Held Up: Force a Three-line Whip!

Scan page 12

Box 5277, London WC1V 6XX. Printed by Anvil Printers Ltd., London not necessarily represent the views of the Workers Socialist League John Corrie's savage anti-abortion bill • ran into problems: in the House of Commons last Friday-but it is far from dead.

It now seems certain that three Friday sessions will be available for its Third Reading rather than the expected two: and it is possible that pro-corne filibustering and other Tory manoeuvres could procure even more time to force through this mediaeval attack on women's rights.

But it is unlikely that the Tory government will give any of its own time for the Corrie proposals, despite the enthusiastic support for the Bill from the leader of the House, Catholic Norman St. John Stevas.

Health minister Gerard Vaughan has made it clear that As the steel strike moves into its sixth week of increasingly bitter confrontation with the Tory government, it is coming under sustained attack from different sections of the trade union bureaucracy.

Even as ISTC leader Bill Sirs and Blastfurnacemen's leader Hector Smith licked their wounds after the ignominious collapse of the much-heralded "new offer" from BSC, craft and general union bureaucrats were preparing to accept an almost identical deal for their 70,000 members, and thus split the workforce down the middle.

Sordid deal The craft unions have given their backing to a sordid deal which offers a 10% increasethe government opposes most of the Bill's provisions-and is prepared to support only the reduction of the upper time limit from 28 weeks of pregnancy to 24.

Labour, Liberal and Tory icaders now seem agreed on this new restriction-but not on Corrie's other, more far-reaching proposals.

Hostility

Corrie had originally called for a 20-week limit. But his Bill -which also attempted to alter the criteria for legal abortion and to shut down charitable elinics-has been met by unprecedented hostility not, only from women throughout the country, but also from men.

A petition against the Bill has so far produced a staggering 200,000 signatures. Two separSE conditional on acceptance of a full-scale attack on working conditions involving flexibility of lahour and demanning-and a possible additional 4% if local productivity schemes are agreed by May 18, at the expense of further jobs and conditions.

Confrontation

All this has been conceded by the craft union leaders for a total amount-14.47-which is still well short of the going rate of inflation under the Tories.

What territies these negotiators is the growing prospect of direct confrontation with the Tory government itself, as the pay strike drags on and threatens to intermingle-particularly in South Wales-with the fight against BSC's programme of plant closures and mass sackings.

The same fear motivates the British TUC, led by General ate opinion polls in the last ten days have agreed that 54% of all adults either oppose any restrictions on existing abortion rights, or actually favour more liberal legislation.

And 80% of women in Britain feel that abortion is an issue to be decided simply between the woman concerned and her doctor.

One in four women of child-bearing age declared that, if faced by unwanted pregnancy, they would continue to seek abortion whatever new restrictions are passed in Parliament.

This prospect of a wholesale growth of backstreet abortions, with all the squalor and misery that this entails, and the problems of imposing a law that would be so widely flouted, have clearly played on the minds of. MPs-spurred on by the huge 20,000 strong antiSecretary Len Murray. Murray's main efforts in the last few weeks have been devoted not to mobilising support for the steelworkers, but to piling pressure on the Welsh TUC to call off their proposed indefinite general stoppage by unions affected by the steel closures.

This Welsh General Strike was originally called for January 21. Under massive TUC pressure it was postponed to March 10, with a Day of Action called in Cardiff on January 28-which mobilised 200,000 workers in strike action.

Now, petrified that the stoppage might actually take place, Murray has persuaded the Welsh TUC to call a special one-day conference on February 27, at which the recommendation will be to hand over control of protest action against the BSC closures to the British TUCthus effectively abandoning the General Strike.