On the occupation of Kosovo

Statement of communist and workers' parties

 Since June 9th  1999 the southern Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohia has been under the occupation of the striking military arm of the Western imperialism, NATO, and the Serbs living in that area have become second-class citizens.

On that day, the so-called "Kumanovo Agreement" was signed, which started the NATO occupation of Kosovo and Metohia after the aggression of the western imperialist countries on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (March 24 - June 10). By signing that agreement, the Yugoslav Army was forced to leave Kosovo, and the Albanian terrorist pro-imperialist "Kosovo Liberation Army" took power in that territory, while NATO formed the largest military base in the Balkans, "Bondsteel". The aggression against FR Yugoslavia, the occupation of Kosovo and Metohia and the installation of the pro-imperialist separatist "Kosovo Liberation Army" in power in Pristina were done for the sake of expansionist and plundering interests of Western big capital.

A large number of Serbs and other non-Albanians were forced to flee their homes and flee to Serbia, while the rest of the Serb population left in Kosovo was subjected to constant torture and harassment by Albanian pro-imperialist separatist authorities in Pristina.

Since 2013, under the auspices of the European Union, meetings have been held in Brussels between the authorities in Belgrade and the separatist leadership in Pristina, at which the goal of the Western imperialists is to force Belgrade to accept the "independence" of Kosovo.

In the meantime, the Serb population has been exposed to constant pressure from the pro-imperialist separatist authorities in Pristina. It is completely hypocritical but also naive to expect that any negotiations on peace and prosperity will be conducted under the auspices of the imperialist power of the European Union, which, along with the United States and NATO, is the biggest culprit for the occupation and separation of Kosovo and Metohia from Serbia.

The Communist and Workers' Parties, signatories to this joint statement, demand the following:

 

    • That Washington, London, Brussels and other imperialist centers of power immediately stop putting pressure on Serbia to recognize the "independence" of Kosovo. Kosovo and Metohia is an integral and indivisible whole which, as its province, belongs to Serbia. Any change of borders is unacceptable and contrary to the interests of peace and prosperity.

     • That the puppet pro-imperialist government in Kosovo immediately stop all pressure on the Serb population living in that territory, as well as provide all refugees with opportunities to return if they wish!

     • The Serbian and Albanian people in Kosovo and Metohia should live in peace and unity and in the tradition of fraternal relations between Albanians and Serbs who, in the Second World War, fought side by side against the Nazi-fascist occupier!

    • The occupying NATO troops must immediately leave the territory of Kosovo and Metohia, and that southern Serbian province should return to the motherland. Only in that way can Serbs and Albanians live in that territory in true peace and prosperity!

    • NATO troops should leave all the territories they hold under occupation in the former Yugoslavia, as well as leave all the countries of the peninsula where they have their bases.

    • The Balkans belong to the Balkan nations and not to the USA, EU and NATO imperialists! NATO out of the Balkans!

 

Signatory parties:

1. New Communist Party of Britain

2. Communist Party (Switzerland)

3. Progressive Tribune of Bahrain

4. Syrian Communist Party (United)

5. Communists of Catalonia

6. Socialist movement of Kazakhstan

7. Communist Party of the People of Spain

8. United Communist Party of Georgia

9. Communist Party of Britain

10. Hungarian Workers' Party

11. Workers' Party of Ireland

12. The Pole of the Communist Renewal of France

13. Socialist Workers' Party of Croatia

14. Philippine Communist Party (PKP-1930)

15. Kurdistan Communist Party - Iraq

16. Communist Party of Belgium

17. Labour Party of Austria

18. Communist Party of Swaziland

19. Communist Party of the Workers of Spain

20. Party of Communists USA

21. New Communist Party of New Zealand - Te Pāti o Te Nuku Mauī Communist Party of  Aotearoa

22. Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)

