Labour in Power: What Next for Feminism?
Submitted by webadmin on 18 September, 2024 -
Author: Editorial
WORKERS LIBERTY
Labour’s election victory in the summer of 2024 was not built off mass enthusiasm. Only 33.7% of the voting public backed the party, and on a low turnout. Labour got half a million fewer votes than it did when it was defeated in 2019 and three million fewer than in 2017. Nonetheless, a Commons majority of 174 – Labour’s biggest since 1997 – means that Keir Starmer will have almost unchecked power to pass legislation.
If ‘girl bosses’ really did solve our problems, this would be the most feminist government ever. For the first time, women and men are roughly equally represented in the Cabinet. 46% of Labour MPs are women. And in Rachel Reeves, Britain has its first woman Chancellor.
Sadly, the new government is already proving an unreliable ally of progressives – let alone socialists or socialist feminists. Keir Starmer has ruthlessly attacked the left, and gone to great lengths to cut himself off from accountability to party members and the wider labour movement. On migration, trans rights, austerity and many other touchstone issues, Starmer shows little sign of breaking with the policy of the outgoing Tory administration.
But the election of a Labour government presents opportunities that we cannot afford to miss. We now have a government which claims to represent the workers’ movement. Most major unions are affiliated to the governing party, and can – if they are moved to by their members – have an impact on its policies.
So what should we demand, and how can we win?
AUSTERITY
The Labour manifesto promised that there would be “no return to austerity”. This ought to be good news for working class people, and especially for women. Cuts have had a disproportionate impact on the pay and jobs of women, who make up the majority of public sector workers. The collapse of social security and bonfire of carers’ allowances and disability benefits also hit women harder. And when the state withdraws from providing for citizens, it is women who pick up the burden. The overwhelming lopsided effects of these policies led Oxfam – hardly a bastion of radicalism – to designate austerity as a form of "gender-based violence."
The recent strike waves made Starmer and Reeves keen to play the role of industrial peacemaker, and one of Labour’s first acts in government was to approve a set of public sector pay awards. These were the first in many years that exceeded inflation, though they did not come close to reversing the pay cuts endured by teachers, doctors and others since 2010. Outside of these pay awards, the story so far has been one of deepening austerity. The two-child cap on benefits is still in place, and Labour suspended seven MPs who rebelled by voting to scrap the measure. In September, the government voted through plans to cut winter fuel allowance for millions of pensioners, with a few dozen Labour MPs abstaining.
It is an obvious farce to suggest that any of this is necessary. Britain is the fifth biggest economy in the world, boasting a record number of billionaires. The question is whether Labour – the party founded to represent the interests of the working class – is willing to confront the interests of big business. We demand that it does, and that it starts by reversing austerity, radically redistributing wealth, and bringing utilities, public transport, health and other key sectors into common ownership as democratically-controlled public services. Rent controls and mass building of social housing are needed to address 45 years in which landlords have extracted untold wealth. We need to rebuild the public services on which women depend for jobs, pay, childcare and support. If we cannot get these basics right, the rest of a feminist programme will be worth little for working class women.
TRANS RIGHTS
The crucial backdrop to Labour’s policy on gender and sexuality, as well as on borders, race and anti-protest measures, is the wider culture war. Britain’s rightward shift on these issues has deep roots, but since the Brexit moment of 2016 it has accelerated rapidly. Until 2016, we had open borders with Europe and the Conservative Party was run by free marketeers who viewed themselves as a modernising, liberal force. Since then, the Tory Right has set the agenda. Labour inherits a country with the most restrictive border controls in Europe; far right riots; and a manufactured moral panic against trans people.
So perhaps we were supposed to breathe a sigh of relief when Lisa Nandy used her first speech as Culture Secretary to declare that “the era of culture wars is over”. Speaking to an audience of civil servants the days following the election, she criticised the Tories for sowing “polarisation, division and isolation”. Nandy clearly wanted to signal a new approach for her department, away from lambasting the BBC for being 'woke' and towards “championing the diversity and rich inheritance of our communities”.
Just one week later, Health Secretary Wes Streeting announced his intention to make the Tories’ interim ban on puberty blockers permanent. This policy will deprive young trans people of potentially life-saving treatment, forcing them to go through a puberty they do not want, with no delay and no way out. The shift of Starmer’s Labour on – or rather against – trans rights has been striking. It reflects and reinforces an erosion in public support for trans rights in recent years, with a large majority of British people now saying they oppose making it easier for people to legally change gender.
