Anaemia — Who Cares?: Ă survey of screening and counselling facilities in England, Usha Prashar, Elizabeth Anionwu, Milica Brozovic. Runnymede Trust.
In April 1984 the Runnymede Trust
carried out a postal survey in order to Identify accurately what services are
provided for sickle cell disease within
the NFS, with particular relerence to
screening facilities, counselling
practices and provision of in-service
training, Questionaires were receiv-
ed back from 98 District Health
Authorities.
Services wre generally poor, even
In those Districts with high ethnic
minorities. Ot those districts with
over 10% ethnic minorities, all
screen pregnant women for sickle hormold counseling tor pre gomt form of counselling pregnant
women, educational material
sickle cell disease and some form of
screening of new born bables.
But only a minority offer prenatal
diagnosis, have regular in-service
training, specialist cinics, trained
counsellors and keep statistics; and
there are only six sickle cell centres.
The booklet argues the case for
sickle cell centres to be set up along
the lines that haemophillac centres
have been set up nationally. The set-
ting up of centres results in more ex-
pertise. education, screening and
counselling. It has been very suc-
cessful in treating haemophiliacs so
surely the same applies in the case of
sickle cell disease.
The authors point out that the black
and ethnic minority communities are
discriminated against, and that this is
one symptom of racism in the NHS.
Fight to break from sectarian method!
WRP after Healy WORKERS' Press, the weekly paper of the purged Workers Revolutionary Party, devoted two pages of a special issue on February 7 to a reply to an article in the last issue of Socialist Viewpoint.
Now, as we are going to the open tate to Be and u the Open Letter to the WRP from members expelled in 1974, which we carried in our December issue.
Clearly the WRP has moved to a much more open attitude to discussion with other tendencies: with this in view, JOHN LISTER looks at some of the more recent developments since last year's expulsion of WRP founder and leader Gerry Healy. WITHIN days of our last issue going to press. the further split we had forecast in the ranks of the purged WRP majority took place.
A group of 50-60, raising the tatty banner of "political continuity" with Healy's International Committee, set out to form a new "British section", apparently taking with them funds from the WRP Young Socialists as a nest-egg.
Masterminding this ultra-sectarian breakaway, and showing that he for one had neither learned nor forgotten anything during the "break" with Healy was the leader of the IC's tiny American section, Dave North.
In Britain, the new breakaway grouping's main strengths were among inexperienced youth members and in the Yorkshire base of Central Committee member Dave Hyland.
If this small-scale split appears sadly bizarre, the latest split in the Healy rump takes the biscuit: having split from the majority of the WRP because they refused to condemn Healy's systematic rape of women members and slavishly endorsed his every Still with Healy: Corin Redgrave political notion, the minority groupSocialist Viewpoint No. 11 March 1986 p29
ing - heavily overpopulated with corrupt elements from the full-time apparatus - ousted Healy himself from their leadership (apparently on the grounds that he has completely lost his marbles)! In the true Healyite tradition, this change of leadership had again to result in an organisational split - leaving a new, ultraHealyite group consisting of Healy himself, Corin and Vanessa Redgrave and two dozen accolytes to carry forward the continuity of the "fight for the right to rape"
But the dangers of disintegration are far from over in the main WRP itself, which lacks either an authoritative leadership OI a developed perspective and orientation towards the workers movement in Britain.
One of the chief dangers has emerged in the form of the profoundly pessimistic line argued in a lengthy • -document from General Secretary Mike Banda, still in self-imposed exile in his native Sri Lanka.
Apparently churned out in a fit of extreme subjective depression, and without obvious reference to documentary sources, Banda's text "Twenty-seven Reasons (why the International Committee should be buried forthwith and the Fourth International Built)" (Workers' Press, Feb
effectively dismisses the entire history of the Trotskyist movement from its foundation in 1938 to the present day — as an utter waste of time.