23. Australian Communist Party

24. Portuguese Communist Party

25. Communist Party of the Russian Federation

26. Communists of Serbia

27. Communist Party of Germany

28. Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia

29. Belarusian Republic Organization KPSS

30. Communist Party (Sweden)

31. New Communist Party of Yugoslavia

Boris is in trouble

Boris Johnson’s in trouble. Getting nowhere with Brussels over northern Ireland; under fire in the North Country for scrapping the HS2 Leeds extension; swamped with sleaze stories largely from his own camp – even the useless Keir Starmer is getting the better of him at Question Time in the Commons. No wonder Labour’s in the lead – the first for nearly a year – in the opinion polls.
    The Prime Minister’s woes are, of course, largely of his own making. He surrounds himself with people lesser than himself and then expects them to resolve problems that even he can’t resolve. His only asset has been a proven ability to get the Tory vote out when needed over Brexit and at the last general election.
    Brexit was, undeniably, a remarkable achievement for the Tory leader who had to drive the grandees out of his own party during the post-referendum battles that brought down David Cameron and Mrs May. Victory, however, came at a high price. The grandees have never forgiven him for his churlish behaviour nor have they abandoned their dreams of returning to the European Union. But the grandees aren’t the only ones.
    Johnson staked everything on a Trump victory in the American elections. “Britain’s Trump” believed that would lead to a “Treaty of Washington” that would create and Anglo-American free trade arena that would replace the Treaty of Rome. But it didn’t happen and it’s clearly not going to happen under Biden.
    The dispute with Brussels over the status of northern Ireland has only made things worse. The Northern Ireland Protocol that governs the post-Brexit customs and immigration issues and trade between the Irish Republic, Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom was meant to resolve the problem. Now the Government, under pressure from the Ulster Unionist parties, is threatening to suspend the deal outright.
    But many in the Tory camp fear that any unilateral move on northern Ireland will only add to their woes. They know that the American Democrats are mindful of the voting power of the Kennedy clan and the rest of the American-Irish lobby which includes Biden himself. And the Americans have made it clear that they’ll support the Irish government if it comes to an Anglo-Irish trade war.
    With no fall-back position Johnson’s been left floundering outside Biden’s international circle. “Global Britain” remains a dream despite hosting two major international summits in the UK over the past year and nobody now seriously talks about a “special relationship” with the United States.
    Some Tories clearly believe that taking Johnson out of the equation will renew the trans-Atlantic bonds they believe are essential for the survival of British imperialism. Others don’t want to rock the boat until after the next election. But for us the future of the Conservative & Unionist Party is matter of complete indifference. It’s the future of the labour movement that counts.
    These days all that Starmer & Co have to offer is the old Blairite claim that they are a tad more liberal than the Tories on social issues. But the choice for working people cannot be simply reduced to which major party is worse than the other. The choice clearly has to be for a Labour Party that reflects the demands of the street and not the differences between certain elements within the ruling class on how to best exploit those they oppress. Sadly the future doesn’t bode well with Starmer at the helm of the Labour Party.
    Labour must return to its core policies to keep its core voters. The “Welfare State” and the public sector must be restored and higher rate income tax raised to 1979 levels to help pay for it. The labour movement has the power to change the leadership and the direction of the Labour Party. That change is needed more than ever now.

Tory sleaze -- no surprise

No one should be surprised at the current Tory sleaze scandals that are rocking the Westminster bubble these days. The Tories are, afterall, the main representatives of the capitalist class in Britain, and corruption has always been the beating heart of capitalism itself. In Brecht’s imaginary city of Mahagonny the only crime was having no money at all. In British capitalism the only crime is getting caught.
    In the old days the landed gentry would look down on businessmen or indeed anyone else who actually worked for a living and claimed they “played the game” for the game’s sake and not for anything so venal as money. But it wasn’t true then and it certainly isn’t true now.
    The real ethos of the public schools which teach those who are born to rule how to behave is simply back-scratching, favours for favours and “jobs for the boys”.
    Though Boris Johnson has been under investigation by the standards authorities more often than any other serving politician in the last three years that, in itself, doesn’t mean much. The gold wall-paper and the venal lobbying pale into insignificance when compared to the Tory sleaze that finally sunk the Major government or the days of Lloyd George, when the “Welsh wizard” sold barrow-loads of titles and honours in the1920s to raise money for the Liberal Party.
    The Tories have slipped in the opinion polls over this. The latest found that almost half of the voters think the prime minister and his party are “corrupt” in the light of a recent lobbying scandal. Some 48 per cent of voters now think the Tories are “corrupt” whilst 47 per cent think the same about Johnson. But whether Labour can benefit from this is another matter altogether.
    Sir Keir Starmer has proved to be utterly useless as Labour’s leader. At Labour conference his camp told us we would see a Starmer come-back in the autumn. But few remembers his Brighton speech and no-one’s bothered to read his boring book. His only achievement has been in leading the purge of the Corbynistas in his own party that has disillusionned millions of Labour’s supporters and paralysed its campaigning activities across the country.
    Some Corbynistas say stay and fight. Others are once again going down the forlorn road of trying to build a new Labour party. The fight-back has prove ineffectual so far while the alternative to labour merchants are doomed to failure as it they have no serious support within the union movement.
    We must, obviously, expose the Tories for their corrupt practices but it mustn’t stop there. Venal Labour politicians and bloated union bureaucrats thrive on the jobbery of a labour movement that mimics the corrupt standards of our so-called “Mother of Parliaments”.
    Though the Labour Party is dominated by the class‑collaborating right wing in the parliamentary party and the trade union movement, the possibility of their defeat exists as long as Labour retains its organisational links with the trade unions that fund it. The defeat of right‑wing union blocs in most of the major unions over the past twenty years demonstrates this possibility.
    The Blairites and Zionists can be driven out of the labour movement but only through mass pressure from the rank and file in the unions and Labour’s constituency parties in support of genuine socialist policies that can rally millions of working people to the Labour platform.
    Meanwhile Starmer remains Johnson’s best card. The Tory leader has little to fear at the next election. Johnson can get the Tory vote out. Starmer can’t say the same for Labour.

