30 Fighting Years of the New Communist Party of Britain

30 Fighting Years!

THE NEW Communist Party was founded in July 1977 by members of the Communist Party of Great Britain, under the leadership of Sid French. They opposed the revisionist line of the CPGB as expressed in its programme, The British Road to Socialism. They had fought within the party for many years against this departure from Marxist-Leninist ideology through the CPGB’s internal democratic centralist structure.
But that structure was not functioning as it should. Instead of high level debate about the correct ideology and the way forward in Britain, the old CPGB leadership gagged proper debate and engineered congress voting so that it would never be possible to hold it to account to its members through its internal structures. At the same time a lack of Marxist-Leninist education ensured that a large part of the membership did not understand why the revisionist parliamentary road to socialism could never work.
The driving force behind the formation of the New Communist Party in 1977 was Sid French who had been the CPGB’s Surrey District secretary for many years. Sid came from a working class, and class conscious family. He was born in 1920 and joined the Young Communist League when he was 14 in 1934. In 1941, during the Second World War, he was called up and served in the RAF. Promoted to Sergeant in 1942 Sid was posted to Gibraltar and later to North Africa and Italy.
While on active service Sid wrote an article for Labour Monthly about the problems facing the Gibraltarians under war conditions. He also met Henri Alleg in Algiers, the French communist journalist who later joined the Algerian resistance against French colonialism, for which he spent five years in prison.
After demobilisation when the war ended Sid’s commitment to the communist movement led to his appointment as Secretary of the newly formed Surrey District Committee of the CPGB in 1950. He remained in that position until he resigned, together with other supporters to establish the New Communist Party on 15th July 1977.
Sid French was a member of the General and Municipal Workers’ Union (GMWU) and an active co-operator. He was elected to the Political Purposes Committee of the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society (RACS) in 1967 and elected to the RACS Members’ Council in 1968.
The CPGB leadership embraced Krushchov’s denunciation of Stalin’s “cult of the personality at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956 and further distanced itself from Marxism-Leninism.
The dangerous levels of ignorance of basic Marxism-Leninism and revisionism that gripped the CPGB became dramatically manifest in 1968 when the Young Communist League magazine, Challenge, published a strong attack on the Warsaw Pact intervention against counter-revolution in Czechoslovakia.
The CPGB was becoming more and more a social democratic party in its ideology and structure but since there was already a mass social democratic party – the Labour Party – the reason for the CPGB’s existence was diminishing. The party’s declining membership and influence were inevitable.
The growing crisis in the party also affected the credibility of its leadership, as formerly senior and influential members left its ranks. In 1976, four of the party’s top engineering cadres resigned. Bernard Panter, Cyril Morton, Jimmy Reid and John Tocher, who had all been members of the Political Committee, jumped a sinking ship. At the base of the party the crisis in organisation was even clearer.
Thousands of members were no longer organised and many did not even pay their nominal 25p monthly dues. Warring camps emerged within the party. The Gollan leadership sought to prop itself up by aligning itself with the “Eurocommunist” forces further to their right.
But the crisis came to a head the following year in the run-up to the Congress in November. The leadership of the CPGB had redrawn the British Road to Socialism aimed at adopting a left social democratic platform that sought the respectability and acceptance of academic and intellectual circles. It was the party’s entrance fee into the reformist and social democratic traditions of the official labour movement. The publication of the draft and the beginning of the pre-Congress discussion period led to furious arguments within the party.
Sid French was an outspoken critic of the British Road and the new draft. And it became clear that the party leadership intended to expel Sid French and a number of others in the Surrey district before the Congress met. The formation of a new party became inevitable.
On the 15th July 1977 the New Communist Party was established at a meeting in London called by French and other members of the Surrey district committee.
Sid French became the first General Secretary of the NCP and Surrey became its strongest area. The first national chairman was Joe Parker, a full-time official in the National Union of Sheet Metal Workers and Coppersmiths (NUSMWC) until he retired in 1982. Joe Parker stepped down as Party chair soon after but remained an active NCP member until his death in 2004. Sid French died in 1979 and was succeeded by Eric Trevett, a close comrade who had worked as a CPGB full-timer with Sid for many years.
Within weeks the NCP’s weekly paper, the New Worker, was up and running, and the first pamphlets printed.
Initially the NCP operated from the old Surrey District office but the Party soon moved to a small office in south London. In 1979 much bigger premises were purchased near Clapham Junction station, together with a press which has continued to print the New Worker to this day.
The Party’s line developed rapidly by the Second Congress in 1979. The Party called for the end to partition in Ireland and full support was given to the Irish national liberation movement while the NCP’s electoral strategy of not standing in elections but supporting Labour based on working class unity was clarified.
The election of a Tory Government in 1979 brought Margaret Thatcher to power at the vanguard of a global shift in capitalist policies – away from Keynesian solutions to economic problems and a return to the liberal, free market policies of the late Victorian era. This involved a direct assault on trade unions – the organised working class – followed by drastic cuts in the social wage, denationalisation of the public sector and the privatisation of state-owned assets.
The NCP and its paper, the New Worker, were in the forefront of the resistance against this attack on the working class. The 1984-85 miners’ strike was perhaps the most important element of this struggle and the NCP gave full support to the miners from the very beginning.
Our members played a full and active role in collecting money and goods to support the miners’ struggle in their local communities, through the miners’ support groups that grew up in every locality in the country.
This set the tone for the NCP’s approach to broad movement work throughout our history. We support existing trade union and broad working class community campaigns and oppose divisive ultra-left efforts to set up separate organisations. We play an honest and hard-working role in building such campaigns without trying to take them over or dominate them. At the same time, in discussion with other members of these campaigns, we try to inject class-consciousness and a Marxist-Leninist understanding of the struggle, using the New Worker along with party leaflets and pamphlets. We seek to win respect for communism within the broad movement for our honesty, hard work and political analysis.
Throughout the miners’ strike we organised support meetings and for over a year every issue of the New Worker carried a banner headline and front-page lead story supporting the strike.
The miners came very close but did not win and that was a major set back for the whole labour movement in Britain. But many working people throughout Britain had a shocking lesson in the ruthlessness and brutality of the state machine, especially the police, in suppressing working class militancy.
It was followed in 1986 by the Wapping dispute where printers and journalists went on strike in protest at Rupert Murdoch’s removal of the production of his newspapers – The Sun, The Times – from Fleet Street to “Fortress Wapping” in London’s East End. In the process Murdoch made hundreds redundant and derecognised the unions. Once again the NCP and the New Worker gave full support to the workers in struggle.
Throughout the NCP’s existence we have given full support to and our members have played an active role in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and, when it existed, the British Peace Council. The party has always recognised that peace and socialism come together as a package and that modern war is a product of capitalist and imperialist rivalries, in which the great powers use the working class as canon fodder to increase their wealth and power.
But we are not pacifists; we recognise the right of workers in struggle against oppression or in defence of working class gains to take to arms if necessary. We give support and solidarity to workers fighting for national liberation and against imperialist occupation – deeming that those on the front line of such struggles are the best judges of what combination of political and/or armed struggle is necessary.
We have always supported the peoples of Palestine and Ireland against illegal imperialist occupation and forged friendship with their fighting organisations. The Palestinian Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) was, in fact, the first movement to establish relations with the NCP, six weeks after our foundation. And we have also forged close ties with the peoples of Korea, Cuba and other places fighting to defend their socialist revolutions.
The NCP gave full support to the Anti-Apartheid Movement in South Africa and to the ANC. When the South African secret police bombed the ANC’s London printing press we allowed them to use our printing facilities.
In the 1980s the NCP established fraternal relations with the ruling communist and workers parties in Afghanistan, Cuba, Ethiopia, Vietnam and south Yemen and a number of anti-revisionist parties in western Europe and the Middle East.
At home the NCP has always played a full and active role in combating fascism and racism. We have always encouraged our members and supporters to become active in whatever anti-fascist or anti-racist broad movement group is active in their locality and to support broad unity on this issue. And we have forged a lasting friendship with the Searchlight organisation and have shared photographers with Searchlight.
Margaret Thatcher’s proposals in 1987 for a universal poll tax to replace the rates system hit the working class like a bombshell, when they realised what the costs would be. The change in local government taxation systems covered up a huge cut in central government funding to local authorities and put the burden of making up the difference on the shoulders of all local residents, regardless of their ability to pay. The tax was set to be imposed even on people who had absolutely no income of their own, like housewives and members of religious orders. The Tory government later backtracked a little and dropped the imposition of the tax on people in religious orders – which led to a sudden growth in new religious orders.
NCP members threw themselves into the fight on this issue, often taking a leading role in setting up local anti-poll tax groups. We recognised that this tax would provoke a great deal of working class anger and that it depended on mass compliance to work.
The tax required first of all for everyone in the country to fill in a registration form. And the broad anti-poll tax movement that grew up rapidly recognised that if thousands or even millions of people dragged their heels or made difficulties over this, it would be impossible to administer. Newsletters, some produced with New Worker expertise, were sent around the country, swapping tactics from one locality to another.
When it came to paying the tax we recognised that masses of people delaying or being awkward a bit would have more impact than just one or two martyrs going to prison for refusing – but that all forms and degrees of opposition were needed and valid. The point of the campaign was to give the masses confidence to disrupt the administration of the tax.
Campaigners produced pamphlets giving legal advice about what would happen at various stages as people held out refusing to pay, so they would know exactly what they were letting themselves in for. At the same time mass anti-poll tax protests were erupting on the streets of London and the other major cities.
The mass actions and protests succeeded. The poll tax was defeated and not long after her own Cabinet members forced Thatcher from office. This was the first major victory for the working class in Britain for many years.
Around the same time on the world stage the working class was suffering a huge setback as the treacherous policies of Gorbachov led to the fall of the Soviet Union and the socialist countries of eastern Europe. It was a fall that shook communist parties around the world; many communists had at first welcomed Gorbachov’s policies of “glasnost” and “perestroika”. It was a testing time and communist parties survived or went under according to how badly they were infected with revisionism. Those whose communism was based mainly on support and sympathy for the Soviet Union were vulnerable but those who had a firm basis in Marxist-Leninist ideology and an understanding of dialectics and the class struggle survived and became stronger.
The rot stopped when the Workers’ Party of Korea, led by Comrade Kim Il Sung, took the initiative and organised an international conference of communist and workers’ parties in Pyongyang. NCP delegates attended that conference and our Party was one of the first signatories of the Pyongyang Declaration that came from that conference.
In 1990 the genuine communist forces began to rally throughout the world. The NCP sent delegations led by Eric Trevett and International Secretary Andy Brooks to Cuba, south Yemen and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Fraternal relations were established with virtually every genuine communist and workers party in the world.
In the early 1990s fraternal relations were established with the Communist Party of China and the New Worker established a close relationship with the Xinhua news agency.
Major delegations have frequently gone to Democratic Korea, People’s China and Cuba and the Party plays a full part in the world communist and workers parties conferences organised by the Communist Party of Greece.
We can now say that the process that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union cleared away a lot of parties that had been masquerading as communist but had long since ceased to be communist.
The NCP survived and was ideologically strengthened, though there were calculated attempts to sabotage us at a time when the confidence of our membership could have been undermined if had we not been so strong ideologically. Many predicted we would not last longer than a year or two after the fall of the Soviet Union – one pessimist said we were “merely rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic”. But we have not only survived but we are now thriving.
The NCP began internally to criticise the Soviet Gorbachov leadership in 1988 and following the collapse of the Soviet Union the party established relations with communist and workers’ parties throughout the world.
In the 1990s party congresses adopted resolutions repudiating and denouncing Krushchov’s anti-Stalin 20th Congress speech. The NCP defined its ideology around the “great revolutionary teachers of humanity, Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin” and the “great revolutionary leaders of the struggling masses, Mao Zedong, Kim Il Sung, Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh”.
The year 1991 also saw the first Gulf War, when the imperialist powers led by the United States and Britain attacked Iraq when it refused to evacuate oil-rich Kuwait, an imperialist puppet feudal Arab state that had been annexed by Iraq in 1990. The Baathist government in Baghdad under Saddam Hussein had previously been a compliant tool of imperialist America when it launched attack on Iran in the 1980s. It had a poor human rights record and many groups on the left were confused and ended up supporting the imperialist war – just as in 1914.
But the NCP, following an analysis of the situation by our international secretary Andy Brooks – now our general secretary – took a correct position of opposition to the war. Subsequent events have borne out the correctness of our line.
Throughout the 1990s the NCP opposed the imperialist interventions that dismembered and destroyed Yugoslavia, opening up the region to the full blast of capitalist exploitation.
At home we continued to fight the policy of privatisation and the introduction of market forces within the National Health Service. Comrades have taken an active part in local broad movement groups to defend the NHS and fought hospital cuts and closures.
And in 1995 we supported the Liverpool dock strike and noted that it led to the first ever global solidarity action, as the new internet technology allowed dock workers around the world to coordinate solidarity strikes and the boycotting of ships loaded by scab labour.
Also in 1995 Eric Trevett retired from full-time Pary work and resigned as general secretary and was elected honorary president of the party. Andy Brooks, a founder member of the Party, was elected to the general secretaryship.
In 1997 we saw the election of the first Labour government for 18 years. The NCP had taken a correct stance of supporting Labour in the election – not under any illusion that Blair was a socialist or would make any dramatic change in ruling class attacks on the working class. We supported Labour because its victory raised the expectations and the morale of the working class and because the organisational link between the trade unions and the Labour government can be an instrument of working class pressure exerted directly on the Government. It all depends on the strength of the trade union leaderships – who are elected and accountable to the workers.
But supporting the Labour Party in elections is not the same thing as giving the Labour leadership carte blanche when it carries on with the same old ruling class policies.
Like the rest of the British communist movement the NCP from the beginning had to deal with ultra-leftist and right-wing deviation. All were defeated at Congresses over the years and many were expelled for factionalism. In 1977 a right-wing social-democratic tendency was expelled. An extreme pro-Soviet revisionist faction went the same way in the early 1980s. In the early 1990s another small revisionist group was expelled. All were guilty of factionalism.
The NCP has never stood candidates in general or local elections and calls for support for Labour candidates. This policy was amended in 2000 to permit support for independent Labour candidates with mass support and the NCP backed Ken Livingstone’s successful bid for the London Mayorship.
The NCP soon found itself with a right-wing faction active inside the Party opposed to the Livingstone candidature, with supporters on the Central Committee that refused to accept democratic centralist decisions and campaigned against them through anonymous circulars and other factional material.
They too were defeated and expelled at Congress but in the process we took a long, hard look at our rule book. In 1977 it had been based very much on the rule book of the old party and contained many flaws. We also looked at the rule book first adopted by the old party when it was formed in 1921 – as a Leninist party of a new type. The early rules were much more stringent and demanded that members should be active within a party organisation.
The central committee undertook the arduous task of drafting us a new rule book much more in line with the original Bolshevik principles, and based on the guidelines of the Communist International.
The proposed rule changes were thoroughly debated at every level in the party and some amendments made before they were presented to the NCP’s 13th congress in 2003 and adopted.
The changes now apply Bolshevik democratic centralism throughout the NCP with the aim of building a monolith Party of the working class. The new rules allow us three years between congresses instead of the previous two. We have found this has allowed us much more time for debate and the serious examination in depth of all our policies on a wide spectrum of issues. We had anyway long since stopped taking for granted what is deemed the broad consensus view of the left on various issues.
When the NCP takes a political position on any issue, comrades want to know why and what are the full implications at all levels.
We have also set up New Worker Supporters’ Groups that allow an informal but structured involvement for readers and friends who are in other progressive parties or no party at all and for a variety of reasons, do not want to commit themselves to applying for full party membership These groups are working well and have allowed up to expand the paper’s influence in many places where we have few members.
Now, in the “post 9/11” world we are exposing the “war on terror” as an attack on civil rights and a licence the imperialist powers have granted themselves to maraud around the globe attacking less powerful nations at will.
At home we are fighting advancing fascism in the form of draconian new laws, including the right to detention without charge or trial for long periods and the attempted imposition of expensive biometric identity cards backed by a database containing detailed information on every person in the country.
But abroad the heroic resistance in Iraq and Afghanistan have brought the imperialist war machine to a halt; the courageous peoples of the north of Korea, of Cuba and of Iran defy the imperialist powers with impunity and many of the nations of South America are making a strong stand against imperialism. In Africa China is offering trade and economic support that provides a real alternative to the one-sided “partnerships” and exploitative trade with strings that the imperialists try to impose.
The Soviet Union may have gone but Russia is now no longer a milch cow for US imperialism. The country has taken back control of its own oilfields and is once again offering trade deals that will allow potential targets of imperialism to defend themselves.
We live in a rapidly changing world, where the power of the working class is rising while the power of imperialism is waning. The future is unlikely to be smooth and simple, especially in the imperialist home countries like Britain.
But so far adversity and challenge have done nothing but strengthen the New Communist Party of Britain.

Labour and Plaid strike deal in Wales

by Lorraine Barrett

Labour Welsh Assembly Member for Cardiff South & Penarth

ON 3RD MAY this year, we had elections to the National Assembly for Wales. I was re-elected for the third time as Labour & Co-operative Assembly Member for Cardiff South and Penarth, which is also represented by Alun Michael who became our MP in 1987 after Jim Callaghan stood down.
Unfortunately Labour failed to get a majority, winning 26 out of the 60 seats. In Wales we have 40 First-Past-the-Post constituency members, and 20 regional list members, which means that, depending on how many votes individual parties get, and how many constituency seats they have in a region, they can pick up on the regional seats. Unfortunately,with the Proportional Representation system we have, the BNP only needed another 2,000 votes in the North Wales region and they would have had a seat in the Assembly.
Our Labour Leader in Wales is Rhodri Morgan and after the election he started negotiations with the Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru to see if a deal could be struck to ensure a stable Government with Labour in control.
Talks took place around the idea of stability pacts rather than coalition, but in the background was the spectre of a so-called "Rainbow Alliance" made up of Plaid (15 seats), Lib Dems (six) and the Tories (12) – there is one Independent member.
Rhodri Morgan had always made it clear that we would never work with the Tories. At one point it looked as though we could come to an arrangement with the Lib Dems which was our preferred option as there are so few of them and we had worked with them in the previous Assembly, but in true Lib Dem style, they couldn’t make up their minds, so Labour put down a motion to elect Rhodri Morgan as First Minister and it went through.
Rhodri appointed his Cabinet and prepared to run a Minority Government, but knew it would only be a matter of time before the three opposition parties would put down a vote of no confidence and set up their "Triple Alliance" (Rainbow is too nice a word to describe a group which has Tories in it). Rhodri then opened talks with the leader of Plaid with a view to setting up a formal coalition and those talks have been developing in earnest for some weeks. There have been voices of dissent in both parties where feelings run deep on historic grounds.
Some in the Labour Party feel that Plaid will try and "force" nationalism on us whilst there are those in Plaid who believe the Labour party will just try to dominate and use them.
I have been an active member of the Labour Party for over 30 years but this has been the most difficult issue we have had to deal with. The problem is that, whilst we have this form of PR in the Assembly, it will be very hard for Labour to get a majority, so we will have to accept that some form of coalition or co-operative way of working, will become the norm.
Running a minority government would mean putting forward only those policies that were guaranteed to get through and the opposition parties, as a group, could just keep voting everything down, which would not be in the interests of the people of Wales.
Whilst there will be huge challenges facing us in the Welsh Assembly, having to work with another party, particularly one that has been our sworn enemy for decades, we will now have stable Government and can get on with the job – something we’ve been waiting to do since 3rd May!