Streeting claims he is following the advice of the Cass Review, published in April 2024. The review has been criticised by the British Medical Association – the trade union for doctors – for its “exclusion of trans-affirming evidence” and questionable methodological framework. In any case, the Cass Review does not even call for a blanket ban on puberty blockers, though it does recommend restricting the number of people receiving them. The report’s overarching recommendations were to increase the provision of trans healthcare and cut waiting lists by addressing long-term staffing issues, increasing regional access, and other measures. There has been no progress on this front.
In late August, the youth action group Trans Kids Deserve Better occupied the Department for Education in London. They cast a banner down the front of the building: “we are not pawns for your politics”. One can’t help but agree that so far the new Labour government has been unprincipled and reactionary in its handling of this issue. We demand that it reverses course, backing trans people and their rights, and investing in the healthcare they need.
WORK
In the workplace, there is at least some cause for optimism. The 'New Deal for Working People', which came about as the result of pushing by Labour’s affiliated trade unions, is set to be implemented this autumn as the Employment Rights Bill. This Bill promises to repeal many of the most recent anti-union laws, abolishing the de-facto strike ban in large parts of the public sector and the 50% threshold needed for strike ballots to take effect. It also includes a set of promises around day-one rights to sick leave and parental leave, banning zero hour contracts, and a number of other measures. The wording is, at the time of writing, hazy – and it is very possible that the legislation will be written in such a way as to give employers loopholes. Unions must fight to ensure that the party delivers on its commitments.
We need to go much further than what Labour has already promised, however. A Labour government could take measures to reduce the working week, giving more space and time for socially reproductive labour – care, education, and so on – that women overwhelmingly take on (or, indeed, more time for whatever it is we decide our time is worth spending on). Repealing Tory anti-strike laws will still leave us with the most restrictive anti-union laws in Europe; all existing anti-union laws must be scrapped. We want sex work to be decriminalised, ensuring workers in the industry have the freedom to organise. We need an expansion in parental leave, giving parents the time to care for children without gendered division, and without fear of being left unable to make ends meet. On all kinds of issues, from challenging sexual harassment at work to tackling the gender pay gap, Labour can and should be radical.
MIGRANTS’ RIGHTS
Under Starmer, Labour has shifted even further to the right on immigration. In his 2020 leadership election, Keir Starmer promised to “make the case for the benefits of migration, for the benefits of free movement”. He U-turned on free movement in 2022, ruling it out alongside a return to the European single market. Labour echoes the Tories’ racist obsession with small boats and “smashing the criminal gangs”. Safe and legal routes for refugees – a basic hallmark of the post-Second World War asylum arrangements – are not on Labour’s agenda. Instead, one of Yvette Cooper’s first acts as Home Secretary was to reopen two detention centres: Campsfield in Oxfordshire and Haslar in Hampshire.
Migrants’ rights are a fundamental feminist issue. The state’s policy of withholding basic support from undocumented migrants – No Recourse to Public Funds – affects carers and parents more than anyone else, and prevents people from seeking refuge from violent partners. Detention centres like Yarlswood have proven to be a cesspit of sexual violence. Women also face sexual exploitation, trafficking and harassment as they migrate. There is only one solution to the “problem” of migration: to open the borders and give all people equal rights. This is why we fought so hard for free movement within Europe to be defended and expanded, and continue to champion open borders. We now face a battle to make Labour do the absolute basics: introduce safe and legal routes for migrants, shut down detention centres, abolish No Recourse to Public Funds, end the ban on asylum seekers working, and scrap the Tories’ recent immigration legislation.
REPRODUCTIVE FREEDOM
In June 2023, Carla Foster, a 45-year-old woman, was sent to prison for more than two years after she admitted to illegally procuring her own abortion medication when she was between 32 and 34 weeks pregnant. Her sentence was reduced on appeal to 14 months suspended (i.e. non-custodial) but the case nonetheless revealed Britain’s quite literally Victorian abortion laws. Foster was prosecuted under the Offences Against the Person Act (OAPA). When this law was passed in 1861, Napoleon III sat on the throne of France, the American Civil War was just beginning, and Tschaikovsky had yet to compose Swan Lake. More to the point, married women would not be legally entitled to own property for another 20 years, and it would be 70 years before all women could vote.
