[until now, defiantly refused to carry out the…]

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until now, defiantly refused to carry out the cuts demanded by Heseltine and the Tory government. Council leader, Ted Knight, has led two marches through the Borough to demonstrate support for the Council's stand. In week of action, including strike action and February Lambeth trades unions staged a work-ins, in support of their refusal to cut.

However, the tide is now beginning to turn, and Lambeth's Council is retreating from its defiant stand.

Cowed by threats of surcharge by the District Auditor and by a reactionary mass. movement whipped up the Tories and otherright-wing organisations against his former (in our view mistaken) policy of raising the rates to keep the Council afloat, Ted Knight is now proposing a 1981/82 budget which includes cuts, and rent and rates increases.

The £11million cuts (about 10% of next year's projected expenditure include Elmillion from housing repairs, £2.3million from Social Services, £200,000 (20%) from grants to voluntary organisations, £1million from amenities and recreation.

A £4 two-stage rent increase is proposed together with 372% on the domestic rate.

Knight argues that these cuts will 'protect essential services'-and yet for the past 2 years, he has insisted, correctly, against Tory accusations of waste and extravagance, that any cuts would affect services.

He also argues that his proposals protect ment to no redundancies. However, it is clear and he has admitted, that natural wastage will occur-thus leaving people on the dole who might have taken those jobs. 200 white collar jobs are to disappear in this way.

These cuts will not satisfy the Tories who have demanded much greater cuts-including slashing the Council's workforce.

They certainly will not satisfy Lambeth workers, who will see their services deteriorate in quality while they are forced to fork out more money for them.

A lobby has been called of the rate-fixing council meeting on March 26. A huge turnout is essential to stop these proposals being implemented and show once again that Lambeth Council will have the support of Lambeth workers if it stands and fights the Tories, instead of retreating.

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part in the occupation of Longworth Hospital in Oxfordshire-Kate White, Longworth is a hospital for geriatric women, which was occupied in December 1980 to prevent the Area Health Authority (w chaired by a leading local Labour Party member Lady McCarthy) carrying out their threat to close the first floor-which the st On February 10, the AHA, with the co-operation of the police, raided the hospital, removed patients from the first floor and the floor down. The occupation was subsequently suspended —but as this interview makes clear, the fight is by no means over. Kate White Woman Worker interviewed four women who took Myra Bungay, Margaret Bradbury and Sylvia Firth.

as the first step to total closure.

Why did you go into occupation?

KW: Well it's simple really. I went into it because I feel so deeply about the elderly and our old ladies here.

SF: I was nervous when Margaret rang me up and told me we were occupying. I thought I'm not an argumentative person, I can't stand up like that.

MB: Well that's how I felt but we just had to do it. You do when you feel strongly, you feel you just can't let them get away with it.

SF: Yes, when you hear they're 200 beds short for the old people, then you know you've got to get back at the AHA. It's for the elderly. They can't do the fighting, so whether we were used to it or not we had to do it for them, even though I'd never thought I'd see the day when I'd be picketing.

Did the occupation change the atmosphere in the hospital?

Myra: Oh yes, that's why the RCN and some sisters didn't like it. It put their noses out of joint when it was us making the decisions.

MB: We all felt happier working during the occupation. There was a sense of purpose, of doing something constructive and of being in control of things, taking decisions, keeping the AHA out.

What about the raid?

MB: Well everyone was shocked didn't think anyone really expected to use those kind of methods.

What could have prevented the raid?

Myra: I don't think just having more pickets would have stopped it. They were prepared to do the job with all the police. I think it would have been stopped if they really felt the unions meant business. If we'd had the real power of the union behind us.

KW: Yes, if the union had stressed that they were going for all out strike action that would have stopped them. But we just didn't get that kind of help from the top in our union and the AHA knew it.

Did the union officers do all they could to help?

