Goodbye and good riddance

If Starmer had hoped to upstage Andy Burnham by resigning on the day Parliament re-opened he was clearly disappointed by the indifference on the street to his long-overdue departure from the political arena. No-one will miss him least of all the media gurus whose only focus was to fire speculation on who will take his seat at the by-election to choose his successor in the London Holborn & St Pancras constituency. 
In years gone by retiring prime ministers could look forward to becoming an elder statesman on the Commons back-benches or the House of Lords ready to give advice to the government of the day as and when needed. A house in town and a place in the country, a few servants (usually referred to as “staff” these days), a social life that revolved around chosen clubs and charities  and time to write those unread memoirs that stack the biography shelves of our major libraries –that was their reward for a life-time of service to the ruling class in those days.
Some, like Theresa May and David Cameron, will still settle for a peerage and the trimmings that go with it. But nowadays a second life in the House of Lords is not anywhere near enough for dumped politicians who lust after the vulgar and ostentatious life of the billionaires and oligarchs they once served. People like Tony Blair – the former premier who sees no shame in acting as a well-paid run-around for Trump and Netanyahu. Others, who are not so lucky, have to get by on what they can make on the American speaking-tour circuit while the likes of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss keep up appearances by filling the columns of the mainstream papers of the English-speaking world with their vacuous thoughts on the issues of the  day.
Sir Keir Starmer is more ambitious, He says he wants  to focus on new work on “international affairs”. Some say he thinks he’s in the running to be the new secretary-general of NATO – a post that is traditionally held by a European politician. Well we’ll see what happens. 
In the meantime the battle to take his seat in the House of Commons has begun. Zack Polanski has already thrown his hat into the ring. The Green leader, one of the three members of his bloc on the Greater London Assembly, has long wanted a parliamentary seat in the capital. He’s got the backing of Andrew Feinstein, the independent Corbynista who came a distant second to Labour in the constituency at the last general election. The Greens came third but Starmer held the seat with a comfortable majority at the 2024 poll. Whether Polanski can overturn Labour’s majority this time round remains to be seen. A lot depends on who Labour chooses to defend it. 

 

To be or not...

Labour’s continued lead in the opinion polls has fired new talk of a snap election next year to give Andy Burnham a proper mandate to carry out his “Manchesterism” agenda. Labour are now four points ahead of the Faragists that only a few months ago were being tipped as the likely winner of the next general election. But while the “Burnham bounce” has revived Labour’s fortunes in England – at least for the time being – it has done little to boost the party’s standing north of the border. The nationalist constituency remains supreme despite all the scandals that have rocked the SNP in recent times. So it’s not surprising to hear words of caution from the Labour ranks.

Scottish Labour leadership front-runner Michael Marra openly argues against an early poll. He told the Daily Record  that “I think we’ve got a very significant mandate to make the kind of change that the country needs”. Burnham had made a “brilliant” start, in contrast to Starmer whose relationship with the country had “broken down”. And  “there’s lots more to do and I think that we should be taking the time to do it”.
However most suspect that Marra’s caution is based on a realistic assessment of Labour’s chances of winning any Scottish election in the near future. Scottish Labour came fourth in two recent by-elections for the Westminster parliament and many fear an early election would see them reduced to fewer than 10 MPs in the House of Commons.
There’s no constitutional need for Burnham to seek a new mandate. He’s perfectly entitled to carry on until Labour’s term of office – won at the 2024 general election – expires in 2029.
The toppling of prime ministers by their own ranks has become an increasingly familiar feature of British bourgeois politics these days. Back-stabbing is more or less written into the unwritten code of conduct of both the Conservative & Unionist Party and Labour alike. The names of Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Sir Keir Starmer immediately spring to mind. Those on the losing side always whine. No one cares... 

Talking about mandates…

...none of the political pundits who are now bleating on about Burnham ever seem to question the arbitrary decisions of past governments on the economy let alone war and peace.
The austerity regime we’ve put up with for nearly 20 years was never part of the manifesto of the Tory government that set it up. And needless to say neither they nor the Labour Party have ever sought public endorsement before spending untold billions on nukes and conventional weapon systems or taking military action – usually at the behest of their masters in Washington – in defence of imperialism.
The mainstream gurus who work night and day to confine political discussion to immigration, taxation and the European Union never talk about the ruling class whose real debate is held behind closed doors and whose decisions are carried out by self-serving politicians on both sides of the parliamentary divide in the Westminster parliament. This is what we’re up against. This is why communists must close ranks with the rest of the anti-war movement to stop the drive to war in Ukraine, Iran and the rest of the Global South threatened by imperialism. 

In Academia also…

Plagiarism is as old as the hills in Western  academia. Passing off the work of others as original research and cheating at exams is part and parcel of the curriculum these days.  ‘Lie, cheat and steal’ is the bourgeois ethic that underwrites everything in the capitalist world so it shouldn’t surprise us to find it in academia also. When caught out erring scholars can usually expect a moment of shame, a rap on the knuckles, a demotion or a discreet resignation before returning to the ivory towers. 
Not so for Jason Arday, the Cambridge professor who was hounded to death by endless racist attacks on his integrity in the mainstream media. They claimed that his academic achievements were faked and that his back-story didn’t add up.
This was all too much for Arday, one of the youngest black professors in Britain. He submitted his resignation. Last week he took his own life.
Jason Arday was subjected to a bourgeois media frenzy usually reserved for mass murderers and serial killers. Some aspects of Arday’s narrative may well have been massaged to advance his career. But other key claims the sociologist made about his academic research and his charity work, which were widely denounced as false, now appear to be true. 
It transpires that the witch-hunt was inspired by another Cambridge don, an American racist and Zionist, who had  previously been dismissed from Emmanuel College in a row over his views on race and intelligence. Dr Nathan Cofnas has a firm view about black people. He is a proponent of "racial realism" who wrote in February 2024 that without affirmative action, "blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment". 
But this wasn’t just an isolated case of academic bigotry and rivalry. London MP Diane Abbott says the press was out for Jason Arday from day one. 
“What you have to remember is that this wasn’t a matter of a few weeks,” the maverick Labour MP told the media. “He was first appointed as a professor in Cambridge three years ago and for those three years he has had a vicious campaign from people who just didn’t believe that a black man should be a Cambridge professor”. And it doesn’t stop there. “Stop and think how many people at other top universities think exactly the same,” she said. “It wasn’t just a campaign against one professor, it was a campaign against all of us”.
Or as Jeremy Corbyn put it “in the final months of his life, Jason Arday was subject to a relentless onslaught of attacks and abuse. Jason was a human being with friends and family – but he was turned into a pawn for vicious culture wars by a cruel media industry motivated by racism and clicks. The lessons are never learned. When will the British media face accountability for its behaviour?
“Jason was much loved by those around him. May he rest in peace”.