The legal framework for abortion in the UK is clear: the state does not approach it as a healthcare provider but as a moralist. The legal limit on abortion in Great Britain (and not Northern Ireland) is 23 weeks and six days, as outlined by the Abortion Act of 1967. The penalty for having an abortion after this, under the 1861 law, is capped at life imprisonment. A number of high profile MPs on Labour’s right wing have made calls to relax the law. Diana Johnson is now the Minister responsible for policing. Prior to the election, she was Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, and tabled an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill which would have prevented women from being criminally prosecuted for accessing abortion, including after the legal-term limit.
We demand that abortion be entirely decriminalised up to birth, and that the criminal law has no place in regulating our reproductive freedom. Given the breadth of support for reform on the issue, we are pushing at an open door. Labour’s National Policy Forum (a largely toothless body which recommends policy to the leadership) said last October that Labour would “provide parliamentary time for free votes on modernising abortion law to ensure women do not go to jail for getting an abortion at a vulnerable time”. However, abortion law reform was left out of the Labour Party manifesto, and the Starmer government is yet to make a move on it. This is an area on which we can expect the new government to be amenable to pressure – from members, unions and MPs. We will seek to mobilise and build alliances around it.
SEXUAL VIOLENCE
Since the #MeToo moment in 2017, the issue of sexual violence been gaining prominence in mainstream politics. This is welcome, and it is also welcome that Starmer’s Labour goes some way to recognising the scale of the problem. Around 3% of women are raped or sexually assaulted every single year in the UK, and the Office for National Statistics estimated in 2021 that around a quarter of women have been sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. In the same year, YouGov found that four-fifths of women had experienced sexual harassment at some point in their lives. 96% of YouGov’s respondents did not report their experience to the police, and there is little reason to believe that doing so would have resulted in anything. Less than 1% of rapes reported to the police end in a conviction.
Labour has pledged to introduce specialists in 999 control rooms to take calls from women who have been victims of sexual assaults, as well as specialist rape courts to address the backlog. While it is good that survivors of rape and sexual assault will be more able to hold their perpetrators to account, these measures are minimal. Where is the money for specialist sexual violence services, for example?
The solutions proposed by the incoming government are largely about using the coercive power of the state and the criminal justice system. This issue opens up a much wider debate on socialists’ attitudes to the carceral system: simply putting more men into an abusive prison system is not going to tackle the root of gendered violence. Our emphasis is on education, fighting misogyny, and giving women power and security over our own lives. Promising someone better support in reporting their rape is worth very little if they are scared to leave their abusive partner because the welfare state has been cut to ribbons, and doing so would leave them and their children homeless.
WHY LABOUR
Workers’ Liberty does not advocate being involved in the Labour Party because it is less bad than the Tories, or because we think that this or that left-wing MP is a great leader, or because we think it is the party that will deliver socialism. We believe in change from below, and we think that the workers’ movement is our best tool for achieving this. Labour is the party of the trade union movement; it is the party around which politically conscious working-class people overwhelmingly gravitate.
We maintain this perspective despite the fact that many of us have been expelled from Labour and despite the fact that Workers’ Liberty was proscribed by the National Executive Committee in 2022. We understand that the union-Labour link has been degraded over the years; that trade union members often have little or no input into their union’s interventions into Labour; and that Labour members themselves have almost no democratic voice outside of proposing conference motions which are, in any case, largely ignored. Keir Starmer is a right wing, authoritarian Prime Minister, driven by personal ambition and advised by sectarian hacks.
But because of its organic link to the workers’ movement, the Labour Party is a crucial terrain of struggle. By agitating and organising within it, and within the wider labour movement, we can change the course of history. Labour’s programme of workers’ rights and (modest, inadequate) public sector pay rises are a result of pressure from the unions and the left. With enough external pressure, we may be able to push Labour to changing abortion law, reversing austerity and improving women’s lives. In the end, however, we do not aim for incremental change, or even radical social democratic reform – as was the party’s policy under Corbyn. We aim for a split in the Labour Party along class lines, and the transformation of the trade union movement into a fighting, militant force committed to achieving socialism.
