11.04.1996

Their warning comes true

From 'The Workers’ Weekly', paper of the Communist Party of Great Britain, April 9 1926

On Saturday morning next, some time between 7 and 8am, seven of the twelve communist prisoners are due for release from Wandsworth.

These are the seven who one and all answered the insulting offer of freedom, on condition of deserting their Party, with the historic “No, I will not!”

... The seven regain their liberty to find, as they predicted, the whole country trembling on the brink of an industrial crisis that may shake it from end to end.

As they predicted, the miners are up against a wall, forced to either fight or surrender to industrial slavery.

The gallantry of the Seven has, we believe, done more than any single thing to prevent the miners being deserted by their class.

They return to find that the Party they refused to desert - whose very existence seemed to be threatened in the fact of their sentence - has carried on without a pause from that day to this ... 

The Communist Party is not only still in being and as active as ever. It is stronger numerically and far stronger morally as a result of their persecution ...

We join them in demanding an end to the iniquity of keeping five others in gaol for the one collective offence which all committed together or not at all.

If the five are kept in gaol, the Tory government will be robbed of its last shred of legal pretence.