02.03.1995

Communist experience

Mary Ward, branch secretary of Dundee CPGB, will be speaking at the IWWD celebration meeting in London. Here she compares her experience as a Labour Party councillor with her experience as a communist

I joined the CPGB during the Timex dispute and last year I was a communist candidate in the Hilltown by-election and the Scotland North East European elections. Next week we will be launching our local election campaign in Dundee and I will be standing in the Hilltown again.

Standing as a communist has been very different to my experience as a Labour Party candidate. For Labour our campaigns were simply about finding the vote. We were told not to discuss anything with anybody but only to identify who they were voting for. If they weren’t Labour they would have a circular sent to them targeting which party they said they were going to vote for.

When you knock on the door for the Communist Party at the moment you know that the mass of people will not have it in mind to vote Communist! It actually surprised me how positive the response was to us as communist canvassers. People were very interested in our ideas. They had generally read our literature before we arrived and would ask us about points in the manifesto.

I think people were interested in what we had to say because it was so different from the rest.

Votes for us are a test of our strength - what is important is working class action. The Labour Party wants working class votes, but not working class action.

As a Labour councillor for Coldside, I acted as an advice or social worker. We kidded ourselves that we were saving people from the worst ravages of Toryism, but you only felt you were doing anything real when you managed to help an individual. It took a while for me to become very cynical and to own up to the fact that, as far as the working class as a whole is concerned, the council was useless.

We organised International Women’s Week on the council to raise the profile of women. We organised all sorts of events, from tiddlywinks to Tai Chi, and as long as you called them ‘women only’ it was OK. But it did not attempt to reach out to working class women.

Our immediate demands in our election manifesto of a minimum wage of £250 a week and 24 hour crèche facilities are minimum needs for women to be able to escape the drudgery of everyday life.

Poverty and childcare are the number one issues for women in the Hilltown. They are juggling all sorts of low paid part-time jobs around the need to look after their children.