Labour’s election victory in the summer of 2024 was not built off mass enthusiasm. Only 33.7% of the voting public backed the party, and on a low turnout. Labour got half a million fewer votes than it did when it was defeated in 2019 and three million fewer than in 2017. Nonetheless, a Commons majority of 174 – Labour’s biggest since 1997 – means that Keir Starmer will have almost unchecked power to pass legislation.
If ‘girl bosses’ really did solve our problems, this would be the most feminist government ever. For the first time, women and men are roughly equally represented in the Cabinet. 46% of Labour MPs are women. And in Rachel Reeves, Britain has its first woman Chancellor.
Sadly, the new government is already proving an unreliable ally of progressives – let alone socialists or socialist feminists. Keir Starmer has ruthlessly attacked the left, and gone to great lengths to cut himself off from accountability to party members and the wider labour movement. On migration, trans rights, austerity and many other touchstone issues, Starmer shows little sign of breaking with the policy of the outgoing Tory administration.
But the election of a Labour government presents opportunities that we cannot afford to miss. We now have a government which claims to represent the workers’ movement. Most major unions are affiliated to the governing party, and can – if they are moved to by their members – have an impact on its policies.
So what should we demand, and how can we win?
AUSTERITY
The Labour manifesto promised that there would be “no return to austerity”. This ought to be good news for working class people, and especially for women. Cuts have had a disproportionate impact on the pay and jobs of women, who make up the majority of public sector workers. The collapse of social security and bonfire of carers’ allowances and disability benefits also hit women harder. And when the state withdraws from providing for citizens, it is women who pick up the burden. The overwhelming lopsided effects of these policies led Oxfam – hardly a bastion of radicalism – to designate austerity as a form of "gender-based violence."
The recent strike waves made Starmer and Reeves keen to play the role of industrial peacemaker, and one of Labour’s first acts in government was to approve a set of public sector pay awards. These were the first in many years that exceeded inflation, though they did not come close to reversing the pay cuts endured by teachers, doctors and others since 2010. Outside of these pay awards, the story so far has been one of deepening austerity. The two-child cap on benefits is still in place, and Labour suspended seven MPs who rebelled by voting to scrap the measure. In September, the government voted through plans to cut winter fuel allowance for millions of pensioners, with a few dozen Labour MPs abstaining.
It is an obvious farce to suggest that any of this is necessary. Britain is the fifth biggest economy in the world, boasting a record number of billionaires. The question is whether Labour – the party founded to represent the interests of the working class – is willing to confront the interests of big business. We demand that it does, and that it starts by reversing austerity, radically redistributing wealth, and bringing utilities, public transport, health and other key sectors into common ownership as democratically-controlled public services. Rent controls and mass building of social housing are needed to address 45 years in which landlords have extracted untold wealth. We need to rebuild the public services on which women depend for jobs, pay, childcare and support. If we cannot get these basics right, the rest of a feminist programme will be worth little for working class women.
TRANS RIGHTS
The crucial backdrop to Labour’s policy on gender and sexuality, as well as on borders, race and anti-protest measures, is the wider culture war. Britain’s rightward shift on these issues has deep roots, but since the Brexit moment of 2016 it has accelerated rapidly. Until 2016, we had open borders with Europe and the Conservative Party was run by free marketeers who viewed themselves as a modernising, liberal force. Since then, the Tory Right has set the agenda. Labour inherits a country with the most restrictive border controls in Europe; far right riots; and a manufactured moral panic against trans people.
So perhaps we were supposed to breathe a sigh of relief when Lisa Nandy used her first speech as Culture Secretary to declare that “the era of culture wars is over”. Speaking to an audience of civil servants the days following the election, she criticised the Tories for sowing “polarisation, division and isolation”. Nandy clearly wanted to signal a new approach for her department, away from lambasting the BBC for being 'woke' and towards “championing the diversity and rich inheritance of our communities”.
Just one week later, Health Secretary Wes Streeting announced his intention to make the Tories’ interim ban on puberty blockers permanent. This policy will deprive young trans people of potentially life-saving treatment, forcing them to go through a puberty they do not want, with no delay and no way out. The shift of Starmer’s Labour on – or rather against – trans rights has been striking. It reflects and reinforces an erosion in public support for trans rights in recent years, with a large majority of British people now saying they oppose making it easier for people to legally change gender.
Streeting claims he is following the advice of the Cass Review, published in April 2024. The review has been criticised by the British Medical Association – the trade union for doctors – for its “exclusion of trans-affirming evidence” and questionable methodological framework. In any case, the Cass Review does not even call for a blanket ban on puberty blockers, though it does recommend restricting the number of people receiving them. The report’s overarching recommendations were to increase the provision of trans healthcare and cut waiting lists by addressing long-term staffing issues, increasing regional access, and other measures. There has been no progress on this front.
In late August, the youth action group Trans Kids Deserve Better occupied the Department for Education in London. They cast a banner down the front of the building: “we are not pawns for your politics”. One can’t help but agree that so far the new Labour government has been unprincipled and reactionary in its handling of this issue. We demand that it reverses course, backing trans people and their rights, and investing in the healthcare they need.
WORK
In the workplace, there is at least some cause for optimism. The 'New Deal for Working People', which came about as the result of pushing by Labour’s affiliated trade unions, is set to be implemented this autumn as the Employment Rights Bill. This Bill promises to repeal many of the most recent anti-union laws, abolishing the de-facto strike ban in large parts of the public sector and the 50% threshold needed for strike ballots to take effect. It also includes a set of promises around day-one rights to sick leave and parental leave, banning zero hour contracts, and a number of other measures. The wording is, at the time of writing, hazy – and it is very possible that the legislation will be written in such a way as to give employers loopholes. Unions must fight to ensure that the party delivers on its commitments.
We need to go much further than what Labour has already promised, however. A Labour government could take measures to reduce the working week, giving more space and time for socially reproductive labour – care, education, and so on – that women overwhelmingly take on (or, indeed, more time for whatever it is we decide our time is worth spending on). Repealing Tory anti-strike laws will still leave us with the most restrictive anti-union laws in Europe; all existing anti-union laws must be scrapped. We want sex work to be decriminalised, ensuring workers in the industry have the freedom to organise. We need an expansion in parental leave, giving parents the time to care for children without gendered division, and without fear of being left unable to make ends meet. On all kinds of issues, from challenging sexual harassment at work to tackling the gender pay gap, Labour can and should be radical.
MIGRANTS’ RIGHTS
Under Starmer, Labour has shifted even further to the right on immigration. In his 2020 leadership election, Keir Starmer promised to “make the case for the benefits of migration, for the benefits of free movement”. He U-turned on free movement in 2022, ruling it out alongside a return to the European single market. Labour echoes the Tories’ racist obsession with small boats and “smashing the criminal gangs”. Safe and legal routes for refugees – a basic hallmark of the post-Second World War asylum arrangements – are not on Labour’s agenda. Instead, one of Yvette Cooper’s first acts as Home Secretary was to reopen two detention centres: Campsfield in Oxfordshire and Haslar in Hampshire.
Migrants’ rights are a fundamental feminist issue. The state’s policy of withholding basic support from undocumented migrants – No Recourse to Public Funds – affects carers and parents more than anyone else, and prevents people from seeking refuge from violent partners. Detention centres like Yarlswood have proven to be a cesspit of sexual violence. Women also face sexual exploitation, trafficking and harassment as they migrate. There is only one solution to the “problem” of migration: to open the borders and give all people equal rights. This is why we fought so hard for free movement within Europe to be defended and expanded, and continue to champion open borders. We now face a battle to make Labour do the absolute basics: introduce safe and legal routes for migrants, shut down detention centres, abolish No Recourse to Public Funds, end the ban on asylum seekers working, and scrap the Tories’ recent immigration legislation.
REPRODUCTIVE FREEDOM
In June 2023, Carla Foster, a 45-year-old woman, was sent to prison for more than two years after she admitted to illegally procuring her own abortion medication when she was between 32 and 34 weeks pregnant. Her sentence was reduced on appeal to 14 months suspended (i.e. non-custodial) but the case nonetheless revealed Britain’s quite literally Victorian abortion laws. Foster was prosecuted under the Offences Against the Person Act (OAPA). When this law was passed in 1861, Napoleon III sat on the throne of France, the American Civil War was just beginning, and Tschaikovsky had yet to compose Swan Lake. More to the point, married women would not be legally entitled to own property for another 20 years, and it would be 70 years before all women could vote.