Bristol’s ‘Wild’ West

by Ben Soton

The Outlaws. BBC TV series currently showing on BBC1, Mondays 9pm. Also available on BBC iPlayer. Created by Elgin James and Stephen Merchant. Directors: Stephen Merchant and John Butler. Stars: Rhianne Barreto, Darren Boyd, Gamba Cole, Jessica Gunning, Clare Perkins, Eleanor Tomlinson, Charles Babalola, Stephen Merchant, Christopher Walken.

Stephen Merchant’s Bristol-based sit-com The Outlaws has now been running for the last few weeks on Monday nights. Merchant has been responsible for an array of comedies including The Office, Extras and Small World.
    The focus of his latest drama is group of Bristolians undertaking Community Payback for a range of minor offences. The characters include a lawyer, a social media celebrity, a small business owner, a civil-rights activist, a student, and an American draft dodger who has been living in Bristol since the Vietnam war.
    Merchant takes a non-judgmental view of every member of this highly diverse group. The story includes flashbacks to the offences that led to each of them finding themselves wearing high-vis vests and clearing derelict waste ground. This results in an array of amusing scenes, often depicting sad situations. In one instance Greg, the lawyer (played by Merchant himself), drives into a police car whilst trying to avoid being caught with a prostitute.
    In The Outlaws Merchant attempts to show some of the issues prevalent in his home town of Bristol, which last summer hit the headlines when Bristolians threw the statue of the slave-trader Edward Colston into the Bristol Channel.
    Another character, Myrna (played by Clare Perkins), is a Black civil rights activist who took part in the destruction of the hated statue. Myrna finds herself doing Community Payback for towing away a police recruitment caravan in Bristol High Street. Her situation shows the price some political activists pay for a lifetime of commitment. She lives alone in a bedsit surrounded by posters and old books and finds herself kicked out of her own organisation by younger activists.
    Although some of us have done a bit better for ourselves, many of the issues depicted in the drama could apply to much of the country – the work-place bullying suffered by Greg the lawyer from his cocaine-snorting colleagues; Frank (played by Christopher Walken), the American who lives with his single-parent daughter, struggling to make ends meet on a low income. The drama also touches on the issue of drug-related crime; something not unique to Bristol.
    Everything changes when a bag-load of money is found on wasteland. John, the businessman (played by Darren Boyd), needs it to help his ailing business; however Myrna, surprisingly, believes the money should be handed over to the authorities. The consequences of this are likely to give the series an extra edge.

UNITE: A new broom at the helm

by New Worker North West correspondent

Unite’s supreme policy making conference, which normally takes place every two years, was delayed by several months because of coronavirus and the pandemic,
    But last month the conference for Britain’s second largest union was held at the huge ACC Convention Centre, Kings Dock, Liverpool. Before conference all delegates, observers, guests, the press and media, were required to be self-tested at home for COVID‑19 using postal NHS kits from the National Test and Trace Service.
    The simple Covid lateral flow test produces a positive or negative result, which is then self-reported via computer or mobile telephone. Those with positive test results were advised to stay at home.
    People with negative test results were not checked at the ACC venue by security however, making a mockery of the whole process.
    Unite's Policy Conference kicked off at 1pm on Monday 18th October. It was attended by over 700 Unite delegates and dozens of observers, guests, Unite full-time officials and staff, fringe-events organisers, and the press and media.
    It was competently chaired throughout by Tony Woodhouse from the Union's Executive Committee and the new General Secretary, Sharon Graham, served as Secretary to Conference.
    In her keynote address, Sharon Graham set out her programme of change to transform the way the union operates. “Unite is going to be in the vanguard that can change what is happening to workers. Their voice must be heard. We have to concentrate on defending jobs, pay and conditions. We will not accept further attacks on workers’ living standards. It’s time we put a stake in the ground on that.”
    In her first speech to annual conference since being elected general secretary, the Unite leader warned that workers should not “pay the price for the pandemic” and compared the current economic situation with the 2008 economic collapse.
    “The post-Covid crisis is 2008 on steroids. The politicians have failed us during the COVID crisis; they were nowhere to be seen. There is no political saviour on a white horse coming over the hill to save us. We have to organise and fight for ourselves. That’s what the trade unions are for.”
    She focused on the many unscrupulous employers who have used the cover of the pandemic to fire-and-rehire workers to force wage cuts and attacks on their conditions. She said: “Employer after employer has used fire-and-rehire to make workers pay for COVID. One in 10 workers has suffered this fate to-date.”
    The new general secretary singled out one particular employer to point the finger at – British Airways (BA). She said: “BA’s actions on fire-and-rehire set a chain reaction which emboldened other employers to fire-and-rehire their workers. They became pace-setters for a drive to the bottom on wages and conditions.”
    Now it was time to build Unite’s power to change things by ushering in a new era of 'Combine' organisation, “deepening the union’s industrial focus”. She pledged to use the creation of ‘combines’ – “where we bring all our reps together by industry or sector to create collective bargaining at the level of whole industries or sectors”. The new combines would be fit for the 21st Century to tackle multinational employers.
    Sharon Graham highlighted Unite’s creation of a home-working agreement for bank workers as an example. This meant that instead of the agreement being put piecemeal to the Big Four high street banks, it should be put forward to all the bank chief executive officers for an industry collective agreement. She said: “The reality is if we don’t strike good agreements, we will pay the price of bad agreements taking hold.”
    Finally she spoke about what she termed “worker politics”. Her position on Unite and the Labour Party had been misconstrued by the media during her election campaign.
    She said her commitment to “getting back to the workplace” did not mean that Unite was abandoning politics.
    “Time to slay this particular dragon,” she said. “The idea that Unite is standing down from the political arena is totally wrong. Rather, we want to build a different politics, not top down but from the shop floor and the fabric of local communities up, in order to drive through the political process in an entirely different way.”
    On Wednesday afternoon, outgoing General Secretary Len McCluskey gave a stirring farewell speech to delegates. After a decade at the helm, assisting the merger of several unions including the old TGWU, engineers, electricians, printers, construction workers, banking staff, Amicus, MSF and others, he wished the incoming general secretary all the best for the future.
    It was a successful, uplifting, well attended delegate conference at the ACC Centre in Liverpool. There were many fringe stalls and meetings. The Liverpool Centre enjoys modern communications and state of the art technology, the Centre staff being helpful and professional. Disabled access outside the Centre to the entrance was poor, however, and complaints have been made about this to the General Secretary and the Centre management.
    Unite is facing the future as a massive, growing and strong union. It is democratically run by its Lay members and its Executive Committee – it is not controlled by its appointed full-time officials.
    Unite's education service nationally and regionally is second to none. Workers can obtain time off from work with pay to attend short courses on health and safety, shop stewards organising and specialist trade courses. Unite should however, organise more courses on the workers history of struggle, and the scientific philosophy of the working class: dialectical and historical materialism.
    Turn-out in the recent election postal ballot for a new General Secretary was too low. Unite needs to find ways to increase membership voting in such important elections.
    Unite is determined to remain membership-led in its campaigns for better wages and conditions, for equality at work, to embrace new technology, for a shorter working week without wage cuts, to rebuff the employers, particularly global companies, and to work constructively with a progressive, socialist-oriented Labour Party without allowing Labour to dominate Unite.

