01.08.1996

Open letter to the Labour Party

From the Workers’ Weekly, paper of the Communist Party of Great Britain, July 30 1926

Last year the Communist Party of Great Britain sent you a communication pointing out that the government were preparing to assist the employers in their attacks on the workers, and that they were prepared to use all the armed forces of the crown to intimidate workers if necessary.

We asked you, in view of these facts, to take the workers’ message to the fighting forces and tell them the truth about the struggle in which the workers were about to engage.

These communications received a somewhat hostile reception from you. Instead of dealing with arguments on their merits, quite a number of you began to assert that the communists wanted to organise an armed revolution, and you, being believers in peaceful, evolutionary democracy, could have nothing to do with them ...

Mr JR Clynes said: “I trust that the Labour Party will decide to treat the suggestion that it should share in an attempt to subvert the rank and file of the navy and army with the contempt it merits.”

Our appeal to you was contemptuously rejected, with the result that when the great industrial crisis of May came, the government had confidence in the loyalty of the troops to King and Capitalism, and were prepared to use the troops against workers if there was any opportunity of doing so.

And you have since adopted, as one of your excuses for calling off the General Strike, the strength of the wage-cutters’ government with the armed forces behind them ...

Since the armed forces are an instrument which the capitalist state wields against the workers during every large-scale strike, and since this instrument is only reliable to the extent that the workers in the forces are not yet loyal to the labour movement, surely it is a necessary phase of working class defence for the two leading bodies of the British labour movement to start carrying the workers’ message to the forces ...

We merely ask you to note that the warning which we conveyed to you this time last year was justified by events, and that anybody claiming to represent the workers, if it desires to further the workers’ interests, must take our advice and carry the workers’ message to the forces.

Communist Party of Great Britain