The legal framework for abortion in the UK is clear: the state does not approach it as a healthcare provider but as a moralist. The legal limit on abortion in Great Britain (and not Northern Ireland) is 23 weeks and six days, as outlined by the Abortion Act of 1967. The penalty for having an abortion after this, under the 1861 law, is capped at life imprisonment. A number of high profile MPs on Labour’s right wing have made calls to relax the law. Diana Johnson is now the Minister responsible for policing. Prior to the election, she was Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, and tabled an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill which would have prevented women from being criminally prosecuted for accessing abortion, including after the legal-term limit.
We demand that abortion be entirely decriminalised up to birth, and that the criminal law has no place in regulating our reproductive freedom. Given the breadth of support for reform on the issue, we are pushing at an open door. Labour’s National Policy Forum (a largely toothless body which recommends policy to the leadership) said last October that Labour would “provide parliamentary time for free votes on modernising abortion law to ensure women do not go to jail for getting an abortion at a vulnerable time”. However, abortion law reform was left out of the Labour Party manifesto, and the Starmer government is yet to make a move on it. This is an area on which we can expect the new government to be amenable to pressure – from members, unions and MPs. We will seek to mobilise and build alliances around it.
SEXUAL VIOLENCE
Since the #MeToo moment in 2017, the issue of sexual violence been gaining prominence in mainstream politics. This is welcome, and it is also welcome that Starmer’s Labour goes some way to recognising the scale of the problem. Around 3% of women are raped or sexually assaulted every single year in the UK, and the Office for National Statistics estimated in 2021 that around a quarter of women have been sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. In the same year, YouGov found that four-fifths of women had experienced sexual harassment at some point in their lives. 96% of YouGov’s respondents did not report their experience to the police, and there is little reason to believe that doing so would have resulted in anything. Less than 1% of rapes reported to the police end in a conviction.
Labour has pledged to introduce specialists in 999 control rooms to take calls from women who have been victims of sexual assaults, as well as specialist rape courts to address the backlog. While it is good that survivors of rape and sexual assault will be more able to hold their perpetrators to account, these measures are minimal. Where is the money for specialist sexual violence services, for example?
The solutions proposed by the incoming government are largely about using the coercive power of the state and the criminal justice system. This issue opens up a much wider debate on socialists’ attitudes to the carceral system: simply putting more men into an abusive prison system is not going to tackle the root of gendered violence. Our emphasis is on education, fighting misogyny, and giving women power and security over our own lives. Promising someone better support in reporting their rape is worth very little if they are scared to leave their abusive partner because the welfare state has been cut to ribbons, and doing so would leave them and their children homeless.
WHY LABOUR
Workers’ Liberty does not advocate being involved in the Labour Party because it is less bad than the Tories, or because we think that this or that left-wing MP is a great leader, or because we think it is the party that will deliver socialism. We believe in change from below, and we think that the workers’ movement is our best tool for achieving this. Labour is the party of the trade union movement; it is the party around which politically conscious working-class people overwhelmingly gravitate.
We maintain this perspective despite the fact that many of us have been expelled from Labour and despite the fact that Workers’ Liberty was proscribed by the National Executive Committee in 2022. We understand that the union-Labour link has been degraded over the years; that trade union members often have little or no input into their union’s interventions into Labour; and that Labour members themselves have almost no democratic voice outside of proposing conference motions which are, in any case, largely ignored. Keir Starmer is a right wing, authoritarian Prime Minister, driven by personal ambition and advised by sectarian hacks.
But because of its organic link to the workers’ movement, the Labour Party is a crucial terrain of struggle. By agitating and organising within it, and within the wider labour movement, we can change the course of history. Labour’s programme of workers’ rights and (modest, inadequate) public sector pay rises are a result of pressure from the unions and the left. With enough external pressure, we may be able to push Labour to changing abortion law, reversing austerity and improving women’s lives. In the end, however, we do not aim for incremental change, or even radical social democratic reform – as was the party’s policy under Corbyn. We aim for a split in the Labour Party along class lines, and the transformation of the trade union movement into a fighting, militant force committed to achieving socialism.
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