FIFTY per cent of the SOGAT joint chapels are women. They have come forward played a strong role on the Wapping picket line and also in the operations room at Caxton House.
Mother of Chapel The Times The strike has made women more aware. Many have said to me: •I didn't realise what it was like until I saw it with my own eyes.
It isn't quite the same as the NUM because there are women in the membership of the union itselt and they work through the structures. But what we find is that since the miners' strike and the role women played, we are treated differently. For example, most of the requests for speakers are for women.
Tory legislation has annihilated this dispute. Anything you do is illegal. Those laws must be repealed.
Murdoch can do whatever he wants with the run strengun or lue govern ment behind him, and the can what they did a few Saturday nights ago get free. It should be illegal to sack 5,500 people.
Saturday 3 May, when the violent unprovoked was deliberate in timidation. They have been developing these tactics for weeks. The police doing it to frighten people away from Wapping, to show they are in control.
They want to drive us on our knees to a settle ment. But we are not after compensation there is no compensation for being driven out of a job, not can you build newsie Ol of a defeat for the labou Our chapel unanimously passed a motion op posing what Murdoch is now offering. It isn't what we came out for. We want our jobs back feel the dispute should be escalated. While we are being attacked by these thugs. our fellow workers are printing otb Fleet Street papers full o lies about what is happe ing. They should come ou with us labour movement support us
Socialist Action 16 May 1986 NEW SOCIALIST is hosting a debate at Labour Women's Conference on the issue of 'sex versus class'. It follows up a round-table discussion between Bea Campbell, Michele Barratt, Angela Weir, Elizabeth Wilson and Anne Phillips which appears in the current issue of the magazine.
Bea Campbell's comments in New Socialist rather graphically reveal that her concern is not women's liberation. Scargill and the miners strike are attacked as one of the best examples of of the best examples of 'conservative class consciousness', and the chief enemy to be fought. despite the fact that the NUM supports the demands of both WAC and the Black Section. Neil Kinnock on the other hand Campbell describes as 'better than anything we have seen in our lifetimes' - despite the fact that be supports neither the demands of women or of black people.
JUDE WOODWARD looks at the real issues which confront this year's Women's Conference • and at Kinnock's attempt to limit the advance of women within the party.
THE RELATIONSHIP of women society has gone through veritable revolution since War II, with the massive entry of women into the workforce. number of married women in paid work has doubled since 1945, and for the first time the majority of women aged between 16 and 60 are in paid work. If we add into this the amber of women seeking paid work, but currently unemployed, 66 per cent of women of working ge in or seeking paid work - and hese official figures understate the situation.
In the period of the 'post-war boom', capital - IO workforce in order to take advantage of a favourable economic situation. However with the overwnelming tha jority of white men already in employment, British capitalism had to open up. paid whole new SCCLOS society. It met the demand for an expanded workforce by bringing women into paid work, and by organising the immigration of black workers from the imperial colonies, cooccally Caribbean, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The change in the composition of the working that resulted remarkable. Alongside the increase in the number of women workers. black population rose from 75,000 to over 2 million between 1945 and 1983.
It is these structural changes in the composition of the working class that are impelling the movements of women and black people the labour movement - and which have found their most organised political expression inside the Labour Party in the the Black Section. movements are driven forward by funThe damental and irreversible forces in society that they cannot be ignored or brushed aside .. Kinnock has to combine suppression of democracy with or even some real limited costlicle. concessions to attempt to maintain the bureaucratic grip on the party.
It is fundamental to the success of the Kinnock leadership's project in the ot Labour Party that it finds some means of incorporating, accommodating and dividing the movements in the party. A whole series of initiatives taken over the last period the of time are testimony to this.
The establishment of the Black and Asian Advisory Committee is a clear attempt to destroy the black section replacing the self-organisation of black the people with a series of appointees of the party leadership.
Bill Morris as the general secretary of the TGWU was a similar response to make a partial concession resisting organisation of black whole.
