AHA gangsters raid hospital ST BENEDICTS: FORCE CHIEFS TO ACT!

Scan page 12

Half way through the month and only £260.30 to show for it. That leaves us £589.70 to raise in two weeks if we are to complete our £850 target on time. This means a good response is needed now so that we are not left with an impossible task on our hands at the end of the month.

Send a donation to help support the work Socialist Press today. Our address is:

Socialist Press, BM Box 5277, London WCIV 6XX Just what d loes it take to force the leade ers of Britain's public sector unions into taking action to halt the This must be the question on the lips of every health worker and every trade unionist who read of last week's savage snatch raids in which AHA heavies seized patients out of the St. Benedicts Hospital work-in in Tooting.

The hospital has been occupied and run by staff since it Fisher was threatened with closure last November.

Until last week it still had nearly 100 elderly patients receiving special care and treatment.

This was too much for the wreckers of the Merton, Sutton and Wandsworth AHA, who were impatient to implement their closure plan following the approval of Tory "Health" Minister Gerard Vaughan.

Last Tuesday September 9 they called in squads of police and hired a fleet of private ambulances with scab crews to drive through angry pickets, grab SIX luckless patientsincluding one old woman on al intravenous drip-and haul them off to Bolingbroke hospital.

On Friday, the operation was repeated, and as pickets pelted the scab ambulances with bricks, police moved in to arrest three of them.

Many of the elderly patients who are being ruthlessly uprooted and shunted into new surroundings to satisfy the Tory government and their AHA hirelings are long-stay patients: some have lived there for 20-30 years, many for ten years.

To suddenly transfer them to unfamiliar surroundings in itself could cause them untold shock and problems of adjustment.

But, additionally, the loss of these NHS beds has severe implications for many other elderly patients in the South London area. And it is a key battle in the fight to save the NHS.

•Done nothing But what have the health service unions done to prevent this vicious attack? Predictably the RCN-opposed «to any action to defend nurses or the NHS-has done nothing.

OR But both NUPE and COHSE formally support a policy of occupying hospitals against closure (though they have yet to take the initiative and officialiy lead an occupation).

Alan Fisher is this year's President of the TUC General Council. A clear call from him for mass action to defend St. Benedicts would put every union on the spot and force the issue into the open.

"Consequences"

Yet neither union has lifted a finger to mobilise the necessary strike action and mass pickets to defend the St. Benedicts work-in as the focal point of the struggle against NHS cuts in London.

COHSE official Nigel Beckett declared vaguely that "there will be consequences"

NUPE leaders have not even uttered dark threats.

Meanwhile the AHA and the Tory government, encouraged by every such sign of weakness, are pressing ruthlessly home with their attack. Scab ambulances are now returning again and again to seize St. Benedicts' patients. And throughout the rest of London and elsewhere the cuts and closures continue.

There is no way that Fisher or COHSE leader Spanswick can fob off the blame for this betrayal onto the supposed "apathy" of the union membership: the St. Benedicts workforce have shown by their tenacious work-in that theylike thousands of other health workers-are more than ready to fight to defend the hospital and the NHS.

Immediate But they cannot win alone. If the union bureaucracy continues to refuse to mobilise full-scale local and national supporting action, there is no doubt that yet another victory will be handed to the Tories on a plate.

Trade unionists must demand immediate action and a full scale fight against the Tory cuts.

*Defend St. Benedicts! NUPE, COHSE and all NHS unions must call immediate supporting strikes throughout the London area!

*Stop all NHS cuts! Оссиру threatened facilities: defend every job and existing levels of service!

*Bring down the Tories! Kick out the Callaghan-Healey axemen! Restore NHS spending to pre-cuts levels! r75 Rinded he Mooning Tithn Printers Ltd The depth of the movemanifest itself.

Strikes are still taking place three months after the first one. There is not an area or an industry that has not been affected by the demand for independent trade unions.

Even writers, actors and lecturers are now demanding their own unions. It is clear that if the bureaucracy had not granted concessions in the north that a general strike would have ensued.

The feeling is so strong that even some of the "official" unions, such as the dockers, are now disaffiliating from the Central Trade Union Council.

The bureaucracy is trying a number of measures to counteract these developments, many of which are proving ineffective. The hard-line of threatening workers against forming unions has actually provoked a number of strikes and led to demands for the removal of the officials.

Another method has been to threaten the loss of social service benefits. The most dangerous is the reported entry of a number of Communist Party workers into the new unions in a bid to take control of them.

This in itself represents à problem: the Polish Communist Party is a bureaucratised party that cannot change, despite the promises of a purge.

of t-dae Spanswick It is an organised force to defend privilege. But it also contains people who can be won to the political revolution.

This has meant a problem for those organising the new unions. There was a press conference, given last Thursday in Warsaw • by a group of the new leaders who were setting up a union for the whole of Mazovia, covering Warsaw and Lodz.

These people said that members of the CP would be excluded from union posts. In Silesia, on the other hand, CP members are participating leading positions and helping the new unions.

Their fear of the mass move ment has led the new "selected' TUC chairman to declare that the 'official' unions would call strikes "if necessary"

This union' leader Romuald Jankowski said that parliament would be passing laws allowing strikes, but, significantly, "include clauses aimed preventing wild-cat stikes".

Censorship of news on many of the developments continues in Poland as do the attacks in the press on the dissidents as «false friends".

This is in sharp contradiction to the way that the workers have insisted on some of the dissidents being on strike committees: and it reminds us that Polish workers have still a lot further to go in the fight to overthrow the parasitic power of the Stalinist bureaucracy.

----- pull-quotes -----

olish leaders struggle for

FUND is1 con-

ment against the Polish bureaucracy continues to