Farage marches on

Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party is clearly dominating the debate, such as it is, over the farcical European elections that take place later in the month. Despite a fig-leaf of support from veteran campaigner George Galloway and a handful of former Trotskyites who have made their name in the bourgeois media, Farage’s platform is essentially like the UKIP of old.

The Brexit Party will hoover up most of the anti-immigrant vote that once went to openly racist parties; and disaffected Tories will vote for the Farage slate in protest at Mrs May’s inability to deliver Brexit.

None of this will make the slightest bit of difference to what is going on in Parliament. Mrs May’s Government cannot deliver Brexit and this fractious Parliament cannot deliver anything these days.

The European Parliament has become a byword for undemocratic practices, corruption, nepotism, waste and fraud on a massive scale. The elections themselves are nothing more than a bogus public relations exercise for a body that possesses no meaningful executive powers at all. They don’t deserve the credibility of a vote at all.

The only way out of the impasse is another general election and this has to be the central demand of the labour movement in the weeks to come. In the meantime don’t bother to vote in the European elections. It’s a pointless exercise for a worthless institution.

For a united Ireland and lasting peace

The continuing Brexit saga has, at least as far as the mainstream media is concerned, reduced the crisis in the north of Ireland to the question of the ‘back-stop’ and what the future relationship between the Six Counties, Britain and the European Union  will be in the future. Whilst the absurdity of the Government being held to ransom by sectarian bigots has not escaped the notice of some of the bourgeois pundits, none of these gurus actually question the fundamental cause of the problem, which is the partition of Ireland by British imperialism.

The New Communist Party never believed that the Good Friday Agreement was an end in itself nor that common membership of the EU had effectively ended partition for all time.

The NCP welcomed the advances made under the historic 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the establishment of the Northern Ireland Executive and Assembly, and the overwhelming endorsement of the agreement in the all-Ireland 1999 referendum.

We call for a complete end to British interference in Irish affairs and any British state presence on Irish soil including civil, military, police or intelligence units. Ireland should cease to be a British 'sphere of influence'.

We also call for an immediate end to the partition of Ireland, the withdrawal of all civil, police or military units from any foreign state, and the achievement of full national self-determination and sovereignty in a united Ireland. We believe that the Irish people have the right to use political or military means to achieve those goals, just as the British state realises its own interests in the same way.