KW: Yes. One or two locally, but the rest really let us down. For the most part they just left us alone to get on with it but the one they did send down, Ernie Brooks, was just wishy washy. He would only point to all the problems of the occupation. He'd really get you down. He never offered you any ideas about what we could do to strengthen it, he 'never lifted you up, gave you encouragement, he'd just try and take the fight out of you.

He only seemed concerned with settling for the best we can-which usually meant to lus nothing at all!

What did the union officers the occupation? — Myra: Well, they never did what we asked them for, like getting support from the other unions and going all-out to get supporting action from the other COHSE members, and other things like press statements. We asked for a typewriter and duplicator from the first week and we never got it. For publicity we managed to get one poster and one badge but not till it had been going for two months.

SF: I don't think the union was doing all it could do. I always thought the union would be behind me. That's what I paid my money don't do ahy shade we got them for it they MB: I thought if we were fighting to save the hospital we'd need the help from all the other members and the leaders who are the only ones in a position to do it, would call on them to coordinate it.

Has it made you want to leave the union?

Myra: Oh no. It makes you want to stay in and fight and tell them they're not the union, it's us, the members, and we've got to let them know they've got to do what we want.

KW: Where I come from in the mining villages in Wales, the unions we've built, struggled for through blood and sweat to give us that strength and protection.

You've got to be part of it and get it back out of the grip of that lot. You saw what they were like at the South East Region TUC conference. They've got it all there but they don't use it. Talking, talking, but no action.

Why do you think that is?

Myra: Well, they've got their own cosy quiet little world, leave well be is their motto:

KW: Yes. They're so busy mixing with management they begin to get like them. They start not wanting what they call trouble'. As far as they're concerned if we want to fight then they want to stay well out of it, Which is iff saw The AHA say the cuts aren't their fault. They say there isn't the money.

Myra: If they're so short of money why don't they open the books so we can see for ourselves.

As far as I'm concerned it's a case of too many chiefs and not enough Indians-we could run this place for a week for what it costs a day. And look at where the money's going. All that money on the drugs, the food, the beds, everything. It goes into someone's private pocket, not into our health service.

What about the role of Lady McCarthy?

KW: I don't think you should print we feel about her.

MB: I thought the Labour Party was always reckoned to be the party of the working class but she's just fighting against everything we believe in.

Myra: Well I didn't vote Labour in the last election because the way I look at it, if you've got policies that you say are for the working class you should stick to it and do jut that. But the last lot didn't when they were in government and McCarthy's not now. She's just going along with money. It's balancing her books that matters to her, not our old ladies.

MB: It's wrong when she'd prefer to see this place sold off as a private nursing home or something.l Myra: Yes, give her her way and in another two years we won't have our health service. It will all be BUPA like you see on TV all the time now.

KW: Oh no we just can't, won't let it go back to that. I've lived through it before, kids dying for want of blood which their parents couldn't afford to pay for.

When I was in school in winter six or seven funerals would go past our classroom, children, babies, and all because they've got no money for proper health care.

SF: It's like poor old 'H'. If she'd had the money for private care she wouldn'd be dead now.

She came in here before Christmas. We knew she couldn't cope at home. She'd no relatives and had had some nasty falls and she was getting a bit dotty.

But McCarthy refused her a bed here saying they weren't taking in any new patients as they wanted to close the first floor.

Well last week she was found dead on the -cold stone floor in the hallway of her cottage.

She had been trying to light her electric fire with matches and had fallen.

KW: It's for H and all the hundreds like her that we're fighting.

Margaret Thatcher returned recently from a friendly visit to co-thinker and free world' champion Ronal Reagan where she pledged her government's total support for US military involvement in El Salvador to combat Russian and Cuban communist intervention' in that country.

The ruling junta in El Salvador came to power in a CIA backed coup in October 1979, has received $75 million in military and economic aid from the US and welcomed large teams of 'advisers' who work closely with the army. The US Rapid Deployment Force of 100,000 men is poised for action in Florida, the Caribbean Joint Task Force is at the ready and CONDECA (Central American Defence Council) forces are massed on El Salvador's borders with Honduras and Guatemala.

