Golding record By Ricky Houston

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for its success and how do you see its function now it has a majority on the NEC?

I think it has been successful partly because of the entrenched and thoroughly bankrupt nature of the right-wing coalition that has run the union since 1948.

The leadership particularly failed in its response to the challenge of privatisation and If it is going to be possible to forge an alliance against privatisation the fight against the sale of British Telecoms is probably going to provide the best vehicle for doing so. That depends on the POEU going out to other unions and the Labour Party to get support.

The new NEC made approaches to the NUR about cooperation against Mercury Published by Socialist Forum for Southern Africa Solidarity.

Available (at 90p plus 20p post) c/o SO, 28 Middle Lane, London N8. 90p Bob Fine JOHN Golding's record in the labour movement as an astute, cunning and ruthless organiser for the right wing is well known throughout the movement.

In the build-up to last year's Labour Party conference he circulated every constitueney to which the POEU is affiliated with Labour Solidarity pamphlets caricaturing Militant, alongside a letter which stated that all POEU delegates had been asked to support the expulsion of the Militant Tendency. This mysteriously became POEU policy after a decision by the [then right wing] POEU NEC without consultation with branches.

He has attempted to sue Miltant unsuccessfully in past years for reporting his position in Parliament on the shorter working week which was at odds with POEU policy.

He is known within the union for deciding POEU policy at some regional Labour Party conferences without consultation with the elected POEU delegates.

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Alright for some women: Thatcher's pampered rich can revel in an outdoor meal. SOME things do grow under a Tory government! Unemployment, we all know about; but there's another boom which has gone largely unremarked: homelessness.

The reasons aren't hard to find: councils, starved of funds, are not building new houses, existing housing stock is being sold off.

As well as that, legislation designed to offer private tenants greater security has led, in the absence of the easy profits of the sixties and early seventies, to its opposite; landlords are just shutting up shop or exploiting loopholes like "holiday lets" or 'business lets" which mean the absence of any low-rent private accommodation and no rights for tenants.

Since the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act, local authorities have an obligation to house families, pregnant women and those who through age or disability can be defined as "vulnerable"

How they choose exercise this responsibility another matter.

In some boroughs, families can expect to spend literally years in bed-and-breakfast. Many councils operate a 'oneoffer only" policy: if you turn down an offer of accommodation, however unsuitable, then you're off the books and classed as 'intentionally homeless" Both "intentional homelessness" and "vulnerability" are interpreted in the most mean-minded way to ensure tht many people who should be covered by the Act are excuded.

But if things are bad for families, they're appalling for single people who lack even the dubious protection of legislation. Quite simply you don't have the right to a roof over your head. Especially if you're a woman.

Here the law and general social ideas dove-tail. Not only are homeless women without rights, they're defined out of existence. Women's place, as we're often told, is in the home - but it's always somebody else's home!

Women are expected to live in their parents' and then their husband's home and if they stry outside this dependency, they cease to exist in the public mind.

Unemployment

As with women's unemployment, this leads to a serious undercounting in the official figures (such as exist). If society decrees you have no right to a home, then your lack of it is not counted as important. So the official statistics — the few that there are — are seriously skewed towards men.

They miss out completely on the 'hidden homelessness -people living in inadequate accommodation or putting up with unsatisfactory relationships - because they have no choice - most of whom are women.

Even given this distortion in the figures, they show a massive, disproportionate increase in women's homelessness.

And homeless women present a different picture to homeless men. "Single and Homeless" , a survey commissioned by the DoE, revealed very, striking differences between homeless men and women. The men they interviewed reflected roughly the same age distribution as the general population. Two-thirds of the women were between 18 Many more of the women proportionally, had jobs, some kind of post-school eduction or training, and no other "problem" such as alcoholism, ill-health, psychiatric disorders, often associated with homelessness. So the stereotype of the middle-aged unemployable, socially inadequate, drunk applies even less to women to men.

It's clear that the only "problem" homeless women have is society's treatment of women -low pay, enforced dependency and lack of basic rights.

Women are defined as belonging to the family, under the control of fathers and husbands and when these pressures become intolerable, it's the women who have to move out.

Another irony of progressive legislation rebounding is the Domestic Violence Act, which gives the victims of violent husbands the right to stay in the marital home. One of its unforseen consequences is that women who do move out, through fear for themselves and their children, or unwillingness to drag their personal lives into the glare of the courts, are seen to have forfeited their rights to other accommodation.

They're told they do have a home and it's up to them to get the husband ejected. Nor is it any great help to women stuck in a relationship that's intolerable but not violent.

When looking for housing, women are again at a disadvantage - not only because they're financially worse off, though that's important, but also because of the assumptions that underlie both the design and the allocation of housing.

The "natural" unit for housing, as for so many other things, is the two-parent heterosexual family. But a large proportion of homeless women are so because they are running away from "home" and 'family" , husbands and parents.

There is no provision in public JOHN HARRIS women's homelessness, which is invisible for the same reason women's work is invisible, women are invisible, because of their role in the family, their assumed dependency.

We need to fight for AT THE end of June over 20,000 anti-abortionists. demonstrated in London for restrictions on abortion rights.

The rally in Hyde Park followed on from months of campaigning by two anti-abortion campaigns SPUC, (Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child) and Life.

SPUC took out full page advertisements in a number of national newspapers. Over Easter there was mass door-todoor leafletting of anti-abortion leaflets.

And there has been an increase in advertising by the anti-abortion pregnancy counselling agencies.

But perhaps more importantly, SPUC now has a special trade union liaison committee and has been trying to undermine the tremendous successes that the National Abortion Campaign has in gaining support in the trade union movement.

SPUC successes to date have been very limited. Motions to disaffiliate from NAC in Brent to the immediate housing crisis which has thrown many thous ands literally onto the street, many of them young women who leave home in search of jobs and independence and face poverty and worse.

Private Members Bill on another issue. However it is not a foregone conclusion.

Even without such a Bill, access to abortion has been severely curtailed due to the Tory campaign to weaken the NHS.

• In 1969 68% of abortions in England and Wales were done on the NHS: in 1980 this had dropped to 38%.

The variation from area to area is dramatic. In 1981 94% of North Tyneside abortions were on the NHS but only 3% in North Warwickshire.

Alongside this goes the whole threat to the Family Planning Service.

Oxfordshire District Health Authority has closed three clinics. Kingston and Esher want to reduce sessions at Family Planning Clinics by a third.

The Family Planning Association have identified a further But we also need a pro gramme which encompases choice in housing, that offers people alternative ways of living and that makes life outside the "family" a viable propostion. woman's to remote.

Nevertheless the campaign around these demands must continue.

And with SPUC and Life on the offensive we must be ready to fight any attempts to reintroduce anti-abortion legislation.

Conference

The gains made by the National Abortion Campaign and the Labour Abortion Rights Campaign in the labour movement must be strengthened.

On October 1 and 2 NAC will be holding a national conference to discuss the future of the campaign.

It is vital to buill for the largest possible attencance with affiliated labour movement bodies well represented.

Further details: NAC, 374, Grays Inn oad, London WCIX 8BB.

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