the basis of opposition to In the recent case deportations. of George Roucou, a campaign of having out the arguments against controls in union immigration meetings and workplaces convinced white manual workers to tools and demonstrate The against his deportation. pressure of support for George forced the immigration authorities to back down. It is strange, isn't it.

"ineffective politics" can produce such effective results.

At the same time black groups know they can expect little support from the left. This has often forced to adopt pragmatic approach to opposing deportations.

But it is disingenuous for Cook et al to use the consequences of the past failures to justify a continued refusal to fight racist laws the next step

FATAL ATTRACTION

ONE-NIGHT STAND

Fatal Attraction, Adrian Lyne (director) As the most successful American film of last year September) opens in Britain, the controversy is already well underway. Is it misogynist? Is it a good thriller? The Sun and the Mirror got straight to the point, headlining respectively *Fatal Attraction will kill one-night stands' and Is stands?' Not satisfied of Aids scares, Hollywood

DOUS NO OC

its part in terrifying errant husbands back into the home.

THATCHERISM IN PERSPECTIVE

Peter Jenkins, Mrs Thatchers Revolution: The Ending of the Socialist Era, Jonathan Cape, £12.95 Peter Jenkins has used 20 years as a political journalist to produce a thorough, first-hand examination of the rise and consolidation of the foremost politician of our times. He also writes usefully on those Margaret Thatcher has Tory wets, vanquished the abour Partv and the SDP (his own party until expect from a former Guardian columnist and associate editor of the unable to draw his valuable information and insights to a decisive conclusion. He begins well by debunking the idea of a But wal us do anything more than a set of political conventions based on the maintenance oT TUll employment and welfare provision, the middle classes returned to the Tory fold in the early fifties and in 1957 chancellor Peter Thorneycroft introduced an orthodox whalenene financial policy. The conventions, articulated in the writings of Labour's boom-time guru Anthony Crosland, depended on the continued growth which the British economy could not deliver. By the time of his death in 1977, Crosland's world was closing in on him writes Jenkins, it foreclosed on Croslandism. the next step

HOLLYWOOD'S LAST

Young New York lawyer (Michae Doug as with beautiful adoring wife daughter and dream affair with an editor Cienn Close trom a publishing firm. Being the very model of the beautiful, assertive career woman she makes the running. Her only use for the kitchen sink is as a perch for after-dinner sex.

When he tries to resume nappy Tammies, However, she is revealed as lonely, Suicidal gestures give way to vindictive pursuit as she demands that their relationship continue. She is revealed

THE POLITICS OF DECLINE

Although he is personalv cawe Thatcher's brusque style chancellor Nigel Lawson nothing between his ears' on ner chiel ally ronald Reagan) he does not fall into the trap of claiming that she revamped British society for want of somethine to occupv ner powerful personality. He consequence as much as revolution was a response to Britain's decline. Helmut Schmidt, premier, put that more Britain is no longer a developed nation.

POPULIST

Writing about the way Thatcherism works, Jenkins is equally perceptive. He identifies Thatcher's populist touch as the ability to provide fundamental political certainties in a period of economic instability. and cites the popular focus on aw and order. as the tirst overwhelmingly successful product of the hatcher method. This was one of the issues which hatcher use to redenne decine as a moral issue According to Jenkins, the question of union power is the most significant issue to have been gone over' in this way. Jenkins can now see that Labour is en route for irrelevance, but it didn't look that way at the start.

In the mid-seventies, he and many other commentators believed that Tony Benn's brand of revews as insane, obsessed and pregnant to boot. She sets about destroying his marriace like a professional homebreaker. First she boils the pet rabbit, then kidnaps the child and finally gets the knife out OCC CHancI herself. Fatal Attraction is breathtakingly obnoxious.

it is competently compulsive as a thriller, contains an exceptional performance from Glenn Close and derives not inconsiderable power for its theme on account of its single-mindedness and simplicity. In this it resembles Brian de fundamentalism was and her new model Tories.

