New cuts it poorest hardest

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WITH Mrs Scrooge herself at the head of the Tory government, a miserable Christmas and winter period have been lined up for old age pensioners and over 11 million people in Britain's lowest-income families. • A report jointly produced by various charities including Age Concern and the Child Poverty Action Group highlights the danger that 44,000 old people and up to 500 young babies will die of the cold before Spring 1984 because they lack sufficient money to heat their homes.

Many of the elderly and unemployed, who spend additional time at home, need to find double the "average" expenditure on heating bills, or three times as much as the wealthy beneficiaries of Thatcher's tax cuts.

Meanwhile the Sunday Times has uncovered details of the impact on low-paid families of the cuts in Housing Benefit announced recently by social services secretary Norman Fowler.

According to a special report commissioned by the Sunday Times, Fowler's cuts will strip No.28 December 1983 Paper of the wants's campaign Alvement Fighthank for Women:

Rights The away the whole housing benefit from 500,000 households, while another four million households - containing ten million people - will lose the right to claim as much as f8 per week. In practice anything up to half this number have failed until now to claim benefits to which they are entitled.

Fowler's cuts consist in stepping up the deductions from the benefit, which is designed to offset rates and rents of families on or around the poverty line; and in ruling that in all but peculiar exceptions benefits below £1.50 should not be paid at all.

The prime victims for this savage move will be families with a single low-wage income - though pensioners, too, will be hit by the reductions in benefit. These are the people to whom Fowler cynically referred when he claimed that the cuts would concentrate on "better-off households"

As a result of Tory cuts and tax changes, the Sunday times points out, these low-paid families by next April will stand to lose 79p in every extra pound they earn through deductions in income tax and other benefits.

How, one delegate argued, could she be expected to go home, and recruit women to the Labour Party by saying to them: 'Women are second class citizens already - come and be a second class citizen in the Labour Party too."?

The organised protest had some effect: Party officials were visibly rattled. Despite their attempts to shackle the day school, they did read out messages of support for Greenham Common and the NGA. On reading the second, Joyce Gould forgot herself and called for a show of hands in favour: a voice from the floor reminded her 'We're not allowed to vote at this Conference."

They also seem to have got the point. Next year's conference has been scheduled for just before the European Elections in June 1983. It's been brought forward to 12-14 May, in Swansea.

Dec tions) next June.

"We're not excluding men, we're positively including women", explained Lynn Jones from Greenham Common.

Ray Bastin from Greater Manchester CND put the issue of women-only actions at the dominated events in whict women were a minority. Anc when it came to deciding whe would stay at home and look after children, and who would gr and demonstrate, women gen erally stayed at home.