JUSTICE CANNOT WAIT

By Len Aldis

On 18th June in the Court of Appeals in New York, lawyers for the Victims of Agent Orange made their arguments against the ruling of Judge Jack Weinstein and sought to overturn that ruling thereby bringing the manufactures of the chemicals used in the US War on Vietnam to trial before a jury.

Lawyers for the 36 chemical companies, headed by Monsanto and Dow Chemicals, argued as part of their defence that they were carrying out the instructions of the US Government. Readers will no doubt recall the pleas by the Nazis on trial at Nuremberg “we were only obeying orders”.

The ruling by the three judges: Judge Robert Sack, Roger J. Miner and Peter Hall, is now awaited. When this will be announced is unknown but it is expected to be some months. Meanwhile the suffering will continue for the victims – over three million in Vietnam – their families, other relatives and their communities.

During the ten-year period of the spraying of the chemicals - in the main Agent Orange that contained Dioxin – from 1961 till 1971 the horrors of abnormal births began and has continued to this day thirty-six years after the spraying stopped. Near to 5 million Vietnamese were sprayed and over 3 million have been seriously affected with illnesses and disabilities all of which are painful to witness.

Photographs and films have shown the many victims and their tragic circumstances, but neither a photograph nor a film can show you the pain felt by the victims, their parents, brothers and sisters. You have to see for yourself to begin to understand how the crime of using chemicals as a weapon of war has affected so many people.

On South Vietnam 82 million litres of chemicals were sprayed, destroying the forests, crops, and vegetation. The chemicals also contaminated the lakes, rivers and most tragic of all poisoned the people.

Thanks must go to the Vietnam Association of Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin (VAVA) for beginning the lawsuit against the thirty-six chemical companies headed by Monsanto and Dow Chemicals, who manufactured the chemicals. Our thanks must also go to the lawyers Vietnamese and American who have given so much of their time and support in preparing the case against the companies.

In March 2005 Judge Jack Weinstein ruled against the Vietnamese thus leading to the Appeal that was heard on 18th June 2007 before three Judges: Robert Sack, Roger J. Miner and Peter Hall. On their ruling, whenever it is made, will depend if justice has been won for the victims of this war crime.

If their ruling goes in favour of the Vietnamese and US Veterans who are also suing the companies, this will mean that the case will go to trial before a jury. This was the essence of the first lawsuit.

However, we know from previous court cases that whenever the verdict goes against Monsanto, Dow Chemicals etc they appeal, as they did when the South Koran High Court ordered Monsanto and Dow Chemical to pay compensation to the Korean Veterans affected by Agent Orange.

It therefore has to be accepted that justice for the victims will take a long time. Meanwhile the suffering for the millions of victims will continue.
Further, and sad to state, before justice is finally won, thousands of present day victims will die from their illnesses and disabilities, and many thousands of new victims will be born.

The legacy of Agent Orange has already gone into the third generation. In my recent visit to Hanoi at the VAVA press conference I was pleased to meet with the four victims who were due to go to the US for public meetings and to attend the Court of Appeals hearing. One, young Nguyen Muoi is a second-generation victim; his father served in the A Luoi Valley and was sprayed by Agent Orange.

Muoi suffers from the painful Spina Bifida an illness that the former President Clinton in his statement in the White House on May 28th 1996, said was due to the use by US forces of Agent Orange. For the sons and daughters of the US Veterans who come down with Spinal Bifida they will be compensated. For young Muoi, he must wait for the ruling of the Appeal Court. His struggle is the struggle of millions of Vietnamese Victims.

Such is the extent of the crime carried out by the chemical companies who manufactured Agent Orange and the US Government for allowing its use on Vietnam.

I appeal to all readers and friends of the Victims of Agent Orange, we cannot allow justice for the victims to be delayed too long; they have waited for thirty-six years. Each of us must continue the struggle and increase our work in the campaign for justice. Millions around the world have pledged their support by signing petitions in many countries. We cannot, and must not, fail the victims.

You can help them by signing the petition:
http://www.petitiononline.com/AOVN/

Len Aldis honoured by Vietnamese Association

THE VIETNAM Association of Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin (VAVA) held a ceremony on 12th June to admit Len Aldis, secretary of the Britain-Vietnam Friendship Society as an honorary member.
Len Aldis expressed his pleasure to join the association. He stressed that the active efforts of VAVA helped to attract increasing concern from people at home and around the world about the consequences of Agent Orange and its serious effects on the environment and people in Vietnam.
“Supporters of Agent Orange victims find VAVA a good way of expressing their concerns and raise aid to help them,” he said.
Len Aldis, 76, first came to Vietnam in 1989. Since then he has carried out many activities, even “more active than many Vietnamese people” as noted by VAVA Vice President Nguyen Trong Nhan, to help Agent Orange victims in their daily lives and in the struggle for justice.
He is the author of a website petition, which is designed to collect signatures of those who want to support Vietnamese Agent Orange victims.
Nguyen Trong Nhan said that it would take a long time to list the initiatives worked out by Len to support the victims.
Len has visited colleges in Britain, giving speeches and showing films about Agent Orange victims in Vietnam. He has also mobilised British MPs for support towards the victims.
His website petition http://www.petitiononline.com/AOVN/ has been signed by over 700,000 people around the world, much more than expected. This shows that his patience has helped many people to gain an understanding of Agent Orange and its serious consequences.

Len is the founder of the Britain-Vietnam Friendship Society which since its foundation in 1992 has, and will continue with its work and projects in raising awareness and funds for the Vietnamese people, especially those suffering from the effects of Agent Orange. BVFS campaigns seeking justice for the victims of Agent Orange has led to Len Aldis being invited to speak at a number of universities in Britain and in Vietnam. He has also spoken on the issue at public meetings in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, France and Vietnam.In addition, the Society has shown international award winning documentary films on Agent Orange such as Battle’s Poison Cloud and Path to Justice in which Len appeared. Another film Agent Orange, a personal requiem” by Masako Sakata, has recently been released as has The Last Ghost of War by an American company, Janet Gardner Group.

Perspectives for Scotland

Review

by London Scot

Communist Party of Scotland: Perspectives for Scottish Independence, Glasgow: CPS, April 2007 pp.31. £1.50 plus 50p P&P. Available from the Communist Party of Scotland 4th Floor, Room 3A, 52 St Enoch Square, Glasgow or from Housmans Bookshop, 5 Caledonian Road, London N1 9DX.


THE COVER of this pamphlet states that it "reflects the views of some comrades in the Communist Party of Scotland. We do not offer this pamphlet as anything more than a modest contribution to the debate". However this does not discuss the pros and cons of independence for Scotland, but instead forcefully argues the case for Scotland’s independence. It was written before the recent elections to the Scottish Parliament saw Labour lose control to a minority Scottish National Party administration and it is already showing its age.
For those not familiar with the ins and outs of Scottish politics it is worth noting that the CPS was founded in 1992 by a number of veteran members of the old Communist Party of Great Britain who remained within the party until the CPGB dissolved itself the previous year.
There are three main sections to the pamphlet. In the first CPS general secretary, retired architect Eric Canning denounces the present "neo-imperialist" state British state and the "fractured British left" who seek to capture it rather than break it. One wonders why a body which calls itself a Communist Party refrains from making even the mildest criticism of the economic policies of the main pro-independence party the Scottish National Party. The SNP has been has been promising lower corporation tax to benefit big business. The same party has been bank-rolled by several leading businessmen including Brian Soutar, the notoriously homophobic owner of the ruthless bus company Stagecoach. It is reasonable to conclude that many promoters of independence see it has heralding in a future Scotland very different from that promised here. While the pamphlet makes repeated and justified attacks on Labour Party policies it might be worth remembering that it was the same Labour Party which brought the Scottish Parliament into being.
It is worth noting that some sections of the Scottish trade union movement have toyed with left-wing Scottish nationalism as recommended here. Some branches of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union did indeed affiliate to the Scottish Socialist Party. It is not clear what the RMT gained as a result of this dalliance. As a result they were automatically disaffiliated from the Labour Party, thus losing any formal influence. In the event the SSP split as a result of a colourful court case involving their former leader and were wiped out in last month’s elections.
Secondly Maggie Chetty offers "Reflections on an Independent Scotland" in which she finds space to applaud the absurd "Tartan Day" initiative aimed at persuading rich Americans with Scottish sounding surnames to take their holidays in Scotland. The great Scottish communist poet Hugh MacDiarmid rightly poured scorn on that sort of nonsense. Modern Scottish communists should follow suit instead of welcoming it.
The final major article by Rhona Fleming takes an unbelievably rosy view of the Scottish economy, present and in an imaginary future. The author starts by welcoming the fact that Glasgow is a "Fair trade city". This means little more than ensuring that only fair trade tea and coffee is served in the City Chambers. Charity mongering does next to nothing for the tea-pickers of the Kenya and India. The main beneficiaries of such policies are the latte drinking classes who invariably gain a warm feeling of self righteousness. Claims that Glasgow is a presently a "lively vibrant city which has reinvented its image" merely regurgitate the purple prose of glossy tourist brochures. While there are now plenty of trendy wine bars in central
Glasgow, they invariably have homeless Big Issue sellers outside them.
There can be no doubt that Scotland could, if it were carried in a referendum, hold its own as an independent state.
Support for independence can be found among sections of the ultra left and those on the free market. But the CPS assumes far too easily that such a rearrangement of the constitutional furniture will inevitably have progressive consequences.

Stop the deployment of new US bases in Poland and the Czech Republic

Joint statement of European communist and workers' parties

Stop the deployment of new US bases in Poland and the Czech Republic,
Romania and Bulgaria

We, the undersigned European communist and workers parties, express our strong protest on the deployment of the US " antimissile " bases in Poland and the Czech Republic, as well as so called ”ordinary military bases” in Romania and Bulgaria.