While this might appear to offer a useful counterblast to the traditional Healy/IC sectarian nonsense of the triumphant all-conquering "thin red line" of Bolshevik continuity flowing exclusively through limited forces of the British SLL/WRP and its international hangers-on, it offers no balanced assessment of the factional strug gles waged by Trotskyists in the harsh conditions since 1938.
Banda's negative line of criticism concentrates excusively upon the evil motivations he attributes to the leading figures of the Trotskyist movement, particularly in the postwar period. Even if all he says were true (and there is little reason to accept it all), it would be the equivalent of writing a history of the trade union movement which looked only at the
manoeuvres, intrigues and corrup tion of the top bureaucrats - and ignored the ciass struggle and courageous actions of rank and file workers.
The Trotskyist movement as a whole certainly has to come to terms with major historical weaknesses — most significantly its inability grasp and confront the counterrevolutionary role of Stalinism, and its tendency under massive ideological and material, class pressure to adapt politically to existing nationalist and reformist leaderships.
Banda, as one of the key theoretical defenders over decades of Healy's crude political assertions, has until now been very much part of this problem. His document however points no way towards solving it.
Instead of recognising that the key strengths which underlay the continued existence and attractive power to Trotskyism - despite its rotten and sectarian leaderships -revolutionary aspirations of the youth and workers drawn into its ranks, their attempts to fight reformism and bourgeois tionalism, and their willingness to struggle in practice, against all the odds, for what they belived to be a correct line, Banda dismisses every struggle, every intervention, every slogan as the outcome of some sick, manoeuvre.
Instead of drawing a balance sheet of post-war Trotskyism with a view to reconstructing a principled programmatic basis on which the most determined forces could be re-organised and united, Banda's approach is that of a single-minded accountant, seeking bankrupt and bring in the liquidator. In demoralisation Helay's aloof sectarian dismissal of every other tendency as worthless except he now brands his own tendency as the worst of all!
This kind of demoralisation is by no means surprising as following the de-throning of Healy, whose personal prestige and authority acted as the keystone to the WRP's self-satisfied conception of representing the sole "continuity of Trotskyism" against an evil "revisionists" and imagined or real police/FBI/GPU spies.
But by one-sidedly and subjectively opening up a discussion on the history of the movement without fixing the terms of the debate or insisting upon an orientation toward today's living workers' Banda's line is exposing the WRP majority to the danger of predatory raids by lanatical sectarians such as the Spartacists the Workers Power, who feed off the casualties of demoralisation.
Such groupings have points to score on the bankruptcy of
the •- PARTI COMMUNISTE to post-war Laur sister colendel pour assurer elle-me la terreur et la de grève géoérale de la C deja fait les métallos qui the dans les usines, les t Pour vo Pour le Pour Pour ubéra Pour were the cupe Stalinism, na- effectively the history of the WRP cynical But they have a line for the present- most extravagent lunacies. blunders of the past: few sectarians anything useful on offer for the actual problems facing the WRP today. And when it comes to making criticisms of the history of particular people like the should hesitate botoze rowing despicable Spartacist a backlash Poland and supporting immigration controls in the imperialist countries (to name but two obvious points) or a regime should be an eye-opener for horde of wavering WRP members. their Healy-style open letter listing their ready denunciations of every other WRPI) as "centrist", apparently open-minded suggestion of imediate fusion movement, might seem to be a more attractive the Spartacists, nor is their history home-grown one of any exemplary practical work in the British "potted history" served up for would- endless be WRP "comrades" carefully skirts around their own relatively Socialist Viewpoint No. 11 March 1986 p30
