WW archive > Issue 408 - 15 November 2001
Letters
Birmingham abuse; Republican SA?; Acceptable fundamentalism
Taliban apologists
SSP sees off McLeish
Internment returns
Socialist labour party
Divide deepens
House of patronage
CPGB-AWL cooperation
Unleashing energy
Two leading figures within Artists Against the War, Tam Dean Burn and Emma Schad, talked to the Weekly Worker about the role of their organisation
Socialist alliance
Factional rights cannot be denied
Democracy and the anti-war movement
Afghan pipeline politics
Ahmed Rashid - Taliban: islam, oil and the new great game in central Asia - IB Tarus, 2000, pp274, ?12.95
Fight reaction on all fronts
War comes home
Alan Simpson is Labour MP for Nottingham South . As a leading member of the Campaign Group of Labour MPs has been a consistent critic of the government?s war on Afghanistan and will address the mass anti-war demonstration on November 18. He spoke to Mark Fischer
Defend democracy
Dave Nellist, chair of the Socialist Alliance, issued the following statement in response to Blunkett?s latest attack
Our history Affiliation rejected
Affiliation to the Labour Party was debated at the Communist Unity Convention, the founding congress of the CPGB, and was endorsed as policy by 100 votes to 85. One month after the Communist Party?s application for affiliation was submitted, the Labour Party?s negative reply was received and published in the CPGB weekly, The Communist. The accompanying article made it clear that affiliation was only a tactical question, and advanced the idea of the Communist Party standing candidates against Labour in elections. The rejection, conveyed in a single bland sentence, was not to be the end of the matter. The CPGB wanted the Labour leadership to come clean and explain to the working class its political reasons for excluding the Party. The Provisional Executive Committee?s reply, containing a series of questions to the Labour leaders, was published in The Communist. So the affiliation issue provoked discussion within the working class and exposed the pro-bourgeois politics of the Labour Party. The Labour leaders knew that the Communist Party was no quiet debating society, that it would use every opportunity to mobilise the working class and link day-to-day struggles to the fight for socialist revolution. This was not at all compatible with the Labourite agenda of reformism and class collaboration. Further correspondence and renewed applications ensured that the CPGB kept the affiliation issue alive, a permanent thorn in the side of the enemy.
Should we defend the Taliban?
Turning the Taliban into the 1930s Ethopians