These plans, emphatically rejected by the peoples of these countries but also by a growing movement in all European countries are in break with the international agreements on troupes and nuclear arms reduction and with the broad demand for disarmament, collective security and peace.

We reject the official reasons given for this "National missile defense system" as pretexts and its projection as a "defensive" one, as pure propaganda.

The real goal of the NMD project is to further strengthen the military position and supremacy of USA by creating new facilities for attack on other countries without treat of retaliation.

Already the USA is the biggest world producer and owner of weapons of mass destruction. Its aggressive policy, with the support of NATO, causes wars, imperialist interventions and instability. With the doctrine of the "preventive wars" and labeling nations opposing its policy as "rogue states" and "axis of evil" the American war machine is the biggest threat to world peace.

The eventual realization of the "anti-missile shield" will lead to new efforts of the US Administration to strengthen the position of the "sole global superpower" implementing the imperialist ambitions as persecutor, judge and executor in the international relations.

Some initiatives by other European governments, by Nato and the EU in support of these plans are relevant for the dangers in face of all the European peoples, resulting from the same aggressive policy, no matter if it's rooted in the US or EU global ambitions.

From now it's more than obvious that the new US bases will accelerate arms race and militarization, foster the antagonism between the imperialist powers and lead to more massive attacks on democratic and social rights.

This is the reason for the legitimated broad opposition to this policy.

We salute and express our solidarity with the large and effective actions developed by the communists, progressive forces, organizations and anti-war movements in Poland, in the Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria and other countries against the deployment of the US missiles and imperialism.

This courageous protest is an important contribution to the growing resistance in Europe and in the world against war, foreign military bases and Nato.

Expressing our strong determination to enhance our struggle, cooperation and solidarity we demand:

Immediate stop of the plans regarding the deployment of the new US missile and radar bases in Poland and Czech Republic, as well as the military bases in Romania and Bulgaria.

Immediate stop of any move by national governments, European Union and NATO facilitating the implementation of the US plans.

Ratification of the treaty on troops reduction in Europe and the total ban of all nuclear weapons.

Broad support to all actions against the legitimization and the deployment of the US missiles and bases.


The parties:

1. Communist Initiative of Austria
2. Communist Party of Belarus
3. Workers Party of Belgium
4. Workers' Communist Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina
5. Communist Party of Britain
6. New Communist Party of Britain
7. Party of Bulgarian Communists
8. AKEL, Cyprus
9. Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia
10. Communist Party of Denmark
11. Communist Party in Denmark
12. Danish Communist Party
13. Communist Party of Finland
14. Unified Communist Party of Georgia
15. German Communist Party
16. Communist Party of Greece
17. Hungarian Communist Workers Party
18. Communist Party of Ireland
19. Party of the Italian Communists
20. Socialist Party of Latvia
21. Socialist Party of Lithuania
22. Communist Party of Luxembourg
23. Communist Party of Macedonia
24. New Communist Party of the Netherlands
25. Communist Party of Norway
26. Communist Party of Poland
27. Portuguese Communist Party
28. Socialist Alliance Party (Romania)
29. Communist Party of the Russian Federation
30. Communist Workers¹ Party of Russia
31. Communist Party of Slovakia
32. Communist Party of Peoples of Spain
33. Communist Party of Sweden
34. Swiss Communist Party ­ les communistes
35. Communist Party of Turkey
36. Labour Party of Turkey
37. Communist Party of Ukraine
38. Union of Communists of Ukraine
39. New Communist Party of Yugoslavia

Right out of their minds!

