BOTH Messrs Segal and Beaman seem not to know when to stop digging the holes they have got into.

This is good for all decent working class people who increasingly do not want their lives to be run and often ruined by the failed monetarist free market dogmas popularised in the Eighties by Reagan in the USA, Maggie Thatcher and Co here and, increasingly desperately by their current successors.

Messrs Segal and Beaman have now, belatedly, admiited there are problems in the former Soviet bloc states and regions like Latin America, but only because even they cannot deny them any more.

I have, furthermore, never denied the injustices which occurred in the old' worker states at the hands of self-serving bureaucrats like Stalin and Ceaucescu.

This was because they often sought to make cosy deals with capitalists instead of challenging the imperialists in their heartlands with international socialist policies.

The much-vaunted democratic social security and many other basic rights which exist here (now all under attack from the right) were actually won in struggles by organised workers.

Do Segal and Beaman really think the rich capitalists of Britain and the USA fell over each other trying to give people the vote, council housing, state pensions, the NHS and so on. No, thousands of workers died fighting for these rights.

If they attend any of our meetings they will learn that mere political democracy is almost useless unless there is firstly real freedom from hunger, illiteracy, homelessness, ill health, unemployment and endless imperialist wars. This cannot be attained under the present system of monopoly capitalism.

The Segals and Beamans of this world are going to have to learn these realities one way or another. The hysterical denial we read repeatedly in their letters helps nobody at all but simply confirms the ongoing bigotry of the authors and those whose interests they seek to further.

Steve Metcalfe, Lancaster.