Once again the Wilson show?

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shoved under people's noses and DLOs are being priced out of a job.

Once you buy your council house, you rely on private builders, not the DLO. In Coventry, the DLO has taken a 16% cut in bonus to try to win a contract.

When people talk about the welfare state, housing is always last, or forgotten. But housing is the centre of virtually èverything.

Take education. If you live on an estate and it's run down, what are the chances of your children, when they go to school and are given homework, being able to do it?

The NHS is overburdened with people who are suffering because of the conditions they work in. They go to doctors with bronchitis, eye infections, rhumatism - all the things that are aggravated or caused by bad housing conditions.

Look at the number of battered wives and children where the chief cause is bad living conditions, and the same for children being taken into car.

Bad housing causes misery and puts undue stress on the social services.

BUB CRYER, for Keighley ON MONDAY the Labour Party conference was a sad spectacle - five Labour Party members being expelled following an unparalleled witch-hunt by the THE 1983 conference _ reminds me very clearly of the 1963 Labour Party conference, when I was a delegate.

That was a conference after two or three years of quite serious left/right battles in the Labour Party. There was a certain war-weariness.

A new generation of Labour Lefts, or peopie who had a leftwing background, like Harold Wilson and Richard Crossman, came in to halt the process of radicalisation.

They won the leadership, and Wilson came 'in 1963 with two messages. One was the white heat of the technological revolution, Which was a way of avoiding all difficult issues like nationalisation, socialism, and the rest, and the other was unity.

The emotive appeal for unity had the effect of derailing the left completely, and it took the Labour Party substantially to the right in the following decade.

Kinnock, it seems to me, is bent on taking the Labour Party massively to the right. He makes no secret of it. What is interesting is the role being played by sections of the Left in apologising JOHN PALMER, a we spoke to John Bloxan that process.

I am thinking particularly of the currents around Marxism Today and the Labour Coordinating Committee:

I'm all for a revision of policy.

Some of the policies are totally antiquated and out of date. They relate neither to an electoralist strategy nor, certainly, to a clas: struggle strategy.

But this is being used to carry the Labour Party into ground already occupied by the centre. From that point of view I think it is bound to fail. And Kinnock does not have this deus ex machina of the white heat of the technological revolution which looked like a solution to the problems of British capitalism in 1963.

I think what was most striking about the CLPs was the massive vote for Hattersley and Kinnock in the leadership election.

Of course one would expect the CLPs not to vote for the expulsion of Militant, which is such a specious operation that it would be difficult to see the average CLP swallowing it.

But I think the basic orientation of the CLPs is back towards the centre-right middle ground. I-known Marxist writer, That is revealed by their willingness to vote for the centre-right dream ticket. It was another way of abandening any serious struggle for socialist politics.

I think the reason for that is that there is in the short run a contradiction between electoralism, and electoral advantage, and what is actually required by the state of the struggle against Thatcherism. The kind of policies needed to mobilise the movement against Thatcher may in the short run be electorally difficult to sell.

But that is a contradiction which in a period of crisis cannot be escaped, and the real test of socialists in the Labour Party is which they put first - chasing the chimera of electoralism, or putting forward relevant class struggle politics They've opted for electoralism. And that conveyor belt will take them, whatever their subjective intentions, to the right.

I believe there needs to be a drastic look at the whole question of what a socialist economic strategy is. I'm particularly interested in initiatives from the bottom upwards in the construction of economic policy - workers' plans -the whole area of prefigurative socialist politics, politicising trade union struggles, democratising campaigns around the health service and housing...

All of that revision of policy can be used as an excuse to dump principled commitments - or it can be used as a means to advance struggles and politicise them.

On the EEC, I don't regard withdrawal as a socialist policy, so it doesn't distress, me that the NEC are abandoning it.

It's always struck me as bizarre that the Treaty of Rome is described, quite correctly, as quintessentially capitalist •and reactionary, and the structures of the EEC as anti-socialist, in a way that implies that the monarchy and the British state and the House of Lords and so on are in some more progressive category.

We have to recognise the inevitable integration of capitalism on an international scale. There is the emerging material basis for European working-class socialist strategy - a material basis created by the integration of capitalism.

The issue is not withdrawal or not-withdrawal. That is something for the future, depending on the. balance of forces in an unpredictable situation where there could be workers' governments in one or other European country in isolation from the rest.

The issue now is the construction of a European socialist alternative strategy, based on the mobilisation around the peace movement, around the unemployment issue, the maximisation of benefits and social security payments at the highest level throughout the Community, women's rights, anti-racism, etc.

None of this means that we should not have policies for execution on a national basis too. But To counterpose the two is actually to end up in bed with the British. state and the Union Jack.

I think the position that the! Labour Party took on the Falklands was prepared for years by the capitulation to nationalism which we've seen in European matters. Mr Roy Hattersley, the new deputy leader of the Labour Party, who was the policeman in charge of vetting pay claims and pay offers during that period.

These problems in the labour movement exist simply because trade unions are being more and more incorporated into the state apparatus. It is in the interests of the Establishment that trade unions are docile, quiescent, and malleable; and very often obtain these qualities from the trade union leadership.

It is of course true that in many unions democracy flourishes and the leadership takes real account of the rank and file. But in a wide range of unions there can be enormous leadership pressure exerted to cool out situations and prevent the members from obtaining what they desire.

This has reached an extreme form in the electricians' and plumbers' union, where branches are closed if they disagree with the leadership, where files are kept on Labour Party members, and where the general secretary of the union asked people to vote for an individual SDP candidate - who was of course being opposed by an official Labour candid ate - at the general election.

These people are still allowed to be members of the Labour Party, whereas members of the Militant editorial board arc not

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