HP sauce

No by-election can be held these days without a flurry of independent candidates to liven up an often predictable race to the House of Commons. There’s the usual posse of self-proclaimed “revolutionaries” who believe that their forlorn efforts will somehow advance the cause of socialism. There’s the remnants of the racist and fascist movements that tried to kick their way to power back in the 1970s and a whole host of cranks seeking a platform for all sorts of bizarre opinions.  And finally there are those who capture the moment to rally dissident opinion that sometimes goes far beyond the usual protest vote. 
The legendary Screaming Lord Sutch first hit the headlines in the early 1960s. He continued until his sad death in 1999. Martin Bell – the “man in the white suit” actually took a seat from the Tories in 1997 on an anti-corruption ticket and sat in the House of Commons until 2001. And George Galloway, the maverick Labour MP, repeatedly bucked the system over the years to win seats against the mainstream parties. Now we have Count Binface.
Count Binface is the street persona of Jon Harvey, a stand-up comedian who has been a familiar face at by-elections since 2017. Binface upholds the rights of every citizen to stand in elections and gets a protest vote that many left groups would envy these days. This week he excelled himself winning 26.8 per cent of the vote in the Clacton by-election (9,455 votes) that was held by Nigel Farage who bagged 22,239 votes (63.34 per cent). Labour said this was “no victory for Nigel Farage” and “shows he likely has so much to hide”.
Though there was never any doubt about the outcome the result was a clear humiliation for the Faragists. The campaign revolved around the unanswered questions about the five million pounds donation given to the Reform UK leader and the antics of a man wearing tights with a bucket over his face who claims to be an “intergalactic space warrior” from the Planet Sigma IX.
Farage’s attempt to avoid Parliamentary scrutiny of his dodgy undeclared gifts and donations by triggering a by-election have turned into a farce and he knows it. The fact that over a quarter of those who voted chose the Count says it all.
The mainstream parties had boycotted the poll in protest. Binface, however, was joined by 33 other novelty candidates in the race. Many of them turned up for the count – unlike Farage who says he’d been advised not to by the police due to “a credible threat against him” – a claim the Essex police categorically deny.
The enquiry begins again now Farage is back in Parliament. If Farage is found to have breached MPs' rules, the Standards Commissioner could impose penalties that could lead to yet another by-election in Clacton. The Tories will now have to think deeply about their next move. Farage is a skilful manipulator. He will be difficult to beat, Though Clacton is part of the Conservative heartlands in Essex they may have to look for a high-profile maverick of their own to take on Nigel Farage.

Remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki

This week millions in Japan and throughout the world will pause to remember those who died in the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the last days of the Second World War. On 6th August 1945 Hiroshima was destroyed by an American atom bomb. Nagasaki was hit three days later. Hundreds of thousands of people, mostly civilians, were killed instantly in the atomic blasts. Many more would later perish from flash burns and radiation sickness.
Hiroshima Day is observed on 6th August to commemorate the tragedy, honour the victims and promote global peace and nuclear disarmament. As Jeremy Corbyn says “On Hiroshima Day, we remember every single person who was killed by an indefensible act of barbarity. We mourn the human lives underneath the statistical horror of the bomb’s death toll which, together with that from the attack on Nagasaki, was more than 200,000 people. And we commemorate the hundreds of thousands of survivors — known as the hibakusha – who endured the horror of what was left behind: nuclear radiation, mass destruction and unimaginable grief”.
The claim that the atom bombs forced Japan to surrender is an enduring myth of the Second World War. The bourgeois politicians who seek to justify this monstrous war crime say that the Americans had to use the atom bomb to force Japan to surrender and bring the global conflict to an end. But Japan was already on its knees begging for an armistice.  Hitler was dead in his bunker. Japan was reeling from daily air-raids and a crippling Allied blockade. Communist-led partisans had driven the Japanese invaders out of vast tracts of China, Korea and Vietnam while the Soviet Red Army delivered the killer blow when they smashed through Japanese-occupied Manchuria in August 1945. But two Japanese cities were wiped out to show the world, and the Soviet Union in particular, what the might of US imperialism was capable of doing.
The Americans thought they had a monopoly on nuclear know-how. They thought their new nuclear weapons would give them the power to dominate the entire world. But they were wrong. Soviet scientists were also unravelling the secrets of the atom and the USSR would soon develop nukes that would more than match anything in the imperialist arsenal. 
All the veto-powers on the UN Security Council – Britain, People’s China, France, Russia and the United States have nuclear weapons. But China is the only one that pledges never to be the first to use them.
People’s China actively supports proposals for multilateral and universal nuclear disarmament. China stands for the complete prohibition and total destruction of all nuclear weapons. China, backed by many other countries, has challenged the West to implement the entire non‑proliferation treaty, which was signed in 1968 to halt nuclear arms race but also committed the signatories to work towards universal nuclear disarmament. In the meantime China calls on all the major nuclear‑weapon states to abandon their policy of nuclear deterrence.
These long‑standing demands must be projected throughout the anti-war movement in Britain. The NCP supports the efforts of the Stop the War movement, CND and other peace movements for unilateral British nuclear disarmament.
The British “deterrent” is a farce. The UK’s submarine-based Trident nuclear missile system is totally controlled by the Americans. Billions are wasted on maintaining Trident – money that could be better spent maintaining the health service and providing the education, affordable housing and decent state retirement pensions worthy of a country as rich as the United Kingdom. We must mobilise to stop the new Burnham government from spending billions more on these needless and useless nuclear weapons; scrap all British nuclear weapons and close down all US bases on our soil. 