Joint statement on Paraguay

For the validity of the rule of law: freedom for prisoners with completed sentences

The undersigned Communist and Workers Parties denounce the Paraguayan government to the international community for the illegal detention of Carmen Villalba, who is still being held in the Asunción Women's Prison, in Paraguay, despite the effective fulfillment of her sentence.


In this regard, we note that Carmen Villalba was sentenced by a final judicial sentence to 15 years in prison plus 3 years for security measures, having served said sentence in July of this year and obtained a resolution of freedom for embezzlement in this case. In the same way, a firm sentence to 17 years in prison weighs on her in a case that, being extinct, should never have reached a sentence. In this case, Carmen Villalba has also exceeded 17 years of sentence, on July 4 of this year. Since then and to date, her legal defense has requested her release by compurgation, a procedure that has been subject to an unjustifiable and illegal delay, considering the constitutional guarantees at stake, such as freedom of movement, the principle of legality, among others.

In this regard, we first recall that Carmen Villalba was apprehended on July 2, 2004, remaining in preventive detention by order issued by the prosecutor Carmen Meza on February 28, 2005, within the framework of case 1129. Notwithstanding this , the criminal execution judge N ° 3 of Luque, instead of ordering the immediate release by compurgation of the sentence in its entirety, issued a resolution in which the nature of the detention of origin is unknown. All of this, based on mere formalities and in open contradiction with the provisions of the legislation that refers to the final calculation of penalties, taking into account the day of restriction of freedom (art. 494 Code of Criminal Procedure).

We consider that Carmen Villalba’sstate of detention constitutes an arbitrary situation and contrary to the rule of law, since she has fully served her sentence, duly established with the same law that is being violated today by not allowing her freedom. In addition, the context in which the restriction of Carmen Villalba's freedom is arbitrarily delayed significantly aggravates the situation.Her daughter Carmen Elizabeth "Lichita" is disappeared since last November, her sister Laura was arrested and her nieces María Carmen and Lilian Mariana were murdered in September 2020, mournful events that add to the murder of her son Néstor and the refuge in Argentina of several of his relatives due to harassment by the Paraguayan security forces.

For all the above, the national and international community demands the immediate release of Carmen Villalba, considering the fulfillment of her sentence. This situation, if it persists, exposes the Paraguayan State to responsibilities for violation of constitutional guarantees and human rights treaties.



