Since September there have been dozens of strikes about privatisation. Workers would have been prepared striking in solidarity. NUPE had a organise just that: but so leaders have refused to implement it.
The mood amongst health workers - who are now seeing the cuts in wages and the erosion of working conditions which come with private prepared to strike. If the Health Service unions really wanted to fight privatisation they would respond to it nationally by calling and fighting for cover only. The response would be greater than in 1982. The time for with the miners out as well, could never be better.
Cyncis argue that workers would never would go back to work. But a strike against privatisation would be much stronger than a strike about pay
In 1982, with the one-day strikes, i wasn't long before people realised that even if we got the full twelve per cent, the award would not cover the money which had been lost by strik
Once that fact crops up it is dif. ficult to keep people out no matter how determined they are.
But this issue is different. It is exactly the same issue as the miners are striking about. It is about jobs. right to work and the right of young people to expect to have a job to go to. At Hammersmith, the number of full time jobs fell from 121 to 15 when the contract went to Mediclean. Merton Council put 1,000 people out of work through its privatisation proservice will be much higher. With 4 million people already jobless there is not much chance of getting jobs
Isolated one-day as WIl The only thing which will now stop contractors getting in, or kick them out from where they are
1S militancy which exists. We need an indefinite national strike supported by all the health unions, with the commitment to build for supporting action by other sections of workers. HEALTH? November 1984
EMERGENCY
London Heal!
HERE COME THE
PROFITEERS
Down go NHS
2=2. 59 standards!
Free newspaper against NHS cuts and privatisation from
Health Emergency, 335, Grays Inn
Rd., London WCI.
Following the Greenham Comweek
September, SUE ARNALL tries to explain the special impact of women's peace campaigners.
"When you see, children, what we do not see have compassion on us blind children of the dust.
not to leave the world as we found it."
("Over our Dead Bodies", by Janet
THIS year the threads are coming together of our common struggle to create a world worth handing on to but it's in action that they are being recreated, as Greenham women break camp to join miners' picket lines, and the police use the same strategies to harass mining com-
Set up to cash in on
INHS
London
The power of Greenham women action
Dubé, p. 71)
In our heads we knew of the links
Socialist Viewpoint, No. 2, November 1984. Page 12 nunities as they have used in the orth of Ireland for more than
The strip searches in Armagh are being repeated nightly on brave women who go over the wire to expose the Greenham death machine. The very nakedness of the aggression being used by police and army makes it impossible for us to use the usual defence of living with the horror. The threat of nuclear winter drives us to protest. The destruction •i traditional communities in the search for "economic pits" has forced men and women to act.
A miner's wife on TV the other night said "The difference between 1926 and now is the women. We are together with the men and determined to preserve our communities and create a future for our
Last month's Exercise Lionheart, the biggest military manoeuvres since 1945, organising 130,000 troops for two weeks in the heart of Europe, was displayed nightly on the TV, showing the soldiers having "harmless" war games to the
bewilderment and disbelief of local people, and yet on full pay, using the technology and skill that could blow us to hell.
And the response of most viewers was to take it in as a normal part of life, just as they coped with the thousands dying in Ethiopia during a world glut of wheat. Psychologically we all live with the news as if it's a game that has no bearing on our own lives.
Occasionally we have nightmares when we see realistic films like the Day After or Threads; but we wake thank god it was only a film, and get on with life. So the arms race is perpetuated by the passive consent of most people content to leave it to our "leaders"
And that's why Greenham is so outstanding. It's not just the unusual, bizarre tactics, the congas, the spiders' webs, the chain letters, the structurelessness. It's the tenacity of women refusing to be passive
Refusing to be evicted, coming back time and again, cutting the wire not once but thousands of times. Facing the incredible military machine eyeball to eyeball and not flinching; often smiling, singing, giving birth in primitive conditions in the face of all that obscenity. Refusing to accept the received wisdom that "yes, it's horrendous, but what can you do?"
Incredibly the Greenham movement has survived three winters without giving in to the sceptics. They have not accepted powerlessness as a fact. The peace camps make constantly visible the armed teeth of NATO, facts we all are more happy to forget.
And the experience of many thousands of women of the arrests, the police violence, the sexual harassment from the army, the media distortion and the bias of the courts has not been lost on the
The conclusions are being drawn and the links made with others struggling against the same forces. In September Greenham asked ten million women to make a miracle happen. Weird language, but if that's what it takes to break us out of our stupor, so what? The capitalists apparently have all the weapons, they have the force of the status quo on our consciousness, they tell us we can't win, so why
But it's a massive con trick and the women in struggle know that from experience and are showing the rest of us. Greenham is a beacon of light, a symbol of power, of refusal to be dismayed by the lousy physical conditions, and so we need to recognise the importance of their struggle as a sign to us all. Women's army is marching... Oh sisters, don't you weep, We are strong, We can win, Say NO to the bomb.
WE arrived late on Sunday night. We had intended to stay at Blue Gate but were dismayed to find no sign of the camp, only some sinister looking mounds of earth where it had been. We discovered the camp the next day. The Council had dumped the earth and rubble on their site and they had had to set up camp in the woods close by the gate. Local residents had been shocked by the way women transformed the mounds by placing a simple wooden cross at the head of each. It mustn't do much tor house-values to have such an obvious reminder of what USAF Greenham Base is all about! stay doing a Cruise Watch at Violet Gate, the next Gate but one, since the women at Indigo had left their camp to go and make links with another group of women in struggle, the miners' wives.
It was a fine night - it could have been almost pleasant to sit up by the camp fire — but I felt very rom the Camp slept across the roa Camp itself were on a narrow stretch of land between the fence and the road. stone would be thrown (a van belonging to the Camp had had its windscreen shattered only the previous night). The women at Greenham have learned to take in their stride worse harassment than this (such as the petrol filled tennis ball an intruder at the Camp left behind when women woke up and welcome experience. from the good folk of Newbury. All
On the