Labour holds!

The Burnham boost continues on a roll in Manchester. Labour swept the board in the Greater Manchester mayoralty by-election last week. Andy Burnham’s chosen successor, Bev Craig, won the most votes. The Faragists came a poor second, followed by the Greens while the Tories and the Liberal-Democrats trailed behind with the also-rans in the poll for the post left vacant when Burnham returned to the House of Commons to get rid of Starmer and become leader of the Labour Party. 
Her victory in what, is after-all a Labour stronghold, is perhaps not surprising. Nevertheless 
 Reform and the Greens had high hopes when the race began to replace the “King of the North” on his old turf. But their dreams of a breakthrough were dashed by Bev Craig, a seasoned Labour councillor who has led Manchester City Council since December 2021.
Bev Craig was the first woman and the first openly LGBT woman to lead Manchester City Council. She’s now the first woman elected to lead the Greater Manchester Combined Authority. She’s a supporter of Mainstream Labour, a self-styled “radical realist” faction that was set up last year to reverse the party's "clear drift to the right" under Starmer and promotes a left social-democratic platform which includes taxing wealth, introducing democratic reforms and restoring part, but not all, of the British public sector that existed until the Tory come-back in 1979. 
Labour now pips Reform in the opinion polls as the Faragist leader flays around Clacton fighting to keep his seat against a man with a bin over his head while more and more voters return to the Labour fold now that Burnham appears to uphold traditional Labour values. But does he?
Yes, no, maybe. Burnham has certainly revived Labour’s fortunes. His initial pledges to build more council houses and help pensioners have helped. So has the long over-due decision to allow maverick left MP Diane Abbott back into the party. His talk about wealth taxes, rejection of neo-liberalism and criticism of Israel – a first for a modern Labour leader – are further steps forward. Some say this is small beer compared to Attlee’s sweeping post-war programme that set up the welfare state and built the public sector and the NHS or those of the later Wilson administrations that brought the unions to the centre of government. But the Burnham agenda is a bonanza compared to Starmer who did nothing for working people.
Of course Attlee, Wilson and Callaghan served British imperialism as much as Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Sir Keir Starmer. Andy Burnham and those behind him are no different.  
Burnham’s modest reforms are, however, not just sops to win votes – they do genuinely reflect the demand for change within the broader labour movement.
Getting rid of Starmer and his henchmen was a start. Now we have to get rid of the rest.
Getting back to the 1970s – the days when unions counted and workers enjoyed the highest standard of living recorded in the UK – will only come with mass pressure from the rank-and-file – the workers, the toilers the people who make this country work. We are part of that struggle and putting the communist answer to the capitalist crisis back on the street is the task of the day... 

Burnham makes his mark

Andy Burnham starts his premiership on a high note clearing out the rubbishy ministers that revolved around Starmer and the ageing Blairite clique he relied on during his two years of misrule. He rejects neo-liberalism – the laissez-faire capitalism that gave us two global slumps and the second world war in the 20th century – and he’s even made a modest criticism of Israel over Gaza. While a package of modest reforms including a curb on bus fares throughout the country, VAT breaks for pensioners and pubs, more devolution and a national council house-building programme will boost Labour’s fortunes for the next few months.
But Burnham’s devolution specifically rules out independence for Scotland or Wales. His government still crawls to the Americans and we’re still waiting for the renationalisation of the water industry.
Labour’s move towards more Keynesian economic solutions is not a shift to the left but merely a return to the traditional right-wing dogmas that once held sway in the Labour Party before the Blairites took over. But social-democracy in whatever form cannot solve the problems of the working class. Our task, to make the case for the communist answer to the capitalist crisis, is more urgent by the day.

Enter the Binman...

Summer is known as the silly season in the press because the long parliamentary recess means they have to fill their columns with even more rubbish to make up the difference. And nothing, perhaps, could be more sillier than the epic battle between Nigel Farage and Count Binface in a run-down former sea-side resort in north Essex.
The leader of Reform hoped to avoid Parliamentary scrutiny of his dodgy undeclared gifts and donations by resigning to trigger a by-election and re-contest in his own constituency. But his dream of trouncing the Tories and his other political foes in the poll has turned sour with all the mainstream parties boycotting the election and leaving the field to Binface and a legion of others seeking their fifteen minutes of fame on the streets of Clacton today.
Count Binface is the street persona of Jon Harvey, a stand-up comic who has been a familiar face at by-elections since 2017. Binface upholds the rights of every citizen to stand in elections and gets a protest vote that many left groups would envy these days. Now the Count is playing for higher stakes on an ethical platform that challenges all that the Faragists stand for. 
Clacton-on-Sea is one of the poorest towns in Essex. Forty seven per cent of Clacton's residents over 16 are classified as "economically inactive" as they say. One in five working-age adults have never held a traditional job. High unemployment and the drugs and petty crime that go along with it have made this traditional Tory homeland the prey for the Faragists and their kind in recent years.
Some argue that the left should have joined the 30-odd others in the fray but this would be pointless given the absence of any substantial working-class movements in the constituency apart from the trade unions and the co-ops. Others say Clacton deserves more than a comic candidate to represent them. They certainly deserve someone better than Nigel Farage. At the end of the day those who bother to vote will decide. Who knows...it is, after-all, the silly season...

If wishes were fishes…

 ...we’d all cast nets they used to say, Now all we hear in the Westminster bubble are the odds on the gravy-trainers lobbying for jobs in the new Burnham government and the echoes of the media pundits on the direction that the “King of the North” will take when he moves into Downing Street. A lot of the speculation is, of course, inspired directly by the Burnham team who hope their leader’s “coronation” will lift Labour out of the pit of despair Starmer left the party in after his two years of misrule ended this month.
Burnham is an ambitious politician who did little during the Corbyn and Starmer years to hide his ambition to lead the Labour Party and the country. Now his time has come with a “Burnham bounce” that has given Labour its first lead in over a year in the opinion polls amid talk of “Manchesterism” and a “new vision” for the future. But what actually is on the Burnham table?
The answer is nobody knows. Burnham is talking about launching the biggest council house building programme since the Second World War. He hasn’t given a figure but last year he talked about building half-a-million “social homes” by 2030. If he ends the “right to buy” and the restrictions on council borrowing that has been upheld by successive Tory and Labour governments since 1979 that will drastically cut the shameful UK homeless figures and create more work for the younger generation throughout the country. Vague promises to return the water industry and the power utilities to public ownership have not been followed up with concrete plans to restore part of the public sector while talk of more power to the councils and the regions is all very well – but it’s meaningless unless these local authorities are given the power and the funds to provide the social services that people so badly need.
Burnham’s people are talking about electoral “reform” which would get the Greens and the Liberal-Democrats on track for a tactical vote alliance at the election. Your Party may be dead in the water as far as a national party is concerned but, nevertheless they look likely to keep the five parliamentary seats they hold at the next election. It could even sway the Corbynistas, if only Burnham could swallow his fear of bringing Jeremy back on board.
But all this is meaningless without a social programme – a genuine commitment to implement the union agenda, restore the welfare state and the public sector we once had. That’s what the unions have got to fight for and that’s where the struggle has only just begun.

So long Keir Starmer…

It didn’t take long to get rid of Starmer after all. His pathetic resignation speech marked the inevitable end of his dismal two years in office spent crawling to the Americans and what he believed was the dominant trend amongst the British bourgeoisie. No longer of any further use to the ruling class following the overwhelming Burnham victory at the Makerfield by-election. Stabbed in the back by his phoney friends in Parliament. No one will miss him.
In the corridors of power Labour politicians and senior civil servants are already drafting plans for the new Burnham administration while union leaders lobby for the return of the water industry and the power utilities to some form of public ownership.
Burnham’s team say their man will revitalise a moribund party, head off the challenge of the Faragists and a resurgent Tory party, and lead Labour to victory at the next general election.
They like to present the “King of the North” as a new broom. But there’s nothing new about Andy Burnham, who while not a Blairite, nevertheless comes from the ‘Old Labour’ class-collaborationist tradition that still holds sway through much of the labour movement.
Economic stagnation, unemployment, homelessness, poverty, drug abuse and crime. These are the problems that face the incoming Burnham government. These are the problems of end-days capitalism. Ultimately, the only answer is socialism. But in the meantime there’s plenty of scope for a country as rich as Britain to take on board the demands of the labour movement that include the restoration of the welfare state and the public sector that Britain once possessed.
The days when people listened to the rich men who told us that the greatest virtue of humanity was the possession of the largest amount of money are over. Great mass movements are again sweeping the continents. The masses are demanding social justice, democratic rights and an end to exploitation. It’s capitalism that’s finished – not us. 
On the streets millions want a decisive break from the imperialist agenda that led to the Zionist genocide in Gaza and countless other Western war-crimes in other parts of the Global South.
The billions consumed by the arms race and the pointless nuclear “deterrent” would be better spent restoring industry to provide work for the younger generation and decent pensions for the old. Progressive taxation for the rich, who can well afford it, would pay for the “safety-net” benefits of old and guarantee free education and medical for the sick and infirmed. 
Burnham says he listens to the unions and the street, unlike Starmer and the ageing Blairites the former Labour leader surrounded himself with, Whether Burnham will actually do anything about it remains to be seen. His decision to appoint former head of Labour Friends of Israel, James Purnell, as his chief of staff gives little ground for optimism...

Double whammy in Makerfield

Makerfield’s voters killed two birds with one stone this week giving the Faragists a drubbing and sending Andy Burnham back to the House of Commons. If Starmer goes before Parliament’s summer recess that will be an added bonus. 
Burnham’s by-election victory was not all that surprising. He was the odds-on favourite with the bookies on the eve of the poll that ended weeks of ferocious Labour campaigning on the streets of the constituency in what was essentially a two-horse race between the “King of the North” and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. But the stakes weren’t quite the same. For Farage victory would just be another feather in his cap. For Burnham victory opens the door to Number Ten.
Farage likes to pose as a country gent with the common touch. But he’s just a venal City businessman who’s been the political voice of those sections of the ruling class long-opposed to the European Union.  For many years he languished on the political fringe of British politics. He made common cause with the Tories with his heady mix of racism and anti-Euro federalism during the Brexit campaign. But being propelled to centre stage and leading a small, but high-profile far-right front is no substitute for Burnham’s years of political experience as a Blairite minister and then Mayor of Greater Manchester. 
Farage is a good communicator. But so is Burnham. Burnham is a hand-shaker and a back-slapper. He’s everyone’s friend and like Labour’s old leader, Harold Wilson, or the late Charles Kennedy of Liberal-Democrat fame he can get the vote out on the street. 
But that wasn’t always the case. Reform had high hopes for their man, a local plumber who was just three points behind Burnham when the campaign began a few weeks ago in the constituency in Greater Manchester. The Faragists played the race card clearly hoping that the Southampton riots and the sectarian violence in northern Ireland would trigger nation-wide unrest that could be exploited in their favour throughout the rest of the country. But the firm response of the anti-racist movements, together with that of the local communities as a whole,  made sure that was no repetition of the mob violence in Southampton despite the best efforts of the racists, the fascist gangs and the followers of Tommy Robinson to stir up anti-immigrant  hysteria. 
Burnham is back in Parliament and he says he’s ready to challenge Starmer for the leadership. Starmer’s followers are drifting towards the Burnham camp. Those of his rival, Wes Streeting, want to do a deal to keep their place in the new Burnham administration. Some Corbynistas even hope for reconciliation – though Burnham has ruled out any return for Jeremy Corbyn himself.
Burnham may not be “New Labour”.  But he’s definitely “Old Labour”. He says he’ll keep the triple-lock and return the water industry to some sort of public ownership. But that’s as far as it goes from a man who comes from the right social-democratic camp that has traditionally dominated the Labour Party from Ramsay MacDonald’s days...

