Claimants fight Police Bill

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A LOCAL group of the National Campaign Against the Police Bill is to be set up in Oxford following a conference there last Saturday, 3rd, to discuss lessons of the massive police swoop on claimants there last year.

"Operation Major may be a year old, but the struggle for police accountability and a better deal for claimants goes on"

This statement by Alan Jarman, of the Oxford National Council for Civil Liberties group, was the keynote of the one-day conference.

The conference was called by Oxford Claimants Defence Committee to mark the anniversary of the grim day when 236 mostly homeless claimants were arrested at a fake DHSS office in Oxford Approximately 100 delegates from unemployed groups, Labour Parties, and trade union branches, plus many individuals, heard Chris Holmes, director of CHAR, the Campaign for the 'Homeless and Rootless, attack the government's Dily :

By record of massive cuts in public spending on housing. Over the last four years it has been halved.

Holmes said that this was one of the major reasons for homelessness in Britain.

• Ted Knight from Lambeth Borough Council also spoke, and the leader of the Oxford County Labour group told the conference that the national leaders of the Labour Party had failed - even after six months of writing - to respond to his requests for them to lead the fight to get a public inquiry into Operation Major. :

There were workshops on most of the issues raised by the police/DHSS combined operation - on the media, on the use of computers for monitoring, and on social security and poverty.

The workshop that generated a way forward for campaigning was the one on police accountability. A speaker from the GLC Police Committee and the National Campaign Against the Police Bill called for a fight against this Bill, which will criminalise whole sections of the community.

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