SolidNet Parties:

Communist Party of Albania
Communist Party of Argentina
Party of Labour of Austria
Communist Party of Bangladesh
Communist Party of Belgium
Communist Party of Bolivia
Brazilian Communist Party
Communist Party of Brazil
New Communist Party of Britain
Communist Party of Chile
Colombian Communist Party
Croatian Socialist Workers Party
AKEL, Cyprus
Communist Party of Denmark
Communist Party of Ecuador
Unified Communist Party of Georgia
German Communist Party
Communist Party of Greece
Communist Party of Ireland
Workers Party of Ireland
Socialist Movement of Kazakhstan
Communist Party of Mexico
Popular Socialist Party - National Political Association , Mexico
Communist Party of Pakistan
Paraguayan Communist Party
Philippines Communist Party (PKP 1930)
Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain
Communist Party of Swaziland
Communist Party of Uruguay
Communist Party USA
Communist Party of Venezuela


Other Parties

Communist Party (Switzerland)
Union of the Galician People

Adult Fun

by Ben Soton

The Man Who Died Twice (The Thursday Murder Club, 2) by Richard Osman, Penguin. Hardback: 2021, 432pp, RRP £18.99. Paperback: 2022, 336pp, RRP £8.99. .

Richard Osman, the television presenter and writer well-known as one of the public faces of the TV quiz show Pointless, has now made a name for himself as a crime writer.
    His second novel, based around a group of septuagenarian sleuths, hit the book shelves earlier this year. In The Man Who Died Twice we meet the four main characters where they left off – living in a retirement community in the fictional town of Fairhaven in Kent.
    As with Osman’s first novel, we see a diverse group of pensioners getting up to mischief and delving into areas you would not expect. At the outset of the novel Ibrahim, a retired psychiatrist, is mugged and ends up in hospital. His friends, Ron, Elizabeth and Joyce, soon get their revenge on the mugger. Fair play to them.
    Much of the novel centres around the re-emergence of ex-spook Elizabeth’s former husband, who re-emerges after several decades with a bag of diamonds stolen from a notorious crook called Martin Lomax. The story takes us into the world of international organised crime and money laundering.
    Oman manages to explain that we live in an ultimately interconnected world, where petty-criminals are linked to bigger fish who are in turn connected to international crime barons. Suffice it to say, these crime barons through money laundering are linked to the world of high finance.
    According to data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and European crime-fighting agency Europol, the annual global drugs trade is worth around $435 billion per year, with the annual cocaine trade worth $84 billion. It poses the question as to whether the authorities turn a blind eye to drug crime due to pressure from finance capital. There are properties in some inner-city areas where residents are unable to open their windows due to the unpleasant aroma of marijuana and are told by the police that nothing can be done. Last year the global cannabis market was valued at $22.10 billion.
    Where do our pensioners fit in? Ultimately, they have experience on their side and to a certain extent no one takes them seriously. The police are portrayed incompetent; in the early part of the novel a drug dealer, whose home they are watching, brings them a cup of coffee.
    Meanwhile, our group are also from that lucky generation born between the last stages of the Second World War and the early 1960s. This generation benefitted from the strength of the socialist camp abroad; forcing our ruling class to give concessions such as the NHS. It is perhaps fitting that Joyce, who occasionally narrates the story, is a former nurse. Another effect of the strength of socialist forces internationally was a strong labour movement in Britain. Again, Ron is a former trade union leader. Strangely, Elizabeth, a former MI5 agent, made a career trying to undermine the things that made her generation’s life much easier than earlier, or to that matter later, generations.
    Osman’s novels have similarities to the Tom Sharpe comedies of the 1980s; namely comedies that shine a light on the dark side of society in a light-hearted and innocent way. I would not be surprised if Osman’s work does not soon hit the TV screens.

