TUC general secretary PAUL NOWAK speaks to the Morning Star’s Berny Torre about the increasing frustration the trade union movement feels at a government that promised change, but has been too slow to bring it about

MY daily bus commute to work used to take me past the gates of the Royal Infirmary in Glasgow. Relatively often I would see a small group of people standing outside the hospital bearing placards decrying the evils of abortion and the rights of the unborn child.
The spectacle was so roundly pathetic and visibly necrotising in terms of both message and messengers that I wrote off the scene as merely another of Glasgow’s nasty Victorian heirlooms which would expire with the crusade’s last elderly soldiers.
How wrong I was. Less than a decade later, a growing number of anti-abortion protesters regularly host “vigils” outside various medical clinics and hospitals — in particular the maternity ward of the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital and the Sandyford Clinic.

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