State Surveillance Exposed

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state, beginning with huge pay law revealed that the Tories are rises for police and army thugs considering vicious new legislaimbabwe With over £2,000 pledged to our £3,000 Special Fund and a total of £636.90 already received, the fund is off to a good start. The Fund was launched at a recent. Special Conference of the WSL to develop our work both nationally and internationally with the founding of the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee and in order to buy a It is important that we keep up the pace of the fund to ensure that we reach the half way stage by Easter. At the same time we have to find ways of raising the extra £1,000 not yet accounted for in pledges. Readers should consider whether they can/send a donation to the fund and fund raising activities must be organised around the country to ensure that we are able to conclude a successful fund drive.

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31, Dartmouth Park Hill, London NW5 IHR Published by Folrose Ltd for the Workers Socialist League, 31 Dartmouth Park Hill, London NW5 Registered as a newspaper at the Post Office. Signed articles do not necessarily represent the views All of sudden last week, after the revelation by the New Statesman of the secret service phone-tapping centre in Chelsea, the press began to act as if such widespread surveillance was common knowledge.

The Sunday Times, for instance, in a major article pointed out that the capacity of the Chelsea centre was probably not 1,000 simultaneous phone calls-as suggested by the New Statesman-but 5,000!

• And it went on to quote one PHOTO: Andrew Wiard, Report Former Labour Home Secretary Rees:

Zi A rocket attack killing 13 in a civilian bus is the latest in a long series of violations of the cease-fire in the Zimbabwe war which are being attributed to the ZANLA guerrilla army.

Robert Mugabe, leader of LANU(PF) which is politically linked to ZANLA, says that it is Bishop Muzorewa's militia' which is responsible for most of the violent incidents.

It is hard to separate truth from fies in these claims and reports.

But it is certainly true that after the tumultuous reception for Mugabe when he returned to the country there has built up an alliance to try to stop ZANU(PF) from getting an election majority without actually banning it.

The alliance consists of the Soames dictatorship, Muzorewa, the veteran white racist leader Ian Smith and, more tentatively Joshua Nkomo.

Demanded

Nkomo, leader of the ZAPU branch of the Patriotic Front, has also demanded that ZANLA end the ceasefire violations.

But so far he has gently reproved lan Smith for calling for a vote to ZAPU as opposed either to the "Marxist" ZANU or to the racists' old and now useless ally Muzorewa.

Mugabe has continued to respond by bending over backwards to deny any intention of "source" who pointed out that every public phone in pubs in the area of Kilburn was tapped as part of the state surveillance of the IRA.

Instances of phone tapping from the 1926 General Strike, through Peter, Hain's 1969-72 Anti Apartheid campaign, Judith Hart's activities on behalf of Chilean exiles while she was a Labour Minister in 1974, to the tapping of the phones of the Grunwick Strike Committee leaders in 1978-have now been brought to light.

The Sunday Times points out that Lord Carrington was able to bludgeon the Patriotic Front leaders the more successfully at the recent Lancaster House talks on Zimbabwe because he was briefed with. up-to-the-minute secret service transcripts of their every phone call and private conversation!

Meanwhile the publicity on the issue has brought evidence rolling in from strike leaders and militants all over the country of extensive telephone eavesdropping during industrial disputes. :

Thatcher, openly challenged on the issue in Parliament, has failed even to deny that Labour MPs' phones are tapped.

But despite the readiness of Labour leaders to climb on this introducing socialist measures.

His abject compromises are one of the reasons why numerous ZANU members are refusing to follow him in cooperating with the imperialist Despite many fabrications, many of thè ceasefire violations do reflect this movement against compromise by the rank and file of the ZANLA army.

But a political leadership capable of directing that movement towards a socialist Zimbabwe has still to be built. printing press. month.

Socialist Press Fund rolling "civil liberties" bandwagon, there is no doubt that Whitelaw is substantially right to argue -that phone tapping under this • government continues in the same way as under the Callaghan and Wilson governments.

The fact is that the machinery of the capitalist state -the intelligence services, the police, and the armed forcesoperate continually against the workers movement, and have only ever been notionally under the "democratic" control of Parliament.

Labour governments, which seek merely to "reform"' the capitalist system and its state, therefore find themselves presiding-with greater or lesser knowledge-over the self-same apparatus of surveillance, harassment and repression as the Tortes:

Offensive The Thatcher government of course committed to a class war: offensive designed to demolish workers' living 'standards and: social services. and restore 1930s levels of unemployment, has set out to extend the powers and strength of the and new anti-union laws.

