Eles Corrie Bill Rel Tuc Treachery

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If the Tories' anti-abortion Bill becomes law, it will be because the TUC refuses to mobilise the colossal feeling on the issue in all-out action against the Thatcher government.

This was shown when tens of thousands marched through London last weekend demanding an end to the Corrie Bill which will attack abortion rights for women.

Police estimates of a demonstration of 17,000 were laugh40,000 also seemed about half able. The TUC estimate the real figure.

Trade unions

It took more than 2½ hours for the thousands of banners to pass any one point.

The largest contingent of banners were from the trade unions. The next largest from the women's groups. In a tightly and bureaucratically controlled march, all political banners were pushed to the back.

But at the end of the day what has happened to the fight against the Corrie Bill?

impressive marches would stop Tory reactionary measures the Corrie Bill would fall.

But they won't.

The capitalist press virtually ignored the march while giving prominence to a march of a few hundred religious bigots demanding an end. to all abortions.

Speeches in Trafalgar Square, heard by only a fraction of the demonstrators since they started when about half of the massive march was still on the streets were remarkable for one stark fact.

The TUC had invited a Tory MP to speak from their platform!

Anthony Nelson, Tory MP for Chichester delivered an attack on the Corrie Bill little different from the majority of his co-speakers.

But despite small scale shouting when he appeared on the platform, he was allowed to continue his speech unharrassed by the group of feminists who had heckled earlier speakers because the Women's Liberation banner was not on the platform.

So a man whose party has launched a massive class attack millions of pounds worth of cuts which will drive women back into the home (and will curb abortion facilities over and above the Corrie Bill) is allowed to masquerade as a champion of women's rights!

This symbolised the cross class position of the TUC campaign.

Not one speaker had a word to say about the large number of Labour MPs who will back Corrie; and no demand for a three line Labour whip was made.

tie abou contence demand the Labour conference demand for extended abortion rights had not been carried out by the Labour government.

She wound up her speech by calling on the demonstrators to write to their MPs!

The need to link the issue of abortion rights to the other "attacks on the working class is not met by putting a TUC stamp on a campaign which fails to identify the class nature of the attack and the necessity for a class response.

The TUC has no answer to the petty bourgeois feminists who ask what the TUC has ever done to extend women's rights on abortion. It has done nothing.

But neither do the petty bourgeois feminists have any answer to the Tory attacks on working class women.

The National Abortion Campaign, while it has taken a step towards the trade unions, still sees them as a 'useful ally' and a means of mobilising, not as the means of placing class demands at the centre of the campaign.

NAC is calling for strike action on 5 February against the Bill. The TUC must be forced to give official backing.

But the campaign against the Corrie Bill is one aspect of the Prague s cratic "reforms"

That opposition still exists in Czechoslovakia. But it lacks a conscious leadership capable of offering a programme and a perspective to the mass movement.

The Trotskyist movement, developed in a continuity of struggle for Leninism against all forms of Stalinist degeneration, offers the only programme based on the practical and political lessons of the STILL AVAILABLE 'Communists' Against Two essays on post-war Stalinism by Adam Westoby and Tim Wohlforth Price £2 including postage from WSL 31, Dartmouth Park Hill, London NW5 fight that must be taken up against all the Tory attacks on the working class. • Union branches must demand that 5 February be made the long-promised TUC "Day of Action" against the cuts, . and the occasion for massive strike action throughout the public sector and the whole labour movement.

If the Bill becomes law then abortion clinics set up by working class organisations and defended by guarantees of strike action in the event of prosecution must be fought for.

The thousands of trade union banners show that such a perspective can be won within the workers' movement.

Anything else will lead thousands of women into the blind alley of feminist politics, Tory cuts and backstreet OW TH Hungarian experience.

Parties of a reconstructed Trotskyist Fourth International are essential to lead the struggle for political revolution throughout Eastern Europe.

Here Peter Uhl's real weakness emerges. His bravery is clear. But in failing to fight for a Trotskyist party, and seeking instead simply to link up with forces nighting for democratic demands in Czechoslovakia, he is headed precisely in the wrong direction.

It is the history of the communist movement, not the covenants of the United Nations that point the way forward for the Czech masses.

Indeed many will now denounce the Czech trials. We must be clear that we in no way agree with those capitalist "democrats" who repress workers in their own countries and wish to reintroduce capital ism to Czechoslovakia.

Nor do we align ourselves with the reformist hypocrites of the Labour Party NEC, who