Visit
Socialist Republic1983Women's liberationPrisoners and the hunger strikesLoyalism and unionismLabour, the left and left unityWomen's liberationPrisoners and the hunger strikesLoyalism and unionismLabour, the left and left unity
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Despite the hysterical attacks by the British media on Ken Livingstone he is not a revolutionary marxist or a member of the far left groups that have kept up a reasonably consistent level of propaganda on the Irish question. Why then has he been willing to run considerable risk and massive personal abuse to deepen his involvement in the Irish question?
The fact is that the effects of the hunger strike are still operating and have convinced many in Britain and on an international level that British involvement in Ireland is no longer justified. Ken Livingstone himself has pointed to a second outcome of the hunger strike - the Sinn Fein election victories. He has pointed out that this drives a coach and four through British propaganda about terrorism and shows that the Irish struggle is a political struggle with mass support which demands a response from British labour politicians.
So the Livingstone visit is not just a flash in the pan. Ken Livingstone has spoken at many meetings and given a number of interviews to the left press since his visit and this activity is helping to promote a general shift in the views of many Labour party activists. forces in the churches and political parties. The cynically named LIFE group, which has been distributing the fanitical ravings of an American | Jesuit at church services in recent months, has threatened to campaign against the Labour Party in those British constituencies with a sizeable Irish vote. It remains to be seen | if Labour leader Michael Foot, | who was the architect of the pact with Ulster Loyalist MP’s that kept the last Labour Government in office, will also abandon the rights of women in the face of the combined bayings of right-wing nationalism and the loyalists. | An important advance for |the struggle of women to secjure rights to abortion could fake place at the end of May.
The North’s largest white-collar union, the Public Service Alliance, is to debate a res- | olution at its annual conferlence calling for the right to | choose and free abortion on demand. The resolution has! been tabled by Branch 705, | a social services branch, which covers North and West Belfast. If successful NIPSA would become the first Irish-based union to adopt a clear position in favour of women’s rights to abortion.
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eta belyhy' rr’ ee tal
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| NIPSA TO DEBATE | RIGHT TO CHOOSE!