Our Land – Our Precious Resource

by John Maryon

As a vital part of the earth's biosphere, the land we live on, along with the air we breathe and the water we drink, are basic for the survival of life, including our own. One of Lenin's first decrees was to abolish the private ownership of land in the countryside and to redistribute it from the church and aristocracy to the peasants. Land is too precious to be regarded as a tradeable asset for speculation or to form a basis for the accumulation of wealth. All land should belong to the people under common ownership as their birth-right.
    The private ownership of land allows for exploitation in the form of rent and access costs for living or any economic activity. Landowners can levy a charge whilst making no contribution in return. They did not create the land. Their regular income represents a never-ending drain on wealth created by others. Two-thirds of all registered land in Britain is owned by just 189,009 families whilst fewer than 5,000 landowners own 27 per cent. Land ownership is increasingly seen as a tax efficient speculative strategy by wealthy foreigners and off-shore fund managers.
    Britain's large land owners include the Church of England, pension funds and aristocrats. Many are pillars of the establishment with strong links to the Conservative Party. This class has ensured that the pledge in the Labour Party's 1945 Manifesto for a radical solution to the crippling problems of land acquisition was never implemented. The Royal Family are also large landowners, along with the Dukes of Westminster and Northumberland.
    Whereas Britain's 189,000 large land-owners are liable for council tax if they own property, they pay no tax on owning their land. In England it is estimated that less than one per cent of the population own half the land. If the land were distributed, each one of us would have about half an acre. The form in which agricultural subsidies are paid each year is being transformed post-Brexit and is currently estimated at £3 billion per year.
    The New Communist Party calls for public ownership of all land with provision for leasehold without charge for owner-occupiers. It is NCP policy to cap rents and impose proper taxation for land ownership that would close off-shore tax havens. The funds generated could off-set council tax, which is, in reality, a regressive tax measure.
    In urban areas, land ownership is the biggest factor in the cost of housing or productive enterprises. In 2020 the costs for building land, generally speaking, ranged from £300,000 per acre in Northern Britain to £1-million in the South. The most expensive land is to be found in central London, where the recent opening of Pandora's Box revealed a billionaires’ playground. The NCP regards the system of land ownership in Britain as obscenely undemocratic.
    Thousands of acres of public-owned land are being transferred into private ownership at an alarming rate. Private Finance Initiative (PFI) projects, the conversion of streets into shopping arcades and the privatisation of utilities, along with the sale and lease-back of public buildings, including health centres, all contribute to this process.
    In the countryside the problems are no less acute. The number of small farms is in decline as they struggle to cope with the volatility of milk, beef and lamb prices. With the ending of the Milk Marketing Boards, many have been forced into contracts that expose them to full market forces. Tenant farmers have been affected by an increasing rent burden. Big business is taking over, and the large estates are increasing in size.
    Farmers have traditionally been stewards of the countryside. By being in close daily contact with the land they loved, they could take a pride in protecting wildlife and ensuring a good level of biodiversity on their farms. Prince Charles has himself been outspoken in his calls to protect the environment.
    With average house prices over 10 times the annual income of most rural workers, housing has become a growing problem. A dwindling stock of affordable housing for key workers such as teachers, nurses, police officers, and land workers has forced many young people to move out, leaving an ageing and increasingly isolated population. Villages are being turned into dormitories for wealthy incomers. Pubs, shops, schools and even churches are being converted into upmarket housing. Cuts and privatisations have devastated public transport and have led to a growing dependence on cars and a divide between those with and those without.
    The NCP calls for the urgent building of council houses, funded by local council bonds, to supply a basic and affordable social need. The NCP also calls for the restoration of rural bus services and post offices.
    Serious concerns exist about the potential damage from fracking to extract shale gas – often in areas of outstanding natural beauty. Contamination of the water-table with methane is a risk, and Carbon Dioxide (CO2) that had been locked away in the rocks is released when the gas is burned. The NCP is totally opposed to fracking in the UK.
    According to the Big Issue magazine, over 20 per cent of the UK population live in poverty, a high proportion of whom live in rural areas. With benefit cuts and fuel poverty caused by rip-off energy costs, the dependence on foodbanks continues to grow. Wages and conditions for agricultural workers in England and Wales are no longer protected by the Agricultural Wages Boards and many permanent jobs are increasingly being replaced with casual labour. The NCP calls for the full and immediate restoration of those Boards that were abolished.
    Land is a precious resource upon which we all depend. Those who work on the land should be respected and paid well. Our land and all the creatures that live on it must be protected and managed for the benefit of all the people. It is not a commodity to be used to line the pockets of the exploiting class.

For a United Ireland

Though northern Ireland dropped from the headlines this week the deepening row with the European Union over the future status of the occupied north continues to simmer as the Johnson government considers the latest compromise offer from Brussels.
    In December the UK and the EU reached an agreement on specific trade arrangements for Northern Ireland, including the implementation of a new Irish Sea border and post-Brexit border checks and trading rules for Northern Ireland. Now Johnson tells us he’s going to 'fix' these post-Brexit rules that are disrupting Britain’s goods trade with northern Ireland while his minions say that the latest offer from the European Union to slash regulatory checks and dramatically cut customs processes on British goods moving to northern Ireland isn’t enough. This is because the Johnson Government wants to go far beyond the confines of trade to rewrite the whole post-Brexit agreement with Brussels.
    Johnson’s demands range from stripping EU judges of power over Northern Ireland to the somewhat ludicrous call from their own backbenchers to scrapping metrification and restoring imperial measurements in what they still regard as a “province” of Britain.
    While there’s no sign of shift in Brussels or London there will be immense pressure on Johnson from the other side of the Atlantic to settle before Joe Biden lands in Glasgow for the climate change conference in November.
    Tinkering around the Northern Ireland Protocol may resolve the current dispute with the European Union but it doesn’t address the fundamental problem which is the continuing partition of Ireland.
    The New Communist Party welcomed the advances made under the historic 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the establishment of the Northern Ireland Executive and Assembly, and the overwhelming endorsement of the agreement in the all‑Ireland 1999 referendum.
    But the NCP did not believe that this agreement could ever be a final resolution of the struggle for Irish national self‑determination. Though the agreement that ended the fighting provided the basis for the economic revival of the north it contained major flaws including the continued dependence on annual block grants from Westminster, and the continued presence of British troops in Ireland.
    We do not support devolution as an end in itself, but call for a complete end to British interference in Irish affairs, and any British state presence on Irish soil including civil, military, police or intelligence units.
    The NCP believes Sinn Féin is the leading force in the struggle for Irish national self‑determination. It is a broad alliance of nationalist and patriotic class forces that more than any other organisation can legitimately claim to be continuing the struggles of the United Irishmen, the Young Irelanders, the Fenian Brotherhood, the Land League, the Irish Citizen Army, and the Irish Republican Army.
    From our earliest days we have called for an immediate and unconditional end to the partition of Ireland, the withdrawal of all civil, police or military units from any foreign state, and the achievement of full national self‑determination and sovereignty in a united Ireland.
    We believe the Irish people have the right to use political or military means to achieve those goals, just as the British state realises its own interests in the same way.

