Poll proves need for nurseries

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Police called to remove Trotskyist YS leaders in 1964.

It is not very often that anything worthwhile is revealed by an opinion poll. But a recent Gallup Poll commissioned by Woman's Own magazine seems a rare exception.

The poll centred on the problem of child care for ich Boudone Mis women who wish to to work. :

And the surprise is that even Gallup. was obliged to confirm the position argued in the TUC's report 'The Under Fives"-that there is a massive unmet demand for state provision of nursery care for young children.

Indeed the answers to the survey shoot down in flames the conventional bourgeois notion of the woman's role as first and foremost wanting to be a full-time mother and housewife.

Choose to It reveals that even if all financial pressures that compel many women to go out to work were removed, only one-fifth of working mothers would prefer to stop work and look after their children full-time.

Four-fifths. stated that they get bored or lonely at home, need a break from the children, and would still want to go out to work.

But of course the financial pressures are there. The poll reveals that one quarter of working women do so because otherwise there would not be sufficient income for the family to survive.

Estimates suggest that if mothers stopped going to work, the number of families on, supplementary benefit would treble.

Yet despite the clear necessity for child care facilities to cater for these requirements, state nursery provision is pitiful and schools completely ignore the needs of working mothers.

Only two percent of working mothers with children under five find places in local authority day nurseries. And only two percent with school-age children found even occasional places for them in holiday play schemes.

Demand

Yet 96% of the women interviewed thought that such play schemes should be provided, and 80% thought that care should be provided after school hours.

More than 50% want nursery and nursery school places expanded to meet demand-while only 2% favour the present predominant system of individual child-minders. • Woman's Own declares its willingness to take up a pressure campaign on this issue, turning to government ministers, the Equal Opportunities Commission, the National Consumers Council and even' the CBI for help.

Workers movement

Such a "campaign" is of course doomed to ignominious failure.

But the figures revealed point yet again to the necessity to take up the sharpest fight within the workers' movement-the trade unions and the Labour Partyagainst the Labour government's wretched betrayal of working women.

Clearly the potential support exists on the estates in each town for a major campaign for an immediate halt to the cuts in nursery care and for a crash programme of child care provision thẹ state.

Public meeting

Trade union branches, "trades councils and Labour Parties must therefore be called upon to order and discuss copies of the TUC Under 5s report, and to 'initiate public meetings in working class • estates designed to take forward a campaign for the following demands:

*Oppose all cuts and closures with occupation and supporting strikes.

*Open all new nursery schools.

*Open the books of the local authorities to reveal their plans, and expose the need to nationalise private suppliers and contractors.

*Set up a workers' inquiry into local nursery provision, to draw up a plan for expanded facilities to be provided, free of charge, to all parents by the state.

*Demand that union officials and Labour MPs and councillors commit themselves to fight in practice for such demands.

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SOCIALIST PRESS, W'ednesday 21 Februari 1979 DESAL MEWS Ambulance drivers are now in' their third week of disruptive actions in pursuit of the £60/35 hour week pay claim. Although the action is having an effect in some areas-especially in London where the overtime ban is causing a drastic shortage of accident coverit is becoming more and more obvious that only strike action will win the full claim.

Ambulance drivers showed their strength and determination on the 22nd January day of action, with an almost complete national one day strike that put them at the centre of the whole pay offensive in the public sector.

Since then, however, their own leaders have come out with a series of weak and halfThe only way forward for ambulance drivers is for a national indefinite strike, with a skeleton emergency cover to be provided under the control of area strike committees-to be withdrawn at the first sign of scabbing by the army,