Stand up to racism!

Loyalist mobs are rampaging through Belfast, spreading terror amongst the black and immigrant population in the run-up to Orangemen’s Day on the “Glorious Twelve” of July. But attempts to spread hate in England have, so far, failed despite the best efforts of Tommy Robinson, Elon Musk and the Faragists to trigger racist pogroms in the wake of the Southampton riots.
The firm response of the anti-racist movements on the street, together with that of the local communities as a whole, has made sure that there’s been no repetition of the violence in Southampton that was triggered by far-right extremists exploiting the death of a student to advance their own fascist agendas and kick off the “race war” that they believe will propel them to power in the future.
Don’t let the far right divide us. That’s what the national Stand Up to Racism campaign says. 
Racists are still attempting to organise, and groups linked to Tommy Robinson continue to seek opportunities to build on local grievances. But organised resistance can deny them the space they need to grow.
The racists and fascists are on the march again, and communists must be in the forefront of the resistance. There is no substitute for blocking their path with massive numbers, even if the police do not like this.
So it goes without saying that on the streets and facing the fascists there must be maximum unity between anti-fascists of all political shades. We must remember that the biggest and most successful anti-fascist alliance of all time was led by Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt, and that they managed to work together despite having very little else in common, until the threat of Nazism was smashed. If they can work with each other then we can also work with everyone on the left and anyone else ready to stand up to racism and fascism.
As communists, working with other anti-fascists of all kinds also gives opportunities for friendly dialogue as we stand shoulder-to-shoulder against racism and fascism, and it in no way implies our support for the political views on other matters of the people we are standing next to. Those are matters for peaceful argument during the lulls in fighting the fascists. This is the only way to achieve the mass turn-outs necessary to stop the fascists. And it happens naturally on the streets. Anti-fascists of all shades will defend one another regardless where there is a threat of attack by fascists or by police.
The traditional tactics of the mainstream anti-racist movements and the more robust tactics of those up for confronting the fascists on their own terms are both needed, and should be co-ordinated for maximum effect.
Communists are great ones for meetings, conferences, debates and committees – work that is usually done sitting down. This is all essential work but it is only half the struggle. If all those great resolutions and clarifications of the line are just left hanging we might as well not bother. We must stand up, get out and about, and be at the forefront of implementation – on the streets, in the workplaces, in the communities, on the housing estates, putting our line into practice and communicating directly with workers and raising levels of political awareness and class consciousness.
We must ensure that the hardship and suffering caused by the austerity regime and attacks on working-class living standards turn into anger and not into despair and resignation. To do that we need some successes in struggle, we need to set at first modest, achievable goals to build morale and awareness. Defeating fascist and racist activity is a crucial starting point.

It’s still the same old story…

...from the likes of Nigel Farage who’ve been stoking up the flames of racist violence in Southampton following the trial and conviction of the young Sikh responsible for the death of a teenager in a fight last December.
That's not to say there aren't serious questions to be answered about the way the Southampton police handled the incident, or indeed about their training and their general policy in dealing with violence of this nature. 
But there’s no doubt that the enraged mob on Southampton’s streets, headed by Tommy Robinson and urged on from afar by Nigel Farage and the American hi-tech tycoon Elon Musk, exploited genuine anger at the conduct of the local police at the incident that led to the death of  the student. These people, to be sure, are not fascists or Nazis in the conventional sense (though some fascists and neo-nazis were amongst the mob that attacked the police). But they are certainly racists, trying to incite a pogrom in Southampton. The ring-leaders deliberately ignore the fact that the fatal incident was not racially motivated (the killer's claim that he had been racially abused was rejected at his trial) not to mention the calls from the victim's family and those of the killer for calm.
None of them care about the victim. Nothing is said about root cause of the spike in violence on the street – the alienation of the youth and the decadence of capitalism in its final days.  No, as far as these people are concerned it’s all down to immigrants and asylum seekers. Kick them out and it’ll all be better – like the never-never land of the 1950s they talk about when there was full employment and everyone knew their place. Or so they say...
The NCP doesn’t support "open borders". We accept that all states, including the UK, have the right to control immigration and emigration in accordance with their resources and    economic needs.
But we are opposed to any controls based on ethnic or religious grounds. Asylum-seekers are different. The UK is bound by international agreements to receive those claiming asylum regardless of their countries of origin. Asylum seekers must be treated humanely and their claims dealt with swiftly. They should be allowed to work to help to pay their own way while their status is being reviewed (a right that was revoked by the Blair government) which is also a demand of the TUC. 
 The ruling class tries to confine the political arena to endless debates on law and order, immigration and the European Union. We have to break the bourgeois consensus that uses immigration to divert working people from the real issues that affect their lives. We must put socialism back on the working class agenda!

What a difference a day makes…

...or not in the case of Sir Tony Blair whose comments on the current turmoil within the Labour Party were splashed all over the bourgeois press last week. Whatever he achieved in office –  Scottish and Welsh devolution, ending the conflict in northern Ireland and pushing through some minor social  reforms – was far eclipsed by his despicable role in supporting the American onslaught on Iraq which ended in invasion and the execution of the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein. The dreams of Anglo-American imperialism ended in the streets of Baghdad as the Iraqi resistance fought back to eventually free the country from imperialist occupation. Blair fell from grace soon after – leaving Downing Street to console himself with lucrative sinecures, non-jobs like his “peace-keeping” role in the Middle East, that were given to him by the Americans as a reward for his life-time of service to imperialism. 
To be fair Blair never pretends to be anything more than he is – a mouthpiece for what he thinks is the dominant trend within the ruling class. He has plenty to say but he’s got nothing to offer workers. Or as Jeremy Corbyn  put it “Tony Blair thinks the answer to this country’s problems is AI, welfare cuts and endless spending on war. Who benefits? Arms companies and tech billionaires. Once again, Blair is wrong. The answer is a redistribution of wealth and power and the relentless search for peace”.
Tony Blair, like Ramsay MacDonald and Sir Keir Starmer, divided and ultimately betrayed the Labour Party. But to paraphrase Orwell and say “all Labour leaders are rubbish, but some are more rubbisher than others” may be going too far.  Attlee, Wilson and Callaghan did have their moments – though this was largely due to the immense pressure at the time from the labour movement as a whole for social justice.
Tony Blair is a rich man who has also acquired a number of gongs along the way. These include the usual honours reserved for past Prime Ministers as well as the American Presidential Medal of Freedom and the more dubious Dan David Prize given by Tel Aviv University for Blair’s "exceptional leadership and steadfast determination in helping to engineer agreements and forge lasting solutions to areas in conflict".
None of this has, however, restored his political standing in Britain. The fame that Blair so longs for continues to elude him. His paean of praise for the sort of  American-style neo-con policies that have been embraced by both Democratic and Republican administrations in Washington throughout the 21st century may have been music for the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg in the Conservative party but it didn’t go down well with Keir Starmer or the two contenders for his job, Wes Streeting and Andy Burnham, and can only serve to remind them of how glad they were to see the back of him in 2007.  