There are also a series of initiatives aimed specifigally at derailing women's struggle for democracy.
These by the LCC, undoubtedly nock's backing, Joan Ruddock into their slate for the NEC is aimed at drawing a substantial element behind their project of removing Benn Skinner or representatives of the left — from the NEC this year see an important NUPE with a resolution that proposes to install a bloc vote of the trade union black bureaucracy at women's conference, to destroy that dependence. The resolution dresses this proposal up with calls for other constitutional reforms presented as aiming build the by Similar proposals for increasing trade union bureaucratic control of the youth section came torward in relation to the The appointment of LPYS at the Scottish Labour Party first black deputy conference last year.
the aim is to destroy the independence an e self- of the most radical conference of the people as a Labour Party. By these means the trade union bureaucracy would seek to have not onlv total control over annual party conterence, Ine with Kin- ference. to adopt. Kinnockite among women in the party some of the headed At women's conference this year we intervention by testify conference's Ical they can be repressed.
changes In the case of women's organisation but also over the youth The establishment of the Black and Asian Advisory Committee is simply a different means to achieve the same end in relation to black people. Here we have the absurdity of a committee Gwyneth Dunwoody, and composed Hattersley exclusively of appointees, claiming to be more representative of black people . than the Black Sections which black people themselves have set up.
All these manoeuvres by Kinnock Liberals.
that the development of the women's and black movements in the party are based on such fundamental forces in British society that they will simply go on driving forward unless diverted, divided, or bought off. They cannot simply be The impact of the massive social since War not confined to the labour movement the Ouisci the SDP/Liberal Alliance had a conscious policy of appealing to the 'new' women voters. They understood that the image of women as mothers, carers and shoppers no longer sufficiently corresponded to the lives of a majority of women. Less than one in eight women now corresponds to the classical stereotype of a of rule. woman of working age who solely stays and Ki at home looking after the house and children. Women are also. workers students and professionals, so the Alliance promoted women like Shirley Williams, Polly Toynbee and so on -the new 'feminist' professionals Even the Tories have been forced to understand that if they want to retain any substantial basis of support among women they have to break out of the Tory lady, jumble sale, tea and sandwiches image. The recent launch of the 'High Flyers' club, unofficially linked to the Tory Party, is evidence of this. 'High Flyers' promotes the 100 or so richest and most successful business and professional women, attempting to build up a new constituency of support among women on the basis that women can make it through the system.
All parties are being forced to shift in response to the huge advances made by women. The aim of Kinnock is to try i to keep these changes to a minimum.
The movement the Women's Action Committee, and the responses to it, have to be understood in this overall context. The Labour Party as it was founded at the turn of the century by non-socialist trade unions, and with the constitution it adopted in 1918, failed to take up the key demands of women. Despite the massive struggle of women for the vote, the labour was not up to taking on board this demand, or of incorporating. the concept of an independent, self-organised women's movement into its constitution. Nor was up to understanding the need to support Irish independence, or the overthrow of British colonial and imperial rule world wide. Labour was an imperialist party the trade unions were still massively in fluenced by the most white male, skilled and relatively privileged, sections of the working class. Women were scarceThe labour movement of the turn of the century, when the modern Labour constitution was created, sisted of a combination of the craft unions — the old skilled male working class — and the new mass unions, composed of unskilled male manual workers. The craft unions had not even created an independent working class Whereas most orner curopean countries had mass Socialist. Parties by the end of the 19th century, in Britain the craft unions had supported the The development of the mass unskilled unions, and the foundation of the Labour Party, constituted an enormous cap orward in lne power anc consciousness of the British working class. But it was still not a sufficient leap forward to bring the labour move. ment up to the level of challenging the British imperialist ruling class was oppressing and exploiting half the bleeding Ireland, establishing the rule of racism in South Africa, exploiting women's labour in the home. and denying women all political rights. None of these policies of British imperialism was systematically challenged the Labour Party. On the contrary Labour participated in this imperialist system The changes in the composition of
socIalst ACton 10 May 1986