A quick interview with pro-choice MP Katy Clark on gearing up for next week’s vote on the existing abortion time limit of 24 weeks:

Remember this, says Katy Clark: the abortion debate we’re having should not be about the 24-week time limit for the legal right for abortion. The issue is purely and simply one of a woman’s right to choose - whether the state should make it lawful for a woman to terminate a pregnancy. The End, in many ways.

Except that it’s not the end, of course: there are only a few days left before MPs take a vote on proposals to amend the Abortion Act via the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, and Clark is certainly one that feels that a woman’s right to choose a legal abortion is ‘under a very real threat.’

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An abortion rights update for you all:

Tis the 1967 Abortion Act’s enactment birthday this week, people, and our friends over at Abortion Rights are suggesting a number of activities (no off-colour comments, please) to mark this major occasion.

One excellent way to observe the anniversary yourself is to send a stiff letter to your MP, telling them to vote against any anti-abortion amendments to the Abortion Act that conservative political opportunists try to sneak onto the agenda as the now-famous Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill progresses through parliament this spring.

Here at LC, we’ve argued - correctly, may I add - that the HFEB has absolutely nothing to do with abortion law (it’s about regulating the sciences of fertilisation and embryology, and - that’s it. The End).

Alas, the pro-life loonies keep refusing to make the leap.
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So glad to hear that the world can’t get enough of the mayoral election, but I for one am finding the whole scene awesomely depressing:

It’s a cold little night in Bethnal Green, and yours truly and about 20 other people - mostly OAPs, it appears - are sitting in a near-empty hall in Oxford House on Derbyshire street, readying ourselves for a London assembly candidates‘ hustings.
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Let’s say it nice and loud, people - IMMIGRANTS DO NOT COME TO THIS FAIR NATION TO TAKE THE PISS. It is simply inhumane to create a society where there is no safety net for those in need - even those who weren’t born here.

Kitchen worker Vanildo Fernandas, 29, was waiting for a bus on Fulham Palace Road late one night after work in October 2006 when two complete strangers walked up to him and tried to kill him with a couple of knives. He still isn’t sure why they did that; maybe for for the hell of it?

“Maybe for a robbery?” Vanildo’s wife Claudia, 37, asks a couple of times. She doesn’t really buy the robbery theory, though.
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One message on the Tory ‘Whole Campaign’ key messages page tickles me above all the others: ‘Can work - will work: help people into jobs and cut benefits for those who won’t work‘.

Which is nice, but I wonder if sorting out welfare dependency will be quite that straightforward. What would liberal lefties think about this?

I recently interviewed a number of people who’d been on benefits long-term. I asked these people about their lives, and what they thought of government plans to cut welfare.
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Another majestically irritating contribution from pro-life sympathisers today: Dave Cameron, who should know better, tells us that he likes the idea of cutting the time limit for abortion from 24 weeks as the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill progresses through parliament.

A few thoughts:

I wonder if I can stand much more of this tripe from these persons. We’re not even talking the real world here - just Nadine Dorries and Ann Widdecombe and other leading lights in Dave’s menopausal mafia claiming - I think my notes are correct - to have seen pictures of foetuses walking/dancing/voting conservative at 24 weeks’ gestation, and being moved observe that we should save babies of this age simply because we can.

I’ve never quite got my head around this aspect of the pro-life argument, but let’s give it another whirl: as far as I can gather, they’re trying to imply that because we’re at a point in medical history where doctors are able to save babies born at 24 weeks, aborting other babies at 24 weeks is giving the big finger to human technical advance.
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As regular readers of this site will know, I’ve been following the story of the Fremantle Trust careworkers who spent much of 2007 striking against the harsh pay and leave cuts a new Trust contract forced on them in April. The dispute is unresolved.

Part one of this series.

A year’s a long while to fight your employer. Sandra Jones, a careworker at the Fremantle Trust’s Rosa Freedman day centre, says there are days now when she wonders if there’s much point to it. She will “keep on with the fight, because you have to keep fighting,” but she doubts that Fremantle will budge. “Fremantle doesn’t give a shit about its staff. It’s gone on for so long now. They [the careworkers] are so demoralised. Some people have depression and stress.”

One thing everybody is specially stressed about is Barnet Council’s recent announcement that it plans to terminate part of the lease at the Rosa Freedman home - that’s the carehome that Jones works at.

Fremantle says it will move residents in that home into residential care elsewhere. Careworkers say families of residents at the carehome are extremely unhappy about the transfer, because of the effect that being dragged out of one home into another will have on their elderly relatives.
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This is a quick blog to update LC readers on the latest god-based outrage against women. As most of you probably know, Gordon Brown’s cabinet contains a number of career Jesus freaks - Ruth Kelly and Des Browne are the main offenders, and there are a couple of other perpetrators whose names and point in our lives escape me for the moment.

Anyway - Ruthie and her fellow holy-rollers have revealed themselves concerned that the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill will make it possible for lesbians to avail themselves of IVF and become parents.

