The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 9th April 2021
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 9th April 2021
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
IT IS election time next month with polls postponed from last year finally taking place. The battle for control of the devolved assemblies in London, Cardiff and Edinburgh has begun along with local elections and a parliamentary by-election that will be held on the same day. This will be the first big test for Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and a referendum of sorts on how the pandemic has been handled by the Johnson government.
Readers interested in events north of the border can turn to page nine, but to start with we turn to the London Assembly elections where the powerful post of Mayor and 25 Assembly Members are up for grabs. Labour should have no bother retaining the Mayor’s position but what happens with the Assembly seats is another matter. Londoners looking for a Corbyn to vote for have one, but as it is the eccentric brother of the saintly Jeremy they must stick with the incumbent, Sadiq Khan.
Starmer well and truly put his foot in it by visiting a ‘happy-clappy’ Black church in London to win over ethnic votes, only to discover that it was strongly opposed to gay marriage. This incident, and the apology issued afterwards, is unlikely to have much impact beyond the bible-punching community. But it is yet another example of how out of touch he is – Starmer’s advisors could easily have looked at the church’s website in the first place.
The same misjudgement is evident in the forthcoming Hartlepool by-election, where Labour imposed a former MP who lost his seat to the Tories at the last election. Given that the imposed Labour candidate was strongly in favour of remaining in the European Union and Hartlepool voted by nearly 70 per cent to leave, one might respectfully ask if the Labour leadership has mental health issues.
the Senedd
In Wales, Labour presently holds 29 of the 60 seats in the Senedd (Welsh Parliament). It is expected that they will lose at least some of those, with the Tories coming a near second closely followed by the nationalist Plaid Cymru.
The message to all New Worker readers is clear and unambiguous: Vote Labour. We cannot allow ourselves the luxury of a protest vote.
Our strategy is for working class unity, and our campaigns are focused on defeating the right-wing within the movement and strengthening the left and progressive forces within the labour movement to create a democratic Labour Party that will carry out the demands of organised labour when in office.
Let’s be clear about bourgeois democracy. We believe that the working class can never come to power through bourgeois elections – but that doesn’t mean that we turn our back on working class demands for social justice.
Social democracy can never lead to people’s democracy but that doesn’t mean that we turn our back on social democratic movements that represent millions upon millions of working people in Britain in the unions and within the Labour Party.
defeated
We believe that the class collaborationist ideas of social democracy can and must be defeated within the working class. But it cannot be defeated by imitating it in the countless variations of the British Road to Socialism upheld by the revisionist, pseudo-communist and Trotskyist movements in Britain today.
The fact that these platforms do not work, that they are rejected time and time again by the same working class these programmes claim to advance, never deters these pseudo-revolutionaries who believe they can change the consciousness of the masses through rhetoric and wild promises.
Standing left candidates without mass support against Labour divides the movement and the class and ignores the obvious fact that the only realistic alternatives are those of the Tories, Scottish nationalists and the Liberal Democrats that have been, and would be, much worse than any Labour administration.
We can all play the game and conjure up imaginary legions beyond the British working class to take us down the revolutionary road. We can all invent a class that is seething with anger and mobilised for revolutionary change that is just waiting for the correct party with the correct formula to lead them to victory. But we are communists. We have to work with the working class that exists and not the phantom of romantic ultra-leftism.