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The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

Bandwagon blues

Week three of a lacklustre campaign livened up only by all sorts of blunders in the Sunak camp and the news that one pollster now puts the Faragist Reform Party one point ahead of the Tories in the race to Number 10. Labour still seems heading for a landslide with a 20-plus lead in the opinion polls while the Liberal-Democrats move to woo the Remainers still in the Conservative camp. On the left front, Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign managers say he’s running neck-and-neck with Labour in his battle to remain in parliament as an independent and George Galloway fights to keep the Rochdale seat he won in February on his Workers Party of Britain platform.

Though Palestine remains a key issue with the younger generation and amongst the Muslim community it is barely mentioned by the Labour and Tory grandees who glibly talk of change on the street while their manifestos make it clear that they will do nothing of the kind after the election.

All the mainstream parties accept American hegemony, NATO and the so-called British nuclear deterrent. All their bourgeois leaders, and this includes Starmer, support the American trade war with People’s China, imperialist aggression against Russia and the Israeli onslaught in the Middle East.

Rather than setting the agenda or even attempting to hold Labour to its past promises the army of local government jobsworths and the legion of trade union bureaucrats that run the big unions are simply going along with Starmer’s “New Deal”, which is nothing new and not much of deal either. Rather than trying to put the communist answer to the capitalist crisis back on the workers’ agenda, the charlatans who lead the fake left that pose as “communist” and “revolutionary” march down the road to nowhere on left social-democratic or utopian platforms that serve only as diversions from the real issues on the street while reinforcing the bourgeois myth of the sanctity of their precious elections.

The bourgeoisie say that socialism means dictatorship and that capitalism stands for freedom. But it is freedom only for the exploiters to continue to rob and plunder working people across the globe to ensure that a tiny handful of parasites can live the lives of Roman emperors on the backs of the millions upon millions of working people.

They claim that they stand for intellectual freedom, but it is the freedom of the straitjacket and the dungeon. They preach this freedom with their missiles and drones against all those who dare to stand up for themselves. We see what the ruling class mean by freedom in occupied Palestine, Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria and Ukraine.

They say we have free speech and democracy, but it’s democracy and freedom only for themselves. If we really lived in a democracy we would expect to see the majority of representatives in the bourgeois parliaments drawn from the majority of the population – the working class. In fact you could count the number of workers in parliament on your fingers.

Bourgeois democracy is democracy only for the exploiters. It’s dictatorship in all but the formal sense for the exploited. Bourgeois elections are used so that the smallest number of people can manipulate the maximum number of votes. Parliaments may reflect the divisions in the ruling class but ultimately all these assemblies are a fraud to mask the fact that bourgeois government rests on the bourgeois state, which exists solely to serve the interests of the ruling class