03.06.1999

Vote ‘Weekly Worker’ on June 10!

Communist manifesto launched

The Communist Party of Great Britain is standing in two regional constituencies in the forthcoming European elections - London and the North West.

On May 21, we launched our election manifesto on our newly revamped website and we reprint it in full in this issue. We call on all revolutionaries, socialists and consistent democrats to back our lists in these regions, to record their vote against Blair the warmonger and anti-democrat. Unfortunately, we have been forced to stand under the name of our paper in these elections, as the ‘Weekly Worker’ list.

We have been denied registration as the CPGB because of the “confusion” this may have caused with other organisations with ‘communist’ in their title. Despite this, the registrar of political parties - one John Holden in Cardiff’s Companies House - has allowed five organisations with ‘socialist’ in their title, along with the Democratic Labour Party, the Pro-Euro Conservative Party, the Liberal Party and other organisations whose names seem just as likely to cause voter “confusion”. In taking this arbitrary and crassly unjust decision, Holden has been ‘advised’ by a parliamentary committee chiefly composed of Blairite hand-raisers like Gwyneth Dunwoody and Gerald Kaufman.

This is typical of the authoritarianism that lies at the heart of the Blair project. While the man inscribes ‘democracy’ on his banner, every new measure he introduces has an autocratic core. The assault on rump Yugoslavia has been prosecuted as a “just war”, a moral crusade to defend the Kosovar people. Yet there is no talk of the basic democratic right these people have fought for - the right to self-determination and independence. In effect, Nato’s campaign is also a campaign against this democratic right of the Kosovar peoples. Essentially, the war is about legitimising Nato intervention and domination of south-eastern Europe.

While these are the first all-UK elections under proportional representation - formally a more democratic system than first-past-the-post - organisations like the Communist Party and the Socialist Party in England and Wales have been banned from standing under their party names. Other restrictions have been slipped in alongside the new electoral arrangements, measures which further limit the chance for smaller organisations to make their voice heard during the election campaign. The new tiers of government in Scotland and Wales have been introduced precisely to deny these peoples the right to self-determination; an anti-democratic sop.

Blair’s establishment anti-racism delivers more powers into the hands of the chauvinist police force and courts to clamp down on ‘unacceptable’ extremist views. Inevitably, this restriction of democracy will rebound on the left, just as legislation like the Public Order Act - ostensibly introduced to deal with Mosley’s fascists and actually campaigned for by
the left - has been used to ban our activities in the past.

Clearly, there can be no excuse for anyone claiming to be a socialist - or even a democrat - to vote for Blair’s deeply reactionary party. We urge readers to support the ‘Weekly Worker’ lists in London and North West England. Our candidates stand on a platform that pushes democracy to its furthermost limits under the existing system and poses the need to go beyond these limits, to create a new society root and branch. By the same token, there should also be no excuse for anyone claiming to be a socialist or democrat to vote for Scargill’s rump organisation in London or the North West. Half of his list in London are members of the Stalin Society. Yet - incredibly - SWP leaders say that they will call for a vote for Scargill. This is shamefully irresponsible. If, through cowardice or inertia, the left gives him the chance, Scargill will lead our class to utter disaster. His politics are far nearer the red-brown politics of Milosevic than anything resembling working class socialism. Scargill aspires to be Britain’s labour dictator, that is abundantly clear. The question is, why are organisations such the SWP conspiring to help him?

There should be no question of handing over the leadership of the left wing of the workers’ movement to Scargill. While his campaign has not attracted much in the way of bourgeois media interest so far, his real victory has been over sections of the British left. Every vote for the SLP will be an argument in favour of Scargill’s personal dictatorship.

The SWP, Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, the Socialist Party in England and Wales, Socialist Outlook, Independent Labour Network and the Communist Party of Great Britain were cooperating in the Socialist Alliance, a left electoral front that was to have mounted a principled challenge to Blair’s Labour in London and elsewhere. Contemptibly, Scargill did not even deign to reply to requests that he join this bloc. Instead of stiffening the resolve to fight, this produced panic. One by one, the other organisations collapsed before the SLP dictator - a dishonourable retreat that they can now only partially redeem by supporting the ‘Weekly Worker’ list.

Every vote for the ‘Weekly Worker’ in London and North West England will be a vote not simply for a principled platform of action to defend the working class and democratic rights. It will also be a vote to purge the workers’ movement of the discredited politics of the past represented by Scargill and his ugly parody of a workers’ party, the SLP.

Mark Fischer