The history of organised fascism and racism in Britain since 1945

by Daphne Liddle

FASCISM and racism are not exactly the same thing but in Britain they have historically been intertwined and they do have common elements. All fascist movements have proclaimed aggressive nationalism and militarism. They proclaim that inequalities of both nations and individuals are real and beneficial, and the idea that the improvement of humanity depends on the "less fit" failing and dying out.
Since 1945 in Britain most fascist organisations have combined racism with their fascism. Within that racism there have been two deep but connected strands. First there is the traditional British imperialist racism arising from the history of colonialism. This sees the peoples subdued by British imperialism in Africa, India and Far East – mainly people of a different colour skin – not as inherently evil but as intellectually inferior and childlike; needing to be ruled for their own good.
Secondly the anti-Semitic strand sees Jews as highly intelligent but very sinister. This links in with a long tradition of anti-Semitism more prevalent Catholic in Europe than in Britain. The underlying anti-Semitism that predominates in Britain’s fascist and racist organisations indicates that their roots are in European fascism and Nazism.
Publicly the fascists deny racism and anti-Semitism but new recruits are often drawn aside and asked them if they think it is really the blacks who are the root of the problem. "After all," they argue, "the blacks are not intelligent enough to be a serious problem without a powerful secret intelligence behind it all". They told all the conspiracy theories dating back to the publication in the 19th century of the fraudulent Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, and how western civilisation is threatened by a world conspiracy of Jews, communists, Freemasons and even mystical extra-terrestrial beings.
They invariably claim that the Holocaust never happened, that it was an invention of Jewish propagandists who used it to inveigle western powers to fight against Nazi Germany.
Just after the war the ideology of fascism and Nazism had taken a battering but there still remained two active strands who kept their heads down at first. They re-emerged when immigration into Britain from the West Indies, Africa and the Indian sub-continent provided opportunities for recruitment on the basis of anti-black racism.
Britain’s National Socialist Movement was led by Colin Jordan and published a paper called National Socialist. Behind Jordan was his mentor, Arnold Spencer Leese, a man who described himself as an "anti-Jewish camel doctor". He was a former army veterinary surgeon who had served in the Middle East. From 1929 to 1939 he led the 200-strong Imperial Fascist League, which was overshadowed by Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. Leese regarded Mosley as an opportunist Johnny-cum-lately and "a kosher fascist".
The Imperial Fascist League in the 1930s was extremely pro-German, adopting the swastika in preference to the Italian fascist symbol, the fasces. Leese favoured the extermination of the Jews but, suspecting the British public would never support this, he publicly advocated their deportation to Madagascar. After his release from imprisonment in the Second World War, he published a book, The Jewish War of Survival, which claimed that although the Jews and Freemasons had defeated Hitler, a determined policy of anti-Semitism could still succeed. Leese also published a newsletter, Gothic Ripples.
Jordan was an avid student of Leese’s conspiracy theories. In 1954 Jordan joined the League of Empire Loyalists, run by AK Chesterton but was expelled in 1957 after accusing the League of being soft on Jews. In 1958 he founded the White Defence League, which he ran from his headquarters, "Arnold Leese House" in Notting Hill.
In the same year the Notting Hill riots started against immigrants from the West Indies, Africa and the Indian sub-continent; they persisted through the summer of 1958 and lasted sporadically into 1959. Jordan took full advantage, holding street rallies nearly every night, whipping up the violence. He published a newspaper called Black and White News calling for repatriation.
Oswald Mosley was also doing his best to exploit the racial tensions with his Union Movement. He had spent much of the Second World War interned under Defence Regulation 18b.
In 1947 he published a book, The Alternative, a plan to save western civilisation from collapse. It called for a united Europe to be a third force between communism in the east and western capitalism.
There were several tiny, fragmented and unstable fascist groups about then, including the Briton’s Patriotic Society, the British National Party (not the modern one), the New Order Group, the Union of British Freedom, the 18b Detainees’ Fund, the Order of the Sons of St George, and others. In 1949 the Mosley’s Union Movement emerged from the chaos taking a stand against the demands of the Palestinian Jews but his undisguised anti-Semitism won his all round condemnation in the press. He had to flee the country and live in County Cork for three years, where he published a literary journal called The European.
In 1953 he returned to Britain and began electioneering, warning that a massive economic crisis was due and exploiting prejudice against immigrants from the West Indies. A year after the Notting Hill riots he stood as a candidate for North Kensington, campaigning for compulsory repatriation of immigrants but came bottom in the poll.
Disillusioned, he gave up on elections and changed tactics to seek international alliances in Europe. In 1962 he organised a "Conference of Venice" with various small European fascist groups.
Leese had higher status among international fascists because of his official recognition from the only remaining segment of the original German Nazi Party – the NSDAP Ausland or overseas section – which still operates in New Jersey in America.
In 1962 Jordan held a "Free Britain from Jewish Control" rally in Trafalgar Square and three weeks later Mosley held a similar rally there. Six thousand people turned up and most of them were anti-fascists. Jeffrey Hamm’s warm-up speech was drowned in a hail of copper coins, eggs and rotten vegetables. Fights broke out between Mosley’s supporters versus Communists, anti-fascists, anarchists, members of the Committee of 100 and the police. Mosley never got to speak.
Shortly after, the same battle was re-enacted in Manchester. He tried stomping round his old haunts in London’s East End but met with serious physical resistance. After that Mosley’s movement faded from the scene and Mosley went to live in France – though he did return occasionally to visit old fascist colleagues.
The League of Empire Loyalists was also involved in stirring up racism and so was John Bean, leader of a tiny organisation called the National Labour Party. It merged with Jordan’s White Defence League to form another British National Party in 1960 with Norfolk landowner Andrew Fountaine as president.
Fountaine had fought for Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Jordan became the national organiser and Bean was his deputy. This BNP opposed democracy as weak "decisions by head counting" and campaigned for repatriation of immigrants, with all Jews to be deported either to Israel or Madagascar.
Later that year Jordan founded "Spearhead" a paramilitary elite corps inside the BNP, which conducted exercises on Andrew Fountaine’s Norfolk estate while wearing imitation Nazi uniforms. The foundation of Spearhead split the BNP in 1962, with Bean and Fountaine concerned about its seditious and illegal nature. Jordan joined forces with John Tyndall, a former member of Bean’s NLP and the two tried to steer the BNP more firmly towards out-and-out Hitlerism.
Bean and Fountaine tried to unseat Jordan as BNP leader but failed because the organisation lacked internal democratic structures and because the headquarters, Arnold Leese House, was the property of Leese’s widow. She regarded Jordan as her adopted son and would tolerate no move against him.
Bean and Fountaine were forced out but they took most of the membership with them to found a new BNP, publishing a journal called Combat. Jordan and Tyndall hosted an international conference of National Socialists in Gloucestershire and founded the World Union of National Socialists (WUNS).
On 16th August 1962 Jordan and Tyndall, with others, were convicted under the Public Order Act with attempts to set up a paramilitary force. In 1963, on Hitler’s birthday, 20th April, Jordan launched yet another organisation, the National Socialist Movement, with about 20 members. Tyndall became national organiser with Mrs Leese as vice president. Within a year this tiny group had split after a clash between Jordan and Tyndall over the French neo-Nazi Francoise Dior. She had been engaged to Tyndall but while he was in prison she married Jordan. She later eloped from Jordan with her 19-year-old secretary, Terence Robert, "to shock Jordan into being a great leader".
Tyndall and Jordan also had differences in outlook between the "German" and "British" factions of their movement. Tyndall then founded the Greater Britain Movement while Jordan turned the NSM into the British Movement.
In 1967 Chesterton of the League of Empire Loyalists founded the National Front (NF), which merged with the Racial Preservation Society led by Robin Beauclaire. Martin Webster was its national organiser. Its initial policies were purely anti-immigration and opposition to international treaties like Nato and the United Nations. Webster had worked as one the racketeer slum landlord Rackman’s bully boys. He had also worked politically with Tyndall but there was animosity between them. Webster was a competent organiser but overtly homosexual, and Tyndall did not approve.
Around this time Webster openly boasted his wages were coming from the South African Apartheid regime but complained that he was underpaid. Later, in 1979, anti-fascists were able to expose that Webster received money from the Special Branch in exchange for information about the NF. This exposure helped to break up the NF.
For the first few years of the NF Webster and Chesterton maintained a bar on overt national socialists joining to keep Tyndall out. But individual members of Tyndall’s Greater Britain Movement infiltrated the NF, the ban was lifted, Tyndall joined and quickly took over.
The NF grew quite quickly in the 1970s to around 20,000 members in 1974. It stood in elections and came third in a number of parliamentary by-elections. It also developed links with the Ulster Volunteer Force and some members were involved in gunrunning for the UVF.
The fascists targeted young working class football fans, encouraging them towards extreme partisanship for their teams and nationalism. The fascists were a major factor in the upsurge of football hooliganism. They found that young lads who were bored and alienated and ready for a fight were ideal recruitment fodder.
There were frequent clashes with anti-fascists; especially as the Anti-Nazi League and Searchlight continually exposed the NF’s neo-Nazi links. These links led to a split in 1974 when new recruits who were more racist than fascist voted John Kingsley Read into leadership. This did not last long as the intimidation tactics of Tyndall’s "honour guard" restored him to the leadership. Read left to found the short-lived National Party.
There were a number of other related groups around at the time. The League of St George regarded itself as a more intellectual fascist and anti-Semitic organisation, which had links with some very wealthy people, including in the intelligence services.
At this time there was a deep division in Europe between the Catholic and Protestant fascists, which manifested itself in regular running battles in the town of Dixmude in Belgium. The NF, with its UVF links, attacked the IRA as "papists who breed like rabbits" – which upset the Spanish and Italian fascists. Eventually the Belgian authorities banned these rallies. The following year there was a violent, fatal football riot at the Heysel stadium, not far from Dixmude, between Protestant and Catholic football supporters.
Another shady group around in the 1960s and 70s was Column 88. This was an umbrella group of sinister, wealthy fascists and anti-Semites with international links who organised joint military training groups and liaisons. It is now thought that this was the British wing of what was known as Gladio in Europe. After the Second World War the western allies, pre-empting the Cold War, set up clandestine paramilitary groups in most western European countries to fight communism and prevent communist governments ever being elected.
By and large these groups were never activated for their main purpose, though in the 1960s when Italian communist Enrico Berlinguer seemed set to win a general election, he was coerced into backing down for fear of a right-wing coup. The Gladio groups seem to have had American financial backing; their members were mostly racists, fascists, nationalists, anti-Semites and racketeers.
The National Front’s real neo-Nazi agenda was confirmed in 1974 with the publication of a booklet, Did Six Million Really Die, by leading NF member Richard Verrall, under the pseudonym Richard E Harwood. He claimed that the Nazi Holocaust was a fabrication and attacked war crimes trials, including the trial of Adolf Eichmann. He based his arguments on a numbers game, claiming that the number of Jews in Europe under Nazi occupation had never exceeded 2.5 million (this figure is contradicted by all reputable sources, including the Nazis’ own figures; they reckoned 11 million Jews were living in Europe in 1942).
These arguments based on numbers are always spurious because of the different definitions of who is and who is not Jewish. It is likely that many of the people who were murdered as Jews would not have thought of themselves as Jewish. This does not lessen the crime of their murder. Probably there will never be exact numbers for the people who were murdered in the Holocaust. There is a consensus estimate of around six million Jews murdered, plus another five million, including socialists, communists, trade unionists, gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, people with physical and mental disabilities and others. Verrall claimed the Holocaust claim was a tool against "the white race" and that the concentration camps were in fact humane work camps.
Another infamous denier of the Holocaust is so-called historian David Irving. Irving started propagating neo-Nazi views when he edited a student magazine at Imperial College in 1959, which he filled with far-right nonsense. He later published a book, The Destruction of Dresden, praising the SS and attacking the RAF as war criminals, which was followed by several more spurious histories of the Second World War. Irving set up the Clarendon Club, which held secretive dinners among leading neo-Nazis. He was a great friend of many neo-Nazis, including their favourite printer, Anthony Hancock of Brighton. He also published a few editions of a journal, Focal Point. Since then his adventures in the libel courts and in the Austrian penal system have been well documented in the press.
In 1979 the National Front splintered after Margaret Thatcher made her infamous "swamping" speech. There were two reasons for this. One was Tyndall’s electoral adventurism; the other was the withdrawal of funds from the shady international body, known as the World Anti-Communist League (WACL).
Former member Geoffrey Stewart-Smith described WACL as "largely a collection of Nazis, fascists, anti-Semites, sellers of forgeries, vicious racists and corrupt self-seekers". It was formed in 1966 in Taipei, Taiwan, under the initiative of Chiang Kai-Shek and a group of exiled Ukrainian former Nazi SS men from the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which initiated the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations.
WACL used to stage conferences around the globe and had funding from various very rich South Koreans, the Sultan of Brunei, the Saudi oil sheikhs and the CIA. It was backed by Ronald Reagan and played a role in forming and funding the Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua and was linked to the notorious Colonel Oliver North. It allocated funds to extreme right-wing anti-communists around the globe. In Britain it channelled funds through Lady Jane Birdwood, a rabid anti-Semite and friend of many fascist and racist groups. She directed its funds in Britain to a number of organisations, including the National Front.
But in the late 70s the United States government started to feel embarrassed about funding out-and-out neo-Nazis and cranks. In 1980 former US Army and CIA officer Major General John K Singlaub was appointed to clean up WACL. He withdrew the funding route from Birdwood and instead directed it to slightly more respectable organisations around the extreme right-wing fringes of the Conservative Party such as WISE, the British League of Rights and the Monday Club. This was a major blow to the National Front finances.
The NF split into fragments: there was the Flag group, the New National Front, the Catholic-dominated Third Way group, which had connections with Italian fascist terrorists, and others. Fountaine challenged Tyndall’s leadership after the adventurist election disaster. Although Tyndall saw off the challenge, Fountaine and his followers split from the party to form the NF Constitutional Movement.
After these splits Tyndall was expelled and replaced as leader by Andrew Brons. Tyndall formed his own New National Front, which was forced by court action to change its name. Tyndall renamed it the "British National Party", which has since pushed out the NF as the dominant neo-Nazi party in Britain.
The NF rapidly declined during the 1980s, although it retained some support in the West Midlands and in parts of London (usually centred on the entourage of Terry Blackham). It tried in vain to gain support in the north of Ireland on several occasions.
The NF lost some of its racist skinhead support because of the group’s support for non-white radicals such as Louis Farrakhan and Ayatollah Khomeini. Griffin and Holland tried (unsuccessfully) to enlist the financial aid of Libya’s Colonel Gadaffi, but this was rejected once the Libyans found out about the NF’s reputation as fascist (a third of Libya’s male population was exterminated by Mussolini’s fascist troops during World War II). Members moved either to the British National Party, the rapidly declining British Movement, or to the White Noise umbrella group "Blood and Honour" that is associated with the commercial production of neo-Nazi music.
The party split again during the late 1980s between the "Flag Group" and the "Political Soldier" ideas of young extremists such as Nick Griffin, Patrick Harrington, Phil Edwards and Derek Holland, who were known as the Official National Front or the Third Way. Under the leadership of the Political Soldiers, the NF quit electioneering in favour of a return to clandestine paramilitary training groups.
The NF Flag Group contained the traditionalists loyal to Brons such as Ian Anderson, Martin Wingfield, Tina Wingfield and others. They ran candidates under the NF banner in the 1987 general election. In the 1990s the Flag Group declined as the BNP grew. The NF has continued to decline although it still exists as a small party, and fielded seven candidates at the 1997 general election.
John Tyndall founded the modern British National Party in 1980. In 1987 it set up headquarters in Welling, in south-east London. This was followed by an upsurge of racist attacks in the area including at least three racist murders: Rolan Adams, Rohit Dougal and Stephen Lawrence. There were fierce anti-fascist campaigns against the headquarters, with a series of mass protests. Eventually a Labour council was elected in Bexley, held a public inquiry into the effect of the BNP "bunker" on the local community and then gave the BNP its marching orders.
The BNP developed from within itself a group of thugs and football hooligans who called themselves Combat 18, led by Charlie Sargent. At first they acted as an "honour guard" for Tyndall and his coterie but later their violence brought such disrepute on the BNP they were thrown out. C18 fell apart over money generated by Nazi music bands in the "Blood and Honour" outfit. Sargent was apparently selling information to the Special Branch and mistakenly believed this gave him legal immunity when he murdered a fellow fascist.
The BNP began to divide in the mid-1990s as Tyndall lost popularity. By this time a seriously ambitious Nick Griffin had joined the BNP with aims to "modernise" it and make it electable. In Stratford, east London in 1997, as Tyndall approached a BNP conference at the Swan pub, he was assailed by half a dozen anti-fascists. He received minor injuries but the incident is notable because at the time the pub was full of BNP members who could see what was happening but not one came to the aid of their leader.
Soon after that Griffin ousted Tyndall. Tyndall’s clique cried foul and accusations of financial corruption flew back and forth. Since then Griffin has tried desperately to change the public image of the BNP, but anti-fascists like Searchlight keep exposing the deep neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism that is still there.
The BNP now has just over 50 councillors; this May they failed to make the breakthrough they were hoping for, gaining eight seats and losing eight.

