THE Morning Star’s Scottish Autumn conference took place today, centring on The Fight For Women’s Liberation.

Undeterred by a last-minute change of venue to Unity Books, on Glasgow’s Southside, about 50 attending in person and more online saw the conference, opened by former Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont.

Turning to the first session’s theme of prostitution, she challenged the claim it was work like any other, arguing: “They say it’s inevitable, it’s about poverty.

“I’m sure we can find better ways of addressing poverty than encouraging men to abuse women.”

Conference then heard from the experiences of two women who had experienced prostitution, one suggesting that arguments for it as work collapsed with the statistic that prostitutes were a staggering 10 times more likely to die than a soldier in the US army.

In the second session, trade unionists Ann Henderson and Susan Galloway discussed the status of women’s rights after the recent Supreme Court ruling on the definition of a woman within the Equality Act.

Ms Galloway asked: “What does it mean when legislation brought into being by the trade union movement and the Labour Party is now opposed by that movement?”

In the third session, Clydebank Women Support Women’s Dawn Brennan and the Communist Party’s Anti-Racism and Anti-Fascism commission chair, Victoria Holmes, addressed the issue of violence against women and hijacking of the issue by the far right.

“The far right doesn’t protect women,” she said. “The far right exploit us. They use our bodies as propaganda and our corpses as recruitment posters.

“The threat is not at the border, it’s at home. We need solidarity, not supremacy.”