Bad news on the doorstep

Rising prices, logjams at the ports, uncertainty on the jobs market and a damning report on the Government’s mishandling of the Covid crisis. Boris Johnson has, predictably, crept off to sun himself in Spain to avoid the flak. Not that there’s much of it these days. What little opposition there is to Johnson is limited to some columnists in the bourgeois press and the backstabbers in his own party. Starmer confines himself to ritual jousts with Johnson in Parliament while his party sinks into a morass of its own making over the Blairite drive to boot out all the remaining Corbynistas from Labour’s ranks.
    Johnson says his government is going to “level up” society with a “high-wage high skill” and “low tax economy” which he claims the capitalist market can deliver. But only where there is a clear labour shortage like the current need for more lorry drivers and the dearth of fruit pickers due to the end of cheap labour from the European Union.
    Pay rises are rarely the gift of the employer. They have to be won by unions determined to fight for their members’ interests and not those of their own bureaucracies whose only interest is to advance their own careers and pump up their own juicy pension pots.
    Johnson and Starmer both foster the illusion that we are all in it together, But we’re not. Workers don’t have a stake in capitalism not do they benefit from some trickle-down effect.
    All we get from the capitalist table is the crumbs and that’s all we’re ever going to get while capitalism survives. It is either us or them; the workers or the bosses. The alternative to workers’ power is a festering morass of exploitation of working people and the environment, racial and communal strife, rapid growth in crime, drug trafficking, violence and conflict from local to international levels. The capitalists must not be allowed to destroy society; it is they who must be supplanted.
    Until such time as socialism replaces capitalism, there needs to be a continuous political struggle to defend and improve social services and benefits. In tandem with this fight there must be a collective industrial struggle for better wages and working conditions that takes on the capitalist class head on

Standing up for Palestine

Congratulations to Sally Rooney, the Irish novelist who refused to allow her best-selling new book to be translated into Hebrew by an Israeli company. The author says she was answering the call from Palestinian civil society to impose “an economic and cultural boycott of complicit Israeli companies,” referring to BDS – boycott, divestment and sanctions – as an “anti-racist and non-violent” movement.
    The acclaimed writer turned down a bid by the Modan Publishing House to translate and publish Beautiful World, Where Are You because she could not "accept a new contract with an Israeli company that does not publicly distance itself from apartheid and support the UN-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people”.
    But "the Hebrew-language translation rights to my new novel are still available, and if I can find a way to sell these rights that is compliant with the BDS movement's institutional boycott guidelines, I will be very pleased and proud to do so."
    Ms Rooney cited reports published by Israeli human rights group B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch earlier this year belatedly recognising Israel’s system of apartheid imposed on Palestinians. These reports “confirmed what Palestinian human rights groups have long been saying: Israel’s system of racial domination and segregation against Palestinians meets the definition of apartheid under international law,” she said.

Fighting the fascists in the Swinging Sixties

by Ben Soton

Ridley Road. A four-part mini-series adapted by Sarah Solemani from Jo Bloom's 2014 novel of the same name. Currently showing on BBC1, Sundays at 9pm. Also available on BBC iPlayer.

