Women's rights

Scan page 11

In fact the resolution said 'purge all fascists'. This was pointed out and acknowledged by the Standing Orders Committee as a misprint. But they still recommended opposition!

Dave Curtis, an ex-YOP worker and now NUR member stood as the Class Fighter candidate for the YS seat on the Labour Party NEC and won 20 votes. In his hustings speech he said:

'We'll only win large numbers of youth to the YS if we fight to win. We don't think a bosses' government will disarm, but that doesn't stop us building a mass CND now, we can't leave everything till after we've won socialism"

Surprisingly the LPYS did not seem to have grown since last year. There were around the same number A fringe meeting was held by the Action Committee for a Woman's Right to Work, which highlighted the appalling levels of women's unemployment and the need for a fight amongst the whole labour movement on the issue of a woman's right to work.

It was agreed that creches should be provided at all conferences so that women can play a more active part.

There were also suggestions that there should be a separate YS women's conference. The meeting supported the demonstration for a woman's right to work, called for June 5 and the need to make this a massive event.

Unfortunately the conference debate on women was not so good. We had speeches that argued the line that women's rights will have to wait until we have got socialism. However several Class Fighter supporters were able to speak out against this view and urged action now.

Amanda Barnes trom Peckham YS pointed to the fact that even in unions where the overwhelming majority of members were women, the union leadership was composed almost entirely of men.

Kate Williams from Wolverhampton SW YS called for positive discrimination to encourage and enable women to take their rightful place as active members of the labour movement - which Militant supporters opposed whilst giving no alternative. people.

just in talking comrades and asking them to go to the meeting or sign the petition, the need for a discussion on gay rights became absolutely clear, faced with such comments as 'God made men for women' We must fight the oppres. sion of homosexuals in our society and develop the very low understanding of so many people, including some of those offering themselves as the leadership of the labour movement, on this subject.

Homosexuals will not disappear under a socialist state. Now is the time to to challenge narrow views on morality.

Get a speaker to your YS branch to discuss homosexual and bisexual rights. Contact the Labour Campaign for Gay Rights.

Scan page 12

4.0, letters, up to a The Leyland Vehicles jobs strike this January and February led to a sharp debate between Socialist Organiser and Socialist Challenge.

This letter was sent to Socialist Challenge but ILLECAL GIC Organiser no. 79 April 15, 1 Dear S.o, I THINK that Cyril Newgate (letters, Socialist Organiser 78) is right to find Socialist Organiser wanting on the London fares fight; but he misidentifies our failing.

The cheap fares were the battle emblem of the London Labour Left. The transport unions accepted the policy without enthusiasm, after watering it down for the GLC manifesto.

An effective fight against the Law Lords had to draw on those most committed to the cheap fares -the Labour activists; and We invite readers We invite readers to send us their to send us their letters, up to a usual maximum usual maximum length of 400 words.

Send to Socialist Organiser, c/o 28, Middle Lane, London N8. has not been published there. ing here.

One-off calls for strike action from "Can't Pay, Won't Pay" councillors would have been useless. What was needed was for every Labour Party to contact local bus garages and NUR branches, organise joint meetings, and work out joint plans for resistance.

The Labour Parties could have helped to organise passengers, too - through the unions in the workplaces that they travel to, or the tenants' associations in the estates they travel AS A TGWU senior steward who attended the picket lines at Leyland and several of the meetings, I would like to express my grave concern at the articles written by P.Sikorski in Socialist Challenge (March 4, March 11).

It is thankfully a long time since I last encounterorters were very active in the LT unions and in local Labour Parties - but 1 think we failed to mobilise our full resources sufficiently, to map out what had to be done on all fronts, and to give a lead.

But when it came to it on March 21, and "Can't Pay, Won't Pay" was the only resistance organised, think we were dead right to support it to the end.

Yes, a flop was foreseeable. But we might have ed such a distressing mixture of waffle and evasion. Serious workers looking for lessons from this debacle will unfortunately have to look beyond your pages.

I will limit myself to the following points.

• Elected stewards are open to the same bureaucratising pressures as fullress tell your Me foreseen wrong. Over-reaction by LT might have sparked a more powerful movement than we could have predicted. In any case, better to be with those few hundreds or thousands who were fighting, however inadequately, than to sit on the sidelines, playing the professor of Marxism, . as Socialist Challenge for example did.

COLIN FOSTER, Islington. time officials, as BL work ers know to their cost. Whilst Mick Coyne or Jack Adams have to be distinguished from Boyd and Dutty, their politics, the politics of the Communist Party, are totally inadequate to the tasks facing workers today.

Does Socialist Challenge agree? Why then don't you say so?

• The strategy of the strike committee was all wrong right from the start. The main problem, you say, was that the Combine Committee decisions were not campaigned for. In fact they were campaigned against... by the local leadership.

The central focus - an all-Leyland stewards' conference - was rejected by Mick Coyne, who throughout verbally attacked those who argued for the extension of the strike • In all of this the IMG acted as Coyne's cocker spaniels.

At the Leyland Action Committee meeting in Leyland, the IMG supporters mixed adulation of Big Mick with attacks on those like Steve Longshawe of LSE who argued for taking the strike into the Division.

• Against this they posed a precise and parochial formula, 'Build the strugg

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

riteback A letter Socialist Challenge would not publish

Failings of left IF IT LIN MCTNOW! sen che perition. in fares