Points Stoke in the West to Skegness in the Denis East and from Sheffield in the North to le jobs. SuaLorO uie soul.
cluded 2,600 given craft training at the is very ten Skill Centres within this area, 800 trainees sponsored by their employers urgue ag- to attend the Skill Centres, 4,000 givMen an intorduction to a trade in a 13liately. week course at a College of F'urther Eded in the ucation (some of them privately-owned)
and 800 given a full training programme ABY COLLH m. 210 of 13-39 weeks at these colleges. he GovBut of workers already on the dole tate a perrkers but me toa omy atrangca tot 300 to be trained at an employers establishment ir the em- (for which the employers received payment), and for 700 to be trained as e Labour HGV drivers (presumably someone in CKS II Whitehall is expecting a massive expan C ITCCZC. sion of the public transport system) at another Government Agenev. Of all of these, only those at the Skill Centres int and receive the services of a Placing Officer, who managed last year to find jobs for le job creaonly 60-70 per cent within three months; tice amply completion of the course. For the rest ALC DEI of the trainees they will only be visited Is of the SAECnO Sweetener OF The Jobs Creation Scheme has been created with grants of £30m, £10m, and the recently announced 130m. EnIS pitiful amount of money is at present the total Government expenditure in this field for the next 19 months.
The Government's own figures indicate that they spend £1,000 for each iob created. herefore the most optim istic cliect of tne coverament s moasures could only be to create aboul 70,000 jobs nationally. 1% million workers on the dole the latest measures do not even add up to a dent in the present unemployment They are simply a sweetener Hgures. for Len Murray & Co.
LINDA SIMON (Secretary, BirmThis Monday sees the first of a new series of deliberations by the re-established parlamentary Select Committee on abortion. Provided that a minimum of three MPs are present, the anti-abortionists on the Committee can get on with their avowed intention of further restricting women's rights to abortion. Ana makc no mistake James wntte s original proposals are on the agenda for discussion to change the 1967 Abortion Act so ual dooruons wul pe rerusea to the vast numoet or women unadic to prove that they would suffer 'grave risk' and "serious injury' to health if they continued with their unwanted pregnancy.
aiso town maew morc lacas ol good measure, such as special 'screening' procedures for women pregnant for the With nearly in particular, his attempt Another Labour MP, Leo Abse, has first time who want an abortion. This could mean extra consultations with doctors for example, on the grounds that such women might suffer more medical risks from the abortion operation. In practice. of course, that would result in more delays and refusals.
Abse is also worried about the difficulties in bringing prosecutions against doctors who perform "illegal' abortions. This is a view shared by his fellow SPUC supporter, Tory MP Andrew Bowden, wro stalce te House ris wel known that it is almost impossible to get a conviction for an illegal abortion under the 1967 Act.' Abse and Bowden are not so much concerned about backstreet abortonists, whose business is boosted by every new restriction on legal abortion, as about doctors who are doctors like anVIOus. prepared to give abortion on demand.
But they need not fear, because the Select Committee did its work well last year. Although almost all the restrictive measures proposed in its Third Report are now in full swing, the final two will be debated in Parliament some time within the next month. If accepted, these will allow, amongst other things, contidential details about women given abortions to be passed on by the DHSS to the General Medical Council (GMC).
As Professor Peter Huntingford has made quite cicat. E woula be unable to guarantee to any woman that information a vailable to me at the time of consultation and operation for abortion would remain confidential. This is not in the interests of women and their health.' But even more is at stake than that, which should alert all of us to the threat to Peter Huntingford, who openae abortion on request ANONYMOUS The GMC has the power to investigate in secret any complaint made to it against a doctor by any member of the pubuc, who can cven lay charges anon ymously! Furnished with the evidence that could be available under this new regulation (if malicious accusations were made), the GMC would find no difficulty in proving that certain doctors had been giving abortions for "illegal reasons (i.e. because the woman réquested it!).
Such a doctor could then be forbidden to practise. perhaps for lle No wonder the anti-abortionists think the Select Committee has been doing 'good and useful work! The witch-hunt against these progressive doctors has already begun, led by James White in the columns of the national press.
