[counci Martin Timmins, an AUEW shop steward and…]

Scan page 5

counci Martin Timmins, an AUEW shop steward and Socialist Organiser supporter, is Labour candidate for the Kings Furlong ward of the Basingstoke Borough Council.

Martin's campaign centres around housing and cuts. As a member of the Basingstoke Socialist Organiser Group, he played a leading part in last year's big local campaign against a swingeing 662% council house rent increase, to which a further 12½% has been added this year.

Socialist Organiser has successfully fought, in Basingstoke, for a Labour manifesto committment to freeze rents for at least a year should a majority on the council be won.

Martin additionally arguing against rate increases on the grounds that attempts to fight the Tories in this way have proved to be a dead end wherever they have been tried, and anyway rate increases hit most heavily at working class people.

Within the Labour Party Martin argues for the ending of divisions between Labour Groups and the rest of the party which can allow councillors to be a law unto themselves.

In Basingstoke, as in many other parts of the country, the politicai centre of gravity in the Labour Party has moved a long way to the left in the last couple of years. But much of the twenty-strong Labour Group is resisting this change, with the group being one of the last bastions of traditional right wing Labourism in the town.

As part of a small group of new left-wing candidates in the borough Martin wants to see-councillors taking a leading rule in building up across the board working class resistance to cuts and redundancies in the Direct Labour Organisations -which he well understands, being himself currently under threat of rédundancy.

In short Martin's campaign is part of the wider struggle to regenerate the labour movement with policies for direct action and class struggle, rather than traditional passivity, defeatism and class collaboration. desire at all to reduce payments to police and army, the Tories have concentrated on reducing Rate Support Grants and forcing up rents and rates at the same time as reducing services provided by local government.

All over the country the result of these policies can be seen in reduced educational facilities, in the closure of nurseries for the under-fives, and of day centres and homes for old people.

They can be seen perhaps worst of all in the virtual Labour fights Islington curs ending of any form of hoursing programme at the same time as the criminal selling off of land and houses for t look: