Get the Tories out!

Mrs May’s government has survived the week by the skin of its teeth following the resignations of two prominent Eurosceptic ministers and a number of their underlings over her botched-up Brexit plan that was presented to the Cabinet earlier in the month. Labour’s standing continues to rise in the opinion polls. The Tory government, which is dependent on the votes of sectarian bigots from northern Ireland, is on its last legs and there’s every chance of a fresh general election this year.

The dominant wing within the ruling class is pulling out all the stops to sink Corbyn and make it impossible for him to become Prime Minister. Their smears are aimed at splitting the Labour Party and keeping the Conservatives in office. Their collaborators are the Blairite fifth column within the Parliamentary Labour Party and the Zionist apologists within the labour movement.

But amongst the Europhiles within the corridors of power there is a growing realisation that the only way that Brexit can be stopped is with the return of a Labour government, dependent on the support of the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) and the Liberal Democrats, whose price will inevitably be a second referendum.

We have to make sure this doesn’t happen. And it won’t if Labour gets a big enough mandate at the next general election to govern without the dubious assistance of the SNP or the Liberal Democrats. But there’s no guarantee that this will happen, or indeed that the Conservatives will be forced out ahead of time, without massive pressure from the labour and peace movement across the country.

But the wounds inflicted by the Blairite rump in the Labour Party can only be healed with an end to the witch-hunt and the return to Labour’s ranks of all those unjustly suspended or expelled over the last few years. The Blairites, who are still a major force within the Parliamentary Labour Party, say that Corbyn’s left policies make Labour unelectable. But what they really fear is that Labour will be returned to office on a programme of trade union rights, public ownership and social justice that they so bitterly oppose.

Communists must campaign to ensure that a future Labour government sticks to its guns and honours the European Union (EU) referendum result. Brexit would mark a significant shift in the balance of power between capital and labour in Britain. It would leave a Labour government free to trade with any country around the world and free to invest in British manufacturing industry. It would be a government ready to restore trade union rights and in so doing reverse the yawning wealth gap between rich and poor in Britain. It would be a government that could cap rents and burst the housing bubble which has led to the forest of towering luxury homes in our great cities that only the rich can afford whilst workers are forced to live in hovels or sleep on the streets.

Corbyn’s overwhelming support within the trade union movement and the rank-and-file of the Labour party shows that Labour is still a potentially strong weapon for our class. Although the New Communist Party has never confused the Labour Party with a revolutionary party, nor imagined that we can gain a workers’ state through parliamentary elections, a Labour government, with its organisational links with the trade unions and the co-operative movement, offers the best option for the working class in the era of bourgeois parliamentary democracy.

Our strategy is for working class unity. We struggle to defeat the right-wing within the movement, and campaign to strengthen the left within the Labour Party and the unions. We support Labour’s demands for the restoration of trade union rights, progressive taxation, state welfare and a public sector dedicated to meet the people’s needs.

But social democracy, left or right, remains social democracy whatever trend is dominant within it. It has never led to socialism. So, at the same time, we must build the revolutionary party and campaign for revolutionary change.