country's own people What IS 10 e brought Photo: GEOFF MORLEY home to the body politic of Britain is that despite all the years of the development of the British work ing has hung around its collective neck an historic inability British perialism. It is time for the British working class to relearn its history The merchant classes of Britain, who now conSUILULO backbone of ruling made their money, their wealth, and their power by - as Mrs Thatcher wants to put it - no more noble private enterprise, than they got in little boats and went other people's countries and sold human beings for money. On that was the strength of British capital British imperialism built. Britain's response to the will of the Irish people, peacefully expressed through the ballot box, was to declare war on Ireland.
England, what makes people supposedly think the way they do • and to tell the truth makes people not think at all, but let the Star and the Sun and breakfast television do their thinking for them don't haves that problem, simply because fight against which represses us so directly that held a veto ever since. The rest of us who lived in the North were stuck in along with them.
That position has prevailed since the 1920s. There is no way you can make that work democratically, because its not democracy.
The Irish Republicans are not against democracy. The Ucl C name of peace it has imprisoned and slaughtered, brutalised and terrorised In the name of law they have broken every interna tional concept of law In the name of justice they have stood the principle of courts and Justice on l. head.
If you are not there to defend us, and to learn from our experience, how are you ever going to be fit to defend yourselves from a regime that is blooded.
tried tested against somebody else!
Our freedom we will fight for and our breedom we will have unite, then there political way forward for our people: freedom and yours.
don't try to learn then you are going to get Mother England's big ruling class boot over your head.
In order to arrive at an answer to this question it is first necessary understand the context in which these attacks are taking place.
Over the last two ticularly in the imperialist countries, women have made some important advances not just at the level of their legal rights, but also in their economic position. The widespread entry of women into the workforce since World War II nas not been structuralv reversed in any of the major imperialist countries during the "70s recession.
Despite the inequality of wages, this has meant that women have achieved a far higher degree dependence from the family than existed previously. This is reflected in higher divorce rates, accompanied by a major increase in the proportion divorce proceedings women. More and more single women are bringing up children 'help' of a man, out of choice rather than necessity.
Alongside these social reflections of the changing position of women, we can see deep-going political changes. In nearly every advanced capitalist country there is an identifiable shift to the left among the mass of women. In Britain this is seen in an ongoing movemell or women away from electoral support for the Tories, towards the Labour Party. More recently this shift has been somewhat mediated by the SDP-Liberal Alliance who have made explicit, partially successful, attempts to channel the women deserting the themselves in the USA there is increasing support among women for the Democratic Party rather than for Republicanism.
This shift in political identity is by no means contined to the arena. On the contrary, it is most strikrevealed in the women have played in virtually every major social and political struggle of recent years — from the way the women of the nationalist communities in the North of Ireland initiated the movement culminating hunger strikes; through to the impact of the Greenham women on the missiles question; to, most dramatically most significantly, the of of the mining themselves, in the 1984-85 strike.
Powell Bill, Umons. decades, parlegislation, Other legislation oi economic inof initiated by without the Africa, Nicaragua and concern of the ruling class.
In relation bourgeoisie has a dual approach.
of it will in the labour movement.
Tories Left Unfortunately b leading role producing only real succour mass around the women in the Labour Party itself.
women Bea tremendous the communities THIS WEEK the 'Gillick ruling' which restricts the possibility of women under the age of 16 receiving contraceptive or abortion advice, goes to the House of Lords for final appeal. Last week, the which would have undermined the legality of abortion in any form, was pushed off the agenda of the House of ComNext year we can expect new this time backed by Thatcher, to reintroduce the basic content of Powell's Bill, and furrestricting time limits for legal abortion. In fact, we find ourselves in the midst of a sustained attack on women's hard won rights for some minimal conmunist and it didn't concern me. When they came for the trade unionists I said I wasn't a trade unionist and it didn't concern me. And when they came for me and there was no one to defend me.' The working class has to urgently learn this lesson in Britain today in relation to the Irish, women, blacks, gays, even in relation to the demands of Scotland and Wales, and in relation to the international class struggle in South EI Salvador.
Breaking up the possibilities of such an alliance emerging is the chief political WORe the On the one side it seeks to convince women that it will find better allies among sections of the ruling class than these ideas gain some currency in sections of the left of the labour movement, precisely due to the paucity of the labour movement's own attempts to take steps to defend women. The disgusting spectacle of the reselection process in the Labour Party woman selected for a safe Labour seat gives lo lnese views among This is what forces like Marxism Today, and its prime exponent among Campbell base trol over their fertility.
And this is not an offensive that is confined to Britain. In the USA, Reagan gave explicit support to the anti-abortion campaigners with a Year's day message direct from the White House. He is on record as supporting a constitutional amendment to outlaw abortion altogether.
In Ireland the most fundamental attack has recently taken place, with abortion not only illegal, but ruled out in the Southern state's very constitution.
Why is it that the ruling class chooses this terrain, above others, as the spearhead for its attacks on women's rights generally? JUDE WOODWARD explains. our dives themselves on in their offensive to turn • women away trom the labour move.
ment and "newscaster" feminism of the SDP.
tive dynamic of forces like the Labour precisely struggle towards a fight within the labour movement itself, to change it, to turn it into a all real instrument of struggle for all the oppressed.
of many on the left, ticularly sections of the so-called 'far left', which denounce WAC as the in'bourgeois' feminists, the truth is that the place reliance on the This is counterposed to the objecCommittee, which IO turI class knows it And contrary to the views way lu including parwhite, careerist.
WAL stand
the right to work, or to equal pay; th movement formally oppose discriminatory even sexual harassment at work has a least been adopted as a legitimate are of concern for the labour movement a a whole, if grudgingly, and with littl But on abortion and contraceptio the labour movement - and the rulin - nas a l0ng, long, lon go. Winning on issu becomes the key therefore to unravell ing all the gains that women have mad since the second World War.
The Labour Party declares the issu to be one of 'conscience' and not a class issue at all. No party whip is ever used