Strategy for the Indian Revolution

by Kumar Sarkar

IT HAS TAKEN 87 years for the communist movement in India to recognise that the Indian society has its own specific qualities that need serious attention, if we are to construct a suitable strategy for the Indian Revolution.
When we look at the Indian society today, we note four basic problems: problems relating to class, caste, ethnicity and gender. Of these, the last three have special relationships with feudalism. And establishing the relationships of these three with the former, the class, either separately or in some combination, constitutes the central programmatic task.
The Communist Party of India (CPI) was established in 1920. But it was not until about 15-20 years ago that the communist movement addressed any problems strategically other than the class. The young communist movement adopted the European model of feudalism and its transition to capitalism. The situation was made worse by considering the Indian Revolution either in terms of the Soviet or the Chinese model, mostly the former. In 1951, in a major bi-lateral discussion with four central leaders of the CPI, in Moscow, Stalin said, "Your people copy our revolution. But these are different stages. The experience of the other fraternal parties needs to be critically taken into account and this adapted to the specific conditions of India."
Marx wrote about the "Asiatic Mode of Production", which is regarded by many Indian Marxists as similar to, but not exactly the same as, the Indian pre-capitalist mode of production. Marx also made other references to the specific qualities of Indian society, but it was the European model that was followed all along.
A few weeks ago the Communist Party of India (Maoists) had their congress, in which they agreed: "The Congress unanimously resolved that in India the feudal/semi-feudal society has its own specific qualities, in as much as it is deeply interwoven with brahminical ideology and the oppressive and discriminatory caste system."
The phrase or the concept of"brahminical ideology" has thus appeared for the first time in an official communist programme in India. The brahminical ideology is essentially the ideology of Hinduism, based on the caste system. It has two principal cornerstones: (a) treating caste-based social hierarchy of inequality and discriminations as natural, (b) their acceptance without opposition and protests. These are achieved by the philosophical stance of fatalism and philosophical theory of "Karmafal" or results of deeds done in previous life.
How these four aspects of class, caste, ethnicity and gender influence the programmatic tasks of the Indian Revolution is at the heart of the divisions in the communist movement in India today.
• The old sections of the movement represented by the CPI and the CPI
(Marxist) still fail to recognise the strategic character of caste, ethnicity and gender. They still view these as tactical matters, as "issues", important but not of strategic significance. In fact, it is only after the dalits or the so-called untouchables and women, particularly the dalits, taking up serious fights during the last two decades against the oppressive system of Hindu apartheid in some parts of India, that these so-called issues have started to enter the CPI (Marxist) programme in some form or the other.
• The Maoists, however, have chosen tribal peasants as their starting
point. The tribals mostly live in jungles, are landless peasants, and worst victims of social discrimination, being treated as outcastes. The Maoists also support the demands of autonomy of different ethnic nationalities, mostly living in India’s eastern hill regions. There is a geographic pattern in India’s ethnic diversity.
This is, of course, only the beginning of a new strategy. India is a vast country with considerable industrial development and a large and growing working class living in numerous towns and cities and with very uneven industrial developments. Hence, the capture of power has to be multi-centred, but with a central strategy and with two main components:
rural and urban.
• The rural component primarily consists of forcible occupation of
lands by landless peasants and moving towards establishing alternative or parallel power locally and regionally, with the aim of creating "base areas". Such actions can start whenever and wherever possible. Based in the peasantry, the power must be politically oriented with "worker-peasant alliance".
The rural component has to take into consideration the role of the brahminical ideology.
• The urban component consists of establishing mass organisations of
industrial working class and non-manual workers, known in India as the lower middle classes, with a political orientation of "worker-peasant-lower middle class alliance". The objective of urban struggles is to prepare for eventual and final insurrections, when the urban areas have been surrounded by armed peasantry.
There is no strategy yet that deals with the both of these components adequately.
The Indian Revolution, as it can be appreciated, is at the stage of the democratic revolution. The Indian democratic revolution itself has had its own specific qualities. In my personal opinion, it was started by the rising Hindu bourgeoisie in Bengal, which soon became defeated by the Hindu revivalists there. One writer, Suranjan Das, has summed it up succinctly: "A particular paradox in the history of freedom struggle against the British Raj in the subcontinent lies in the fact that the maturing of mainstream Indian nationalism was almost synonymous with the strengthening of communalism in Indian politics, which in the long-run contributed to the partition of India along religious lines".
The Hindu revivalism has ended up in Hindu fascism as a major enemy, though it may not be the principal enemy. This is an outline of the problems of the strategy of the Indian Revolution.

Solidarity with the communists and the working class in Turkey

Join statement of communist and workers' parties

We, the undersigned communist and workers parties, vehemently condemn the police attacks against the tens of thousands workers demonstrating on the 30th anniversary of the May Day 1977 in Taksim Square in Istanbul.

We express our full solidarity with the communists, the trade unionists, the patriotic and progressive forces and demand the immediate release from custody of all arrested and the punishment of the responsible for the police riots. We support the demand by trade unions and political organizations that ask the resignation of the governor of Istanbul.

Once again the terror deployed in Istanbul demonstrated the hypocrisy governing the European Union, apart of course of the relevance of the NATO “human rights values” governing the allies.

We declare our full support with this “other Turkey”, the Turkey of the struggle for social and democratic rights for the working people, far away from the division between “ secular” and “Islamic” forces both serving the interests of big capital , US and EU.

The aim of the reactionary forces is to destroy the memory of the heroically struggle of the working class of Turkey and the sacrifices of the 36 workers killed on May Day 1977 on Taksim Square.

The brutal attacks against the workers and trade unionists in Turkey are attacks against the working class in all countries.

We appeal to the working people and youth, to the trade union movement, all progressive minded people in our countries to strengthen the protest movement against the brutal attack by the Turkish government and to reinforce the internationalist solidarity with the workers and youth in Turkey.

The Parties

Communist Party of Belarus
Workers’ Party, Belgium
Communist Party of Bulgaria
Party of Bulgarian Communists
New Communist Party of Britain
Socialist Workers’ Party of Croatia
AKEL, Cyprus
Communist Party of Denmark
Communist Party in Denmark
Communist Party of Estonia
Communist Party of Finland
Unified Communist Party of Georgia
Communist Party of Greece
Communist Party of Ireland
Party of the Italian Communists
Socialist Party of Latvia
Socialist Party of Lithuania
Communist Party of Luxemburg, KPL
New Communist Party of Netherlands
Communist Party of Norway
Communist Party of Poland
Portuguese Communist Party
Socialist Alliance Party, Romania
Communist Party of the Russian Federation
Communist Workers Party of Russia-Party of Communists of Russia
New Communist Party of Yugoslavia, Serbia
Communist Party of Slovakia
Communist Party of Peoples of Spain
Communist Party of Sweden
Communist Party, Turkey
Communist Party of Ukraine
Union of Communists of Ukraine

9th May 2007

Stop the escalation of the anti-communist and anti-democratic attacks in Europe

Joint statement of the international communist movement

The decision made by the government of Estonia to remove the monument honoring the memory 270.000 Red Army soldiers dead in the antifascist fight followed by brutal police attacks in Tallin-, the acts of vandalism of the grave of Janos Kadar in Budapest on 2 May, the implementation of the new “lustration law” in Poland targeting 700.000 people, the anticommunist Romanian National Security Law, the anticommunist statement of the Romanian president Traian Basescu and the partial rehabilitation of the former fascist Romanian prime minister I.Antonescu are only some of the new anticommunist and antidemocratic attacks occurred in the last time in Europe.

Our parties vehemently protest against these measures which are directed not only against the communists, the heroic antifascist fighters, against the fighters of the international brigades in the Spanish civil war and the antifascist victory in the WW II but also against elementary democratic rights and liberties.

We consider accountable the European Union, having in mind several statements and decisions preparing the ground for these developments and for denying any measure to stop this situation.

On the occasion of the big campaign against the Anticommunist Motion in the Council of Europe in January 2006 our parties and other progressive forces from all countries warned on the real aims and goals of the attacks against communists and their ideology.

The aim of these measures is the attempt made by the ruling forces in the European countries, in the EU, NATO and the other imperialist centers to intimidate and to counter the growing resistances against the anti social anti laboral policies followed by the governments and their supporters.

