How to Make Labour Party Regional Conferences Useful

Labour Party Regional conferences are usually dull end uninteresting. The rule forbidding discussion of national policy results in most of the time being devoted to triviae Yet, with the growing importance of regional government, it seems to me an opportunity to enliven re;‘ional conferences with matters of consequence is: teing missed. Here are a few of the issues that legitimately could be raised: First, the regional economic development plans. These nre based on the principle of giving private industry a carrot (financial concessions) to induce it to open new factories, Instead of lining capitalists! already bulging pockets, socialist would, I think, favour governnent-built and run factories in underdeveloped regions. Second, regional seats of governnente In the two years since the "Spies for Peace" pamphlet, it is surprising no attempt has been made to raise this issue at Labour regional conferences, While VIPs, in a nuclear war, will descend a thousand feet to concrete-encased safety, apparently the rest of us are to be left frantically whitewashing windows, filling baths, shaving hair, cutting toe-nails, and doing all those other thins that can be done in four minutes flat. Surely it is time this class distinction in the survivali stakes, as well as the larger lunacy of most civil defence thinking, was exposede Third, regional borrds of public corporations. This involves doing some researche But when I last looked, for instance, at the board of the British Transport Commission that runs the North-West (where I live) I found the sevenenan committee held 34 other directorships between theme One of the gentlenen, Mr. ReF. Summers, a director of four steel companies, is a passionate believer in private enterprise. During the last General Election he strenuously argued against the nationalisation of steel. Are not the decisions to close railway workshops, shoving the work out to private industry, understandable when the boards are weighed down with businessmen and financiers? Fourth, the pricing policy of revional boards of public corporations. Capitelists make over £900 million a year through receiving cheap coal, gas, electricity, etc. The case against this hidden subsidy can best be made in terms of gas, a homogeneous comaodity. For, if one type of custoner is having it more cheaply, then another type must be paying noree A small concession for bulk=-buying might be reasonable, but it is: quite outrageous that the small domestic consumer should pay precisely twice as much as the large industrialist, a situation that the Novih-West Board'ts report shows exists in our region. Almost certainly, it is the sane elsewhere» But 1t is necessary, if these and other issues are going to be raised that some research is done. Perhaps, the various Centres for Socialist Education could be usefully employed in delving for suitable ammunition.