THATCHER'S CYNICAL attempt to buy off the militancy of nursing staff was a significant retreat in the face of hostile public opinion and the strike wave of February and March.
It remains to be seen,
however, if the enlarged pay settlement will achieve its objective of 'divide and rule', silencing the nurses while Tory cash limits put the boot into the NHS.
Few nurses yet know how much the review body award means to them in hard cash: it seems that many ward sisters and top-level staff nurses could yet suffer an overall loss through cuts in special duty payments for unsocial hours.
Many will get far less than they expected. Meanwhile other sections of health workers have been angered that they will receive far lower increases.
A new, brutal round of cuts and closures has begun for the new financial year, with West Lambeth district health authority heading the pack with the biggest-ever single package of cuts — £l million of which is to be saved through redundancies among all sections of staff, including nurses and doctors.
West Lambeth has also found an ingenious way to avoid further increasing waiting lists at St Thomas' Hospital while keeping 180 beds closed: it has axed 25 per cent of outpatient appointments (60,000-plus this year) — thus preventing patients being put on to the waiting list in the first place!
Further hefty cuts programmes are being pushed through most London health districts and many others across the country, including Birmingham and Manchester.
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 7 May/lune 1988
PERONT
An analogous problem with the region of Nakhichevan, populated predominantly by Azerbaidzhanis but within Armenia, was solved by granting it the status of an
autonomous republic.
Since then, Nagorno- Karabakh has suffered further and further isolation from Armenia. It has not been able to receive broadcasts from
1 the wards
Adam Hinton/Refiex
General surgery in the Queens Medical Centre,
Nottingham
Little of the militant strike and protest action by nurses in February was over wages: most nurses were solely concerned with the state of the NHS.
Thatcher's attempt to buy off this movement could simply encourage other health workers to fight for decent pay, while events spur nurses into new local battles against cuts and closures, which will come back
to the toretront of health campaigning.
In the run-up to the budget, unions were half-heartedly demanding an extra £2.5 billion for health: now Thatcher under pressure has coughed up £750m from the contingency fund, it is time to press home the fight for the rest • HARRY SLOAN
7
8
Yerevan, Armenian schools have been closed and the Armenian population has remained static in numbers while falling as a proportion of the total population of the region.
What has brought this situation to a head at this particular time is difficult to determine. It seems that the burning of an Armenian primary school in early February touched off mass protests including a spontaneous rally and strikes in Stepanakert. In response to this the local soviet in Nagorno-Karabakh called for the incorporation of the region into Armenia.
The Armenian Communist Party headed by Karen Demirchyan, taken to task in recent months for its very slow implementation of perestroika, its thoroughly corrupt practices and the victimisation of its own internal critics, might have used this opportunity to cover its misdeeds were it not for the fact that it was immediately by-passed by the mass movement and the spontaneous leadership which emerged from it.
This leadership took the form of an organising committee composed of intellectuals from which the communist party was absent. Indeed, the party seems to have set its face against incorporation.
The organising committee led the mass mobilisations in Armenia itself including a one- hour general strike on 11 March.
Representatives of the committee also met Gorbachev in Moscow on 25 February — an acknowledgement of its authority - and they brought back Gorbachev's appeal for calm.
During the course of the mobilisations the committee seems to have expanded to include representatives from local committees in communities and factories.
Unfortunately, the limitations of glasnost have been all too easy to discern in respect of the events in Armenia.
Little information has emerged through official
channels, western journalists have been banned from the area and western radio stations blamed for instigating the troubles. References have been made in the Soviet press to Gorbachev's appeal for calm but as yet the text of this appeal has not been made known.
The scale of the "pogrom' of Armenians in the Azerbaidzhanian town of Sumgait varies from 30 to 300 dead depending on sources but has been put officially at 32. The fact that leading politburo
members have been in Stepanakert and Yerevan and have addressed rallies has only been briefly acknowledged
The Kremlin has rejected incorporation into Armenia and only appears to be willing to grant 400 million roubles in socio-economic aid to Nagorno-Karabakh with a promise that Armenian language broadcasts will be received in the region. But a general strike has been in effect in Stepanakert and will continue until incorporation is reconsidered.
At the time of writing, the strike had caused losses of more than four million roubles and technically made four firms bankrupt.
This is a clear indication of the lengths the people of Nagorno-Karabakh are prepared to go to achieve their democratic demands and a warning to Gorbachev that the many remaining national questions in the Soviet Union can only be tackled by a completely open and democratic discussion • SEAN ROBERTS
Panama: no to US interference
THE US attempt to extradite on drug charges General Mañuel Noriega,