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actively encourage the staff to This was left to the staff themselves. Fortunately when the closure was first announced the COHSE branch had a very active assistant secretary, Jo Coxhead,, who had been involved in the South Oxford Nursery occupation and who had responsibility in the branch for the Longworth section.

She immediately organised a meeting with the COHSE steward at the hospital and they adopted the policy of occupation when the closure date was announced. They established a very strong Longworth Hospital Support Committee.

At the same time as the closure of Longworth was announced the closure of the major geriatric hospital in Oxfordshire-Cowley Road Hospital-was also proposed.

This was a much larger hosPitol, interallion it for deved opments in geriatric care.

Cowley Road was strongly unionised by NUPE, with the senior shop steward, Betty Ward, being a National Executive member of the union.

When the closure of Cowley Road was announced the Community Health Council (not NUPE) organised a meeting. It was attended by over 300 people-but the only recommendation to come out of it to save Cowley Road Hospital was a petition.

NUPE organised nothingjust one meeting with management. On Trades Council, on the Joint Trade Union Committee of the NHS unions, the NUPE officers said Cowley Road was a matter for the internal affairs of NUPE.

They hotly argued that the workers there did not want to fight, and that the closure was not even a cut!

Cowley Road Hospital is now closed. It is standing empty, desolate, despite the Inside the occupation. thousands of signatures on the petition.

A Cowley Road Support Committee, was set up, but it soon became evident that Betty Ward was concentrating her energies not in fighting closure plans, but doing everything in her power to fight and discredit the Support Committee-as a bunch of troublemaking "politicos"

With their own NUPE stewards doing nothing to fight the closure, busy organising transfer deals : and smear campaigns against the Support Committee, the workers were made confused, demoralised and though in complete opposition to closure, without the necessary leadership and encouragement could not organise the very big step of occupation.

The workers at Longworth are fully aware that though it is easy to have the policy on paper for over two years, actually establishing an occupation is no automatic, easy process.

It requires a lot of advice, patient work developing. confidence, aid a substantial shift in the consciousness of workers, developing the necessary control to remove the authority of management and replace it with the authority of the occupation committee.

If any section of workers had the odds against them in establishing an occupation it was this group.

The hospital itself is a couple of miles outside of Longworth village, small and isolated in. rambling grounds, with many entrances.

The main gate is a good distance from the hospital itself, in the woods, which makes look out and picket duty from the main body of the hospital impossible.

Therefore, a 24 hour picket has to be maintained in the woods, where there is no light or shelter.

The hospital itself is run like large family institution. Challenging the nursing officer is like challenging the head of the household.

The sisters, who are hostile to the occupation have had years of having their autocratic authority respected through the use of intimidation.

The women who work at hospital work on a multitude of part-time shifts to fit in with both child care arrangements and when they can get a lift into the hospital from their homes in outlying villages or with other part-time jobs in the local schools.

Many have large families, and therefore heavy commitments in the home.

Getting a meeting of all the staff is a complete impossibility.

Therefore the occupation had to be declared by one shift, before the intention got back to management, and could only later be explained to the others!

The occupation . requires many different meetings to get the involvement of staff on all the different shifts.

Sometimes members of the occupation committee find that they are the only ones on a certain shift with hostile sisters and unsympathetic trained staff.

The confidence, strength and determination of the workers from the occupation committee is noticeably shifting the whole response in the hospital day by day from one of suspicion, indifference or hostility to the TITAOTUAT AHA controlled hospital under instructions from the AHA.

Once a picket is mounted on the gate, however, and support for the occupation is declared by the ambulance union, then the drivers are under instruction by their union not to cross the picket line for any purpose which could threaten the occupation.

The central task for the occupation is therefore to prevent patients being moved out.

In order to do this the picket must obviously be maintained. But we have seen in the past how those picket lines have been smashed through by scab CANIIDINOIIID A sufficient threat must be posed to the AHA to prevent them employing these tactics.

This threat can only take the form of strike action throughout the NHS in the area, backed up by supporting strike action from industrial sectors determined to preserve their health service.

This is the aim of the occupation committee.

It is not an easy thing for part-time women workers-some of whom have not even attended union meetings before, and who have had years of playing a set role in the family, now to spend their days doing their very arduous shift in the shortstaffed hospital, as well as consolidating the occupation there challenging the upper eschelons of management and now coming out every night to speak to trades councils, union meetings and public meetings.

But they are determined having got so far, and done so much, not to give up.

They are fully aware of how much is at stake. Representatives from the St. Benedicts Hospital occupation have come down several times over this past week to give support and advice the Longworth workers.

They, like the Longworth workers are determined that this murder-for how many of the sudden deaths of patients evicted from Hounslow and St. Benedicts Hospitals are due to their brutal actions?

The full weight of the labour movement outraged by the callousness of management in these actions should have been mobilised in strike action in defence of our hospitals.

The AHA in Oxfordshire are relying-like other AHAs-on vacillating, weak-kneed betrayals from the COHSE leadership.

Suspended

Within two days of the occupation being, declared the COHSE officials recommended that the occupation be 'suspended' on the basis of an agreement from the AHA to have "full consultation with COHSE before moving patients"

The argument was worthless. The AHA continued to declare its determination to close the upper floor of Longworth and ultimately the whole of the hospital.

The COHSE members of the occupation committee immediately voted unanimously to reiect the proposals, stating they hadn't gone so far to turn back now for nothing.

The COHSE officials now know that selling this occupation out is going to require a bit of thought.

The AHA are aware of this too.

Lady McCarthy, the AHA chairwoman is on the GMC of the local Labour Party.

(She is also a supporter of the Gang of Three' and an ardent witch-hunter in the Oxford Labour Party), She is vicious in her determination to break-up the NHS in Oxfordshire, in particular the "cinderella" services for geriatrics.

Noticeably, it is Dr. Ken Williamson, chairman of the Longworth Hospital Support Committee, that she and fellow witch-hunters are determined to refuse to allow to join the McCarthy is probably the most notoriously anti-working class figure in the local Labour