As John Corrie's anti-abortion Bill comes up for its Third and final reading in the House of Commons this Friday, two new surveys have shown that it flies in the face of the wishes of a majority of adults.

Only the Anthony Blunt scandal torpedoed a Tory attempt to push through a "Protection of Information'' Bill that would almost certainly have made the New Statesman revelations itlegal:

Last week saw the first mass arrests of pickets in the steel strike-and the use of handcuffs to shackle workers, who were offering no resistance.

And Home Secretary Whitetion that would oblige demonOne, conducted by Woman's Own magazine, showed that a massive 80% of the women asked believed that the choice of whether or not to have an abortion should be an issue to be decided solely by the woman concerned and her doctor.

And a Sunday Times opinion poll revealed that less than one-third of the public wanted the abortion law tightened up, while 50% want it left the way it is or made more liberal.

According the Sunday Times 54% of the public as a whole agreed with the statement "Abortion should be made legally available for all who want it.

Horrors

But of course the Tories have other ideas. Not only does Corrie's Bill set out to condemn thousands of women to the horrors of unwanted pregnancy and childbirth, but the savage spending cuts in the Health Service are ensuring that the facilities for free abortion are inadequate even under the existing laws.

For Tories like Corrie and his reactionary allies in the Catholic Church, women are to aspire to no more than to be housekeepers and child-rearers.

But such reactionary values are shared also by the gang of 1HR, Printed by Anvil Printers, London of the Workers Socialist League. Home Secretary Whitelaw stration organisers to pay the cost of policing street demonstrations and putting down hefty advanced cash deposits against possible damage.

With employers now screaming their demands for new anti-working class legislation there is no doubt that the only way to curb the growth of police powers in the next period is through mass action to bring , down the Tory government and the removal of Labour's reactionary Callaghan leadership. Labour right wingers that argue it is against their "conscience" to allow women the elementary right to control their own bodies, their own lives.

Corrie's Bill has proceeded this far with only token oppos ition from the trade unions, and has been actively fought by only a depressingly small section of left wing Labour MPs.

Majority

The Tory majority in Parliament seems now certain to. ensure that the Corrie Bill carries through its Third Reading, to emerge in the near future on the Statute Books.

But it is not too late for the labour movement to prepare the ground for action to defend abortion rights against the new legislation.

This means fighting to:

*Call on the Labour Party to enforce its policy of "free abortion on réquest" by a) imposing a three line whip on Labour MPs to vote against the Corrie Bill and b) pledging the next Labour government to the repeal of all anti-abortion legislation.

*Call on trade unions to ensure that sponsored MPs vote in | accordance with Lubour Party and TUC policy and to act to remove those that do not.

*Call on union national of Lords to overturn Lord Denning has still left room for the law to be used against strike action.

While the Law Lords have not yet published their detailed reasons for overturning Denning they did not rule out the possibility of injunctions being grantea in the event of a general strike. (Such injunctions could then legitimise the use of police and army against strikers as strikers, rather than against pickets).

The private steel firms had based their application on the remoteness' from the dispute.

It was the Appeal Court itself (firstly Lord Lawton and then Lord Denning) that came up with the concept of there being two disputes-one with the BSC and one with the government. It was this notion that the House of Lords overturned.

Counsel for the private steel firms said that the strike was damaging to the "wellbeing of the country" (i.e. the wellbeing of the bourgeoisie). This line of argument has not been definitely set aside.

Lord Scarman in overturning Denning remarked that one of the factors the court must consider was:

"Whether it would be pos sible before the damage developed irretrievably for the government by action of some sort or another by legislation or whatever-to avert damage to y the welfare of the state".

In othér words Scarman is saying that the courts should not declare a strike illegal-so long as the government is capable of acting by other means against the strike.

But, should the court take the view that the government is not capable of so doing, it could then declare the strike illegal.

The Lords' judgement is thus not so much a licence to strike, as a decision to hold back on the use of what the bourgeoisie recognise must be a weapon of last resort. executives, particularly ASTMS/ MPU, to commit their unions to strike action in the event of any member being prosecuted for continuing to provide abortion in defiance of the law.

*Support trade unionists who take action, including strike action or occupation, in defence of abortion or other health service facilities threatened by the government's public spending cuts.

PHOTO: Laurence Sparbam NUPE leader Fisher-must be forced to act on Corrie