occupy the foreground, 'the glint of destiny in his eye, was banished to the political fringe. Jenkins still doesnt cedry set why. When the recession arrived and broke the old rules of British government, Benn's Labour Party and the labour bureaucracy were too embedded in the methods and ideas of the past either to serve the establishment or to challenge it. They could not play the role for our class which Thatcher proceeded to play for Jenkins is left with the assumption that the future will simply mean more of the past, that the Tory agenda will work itself out until 'the postsocialist society will be characterised by a majority of haves over have-nots. It will be a two thirds, one third society...(in which) not only the poor but the "working class" are political minorities.' He appears in this prophesy to have forgotten his own misgivings in an earlier of an economic miracle in recession, one of the most important characters in his book, has left the stage of history. In reality its big scenes are vet to come. More importantly he appears to confuse the death of the socialist era (ie, the Labour Party in its prime with the death of the working class, a Dage Palma's recent film The Untouchables which is similarly confident and blatant, similarly unencumbered with any qualms or qualifications ot its reactionary theme Not only is the independent woman set up to be revealed as an insecure and psychopathic harpy, but significantly the object of her hatred is the institution of the family quite as much as the man himself. She cannot bear to look at the family photo-portraits which litter his office and in the final shot the camera closes on such a picture in the hallway of their home). When she peers through the window at fireside as the little girl gleefully receives a white rabbit from Daddy, she turns away to throw up in the bushes.

SHAMELESS

Excuses for the film will no doubt be made by those who claim that it is a send up or that the studio spoilt it by changing the ending. The truth is as uncluttered as the film. From start to finish it is a shameless exercise in misogyny and reaction. The Sun and the Mirror saw what it was about straight away bolstering the family by cutting out those onenight stands. Pat Ford confusion assisted by an aoparentiv narrow understanding of what the working class is. The future is not given. Whether Mrs Thatcher's revolution' turns out to be the first wave in a tide of reaction or the last gasp of a crippled British establishment will depend most or all on what te working class has to say about it. Andrew Calcutt

THATCHER HAD THE BOTTLE LABOUR LACKED

BEST-SELLING BLACK NOVEL

LIFE'S NOT

LIKE THE

COSBY SHOW

Toni Morrison, Beloved, Chatto and Windus, £11.95 Why is Toni Morrison's latest novel a best-seller, especially in the States?

The black feminist writer has featured in magazines and talk shows from coast to coast and she is said to have been offered a chair in Afro- American literature at Princeton University. She is of course justly famous for earlier books such as Tar Baby and Song of Solomon, but at first glance you might think well-received in many quarters. Central to it is an affirmation of black culture and the tenacity in particular of black women in a racist and sexist society. Her prose is lush and seductive, rich in African folk motifs and the traditions of rural black American story-telling and

SACRIFICE

Beloved tells the story of an escaped slave Sethe baby daughter to prevent the child being sent into slavery. Nineteen years later, the daughter reappears as the ghostly 'Beloved', and the novel turns on the relations between mothers and daughters and lovers, and the possibility of personal The first clue to the uncomolicated pleasure which white middle class take in the story is the absence from it of white people. The world of white racism is only atmospherically and symptomatically present: in the intricate scar on Sethe's back and in allusions to some Ibera whites, the Garners, or the Secondly, Morrison's magic, in which ghosts appear and holiness is materialised as a vast, sumptuous feast of turkey and fruit pies, produces a vision or black America which appears to be both benign and exotic, and which presents black experience as alluring and non-threatening

FAMILY

Most importantly the book dwells on the strength of family ties. In this respect Beloved stands in marked contrast to Morrison's earlier (and much better) novel Sula, which relentlessly demonstrated how black women suffer on account of their gender, race and class and did not imply that a restitution of the family would rescue them Her latest novel, however, cledhy salishes te powerful longing in contemporary American culture for the recovery of the ordering values ol family life. Toni Morrison may not have intended this reading of her work.

She emphasises the support and reinforcement provided by this family as part of an attempt to depict black Americans as free and proud in spirit.

RACISM

But Morrison cannot choose the way her book is received, and received differently in black and white America. The USA is divided by racism. In Boston, where I live, as in most major cities, a no man's land separates white and black neighbourhoods. White Americans know black Americans mainly through image and anxious rumour. US television's most popular show, The Cosby Show, presents a weekly fantasy of black family life, a myth of middle class respectability that has even less to do with reality than most TV.

In 1950 just over five per cent of white children were born to unmarried mothers, by 1985 the figure was, 17 per cent. For black births the figures are 17per percent in 1950 and 56 per cent in 1985. In this context, Beloved can only contribute to the complacency of white America. For those who would rather be challenged than comforted by Morrison's vision of the experience of black women, leave this and read Sula. Annie Jay 22 January 1988 • 15

thenext step

BRITISH TACTICS

IRELAND AND

PALESTINE ARE

OCCUPIED

TERRITORIES

THE Israeli forces now brutalising Palestinians in the occupied territories learnt the essential rules of state terrorism from the British authorities. The "iron fist' policy with which Israel administers Palestine is still based on the British Defence (Emergency) Regulations of 1945, which the imperial statesmen at Westminster used to put down resistance when they occupied the area. And such British brutality is not a thing of the past. For almost 20 years, British governments have used violence and victimisation against nationalists in Northern Ireland. The methods which Britain uses against those fighting for Irish unity and independence match those which Israel employs against Palestinians who dare to demand their freedom.

