21.11.1996

The ban

From the Workers’ Weekly, paper of the Communist Party of Great Britain, November 19 1926

 The police ban on communist meetings in certain mining areas has not daunted our Party, which is taking all steps to ensure that the ban shall be fought. When the ban was imposed a fortnight ago, our Party warned the workers that it would soon be enlarged to apply to other working class bodies. This has now been done by the banning of the meetings of Mr Kirkwood and other Clyde MPs in Derbyshire.

The excuse for imposing the ban is that such meetings are liable to give rise to disturbances. This is a lie. It would be a bold man who would dare to disturb any Communist or Labour meeting in a mining area today. The real reason for banning these meetings is to isolate the miners and leave them the prey to press lying, Board of Guardians brutality and police repression.

The home office regulations empowering chief constables to ban meetings is simply a weapon handed to local capitalists to enable them to effectively suppress the working class. With whom is a chief constable likely to associate: the local miners or the local mine owners and country gentry? Obviously the latter. He moves in their circles. He shares the opinions of those around him, and that determines his attitude to the whole question.

All workers have now the object lesson before their eyes that in a period of intensifying struggle the mask of democracy is dropped, and the state stands revealed as the naked dictatorship of the capitalist class.

All working class bodies must protest against the ban, and must, in those areas in which the ban operates, mobilise all working class forces to assert at the earliest possible moment the right of the labour movement to carry on its meetings, without and in spite of police interference.