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RAL ED COHSE members and supporters shout their disapproval at an AHA lobby prior to the.

ng of 3 rush to Liberals Linwood workers picketing during earlier pay dispute Country roads sealed off by police cars. Busloads of police held in reserve. Telephones cut off. A snatch squad arrives, manhandles quiet country hospital, bundles out four confused and distressed elderly patients, and shunts the others downstairs: They rip out fuses and smash the hospital boiler in a frenzied move to shut off power and heat.

"It was just like an SAS operation" said COHSE steward Myra Bungay in the aftermath of the traumatic raid last Tuesday on the occupied Longworth Hospital in Oxfordshire.

Enthusiastic

It was carried/ out by the Area Health Authority with the enthusiastic help of its chairperson-leading Labour Party member Lady McCarthy.

McCarthy had set her sights on smashing the work-in by fair means or foul since it began in early December.

She had been angered by the growing militancy of the COHSE members at the hospital and their steadfast resistance to her planned cuts in the health service in the Oxford Area.

These cuts include the closure of the top floor at Longworth as a prelude to total closure-in an area already 200 geriatric beds short of requirement.

The night before the raid McCarthy had learned that COHSE members at Longworth voted unanimously to reject an AHA deal which simply postponed the loss of beds for a few weeks.

This rebuff, following on the failure of an earlier AHA attempt to snatch patients from the hospital under the guise of *taking them on holiday"

Recovering from a nearsuccessful assassination attempt, Bernadette McAliskey has accused the RUC of refusing three applications for a firearm to use in self-defence.

She told the Dublin Sunday World that she had been forewarned by the RUC that the UDA planned to murder her. In the event she was unarmed when the Loyalist gunmen smashed their way into her home and shot her down together with her husband Michael.

Her courage in continuing to expose the reality of • the "security forces" in the sectarian statelet of Northern Ireland is matched by the courage and tenacity of the six republican hungerstrikers who fasted nearly to death before Christmas.

Returned from the prison hospital recovered from their 53-day hunger strike, they were placed in clean cells in the 'H' Blocks of Long Kesh: prompted the go-ahead for the raid.

The full destructive savagery of the AHA management emerged as they set about rendering the top floor: of Longworth unusable-at considerable hazard to the remaining patients -smashed up the pickets shelter by the gate, and tore down and destroyed posters, petitions and other material in the occupation room at the hospital.

When pickets refused to obey management instructions to leave the gate they were threatened with police action.

A mass picket of over 70 pickets quickly assembled, drawing wide support from the Oxford labour movement, while police, despite urging from the AHA, were reluctant to intervene.

As the dust settles after the raid, the AHA has been daunted to discover that the occupation committee remains strong and is actively campaigning for trade union action to force the reopening of the top floor that proved so hard to close.

COHSE members at Oxford's -Littlemore hospital have been approached and asked to black the admission of female n or lemaie Further evidence of the contempt and loathing the bulk of Labour activists have for the right wing Gang of 3 and their hangers-on emerged last week as more Labour Parties voted to call on their "social democrat" MPs to resign.

But the attachment of these strikers But, in common with their comrades who have sustained the blanket protest in pursuit of Prisoner of War status, the six men at once joined the *dirty' protest.

410 republicans are now 'on the blanket' in Long Kesh: and a new hunger strike is scheduled to begin next month.

The British labour movement must be mobilised in their Bernadette McAliskey geriatric patients until the beds at Longworth are restored and filled.

While there is a sympathetic response to this policy at Littlemore, staffing levels at Longworth have been driven so low by the AHA that official COHSE action is needed to increase them.

Meanwhile the St. Clements ward of Oxford City Labour Party has spearheaded the struggle against McCarthywhose action's flouted not only socialist principles but also the specific policy of the CLP, to support the Longworth. workin.

An emergency motion has been tabled calling for Carthy-a General Commitmember-lo excell from the Labour Party. ' Trade unionists and Labour Party members throughout the country should take up this call. The Longworth struggle has become the prime focus for the fight against the cuts in the NHS.

It must be defended against both the attacks of McCarthy and the inaction of the COHSE bureaucracy which has left the struggle isolated on a national level.

Messages to Myra Bungay, 13 Bowbank, Longworth, Oxon. parasites to the ideals of "democracy" does not extend, apparently, to submitting themselves to a fresh election on their present political positions.

Free publicity

, Small wonder. After the initial flurry of favourable opinion poll findings-prompted by the never ending tide of free publicity in the Tory press and mass media-it is becoming In miserable contrast to the stand by miners against pit closures, shop stewards and union officials have outlined a pathetic programme of belly crawling in their efforts to "save" the Talbot plant at Linwood.

A poorly-attended mass meeting last week bore testimony to the lack of enthusiasm for the feeble protest campaign outlined by convenor Jimmy Livingstone.

Instead of an immediate stoppage of work and preparations to occupy the doomed plant, Livingstone stressed the intention of stewards to work on in an exemplary way to complete work on the outstanding stocks of cars-tidying up before the closure!

Instead of fighting for immediate supporting action by TGWU members in other Talbot plants and for blacking of Talbot cars and components, Livingstone insisted that there would be no "provocative" steps or any form of industrial raid. increasingly clear that the "social democrats" have a very limited prospect of success at the polls.

They are able to count on little support from traditional Labour voters. And they have no party machinery of their own. This, as much as anything else, drives them faster than they might have wished into the open arms of an increasingly arrogant David Steel.

No doubt the Gang's explicit action until the time-wasting disputes procedure has been exhausted. на -reality Livingstone's course of action will exhaust the membership-with endless futile pilgrimages to Peugeot management in France, the Foreign Office, the Scottish Development Agency and others.

Procedure

Like any union bureaucrat, Livingstone sticks woodenly to the formalities of procedurewhile management merrily tear up agreements and implement measures that threaten 4,800 jobs at Linwood and a further 5,000 jobs in the component The Linwood #action group" that has now been set up is an ominous echo of the wretched protest campaigns run by union bureaucrats at the doomed Dunlop plant at Speke on Merseyside and the Bowater paper plant at Ellesmere Port.

Like them, it embraces a gaggle of MPs, councillors, Our address is: rejection of socialism is one of the features that helped lure the first prominent members of the Communist Party to break ranks and declare support for the Council for Social Democracy.

Sue Slipman-an Executive member of the CP for four years and a former President of the National Union of Studentsjoined the CSD, along with ex-Stalinist Penny Cooper, a former NUS treasurer.

"My politics have not bureaucrats and even bosses from the Scottish CBI.

Like them it is focussed on "responsible" moves to persuade Talbot management to hold their fire-at least for a year.

Like them it offers no perspective for Talbot shop floor workers to act-placing reliance exclusively on top level diplomatic manoeuvres.

Both plants are now closed. vusica-so PHOTO: John Sturrock, Report Socialist Press Monthly Fund BM Box 5277, London WCIN 3XX changed," argued Slipman, who professed her adherence to the reformist strategy embodied in the CP's "British Road to Socialism"

Of course Slipman is right. The CP has for years worked happily in NUS with Tory forces if anything even more reactionary than the CSD.

Slipman and Cooper have cut and iun to the Liberals: how many more Stalinists will follow them?

Thousands of jobs already been lost by such rupt tactics.

But now the miners' struggle offers a new situation in which solid action ' by Linwood workers can link up with workers throughout. Scotland and the whole of Britain in a fight to defeat the Tories.

*Reject the ridiculous Livingstone campaign!

*Occupy the plant!

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the picket, lifts the gate off the hinges, busts into the

dec. m. 2aa.