• ADMINISTRATIVE

DETENTION: In the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the Israelis can hold Palestinians without trial for six months - and then get the detention extended. In Northern Ireland, the British call their version of this concentration camp law "internment without trial.

The authorities in Northern Ireland imposed internment on the nationalists during every decade from the twenties to the seventies; the last time was from 1971-75, when 25 000 Irish people were held in cages without charge or trial.

Since then, the British have modified the law. Now nationalists are held for a week without charge under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. At the end of that period of detention and interrogation, many Irish people are accused of some trumped-up charge, which enables the authorities to hold them for months (and sometimes years) awaiting trial. • DEPORTATIONS: British commentators have joined in the widespread criticism of Israel's deportation of Palestinians accused of leading the unrest in the occupied territories. Everybody agrees that the Israeli action is against international law'. But it is in tune with British law. The Prevention of Terrorism Act has allowed the British authorities to deport Irish people who they accuse of 'terrorism'. The Prevention of Terrorism Act gives the British government the power to 'exclude Irish people from Britain — that is, to kick them out of their homes and back to Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland.

The authorities do not have to give any reason or provide any evidence to justify their action. Being Irish in Britain, like being Palestinian in Israel, is considered crime enough.

• MILITARY COURTS:

Palestinians accused of taking part in anti-Israeli protests are dragged before a military court, where Army officers hand out harsh punishment on the basis of little or no evidence. In Northern Ireland the authorities observe the formalities of holding trials in a civilian courtroom and dressing up the judge in gown

ISRAEL USES

The hypocrites of the British establishment criticise Israeli terror against the Palestinians, but use the same tactics themselves against the nationalist community in Northern Ireland and wig. But the 'legal process' is much the same as the Israeli model.

Irish people accused of being republican activists are tried in Diplock no-jury courts. A single judge, often a former leading member of the Unionist Party, deals out long sentences on the basis of 'confessions' extracted under duress, or on the uncorroborated word of police officers and their paid informers. Once convicted, republicans are branded as criminals and held under a harsh regime in the H-Blocks of the HM Prison the Maze. • ARMY BRUTALITY: Many people will have been shocked by the television pictures of Israeli troops beating Palestinians off the streets, shooting indiscriminately into crowds and even attacking mosques.

Yet the major difference between this and what happens in Northern Ireland is that the camera crews are usually conveniently absent when the British forces go on the rampage.

in Northern Ireland number 30 000 police of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, local auxiliaries and the SAS. Enoch Powell has accurately described these armed men as 'a killing machine'. They have committed countless acts of brutality against Irish nationalists.

This month marks the anniverary of Bloody Sunday, 30 January 1972 14 unarmed demonstrators in Derry city. In the years since then the The British forces of occupation - including troops, the paramilitary when British paratroopers shot dead March for a British withdrawal Saturday 30 January Assemble 12.30 Whittington Park, Holloway Road London N19 Army and RUC have fired off countless thousands of rounds of ammunition and plastic bullets at Irish nationalists. And the British statesmen who cried 'sacrilege' when the Israelis attacked a mosque last week don't take offence when the RUC frequently opens fire on and baton charges mourners at republican funerals in the Catholic graveyards of Northern Ireland.

The Palestinian struggle against Israeli oppression is a just fight for freedom which we should support.

But we must not allow the posturing of British politicians to blind us to what these same authorities are doing just across the Irish Sea.

At the weekend, when the eyes of the world were on occupied Palestine, there was another round of shootings in Northern Ireland.

Loyalist gunmen shot dead a Catholic civilian in another sectarian attack on those identified as the enemies of the Crown, the RUC shot a nationalist after a car-chase, and the IRA shot dead two members of the Ulster Defence Regiment. Such violence will continue for as long as Britain occupies any part of Ireland.

If you are opposed to oppression around the world, join us on the Bloody Sunday commemoration march next week. Let's remind people in Britain of the Israeli-style occupation which our government presides over, and demand the immediate withdrawal of all British forces from Ireland.