Talking about communism in Salisbury

Andy Brooks at the school

by New Worker correspondent

Salisbury is best known as the location of a bungled attack on a Russian turncoat spy by alleged agents of Russian intelligence and for a famous cathedral whose spire is the tallest in Britain. But it is also the home of two historic Church of England schools and last week NCP leader Andy Brooks went down to one of them to talk to sixth-form students about the communist cause.
    Making the case for communism kicked off a lively discussion at the meeting of the Politics Society at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in the heart of town.
    This Anglican grammar school lies within the grounds of Salisbury cathedral and next door to the Cathedral School that was founded by St Osmund, the Bishop of Old Sarum, in 1091. The Bishop’s school, however, only goes back to 1889 – an initiative of John Wordsworth, the Bishop of Salisbury or ‘New Sarum’ as it was still officially called until 2009.
    On one of its walls there is a blue plaque dedicated to William Golding, the novelist and Nobel prize winner, who taught at the school from 1945–1962. The ship-wrecked school-boys who descend into savagery in his first book Lord of the Flies are believed to have been based on some of Golding’s pupils!
    Needless to say, the 50 or so sixth-form students who turned up to hear Andy open a discussion on the communist ideal bore no resemblance to the pupils marooned on Golding’s nightmare desert island.
    A forest of hands shot up to question or comment on the role of the communist movement from 1917 onwards. The usual questions about the gulags came up, which sadly reflects the biased orientation of the bourgeois education system that caricatures communism as a failed Soviet system and ignores the outstanding achievements of People’s China and the other people’s democracies in Asia and the Caribbean. But the discussion later broadened to look at the Chinese experience and the role of the world communist movement in the 21st Century.
    Back in the 1960s and ‘70s the spirit of rebellion swept the younger generation. Inspired by the student uprisings in Latin America and Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China, young workers and students took to the streets around the world in the struggle for a better tomorrow. Although those days are long gone, a new generation is once again beginning to question the essentially exploitative values of bourgeois society in the age of conflict and austerity. And the only answer to capitalism in crisis that serves the interests of the working class is socialism.