In face of the growing influence of the ideas of the October Socialist Revolution and of the achievements, despite the mistakes and errors of the socialism in the 20th century, in sharp contrast with the every day’s reality for millions, the attempts to rewrite history and to escalate state sponsored anticommunism will increase.

In spite of all this we are confident that nobody, no mater if political force, government, NATO or EU will be able to stop the impact of the communist ideas in the working class and youth, simply because they proved more than ever to be true and the way for the realization of the popular aspirations and demands.

That’s way we will multiply our efforts for joint action, in support of the popular struggles, first of all of the working class, of a large movement in support of democratic rights and liberties.

It’s time, for all progressive minded people in Europe to remind on the catastrophic impact of the same these policies in the history of our continent.

It’s time to vigorously react and condemn by any mean any antidemocratic attack, any anticommunist measure.


We demand

• Abolition of all anticommunist laws , decisions and governmental actions condemning the communist ideology, the communist symbols as well as the persecutions against the communists, the antifascists and the fighters for socialism.

• Severe punishment of the responsible for the vandalisms to graves and monuments honouring the memory of the antifascist fighters.

• To set an end to the massive campaign of terrorizing millions of people for their political opinions.

• Abolition of the laws and other decisions banning the activity of the communist parties

• To stop the campaigns aiming to defame and distort the real history of the anti nazi and antifascist fight in the education and mass media.

• To stop the anticommunist campaigns of changing names of public places honoring the heroic struggle against fascism.


The parties

Communist Party of Belarus
Workers’ Party, Belgium
Communist Party of Bulgaria
Party of Bulgarian Communists
New Communist Party of Britain
Socialist Workers’ Party of Croatia
AKEL, Cyprus
Communist Party of Denmark
Communist Party in Denmark
Communist Party of Estonia
Communist Party of Finland
Unified Communist Party of Georgia
Communist Party of Greece
Communist Party of Ireland
Party of the Italian Communists
Socialist Party of Latvia
Socialist Party of Lithuania
Communist Party of Luxemburg, KPL
New Communist Party of Netherlands
Communist Party of Norway
Communist Party of Poland
Portuguese Communist Party
Socialist Alliance Party, Romania
Communist Party of the Russian Federation
Communist Workers Party of Russia-Party of Communists of Russia
New Communist Party of Yugoslavia, Serbia
Communist Party of Slovakia
Communist Party of Peoples of Spain
Communist Party of Sweden
Communist Party, Turkey
Communist Party of Ukraine
Union of Communists of Ukraine

9th May 2007

Kim Il Sung -- A hero to remember

by Andy Brooks

KOREAN PEOPLE on both sides of the divided peninsula and amongst the overseas Korean community paid tribute to Kim Il Sung last week on the 95th anniversary of his birth on 15th April 1912. Kim Il Sung was an outstanding communist leader and thinker who will always be remembered by working people all over the world.
The great leader, comrade Kim Il Sung, was one of the giants of communism – the man who led the people in a war of liberation from Japanese occupation and then defended that victory against invasion by the United States and its allies in 1950, using the fledgling United Nations as a puppet.
He then went on to lead his country in building its own, independent socialism, steering a careful path during the period of Sino-Soviet ideological conflict and managing to remain on good terms with both parties.
And after the demise of the Soviet Union and the loss of the eastern European socialist countries, an enormous setback for communism globally, when parties were becoming demoralised and failing around the world, Kim Il Sung stopped the rot by summoning a global conference of communist and workers’ parties in Pyongyang in 1992.
When Kim Il Sung formed the Down with Imperialism Union at the age of 14 no one, least of all the Japanese imperialists, could have dreamt that within 20 years Korea would be free.
Kim Il Sung saw the hopelessness of the sectarians, flunkeyists, dogmatists and factionalists who called themselves communists in the 1920s. So he decided to form a communist movement from the youth and the grass-roots of the villages and factories, and surprised everyone with the emergence of the mighty Korean communist movement that led the people to victory in 1945.
When Kim Il Sung gathered a small band of heroes to form the first guerrilla units to take on the Japanese Army no one could have imagined that this would become the People’s Army that brought the American imperialists to their knees begging for an armistice in 1953.
Kim Il Sung not only grasped Marxism-Leninism but he applied it to the concrete conditions of the Korean people. He knew that once the masses realised their own strength they would become unstoppable. He knew that serving the people was the be-all and end-all for the Korean communists and for the Workers’ Party of Korea that he launched in 1945. He developed Korean style socialism into the Juché idea – which elevates the philosophical principles of Marxism-Leninism as well as its economic theories – and focuses on the development of each individual worker, who can only be truly free as part of the collective will of the masses.
Kim Il Sung was born in a world of oppression and exploitation. He lived and fought to end that rotten system and he lived to see the construction of a modern socialist system in the north of Korea. But he wasn’t just a Korean communist. He was a great internationalist.
The leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea championed the struggle for colonial freedom, non-alignment and Third World co-operation. He pioneered the call for south-south co-operation which is now bearing fruit today. He sent technical and military assistance to the African and Arab peoples struggling for independence and he constantly strove to strengthen the world communist movement.
Some members of the New Communist Party, like myself, had the honour of meeting Kim Il Sung. All of us know him as a great friend and teacher. The President of the NCP, Eric Trevett, met Kim Il Sung on a number of occasions because Comrade Kim was very interested in the British communist movement. Kim drew parallels with the problems the Korean communists faced in the 1920s but always maintained that communists had to resolve their problems in their own way, based on their own conditions – like the Koreans themselves.
Today, the Workers’ Party of Korea, with Kim Jong Il at the helm, is relentlessly advancing into the future to fulfil the dream of all Koreans, the peaceful re-unification of the country.
Kim Il Sung worked tirelessly all his life to end the cruel partition of Korea but all his efforts were rebuffed by American imperialism. More than six years ago, on 15th June, Kim Jong Il signed the historic joint declaration with south Korean leader Kim Dae Jung that outlined the way forward to achieve this goal. But the forces of US imperialism have moved to stall progress and prevent the Korean people from achieving their undeniable and inalienable right to the end of partition and to reunify their country.
Democratic Korea began to develop its nuclear industry in the 1990s but agreed to suspend its programme following an agreement with the United States that was to have led to the construction of two light water reactors in the DPRK. This agreement was never honoured and it was virtually torn up by the Bush administration. The American diplomatic and economic blockade on the north since the end of the Korean War was maintained.
The DPRK was branded by the American imperialists as part of the “axis of evil”, and one of the “outposts of tyranny”, that include Cuba, Syria and Iran, and was topped by Iraq until that country was invaded by US-led imperialism in 2003. The US army and its south Korean puppets rehearse the invasion of the north in annual war-games and the south Koreans have developed a cruise missile of their own targeted on the DPRK.
In face of these renewed threats the DPRK has had no alternative but to develop a nuclear deterrent to defend its socialist system. At the same time it has pledged that it will never be the first to use nuclear weapons and it has also vowed never to threaten the use of nuclear weapons or allow the transfer of nuclear technology to other countries.
We believe that the will of the Korean masses, expressed in concrete terms by their vanguard party, the Workers’ Party of Korea, will overcome all obstacles to fulfil the revolutionary tasks that faced the Korean people when they began their long march to socialism in the struggle against Japanese imperialism.

Fighting Modern Slavery

Interview with Muhktar Rana

On Friday 23rd March MUKHTAR RANA, a veteran Pakistani campaigner for labour and trade union rights, former member of the Pakistani parliament and former prisoner of conscience, spoke to the New Worker on the campaign against bonded labour in Pakistan and his role in launching it. He began by explaining how people come to be bonded labourers:

FAMILIES become victim to disease or famine or some other disaster and have to borrow money in order to survive. They get an agreement with big landowners or factory owners and end spending the rest of their lives working to pay off the debt.
The big landlords and factory owners use dirty tricks and fraudulent accounting to keep them always in debt; they charge too much for helping these people to survive and pay wages too low for them ever to repay the debts.
Those who work on the land are given nothing from the crops they produce and the wages they are paid are very, very low. The children of these bonded labour families are also forced to work and the women are misused for sex.
This kind of slavery is spread all over the world and, according to various international human rights bodies; there are around two million bonded peasants and labourers in Pakistan working in farms, factories and kilns. They are kept in big camps under armed guard to stop them escaping.
My first contact with bonded labourers was when I was running an educational institution called the People’s Academy in Faislabad (formerly known as Lailpur but renamed after King Faisal of Saudi Arabia after his death).
Bonded labourers working in a nearby brick kiln walked miles to my academy to see me and explain their situation.
I had also become a member of the national Parliament of Pakistan. I won the votes of the working class of Faislabad and I also chaired the People’s Party of the district of Faislabad. Under my supervision we won 90 per cent of the national and provincial MP seats because I was very popular among the workers. Even one of the very big capitalists, Saigal, was defeated in spite of tremendous support from a lot of mullahs.
After coming to know the situation of the bonded labourers working in that brick kiln I decided, along with my family, to involve the trade unions in working for the freedom of bonded labourers and the movement started to gather momentum.
But I was thrown into jail for five years for opposing the martial law imposed by the President, Mr Bhutto, because our manifesto demanded democracy. We had been demanding this in the past, throughout various periods of military rule.
Some other trade union leaders also suffered and were even thrown out of Pakistan and never allowed to come back. They took refuge mainly in Britain and Sweden.
During my imprisonment Amnesty International adopted me as a prisoner of conscience. After I had completed my term of imprisonment Mr Bhutto met me. There is a long story of how he apologised for his actions.
But during that period Bhutto again imposed another period of martial law in Karachi when the people demonstrated against the elections he had conducted – claiming they were fraudulent. I went with my family to Karachi to campaign against martial law, with a manifesto against military rule and for the restoration of democracy.
Mr Bhutto then, instead of putting me in prison, threw me out of Pakistan. It was because Swedish Amnesty International had adopted me as a prisoner of conscience. Then I had a choice of going to Sweden or Britain. I was born in the Punjab desert and I was a bit nervous about Sweden’s cold climate, and in any case I could speak English but not Swedish so I opted to come to Britain. And in London there were various committees – backed by some MPs – campaigning for me to be allowed residence in Britain. The British Library was another attraction that drew me to choose to come to London.
I walked out of London airport without much fuss; I had come on the grounds that I needed medical treatment and I had a certificate from Pakistani doctors confirming that I needed to come for treatment. I started living in London in 1977 and while I was living in sheltered accommodation as a patient I founded the Peace and Human Rights Trust. My wife Norma and her son became fellow trustees.
Our objectives were to campaign for peace and human rights. As I was well known in Pakistan, especially amongst the working class and peasants, I discussed with my fellow trustees and decided to start campaigning in Pakistan for two important goals:

1) To work for the freedom of bonded labourers and peasants;
2) To work for the establishment of a welfare state and other human rights in Pakistan.