Let the good times roll…

The race for the Labour leadership has begun. Not officially. No leadership challenge has been formally made. No election under rules has been set. And Sir Keir Starmer is still at the helm. But no one doubts that his days are numbered as Wes Streeting and Andy Burnham set out their stalls in preparation for the contest to come which will give one of them the keys to Number Ten.
Streeting is a Blairite who has nothing to offer working people apart from more of the same rubbish they got from Starmer. He wisely plays down the fact that he was a protégé of the disgraced Peter Mandelson while Andy Burnham plays up demands for social justice to fend off the Greens and woo back the Labour vote on the streets that until recently had traditionally backed Labour. The self-proclaimed “left” on the Labour back-benches – the sort who support the Socialist Campaign Group and other Bennite campaigns – is backing Burnham, largely to keep Streeting out. John McDonnell, a one-time ally of Jeremy Corbyn, says that the former Labour leader should be able to rejoin the party if Burnham becomes leader. But this has been ruled out by the Burnham camp.
But everything hinges on Burnham winning the Makerfield seat. If he fails – and the Faragists are going to put up a strong challenge – then all bets are off for both Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting.

Back in Brussels…

...all eyes are on the battle for Labour’s top job. Whoever gets it it’s a win-win for the Common Market. Streeting is opening calling for a return to the European Union. Burnham says nothing now that could play into Farage’s hand but only last year he told his supporters that “I want to rejoin the EU. I hope it happens in my lifetime…”. Whoever wins a second referendum looks inevitable. Rejoining the EU is now back on the agenda, and the Remainers are winning the argument given the pathetic leaders of the Brexit camp these days.
The Tories had a golden opportunity after Brexit to build an independent British economy freed from the fetters of the European Union. Johnson, Truss and Sunak squandered it in pursuit of the impossible dream of a free trade agreement with the United States – that was never on the cards in Washington. 
Lexit, the left case for leaving the European Union, never got off the ground. The public face of the Brexiteers is now that of Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch and the followers of Tommy Robinson that we see draped in Union Jacks at the anti-immigration rallies of the lunatic fringe.
But one only has to look at what’s happening in Europe today to see that rejoining the European Union will not solve the problems of working people. Communists need to make the case for staying out of the EU, trading freely with everyone throughout the world and building an independent economy needed to restore our public services in the 21st century. 

Now the fun begins...

The knives are out. The back-stabbers are at play as the struggle begins anew in the corridors of power within the Labour Party for the key to Number Ten. Sir Keir Starmer says that the United Kingdom faces going down 'a very dark path' as he pledges to fight on as Prime Minister. And former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, a one-time ally of Jeremy Corbyn, says Wes Streeting is planning a stealth coup to move against Starmer to avoid a leadership contest which could include Labour’s “King of the North”, Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham.
The solid vote for the Scottish and Welsh nationalists in last week’s elections in Scotland and Wales along with the spectacular rise of Reform in the council votes in England spells doom for Keir Starmer and the ageing Blairite crew that has brought Labour to the brink of electoral collapse in recent years.
The results – the collapse of the Labour and Tory vote across the country, sweeping gains for the Faragists and more modest but significant gains for the Greens and the Liberal-Democrats came as no surprise to the pundits who long ago read the writing on the wall when the Labour leader purged the Corbynistas and drove hundreds of thousands out of Labour’s ranks soon after Starmer became leader in 2020. The likes of Peter Mandelson believed the working class would put up with this and more as they “had nowhere else to go”. They said Labour’s loveless landslide victory, largely due to the Faragist intervention that split the Tory vote, was a vote of confidence in their particular brand of class collaboration which revolved around following what they believed was the dominant trend within the British ruling class; crawling to the Americans and the Americans; upholding the old Tory austerity programme and carrying on with the stealth privatisation of the health service.
Many of them clearly believed this rubbish even though reality was staring them in the face as hundreds of thousands took to the streets every month to demonstrate against Israeli aggression and hundreds of thousands more abandoned Labour at the ballot box. Starmer clearly still believes in the old lies – trying to block the Blairites chosen successor and clinging to power when it’s obvious the game’s up.
But just getting rid of Starmer will not revive Labour’s fortunes. Labour needs to accept the inevitability of independence for Scotland and Wales and the re-unification of Ireland. It needs go beyond the parameters of political debate set by the bourgeoisie that revolve around law and order, immigration and the European Union and campaign to win the demands of the union movement that the Labour Party was set up for in the first place back in the early 1900s.
 A genuine return to a working class agenda and a commitment to restore the welfare state and the public sector that existed until the Tory come-back in 1979 could win back the traditional Labour vote. That may be a call to far for the Burnham and Rayner camp but it has to be made – inside or outside the Labour Party.

