Lead story

Cameron out!

by Daphne Liddle

EVIDENCE is mounting that David Cameron has ceased to care whether the Tories win the coming general election. He’s done his bit for his ruling class masters and his thoughts are now drifting to a well-rewarded retirement with little work except the occasional lucrative lecture tour.

This is the only explanation for the lack of logic or consistency, from any point of view, in the plethora of proposals currently coming from the Tory leadership.

There are many reasons why he would not want to be in Number 10 in six months’ time. The global capitalist economy is gearing for another catastrophic collapse that may well be triggered by the housing bubble in south-east England bursting.

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Paris pays the price of French politics

by our Arab Affairs correspondent

WHILE there’s been blanket coverage of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in the imperialist media little is said about the perpetrators or the hidden hands behind them beyond the stock “Islamic fanatics” narrative of the bourgeois pundits.

But Syria says that recent terror attack in Paris was carried out by terrorists who previously enjoyed the backing of western and French officials — a view also endorsed in the Kremlin.

Seventeen people were killed in the French capital and its neighbourhoods in the terrorist attacks last week. Among them were ten journalists from the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine, three policemen and four visitors at a kosher grocery store. All the gunmen were killed in shoot-outs with the police.

Speaking to Press TV, Syrian Ambassador to the United Nations Bashar al-Ja’afari said the western support for terrorism in Syria has backfired on France.

“France, today, is paying the price of its unprofessional politics with regard to the Syrian crisis,” the envoy said.

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Eric Trevett remembered

IT WAS A cold and wintry night but friends and comrades braved the harsh weather on Saturday to recall the life and times of Eric Trevett, the outstanding leader of the New Communist Party, who passed away last September.

Eric was a life-long communist, internationalist and peace campaigner who, together with Sid French, led the fight against revisionism on the Surrey District of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Sid French and Eric Trevett opposed the revisionist line of the CPGB as expressed in its programme, the British Road to Socialism. For many years they fought within the party against this departure from Marxist-Leninist ideology through the CPGB’s internal structure.

But in 1977, when the revisionist leaders moved to violate their own rules and basic communist norms and expel Sid and Eric to push through a more blatantly revisionist programme, the formation of a new party became inevitable.

Eric was a founder member of the NCP in 1977 and he was elected general secretary of the Party following the death of Sid French in 1979. He held that post until his retirement from full-time party work in 1995. He was subsequently elected president and remained in post until his death last year.

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Editorial

The two-faced sponsors of terrorism

IF ANYONE still had any doubt about the true nature of the Syrian rebels, last week’s killings in Paris should have finally opened their eyes. The Charlie Hebdo terror attack and the assault on a Jewish supermarket showed what Syria is up against today.

The gunmen who killed 14 civilians and three police officers in the name of the “Islamic State” are no different to those who are spreading death and destruction across Syria in an attempt to overthrow the Popular Front government of Bashar al Assad in Damascus. In fact they are clearly linked.

Initial French reports suggested that the terrorists were petty Muslim criminals radicalised in prison who were acting on their own. But one of the gunmen, at least, recorded a seven- minute-long “martyrdom” video in front of the “Islamic State” banner in which he discussed support for the reactionary terrorist movement that has seized control of parts of Iraq and Syria.

The “Islamic State” is now in conflict with the imperialists. When the IS militia overran large tracts of Iraq last year it grew too big for its boots. The captured oil wells meant that the Islamic State no longer needed direct western support to pursue its reactionary agenda and when the imperialists attempted to drive their militia out of the oil fields they responded with savage reprisals against western hostages. This wasn’t always the case.

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