Since 1977 I had been going back to Pakistan to campaign against corruption but in 2003 I went to Pakistan and we held our first seminar on the issue of bonded labour, including in the bangle-manufacturing industry, for a welfare state and for the abolition of Bhatta (the form of bonded labour imposed on brick kiln workers). Various political leaders, human rights activists, representatives of labourers and peasants and journalists took part in the seminar. To the good luck of the trust it was very well reported and an office of the PHRT was formed in Pakistan.
To our pleasant surprise similar seminars were held in almost every province and the issues of bonded labour and a welfare state were brought into focus. But the most active and physical response was reserved for Hyderabad, the capital of Sindh province. The journalists, lawyers and human rights activists in Hyderabad responded enthusiastically and we formed a trust unit for Sindh.
After the creation of that unit and various conferences the issue of bonded peasants and labourers started whipping up. To our surprise the office of the chief minister of Sindh made a very wrong claim that there were no bonded labourers in Sindh. But to our greater and pleasant surprise the provincial minister for the interior came to our support. He said the Sindh government claim was wrong and that there were two million bonded labourers and peasants in Sindh. And he supported the campaign of the trust for their liberation.
As a matter of fact the cruelty of the big feudal landlords of the Sindh was so well known for such a long time that various peasant groups have been formed for the rights of peasants and tenants. One of the best known was the Hari (peasant) Committee.
Some of the bureaucrats favourable to the cause of the Haries had written very good reports about the problem.
Bhutto was from Sindh and for a while he was President, chief minister responsible for administration, Prime Minister and chair of the People’s Party. Part of the manifesto of the People’s Party was for the freedom of bonded labourers and peasants but the problem continued under his rule and still continues today. After him his daughter also became president of Pakistan twice.
They also made a law for the abolition of bonded labour and the constitution of Pakistan bans any kind of forced labour.
There have been various High Court decisions and precedents in place banning bonded labour and freeing the peasants and labourers. And there are various human rights organisations all over Pakistan working for the freedom of bonded labourers and peasants.
But in spite of all this today according to the human rights groups and the International Labour Organisation there are still an estimated two million bonded labourers and slaves in Pakistan. Because the big landlords rule the politics, hand-in-hand with the military. They have control over the government and politics.
But good things have been happening. For example a young minister of labour in the central province – a friend of mine and the son of another friend of mine – got deeply involved in the movement for the freedom of bonded labourers and peasants.
He succeeded in getting thousands freed and rehabilitated in spite of serious opposition from a corrupt administration and cruel landlords.
According to Sajjad Ali Shah, a former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, a young labour minister was targeted and killed. Police claimed he had committed suicide. The workers and peasants of Sindh loved the young central minister and do not believe he committed suicide. They are indebted to the help he gave.
Soon our trust workers and leaders succeeded getting bonded labourers and peasants released with the help of lawyers, courts and the media.
To our happiness both the judges and the media have played a very big role in this and in getting the issue whipped up nationally.
There is a significant case of a bonded labour family that raised the issue throughout the nation.
Munoo Bheel is the head of the family; about nine years ago because of international pressure the landlord, Abdur Rehman Murri, was forced to release them. But shortly after that the landlords sent his armed guards and got the family re-abducted. They did not get Munoo Bheel himself because he was not at home when they came. But Murri and six other men were identified by witnesses as being responsible for abducting the family and the case was registered with the local police but they have taken no action yet to release the family or bring the kidnappers to justice.
Human rights org-anisations from Sweden and Pakistan were campaigning for the freedom of the Munoo Bheel family but the big landowner is so powerful that for years Munoo Bheel could not get his family released. We joined the campaign for his release and to our very pleasant surprise we found an ally in the Pakistan Chief of Justice, Mr Iftikhar Mohammed Choudry – the one who has been arrested and detained recently by the dictator General Perves Musharraf because of his actions to defend human rights.
In the Supreme Court, Choudry brought a “suo moto” (self-motivated by the court) case and ordered that the Munoo Bheel family should be released. But the police have been playing tricks and the family has not yet been released so far.
But the cause of this family is getting support from the trust and from the very highest court in Pakistan. The campaigning goes on.
In order to satisfy the Supreme Court, they sent the inspector general of police for Sindh, saying that anyone who gave information that led to the whereabouts and release of the Munoo Bheer family would get millions of rupees reward. But so far there has been no response because the chief minister of Sindh and his colleagues are refusing to cooperate with the Supreme Court.
Not only that; although the big landlord Murri had been imprisoned for abducting the family and not releasing them, his friends have been threatening our trust coordinator in Pakistan. They said that if the trust did not stop pleading to keep Murri in prison the coordinator would be killed. So far he has survived and our representations in court have succeeded in stopping attempts by Murri to get bail. We are determined that the Munoo Bheer family will be found.
And we will keep on with the campaign for the freedom of bonded labourers until every labourer who is a bonded slave is freed unconditionally.
To focus attention on the campaign in Britain we are having a gathering on Sunday 8th April on my birthday at the Bakehouse in Blackheath, which will celebrate the release of 3,000 bonded labourers.
We need to raise fund because once these bonded labourers and peasants are freed they have no home and no job. We need to build accommodation for them and to provide them with food and clean water. In the Sindh there is a problem with salt water; clean water has to be transported over long distances. We have taken out bank loans to set up camps to provide accommodation and we are getting support from NGOs (non-government organisations).
We prefer to raise funds from the working class and there has been a response. One small landlord who is sympathetic has given 50 acres to the trust to provide accommodation for freed bonded labourers. And recently some other small landlords have offered a car for communications. More and more political and human rights workers and social workers are offering cooperation.
But the process has been stopped because of the presidential attack on Choudry and now the progressive campaigners in Pakistan are having to fight to get justice for the Chief Justice.
Anti-Slavery International are supporting us and their director has promised to come to Pakistan and to provide more funds for legal and political work.

The Soviet National Anthem

A Paul Robeson classic

No to the New Anti-Cuba Manoeuvres of the EU

Joint Appeal of Communist & Workers' Parties of Europe

We, the undersigned parties, vehemently condemn the intensification of the anti-Cuba campaign being carried out by the EU, especially its intent to pass a “mid-term and long-term strategy on Cuba” at the next summit of the European Council.

With this document, the EU aligns itself completely with the policies and plans of the U.S.A. for a strike against the Cuban revolution, in complete contradiction with the powerful sentiments of friendship and solidarity for Cuba, held by the people of Europe.

For the first time ever, the EU will publicly reveal a joint strategy against another country of the world. It is assuming an active role in the imperialist, anti-Cuba campaign, in complete accord with the so-called “Bush Plan” and is striving to actively enlist the EU member countries in the interventionist plans against Cuba.

It intensifies the regime of outrageous discriminatory practices, pressures and intervention that was launched in 1996 with the so-called “common position”. This development constitutes yet another dangerous step towards convergence with the policies of the U.S.A. It reaffirms the hostile stance of the EU towards the ideas of national independence and sovereignty.

It is particularly objectionable that this new anti-Cuba campaign, under the pretext of supporting “human rights” and “democracy”, is being primarily instigated by champion anti-communist, anti-democratic governments who promote the most reactionary anti-people measures in their own countries: those of the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Lithuania, and others.

The EU has neither the right nor the moral stature to impose terms on Cuba in regards to its relations with other countries.

We demand that our governments reject the “mid-term and long-term strategy on Cuba” in the European Council.

We demand the abolition of the “common position” and the development of relations with Cuba based on equality and the principles of international justice.

We call upon the working people, the youth, women and the peoples’ movements, as well as, every progressive and democratic-thinking person in Europe to express their opposition to these anti-Cuba maneuvers.

To reject and refute the reactionary propagandistic campaign, to isolate the political forces that support it.

To defend the right of the peoples to resist and determine their own fate.

To strengthen their solidarity with socialist Cuba and her people.


The Parties

Communist Party of Albania
Workers' Party of Belgium
Communist Party of Britain
New Communist Party of Britain
Socialist Workers' Party of Croatia
AKEL-Cyprus
Communist Party of Bohemia & Moravia
Communist Party in Denmark
Communist Party of Finland
Unified Communist Party of Georgia
German Communist Party
Communist Party of Greece
Hungarian Communist Workers’ Party
Communist Party of Ireland
Workers’ Party of Ireland
Party of the Italian Communists
Socialist Party of Latvia
Communist Party of Luxembourg
Communist Party of Malta
Communist Party of Macedonia
Communist Party of Norway
Communist Party of Poland
Portuguese Communist Party
Romanian Communist Party
Socialist Alliance Party, Romania
Communist Party of Russian Federation
Communist Workers Party of Russia - Party of Communists of Russia
New Communist Party of Yugoslavia
Communist Party of Slovakia
Communist Party of Peoples of Spain
Communist Party of Spain
Communist Party of Sweden
Communist Party of Turkey
Labour Party of Turkey (EMEP)
South African Communist Party