  

   

The spirit of May Day

May Day is workers’ day. But its origins go back to the  rituals of hallowed antiquity. Long before the emergence of trade unions, May Day was a spring festival dedicated to the spirits that people thought controlled the destinies of humanity. Houses were decorated with green branches. Peasants danced and picked a "May King and Queen", believing this would magically bring about a  good harvest and prosperity. 
Nowadays it’s a time to remember past struggles and achievements and look forward to the bright red future still to come. From the big parades in the people’s democracies to the rallies in Europe and throughout the Global South, May Day is celebrated to honour the generations that have gone before us and to look to the future with confidence and determination. 
We recall the fight for the eight-hour day and the strikes in the United States on May Day 1886 that ended in the murder of six strikers by the police in Chicago, and the deaths of seven police the next day when a bomb exploded during a protest in the city’s Haymarket Square. Eight union leaders were arrested on trumped-up charges and four were later hanged.
In 1889 the First International, the International Working Men’s Association, declared May Day an international working-class holiday to commemorate the Haymarket Martyrs, and the Red Flag, representing the blood of working class martyrs – the martyred dead of Labour’s anthem – was adopted as the international symbol of working people.
Lenin’s May Day was a call to action. He said “May Day is coming, the day when the workers of all lands celebrate Their awakening to a class-conscious life, their solidarity in the struggle against all coercion and oppression of man by man, the struggle to free the toiling millions from hunger, poverty, and humiliation. Two worlds stand facing each other in this great struggle: the world of capital and the world of labour, the world of exploitation and slavery and the world of brotherhood and freedom.
“On one side stand the handful of rich blood-suckers. They have seized the factories and mills, the tools and machinery, have turned millions of acres of land and mountains of money into their private property. They have made the government and the army their servants, faithful watchdogs of the wealth they have amassed.
“On the other side stand the millions of the disinherited. They are forced to beg the moneybags for permission to work for them. By their labour they create all wealth; yet all their lives long they have to struggle for a crust of bread, beg for work as for charity, sap their strength and health by back-breaking toil, and starve in hovels in the villages or in the cellars and garrets of the big cities.
“But now these disinherited toilers have declared war on the moneybags and exploiters. The workers of all lands are fighting to free labour from wage slavery, from poverty and want. They are fighting for a system of society where the wealth created by the common labour will go to benefit, not a handful of rich men, but all those who work. They want to make the land and the factories, mills, and machines the common property of all toilers. They want to do away with the division into rich and poor, want the fruits of labour to go to the labourers themselves, and all the achievements of the human mind, all improvements in ways of working, to improve the lot of the man who works, and not serve as a means of oppressing him”. Let us all follow in Lenin’s footsteps to build a better tomorrow for the generations to come.

Starmer must go!

Starmer may not be in the Trump league but nobody believes a word he says these days. He says he knew nothing about Peter Mandelson’s security status. He claims the Foreign Office didn’t tell him that the grandee had failed the vetting process. Starmer clearly thinks everybody is as stupid as himself. 
Many thought that Ramsay MacDonald and Tony Blair were the worst but Starmer has proved them wrong. MacDonald presided over the meteoric rise of Labour after the First World War and led the first Labour government in history back in 1924. He ended up splitting the movement and serving the ruling class he once claimed to oppose during the turmoil that followed the Wall Street crash of 1929 that plunged the world into a slump that only ended with the outbreak of the Second World War. MacDonald admitted that all he could do was administer capitalism. But he still talked about “socialism” – albeit in the never-never land of the far distant future.  
Blair, on the other hand, never talked about socialism at all and what he achieved is far outweighed by his role in the imperialist onslaught against Iraq and his support for Zionism that continues to this day. Nevertheless he did preside over the negotiations that ended the conflict in northern Ireland and his administration and that of the Gordon Brown government that followed did pass some constitutional reforms and make some minor concessions to the union movement.
Starmer, on the other hand, has achieved nothing. All Starmer can brag about is a purge of the Corbynistas that drove hundreds of thousands out of the Labour Party.
Starmer surrounds himself with people lesser than himself – like the ageing Blairites who pandered to his vanity to return to the money tree of Westminster politics. They said Starmer’s stand – just another variant of Tory austerity – was the key to Labour’s loveless victory in the 2024 general election. But in reality Labour’s landslide was due to the Faragist intervention that gravely split the Tory vote across the entire country. Now with the Greens and Faragists snapping at their heels Labour is heading for disaster at the Scottish, Welsh and regional polls in May. 
Angela Rayner and Andy Burnham wait in the wings to pick up the pieces when Starmer inevitably falls on his sword. Their time will come but at the end of the day their outlook differs little from the right-wing Labour milieu they came from in the first place. They talk about workers’ rights and pay lip-service to union bureaucrats. That’s as far as it goes – and as far as it will ever go as long as the careerists and time-servers remain in charge. 
Dumping Starmer won’t make much of a difference. But any Labour recovery can only begin when he goes – together with the Blairites and the other bureaucrats that surround him. That fight begins amongst the rank-and-file of the labour movement. That’s where the struggle for socialism must begin anew. It starts now...

A lull in Lebanon

Everyone will welcome the ceasefire in Lebanon – not least the people of the south who have bourne the brunt of the Israeli incursion that has cost countless lives of innocent Lebanese civilians and wreaked havoc on the villages and towns of the borderland. How long it will last is, of course, another matter.
The fact that the temporary truce was imposed by the United States shows who ultimately calls the shots in Tel Aviv. And the fact that Donald Trump had to do it to get the Iranians back to the negotiating table shows that the Americans have lost the initiative in this war that they started.
Trump gave them his best shots starting with a treacherous surprise attack followed by the assassination of the Islamic Republic’s leaders in a terror bombing “shock and awe” campaign that the Americans and their lackeys thought would force the Iranians to beg for mercy in a matter of days. But the Iranians gave as good as they got laying waste to America’s ring of bases across the Middle East and giving the Israelis a taste of their own medicine with wave after wave of missile attacks that has left much of Tel Aviv in ruins.
Trump open talked of regime change à la Libya and Iraq. Netanyahu bragged about a future “Greater Israel” that the Zionists believe will stretch from the Nile to the Euphrates. Both conjured up armies of traitors and quislings that they imagined would take to the streets of Tehran to do their bidding and welcome the imperialists with open arms.
But none of this happened. The Iranians stood firm and so did their Arab allies in Yemen, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon – the axis of resistance that refuses to submit to the Americans, the Israelis or and their feudal Arab lackeys.
The Iranians throttled the Big Oil corporations when they closed the Persian Gulf. They watched US imperialism’s allies wash their hands on the American-Israeli offensive in Iran. They ignored Trump’s empty threats of annihilation and they’ve laid down their own terms for ending the conflict – terms that China, Russia and most of the Global South have endorsed as the basis for ending the conflict.
But in Europe the leading members of the European Union have openly refused to join in Trump’s crusade. In Britain the Starmer government sits on the fence, distancing itself from Washington over Iran while still supplying arms to the Zionist entity and allowing the American air-force to use some of the RAF’s bases in operations against the Islamic Republic.
These are volatile times.The old order is being challenged – and not just in the Middle East.
On the street the masses have broken the bourgeois consensus that rarely goes beyond endless “debates” on immigration and the European Union, mealy-mouthed reforms and Atlanticism. The issues of war and peace, imperialism or socialism are, once again, back on the agenda...