The message is clear, the dangers are More than ever before we need to build a strong and active campaign in support of free abortion on demand amongst the whole labour movement, in order to be in a position to defend any doctor who is threatened in this way by those who express 'concern' for women. At the same time we must continue to fight for the remedies to what concerns us about women's treatment at the hands of dors ande NS freely available out-patient abortion clinics and other abortion facilities in all areas on the NHS * incorporation of all private abortion facilities into the NHS removal of all those doctors who refuse to give abortions * training of other health workers and lay people in the simple skills needed to perform safe early abortions free abortion on demand - a woman's right to choose - in law and in prac Berry Beaumont New badge available-15p each (plus 7p p&p) from: Jo-Ann, 97 Caledonian Road, London N1 (01-278 9526)
BULK ORDERS-reductions by request
of Red Whole we have bow the Workers Socialist League (WL) has ot fully broken with Healyism on a number of mportant questions of political line. However it is notably from their series of articles on 200021 the Russian Revolution and their documents in Trotskvism Today that the WL has not consciously broken with the framework of Healyism at the level of organisational principles and theory While the WSL comrades have rejected the physical violence, arbitrary expulsions, character¡sation of opponents as accomplices of the GPU and other grosser methods of the WRP, they have not as yet broken with the theoretical roots of Healyism on organisational principles. It is evident from articles in their paper, Socialist Press, that they have not carried through a serious study or ine incoretical and pracucal postions or Lenm and Trotsky on these questions. They thus fall into the error of repeating the same mistakes and revisions as Healyism- most notably in their systematic confusion of a party with a faction.
The most obvious and gross example of this comes in the article The Beginnings of Bolshevism" (Socialist Press, 14 January). This states: "Although the Bolshevik Party did not arise until the 1903 split in Social Democracy the foundations on which it was built were laid in the preceding years." But this is factual nonsense. No Bolshevik party was created in 1903. What was created was the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP).
No split rurnermore. not merely was no solshevik party formed at this time, but Lenin was relentlessly agaunst any spur into two parucs. mis struggle after 1903 was a political and ideological faction struggle against the Mensheviks and simultaneously a struggle for a unified Party against what he termed the 'anarchistic actions of the Mensheviks. which threatened the Party witn a split. Indeed Lenin, far from taking the initiative for a split in the Party, was very clear that it was the actions of the Mensheviks which threatened a split:
The refusal of Martov to serve on the editorial board [of Iskra], his refusal and that of other Party writers to collaborate, the refusal of a number of persons to work on the Central Committee, and the propaganda of a boycott or passive resistance are bound to lead, even if against the wishes of Martov and his friends, to a split in the Party (1). of Lenin with Martov (right, seated), later to become a leader of the Mensheviks AND the WSL. ace as one man der and abuse on the illegal Party, calling upon the workers to regard the nuclei of the Party and its hier archy as "dead", etc.
At a time when throughout Russia the members of the Party, irrespective of factions, united to promote the immediate task of convening a Party conference, the liquidators, banded together in entirely independent small groups, split away from the local organisations even where the pro-Party Mensheviks predominated (Ekaterinoslav, Kiev) and definitely refused to maintain any Party relations with the local organisations of the RDLP. The Conference declares that by its conduct the Nasha Zarya and Dyelo Zhizni sed beid the party up has definitely placed itFurthermore, so clearly did this split of the Party not arise from the political grounds of the incompatthe organisational basis of the refusal of various elements to submit to the discipline of the Party, that there was an explicit tendency of political supporters of Menshevism ( the pro-Party Mensheviks) within the Party — a fact acknowledged in later Socialist Press articles, but whose significance is not grasped by No manoeuvre So this was in no way some nifty manoeuvre thought up by Lenin to justify a political split on organisational grounds - which is naturally Healy's conceonor osen as a oracuser or ence rent politik. On the contrary, Lenin clearly explained - and not merely on a Russian but on an international level - his position on whether Mensheviks should be within the Party at that time. When asked why liquidationism, just like Bernsteinism, could not be fought within the Party, he replied not on the grounds of their political incompatibility but on the organisational principle that the Russian Bernsteinians refused to accept the discipline of the Party:
"There are not many people among the adherents of the RSDLP capable of sincerely defending the liquidationist trend. Unfortunately there are still quite a number of people who are sincerely opposed to liquidationism, but do not understand the conditions under which the struggle against it has to be waged. Of course, they say, liquidationism is a bourgeois trend in the Social Democratic movement; but why not fight in the ranks of a single party, just as the Germans fight Bernstein?" For the Healy school this is out of the question the Bernsteins should all have been expelled for their views even