I’m still trying to grasp the exact reasons why the thought of a couple of dykes pushing a pram is considered such a disaster - who gives a stuff, basically - but I’ll go out on a limb for you here and posit the theory that the big concern is that two women who bring a child up without male input will wash its hair and teach it to bake and turn it into a Gay.

Horrors.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill is dear to our hearts here at LC, not least because we’re trying to stop followers of the Lord amend the Abortion Act through it.

Now it appears that Gordon Brown’s cabinet is peopled by people who are concerned that letting lesbians in on the reproductive act will upset Jesus H (who, let’s not forget, is only a made-up person, like Big Bird or Po) and spell the end of the traditional nuclear family unit. Continue reading…

A little preamble: There is nothing in this world that winds yours truly up like political and/or religious opportunists banging on about restricting access to legal abortion, and foetus rights, and 40 years of legal abortion delivering Britain of two generations of conscience-free sluts, etc.

The truth is that pro-lifers drive me BANANAS. I have frothed about them all over the internet and most social events I’ve attended. Alas, the pro-life contingent and their political backers witter on, undaunted by the fact that the great majority of the British public supports a woman’s right to choose.

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About 300 women (and a small cluster of blokes) turned up at the Houses of Parliament last week for an Abortion Rights meeting about the threat posed to the 1967 Abortion Act by proposed - and opportunistic - anti-abortion amendments to the government’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. Pro-lifers are particularly keen to lower the present 24-week gestational limit for abortion.

The bill - as you doubtless have guessed - has absolutely nothing to do with abortion law (it’s about reforming the regulation of human embryology as the sciences of fertilisation and embryology move on at pace). Sadly, complete irrelevance ain’t putting the god-squad off.

One Baroness Masham has already attempted to perpetrate an amendment to reduce access to abortion for women who discover their babies have severe disabilities. Her notion was to force women in that situation to see their pregnancies to term - to give birth, as renowned pro-choice doctor Wendy Savage said at the abortion rights meeting - to children they know are doomed.

MPs might be crazy, but they’re not all stupid, and the brighter ones know very well how women instinctively respond to the thought of being trapped by an unwanted pregnancy.
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[The first part in this series on trade union issues is here.]

It is 1pm on a crisp afternoon in North London’s Burnt Oak, and a hundred or so Fremantle Trust carehome workers and supporters have gathered in the St Alphage church hall on Playfield Road, where they’re waiting to be addressed by various lefty speakers and political worthies.

There’s a bit of a buzz in the hall this afternoon: the carehome workers have just finished a very noisy (whistles, horns, hooting, honking, yelling, etc) protest march through the town centre, where they again aired their grievance about the harsh cuts that the Fremantle Trust has made to their sick pay, holiday allowances and salaries.

Most of the workers here are middle-aged women, and they are from a variety of - charming term - ethnic groups. They say they have no intention of abandoning their fight to win back the salaries and working terms that the Fremantle Trust forced them to sign away in April this year.

Longtime Barnet carehome worker Breege Kelly is one of these women. She’s worked in the laundries and kitchens of Barnet Council and Fremantle carehomes for about 18 years. She says that she got her letter telling her to agree to the new terms and conditions just before Christmas 2006.

“Yep,” she says. “It was saying that we had to sign the new terms and conditions by the 31st of March (2007). A lot of people put it off for as long as they could, but in the end, we had to sign it, or we would be sacked.”

Indeed, Unison says that some members of staff who refused to sign were sacked. “They (Fremantle) work on putting pure fear [into everybody],” Kelly says. “I had to sign the new contract. I’ve got a mortgage and people got a mortgage, you know. They made it so that we had to stay and take it, what they were giving out.”
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This is the first in a run of stories in which this liberal lefter asks: Why are so many people taking strike action?

Where is New Labour at with the low-paid people that the Labour party was established to represent?

Why does the UK still have some of the most vicious anti-union laws in Europe?

In the London Borough of Barnet, a large number of careworkers who work for a grim outfit called the Fremantle Trust are planning another day of strike action this Saturday. Their dispute isn’t a Grunwick yet, but it’s on the road.

Fremantle careworkers Carmel Reynolds, Anne Quinn, Lango Gamanga and Sandra Jones say they knew their working lives were about to take a turn for the perverse when Fremantle management began talking about cutting careworkers’ sick pay and holiday allowances late last year.

It didn’t take long for the talk to evolve into policy. “It went from ‘we’re going to have to take your holidays and your sick pay’ to ‘we’ll do all that and we’ll freeze your pay and cut your weekend enhancements,” Reynolds says.

She and the other careworkers had been worried about their salaries and terms and conditions ever since Barnet Council outsourced its care contracts to Fremantle and transferred staff to the trust’s employ, but the council had fallen over itself to reassure careworkers their new employer would be as great as their old one. God knows those of us on the union circuit have heard that one a million times in the last few years, but unfortunately, there are hundreds of consultants out there who can still make it sound fresh at negotiating meetings, and even more local councillors who are dopey enough to fall for it, so it’ll be a factor until such time as leading members of the New Labour cadre stop privatising public services (fat chance) and/or decide to legislate to consolidate worker protection (ditto).

“Oh yes,” Reynolds says. “They said it was all going to be super-duper and we were going to be fine.”

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