One step forward…

 While victory celebrations in Tehran may be premature the sombre faces in the corridors of power in Washington and Tel Aviv tell another story – one of hubris, humiliation and defeat.
Last week Donald Trump ranted and raged against the Iranians. They were going to be wiped out if they didn’t end their blockade of the Persian Gulf and hand over their nuclear plants and oil industry to the Americans. A few days later he’s agreeing to a Pakistani-brokered cease-fire that pivots on the Islamic Republic’s ten point terms for ending the war.
In Washington the blame game has begun. Trump’s friends say their leader was misled by the Zionists and the fools that surround him in the White House. They’re  already pointing the finger at Pete Hegseth, his useless minister of war, and the Israeli premier, Benjamin Netanyahu. Other insiders, mindful of their political futures in the post-Trump world, are telling tales to the mainstream media of a senile old man in the White House whose delusions of grandeur have plunged the capitalist world into a crisis not seen since the height of the Cold War.
No-one can believe a word the US president says. Donald Trump is an incorrigible liar. His agreements are not worth the paper they’re written on. Nevertheless Trump’s minions, led by Vice-President JD Vance, are now in Pakistan for talks with the Iranians. 
The ceasefire, a two-week truce to pave the way for negotiations, is on a knife-edge. The Israelis, who were not party to the secret American parleys with Pakistan, are out to sabotage the peace talks. They’ve stepped up their offensive in southern Lebanon claiming they’re not bound by the terms of the truce the Americans signed up for. The Lebanese resistance and their north Yemeni allies have hit back with a volleys of missiles and drones. 
In Israel they’ve been taught no end of a lesson – getting a taste of their own medicine that has left their capital in ruins and forced hundreds of thousands of Israelis to flee to safety in  Europe and the United States. And needless to say the Strait of Hormuz remains closed to imperialist shipping. 
On the diplomatic front the European powers are rapidly distancing themselves from the United States. France joins Russia and China in blocking an American manoeuvre on the UN Security Council designed to endorse “international” action against Iran in the Persian Gulf while Starmer poses as non-interventionist to curry favour with his old friends in Brussels.
American and Israeli air-power has failed to crush Iran. The Islamic Republic, on the other hand, has destroyed all the American bases on the Arabian peninsula. US troops have been forced to flee to hotels. Others have been evacuated back to the United States.  America’s much-vaunted nuclear aircraft-carriers retreat under fire. Their commando raids are beaten back. The myth of American invincibility has been shattered. The dream of a “new world order” is over.

Defend the Islamic Republic

Millions upon millions have taken to the streets of Britain and throughout the rest of the world to demand an end to the imperialist war on Iran. Donald Trump and the fools he surrounds himself  with talked about   a “decapitation” victory. Benjamin Netanyahu thought his dream of a “Greater Israel” from the Nile to the Euphrates was about to come true. The Americans and their Israeli and feudal Arab lackeys thought that Stealth war-planes, missiles and drones would soon have the Iranians on their knees begging for mercy.  But it didn’t happen. The dream of The Donald died in the smoke of burning American bases and the bombed out  ruins of Tel Aviv.
The leaders of the European Union have wisely spurned Trump’s call for help to break the Iranian blockade of the Persian Gulf. So has Starmer who’s now trying to rebuild the links with his old mates in Brussels while still keeping sweet with the Americans and the oil sheikhs.
The bourgeois media talk about the crisis in the Persian Gulf that threatens Western supplies of oil and gas – and indeed that is a crisis for them, Soaring energy prices could plunge the imperialist world into a slump of 1929 proportions – but re-opening the waterway won’t solve the underlying problems that once again set the Middle East on fire.
The immediate issue is to end the fighting, lift the imperialist sanctions on the Islamic Republic and recognise Iran’s right to control its own economy and develop a nuclear energy programme. But the heart of the matter is Palestine. The legitimate rights of the Palestinian Arabs must be recognised including the right of return for the millions of Palestinians whose families were driven from their homes by Zionist terror in the 1940s and the equally legitimate right of the Palestinian Arabs to self-determination and the independent state they were promised when Palestine was partitioned in 1947. 
UN resolutions have provided the basis for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East. First of all Israel must totally withdraw from all the occupied territories seized in 1967, including Arab East Jerusalem and Syria’s Golan Heights. The Palestinians must be allowed to establish a state of their own on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Palestinian refugees whose homes are now in Israel must be allowed to return or, if they so wish, be paid appropriate compensation in exchange. And all states in the region should have internationally agreed and recognised frontiers guaranteed by all the Great Powers.

Defend the right to protest

Palestine Solidarity Campaign director Ben Jamal and Stop the War vice-chair Chris Nineham have been found guilty of breaking the Public Order Act this week. Though their punishment – they were fined and conditionally discharged – was not severe they shouldn’t have been in court in the first place. These were clearly trumped up charges designed to stifle the massive Palestinian solidarity movement that has swept the country in recent years. The two campaign leaders have made it clear that they will appeal and so they should. This is an attack on civil liberties. It affects us all. The verdict raises huge concerns about any further powers granted to the police through the Crime and Policing Bill, which is currently progressing though parliament. It confirms the view that these proposed increased powers represent a seismic threat to democratic freedoms.