24 hour action for GCHQ | Socialist Action 1983

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GCHQ * UNIO SER NOS LIM DESPITE SOME ringing rhetoric, no clear strategy emerged to combat the Tory attack on trade union rights at GCHQ, during the first debate of the 1985 TUC congress in Blackpool.

Rather it was a stage-managed affair, a display of amour propre between the general council and the new realist splitters acted out between Norman Willis Eric Hammond.

Civil servants Cheltenham were pride ners festooning the balcony during the debate, as one general secretary after another took the rostrum to pledge their Movine recono n 20, John Sheldon of the Civil Service Union pointed out that disciplinary action against GCHO members was imminent. am therefore calling upon the movement,' he said, "to act on its previous pledges: that if our members dismissed they Will lake accion in their support.

Pledge The pledge rellan. that of last year's congress, to call a day of action coordinated through the Council of Civil Service Upions.

'Support those people, support the resolution, demanded NUPE's Rodney Bickerstatt. 'And if Thatcher dares to move against one of them, let's make sure that the day of action is massive industrial action the like of this government has never seen before.

But with no plan beyond a 24 page Bickerstaffe's speech is likely to stay only at the level of fine words.

the exchange between TUC general Norman Willis and the electricians' leader Eric Hammond that propose of this opening debate. Promising a ballol to call out the power workers for a one-day action in support of GCHQ, Hammond becan: n proud to be _responsible for this contribution, it'|] probably be my last one.' Welcoming the promise of support from the electri cians, Willis said in his "If this battle is to be won, Eric, need the electricians and the engineers in this EL COS The beginning of congress was a set-piece show of unity. Unity of course, is necessary in the face of a threatened split movement. media dramatics aside, there should be no doubt that the terms were those AUEW and the EBPTU. ancialen Eric Hammond called the tune Norman Willis dutifully piped

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Socialist Action 13 September 1985