PROLETAIRES DE TOUR LES PATA, UNISSEE-VOUR I NUMERO SPICIAL LA VÉRITÉ Hitler ne doil me exploltears cap Deja, les chen VELA GRAVE DES CHEMINO ye dans plusi chantiers. 0G GRÈVE cations : IN 36. I de J Ses cas control •tro HERS LI region. Tutte de canisses- en Jain 36 French Trotskyists and others in occupied Europe risked everything to campaign underground in World War 2: the movement is much more than the weakness of its every other tendency bar their own. day class struggle which is easily as sterile and self-isolating as Healy's Any fool with the benefit of hind point the finger at the anything deeper to say Spartacists who quick look at megalomaniac degenerate internal struggle, At first sight Workers Power, with orthodoxy. current (save for now and with their with the WRP. But they are no more honest than class struggle. Their small,
Le journal des trotskysies qui funteur depuls 5 ana doms Calligalile coatre in guerre impe- rinliste et At dervour fascist. Affondre la situation et passer & action et la réaction, contre ates. Suives le mot d'ordre sont entrés en lutte I SOUTENE A, comme root out a la fois. a votre travall et, VERALE ! retour aux conquétes • imperialiste, mais les ce de droit des ourriers a • prisommiers politiques en Juin 36 l occupez-les ou joignez-vous vos délégués. Quis consti- Fastenrite abandonment of the state capitalist analysis on the Stalinist states, claim- ing that "...on Stalinism and many other questions we have maintained consistently revolutionary positions in contradistinction to the waverings of the centrists." Banda-like, tively write off the whole post war history of the Fourth International fosill But in place of the stig com placency of the "thin red line' cept of Trotskyist continuity so long cherished by Healy and the WRP Workers Power (who have never led struggles substitute the arrogance of "minute red blob" theory of a group- ing magically discovering the elixir of centrists. from nowhere and with no record of themsleves authorities on Trotskyist Hastening to score cheap points on the numerical decline of other group- ings on the left, Workers Power swag- boast and inflate the picture of eir own size, with wiltully deceptive claims for the size of their support amongst miners, and their ludicrous slogan of launching a new rank and file "minority movement" in the NUM consisting of themselves and a few close supporters. Behind the bravado and bluster is the harsh fact that Workers Power is a ossified, sectarian current which has never succeeded in work-
Will WRP break from its sectarian abstention from the functioning Miners" Support Committees and other broad campaigns?
mAlr ing constructively with any number of unaffiliated workers or with any other forces on the hard left in any flurry of activity around the miners significant campaign. strike, Workers Power's main focus for political intervention - like that of the Spartacists 1s meetings of other currents on the left. Broad campaigns and initiatives they see purely and simply as an occasion for polemics and a platform for their own sectarian politics splitting and ultimatums. Their conception of a 'united front' is one in which all forces involved agree to unite behind the Workers Power programme!
Curiously, the Workers "planks for a fusion platform" skirt around the fundamental democratic centralism.
Could this be becasue the whole "fusion" ploy is not so open and fraternal after all, but a deliberate manoeuvre to lure around some unsuspecting WRP militants, recognising that it is not a viable possibility with the group as a whole? Why else would Workers Power as a minority in any fusion with the WRP not even mention the question of in-
2DAШ nolga NO VICTIMISATIEN ternal regime and the rights to form minority tendencies especially in the aftermath of the ex- Despite posure of the Healy regime? Whatever the propaganda parasitic members WRP politics of Workers Power would be to still the leave the sectarianism of Healy and Banda - intact, and duck the central problem of relating seriously to the actual struggles of the British labour movement. hair- recognise and seek Power issue of any section of that movement while "Marxists" versus "revisionists". Socialist Viewpoint No. 11 March 1986 p31
by guaranteed factions, and real plans of this organisations for group, embrace the to tionary The priority at present for the WRP is not to reject out of hand the whole history of struggle - imperfect, in- adequate, against the stream — of the post war Trotskyist movement, but to politically to tackle the common political problems which have remained unresolved by movement, In other words, the lesson of the break from Helay and rejection of Healy 's political methods, the lesson of the break from North and the nonsense about "IC continuity" must forward. be a