Block voters block women by Ann Pettifor (CLPD Women's Action Committee

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TRADE union leaders and the NEC took some trouble last week to forge an alliance that would prove powerful enough to halt the onslaught on their authority by a tiny minority at the Labour Party conterence.

In particular, they matshalled their not inconsiderable forces, against the pitifully moderate demand of organised women within the party that they be allowed to voice. their views in the course of the major debates of conference on the economy, health, education etc.; a demand the unions felt necessary to defeat by more than six million votes.

Women have not been so roundly rejected by a Party Conference since 1907 when Ben Turner from the Yorkshire Wool Workers Union proposed a women's suffrage motion, only to have it defeated by a massive majority.

This prompted Eva GoreBooth (of the Lancashire Association of Machine, Electrical and Other Women Workers) to write:

"Amongst Lancashire working • women there is a strong inherent sense of commercial honesty and it is no exaggeration to say that amongst the more progressive workers, there has grown up a deep feeling of bitterness and disappointment, a feeling which culminated this year when the Labour Party lead away by a theoretic inclination for the very stale red-herring of immediate; complete and entire adult suffrage, refused to fulfill their written pledge and press forward a measure for the enfranchisement of women."

Bitterness

The size of the defeat inflicted on women this year will serve, as it did in 1907, to encourage a feeling of bitterness and disappointment amongst Labour women; and it will also serve, as it did in 1907, to fuel debate and further the argument.

Gwyneth Dunwoody, who replied for the NEC, raised a red-herring as stale as that purveyed by the 1907 NEC, by arguing that to accede to women's demands, the NEC would be opening the door to other argument that deftly ignores the fact that women, who are almost entirely absent from the labour movement's powerful policy-making bodies, nevertheless make up a majority of the electorate, and more than 40% of the workforce.

That, above all, in Dunwoody's fast-decomposing red-herring ignores the double oppression inflicted on this particular working-class "pressure group" -a restricting oppression that can never be claimed by or applied to the other groups "waiting in the wings" for direct access to conference.

Groups like the Association of Metropolitan Authorities, the Parliamentary Labour Party, and the Local Government Conference!

Indeed, by drawing such an irrelevant and irreverent parallel, the NEC revealed how misplaced is its opposition to the demands of women whose anger and determination is based first on the double attacks they face from Thatcherism as the most vulnerable section of a weakened working class and second, the need to union and political organisations to resist these attacks more effectively. .

Ann Davies, who acted as Chair at the Women's Conference this year who used her casting vote at that conference to oppose demands for a strengthening of the Women's Organisation, was catapulted to fame and power this week by trade union leaders determined to suppress the grow ing militancy of the Wom Division Four of the NEC ballot, the women's section, she came second only to the longest serving woman in that section, Judith Hart, surpassing even Gwyneth Dunwoody, in her acceptability to trade union leaders.

There can be no doubt that her election was meant as a powerful and provocative challenge to those demanding that the women's section be elected by the Women's Conference.

It is a challenge that will unhesitatingly be taken up this year by the Women's Action Committee of CLPD. •Gwyneth Dunwoody For it is imperative that we campaign now for the formal constituting of the Women's Conference; and for the adoption there of procedures commonly practiced throughout the labour movement.

We will welcome the introduction of the block vote to the Women's Conference, as the establishment of a vital link with collectively organised working class women. We will argue that the block vote be based not on the unions' national affiliated membership, but simply on female affiliation