SHACKS So what is it that these champions freedom and democracy are so anxious defend? Most of the land in El Salvado owned by the so-called '14 fa nilies': 73% children suffer malnutrition; 1 he majority El Salyador soldiers look at their victims: ever What suspension tion?

Myra: We've suspended the occupation as the first floor is closed because of the raid.

The AHA say they consider that the hospital will stay open for three to four years, but we don't believe that. We may well be back in occupation before the end of the year and just now we're reserving our strength.

MB: Yes, and when we reoccupy we'll be a lot stronger. We learnt a great deal about our strengths and mistakes and the whole occupation has made everyone aware of the health cuts and just what can be done to fight them. We'll be back all right. After all, we've just got to, haven't we NOTE: COHSE is the Confederation of Health Service Employees, the union which represents Longworth workers. RCN is the Royal College of Nursing, which although registered as a union is not affiliated to the TUC and often acts in a very anti-union way.

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the population has no access to clean water, education or housing, other than cardboard shacks; 60% of the adult population earns £1 a week; peasant unions exist but are completely illegal and industrial unions are persecuted.

Last year 10,000 people were murdered by the security forces (most of them unarmed workers and peasants), their mutilated bodies dumped on the side of a road or in shallow graves and another 2,000 have already been killed this year.

These statistics can be illustrated by examples of the level of brutality necessary to maintain this economic and political injustice: peasant women blindfolded, tied to a bunk in Although here in Britain the working class pays a high price for the current recession in the world economy-unemployment, cuts, low wages, etc., we are still relatively privileged because we live in a rich, imperialist country, the highest price of all is always paid by workers and peasants in the underdeveloped countries, underdeveloped by imperialism. In order to keep labour cheap for the multinationals, in order to guarantee cheap imports of raw products, (mainly coffee from El Salvador), in order to guarantee that these dependent economies respect their foreign debts and remain under the political control of capitalist banks like the IMF, in order to prevent workers and peasants rising up and fighting against capitalism, imperialist governments like our own prop up the most vicious anti-worker regimes, Oxford Latin America Committee DEMONSTRATION Against US intervention Salvador Saturday April Assemble 2.00 pm. at "The Plain' 2.00 pm. at OXFORD Followed by Rally with speakers from the Nicaraguan Embassy, the Grenadan High Commissioner and others Social in the evening Come and support it!

Bring banners!

Although as Trotskyists we have many political disagreements with the leaders of the guerrilla movement, the FMLN, we have a clear responsibility to support them against the bloody military junta and their imperialist allies.

The US State Department assesses that a guerrilla army must be outnumbered 10-1 by the regular army if it is to be completely routed.

At present they are only outnumbered 4-1 and a full scale intervention to follow the new military package just approved cannot be ruled out.

*Fight for solidarity with the workers' and peasants' resistance!

*Demonstrate your hostility to Thatcherbacked US intervention!

*Fight for the reconstruction of an international revolutionary socialist partythe Fourth International-as the only organisation which will be capable of concrete Saturday March 14th is the date of the next National Abortion Campaign/Labour Abortion Rights Campaign Trade Union conference.

For about the first time in its history, NAC is actually going on the offensive, to fight for 'positive' legislation, rather than being forced to defend 1967 Act. This involves extending abortion rights and facilities under the NHS, and seeking to end the regional differences which now exist.

It will be an important conference. NAC/LARC recognise that changes will not come without pressure from the Labour movement-the trade unions and the Labour Party.

Pro-choice MPs may make an attempt to liberalise the 1967 Act and to push for new laws requiring the DHSS to provide adequate abortion facilities, but we also need the strength of the Labour movement, in national and locally organised action, for such an attempt to have any chance of success.

We have had to defend what we have got for too long-now is the time to go on the offensive.