Tories' 'H' Block lie-sheet g Socialist ress pamphlet

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LE THIS WINTER!

Available, price 45p including postage from WSL, BM Box 5277, London WCIN 3XX BRING A brand new pamphlet, spelling out programme and perspective for struggle to oust the Tories.

Along with the holiday brochures plopping through the letter boxes advertising the benefits of a winter holiday in Bermuda may well come one from a less well-liked resort.

The British Army-through the Northern Ireland Officehas made a determined bid to put the H Blocks on the tourist map with a brochure grotesquely entitled 'H-Blocks: The Reality' • Complete with colour pictures, diagrammes and quotes from the Tory press, it is the Northern Ireland Office's propaganda answer to the republican blanket protest.

It was rushed out as the hunger " strikes began, to persuade bourgeois liberal opinion in Europe and America that the army and the H Block jailers are just nice misunderstood people.

An introductory articlecomplète with an uninspired picture of a corridor on a wing of an H Block'-sets the tone for the "balanced' view of the H Blocks.

"The fact is that the prisoners have imposed the conditions upon themselves. It is they who have chosen to create squalor. They who have chosen to deny the use of extensive facilities and privileges which the majority of the Maze prisoners have been enjoying."

And why have the prisoners "chosen" to live in this way? Why it is as "part and parcel of the overall terrorist activities of the Provisional IRA"!

Nevertheless, despite this provocation, the humane officials of the prison service patiently continue to provide their own version of tender loving care.

"Independent obseryers (who! Roy Mason.) have accepted that it is administered in humanitarian fashion. This will continue despite efforts by the protestors • to frustrate and disrupt the smooth running of the prison."

(So that's what it is all about!)

Even those prisoners not on the protest are grist for the mill. We are told that these are the rules "with which the overwhelming majority of prisoners in Northern Ireland's prisons comply."

Other headings speak for themselves: "The facts and the fantasy" "The European Court of Human Rights"

and Humane petey offer and Humane policy There is a picture of men baggy shorts playing football. The text cunningly points out that the prisoners are generously allowed to wear sports clothes during sport-suggesting no doubt that here at least there should be no complaints about prison uniform.

But of course such concessions by these humane men are wasted on these prisoners. After all, do we not learn, in a penetrating fifty word analysis of what the dirty protest is, that the beasts have "DEFACED religious magazines and bibles"?

Quotes

The booklet closes with quotes from the press reflecting a "wide range" of opinion (The Sun, the Newsletter, the Belfast Telegraph and the Sunday Times). • Given that the clergy have been flocking to echo the sentiments of this slim pamphlet, there will no doubt be a second edition out soon.

In the meantime it is a good thing that there is no cover price on the first edition.

Somehow it misses the elements of a best seller, although it would stand more chance on the fiction list than as a documentary. political asylum by Sweden and is now in the Swedish embassy in Bissau Also the coup coincided with the arrival in Bissau of a large contingent of advisors from the Soviet Union. / Significantly, the first country to recognise the -new regime was neighbouring Guinea (Conakry) led by the still relatively pro-Soviet Sekou Toure.

Several of Toure's political opponents had been given asylum in Bissau by Luis Cabral.

The coup may therefore mark a realignment in West Africa as well as more internationally with a renewal of the old cooperation between Conakry and the PAIGC which ended after the war of independence.

But it looks doubtful in the extreme that it will represent any realignment for the inhabitants of the country who continue, after their heroic struggle against the barbarities of Portuguese colonialism, to be the victims of repression, misery and hunger.

There are only about one million people living in Guinea Bissau. In the years leading to the Portuguese revolution of April 1974 their actions played a major progressive role in world history as their brave fight progressively demoralised Salazar's army.

The coup highlights how far they still are from winning what they were fighting for in that struggle, and how they now need to take up a new fight against new forms of oppression and privilege.

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round-up EL Perhaps you've been waiting patiently, like the Labour and trade union leaders, for the 1984 \General Election as your chance to settle accounts with Thatcher?

Not so fast! The Tories are all set to rush through new gerrymandering legislation that would redraw electoral boundaries and give Thatcher an estimated 30 extra safe Tory seats in Parliament at the next election!

At that rate we would never see the 'back of this bosses' government! A Bill has already been published that would allow the Tories to proceed with this fiddle as quickly as possible.

Atter all, it's the only way they could hope to win again. copsaupa much for democracy!

But it underlines the point Socialist Press has stressed time and again: the only way to bring about a governmeht to defend the working class is through mass working class action to bring down Thatcher, drive out Labour's right wing, and press through the fight for socialist policies.