Lynch gang backs Mason's repression FREE LEGAL CONTRACEPTION PHOTO: Derek Speirs,

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Long Kesh concentration camp and in Armagh jail.

PoW status

For over two years these prisoners have been refusing to wear prison clothing or do prison work in pursuit of their demand for the restoration of PoW status stripped from them by Labour minister Mason. As a result they remain clad only in a single blanket, in unheated, unlit cells, and subjected to beatings and abuse by prison screws.

Yet O'Kennedy claimed that the struggle was simply being 'used' by the Republican movement for propaganda purposes. He went on to suggest that the consistent, widespread reports of systematic ill treatment of Long Kesh prisoners were "The existing law is "The existing law is excessively solicitious towards accused persons"

So says Sir Thomas Hetherington, Director of Public Prosecutions, in his submission to the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure.

This same Royal Commission has already witnessed the reactionary rantings of Metropolitian Police chief Sir David McNee, demanding a whole string of draconian police untrue, stating that "any evidence of ill treatment of any kind" would be welcomed by him and "pursued as he had pursued such reports in the Past"

Perhaps O'Kennedy should be referred to the recent report by two US congressmen which described conditions in "H Block as worse than those meted out to prisoners in "Saigon 1968"

Or maybe he should offensive against British imperialism and minimising its impact on the militant workers' movement in the 'Free State' And he is also anxious to prevent obvious analogies being drawn between the savagery of 'H' Block tortures and the brutal treatment of prisoners of war in the 26-counties, where frame-ups, forced "confessions" and prolonged periods of imprisonment without trial virtually equal the repression of the RUC in the North.

Christmas-but is now seeking call for a united Ireland.

the division and repression of people. the Irish working class by the British military occupation.of the North is an essential element in the survival of his wretched bourgeois regime, which offers record rates of profit to imperialist exploiters, and record low living standards to the Irish working class.

So in replv to Mason's typically reactionary statement that the language of party politics in the occupied six counties is "still the political rhetoric of 10, 50 or 100 years ago", Lynch offered only the most timid opposition.

"It is easy for a person in Roy • Mason's • position to criticise others, but the fact is that the politicians in the North of Ireland have no forum within which to vocally and overtly represent their people.:

"I would like it if the British government tried to establish an acceptable form of government"

The reality that the problem in the six counties is in the six counties is the same as it was 10, 50 or 100 No form of government six county sectarian stateletWithdraw troops The only "political solution": that offers any way out of torture, barbarism and oppression is the immediate withdrawal of British troops and the establishment of a workers and farmers government which must carry out the nationalisation of Irish and foreign capital and the ending of all forms of national religious and sexual oppression in a united socialist Ireland.

These latest desperate joint efforts of. both Lynch and Mason to contain the current IRA offensive shows that they stand in mortal fear of such a development.

Now is the time therefore for the British labour movement to make its voice heard, and to raise far and wide the demand for the removal of the pro-imperialist Callaghan-Mason gang and the immediate withdrawal of British troops from