Set in 1962, a young Jewish woman, Vivian Epstein (played by Agnes O’Casey), leaves her comfortable life in Manchester in search of her boyfriend. She finds work as a hairdresser and on her afternoon off wanders into a fascist rally in Trafalgar Square only to find her lover, Jack Morris (played by Tom Varney), masquerading as a far-right thug.  The organisation in question was the National Socialist Movement (NSM) led at the time by Colin Jordan and John Tyndall and campaigning in Ridley Road in London’s East End, from where the drama takes its name.
    The drama has three areas of focus: those opposed to fascism, the fascists themselves and those naïve individuals fooled into supporting it. After Jack is injured in a street-fight Vivian becomes involved with a group of Jewish anti-fascists for whom he is working undercover. The group, led by Jewish cab driver Solly Malinovsky (played by Eddie Marsan), have fresh memories of the Holocaust and Cable Street and are determined to get this poisonous ideology crushed for good. Vivian infiltrates the NSM to discover Jack’s whereabouts.
    Ridley Road also shows how fascism prays on people’s fears and even legitimate concerns.    Fascists fraudulently claim to be opposed to capitalism and often promote an opposition to modernity.
    In one scene a covert fascist sympathiser talks of the closure of corner shops due to competition from supermarket chains. For most readers under 70 it is difficult to recall a time when most shopping was not bought in supermarkets but in the early 1960s they were an innovation. The same demagogues often hark back to an imagined past when apparently everyone knew their neighbour and looked out for each other – a dog whistle reference to immigration. From personal observation, the death of community spirit is grossly exaggerated just as is the notion that it was somehow better in the past. Meanwhile, the street I live on still has a corner shop, only it is open for much longer than it would have been in the 1960s.
    Colin Jordan (played by Rory Kinnear), the leader of the NSM, is portrayed as calm and collected, as well as a doting father.  He is not a one-dimensional, spitting fanatic, the classic cartoon fascist. The rank and file, referred to as his men, are portrayed as thuggish and drawn from the lower end of the working class. The wife of one of them points out that the stately home, used by the NSM, has been donated by a wealthy aristocrat. A reminder that fascism is not about looking after the little people.
    Ridley Road intertwines newsreel footage between scenes, which gives it a documentary feel.    It contains several sub-plots, giving the drama an added suspense. Meanwhile, it also makes reference to the treatment, or should I say mistreatment, of women – both by the fascist movement and ironically also within the Jewish community. This multi-layered and largely accurate historical drama is definitely a must in terms of Sunday night viewing.

Crisis? What Crisis?

Empty shelves in the supermarkets, soaring energy prices while motorists fume in queues for fuel at petrol stations struggling to remain open as supplies run out due to a shortage of drivers in the haulage industry. In other times this would be an open goal for Labour to hammer the Tories. Now the utterly useless leader of the Labour Party can barely turn away from his relentless purge of the Corbynistas to utter the usual platitudes that nobody listens to these days.

    No wonder the Tories are basking in complacency at their annual conference in Manchester. Boris Johnson struts the stage drivelling on about his “mission” to decrease geographical inequalities and defending “our history” from “cancel culture iconoclasm” in a rambling speech that made no mention of the rising cost of living or the supply chain crisis.
    But you’d think this was a second Cicero judging from the applause of his followers who laugh at his sixth-form jibes at Starmer – the “Captain Hindsight” who resembles a “seriously rattled bus conductor” and eagerly lap up talk about unleashing the potential of all Britons in the spirit of Olympians or the England football team.
    When Tory leaders talk about "Britons" and "our one-nation" they want to foster the idea that we are a united people with a common national interest. But nothing could be further from the truth. We are, in fact, a class divided society in which the interests of the exploited class – the majority of the people – are in direct conflict with the interests of the exploiters.
    In the past Labour leaders recognised class divisions and during the Attlee and Wilson eras their economists talked about “democratic socialist” solutions to end exploitation and poverty. Now that’s been reduced to Angela Rayner calling the Tories “scum” while talk of nationalising the railways or the utilities is frowned on by Starmer & Co.
    Though state intervention is essential in Keynesian economics the form it takes reflects the needs of the ruling class at the time. Keynesian reforms are designed to uphold the existing order and stave off social unrest and they are the kernel of left social democratic thinking in the capitalist world.
    But they were also embraced by Benito Mussolini, whose fascist Italy had a public sector second only to that of the Soviet Union before the Second World War. Franklin D Roosevelt tried revive the American economy after the massive slump in 1929 with a Keynesian “New Deal and Adolf Hitler did the same when the Nazis took over in Germany.
    The neo-liberal unrestricted market economy of the imperialist heartlands is clearly unable to cope with the post-Covid world and so the ruling circles in the United States are returning to the old Keynesian models. The Biden administration’s $3.5 trillion economic plan is going down the same road as FDR’s New Deal and the “Great Society” of the 1960s.
    While new bourgeois consensus has seen the old social-democratic parties return to the centre of government in Western Europe.
    But whatever form it takes capitalism will always be brutal and oppressive because that is the only way it can ensure that the rich can continue to live the lives of Roman emperors off the backs of workers and peasants. The capitalists fear and loathe organised labour because it knows that the entire wealth of the world comes from workers in the factories and peasants in the fields.

The capitalists know that eventually their insatiable greed will provoke a political reaction among those they rob and cheat. And, even though they deny it and refuse to speak about it, we know that just as inevitable as capitalist crises is the ultimate victory of socialism over capitalism.

A Marxist view from India

by Robin McGregor

Revolutionary Democracy. Vol XXV(2), September 2020 and Vol XXVI(1), April 2021. £5.00 + £1.50p&p from NCP Lit: PO Box 73, London SW11 2PQ.

The twice-yearly Indian Marxist-Leninist journal is making a recovery from a COVID‑19-induced interruption to publication. The last printed issue was Vol 25(1) for October 2019. Another Vol 25(2) for April 2020 was prepared for the press but remained unprinted, although its contents can be read on the www.revolutionarydemocracy.org website.
    This issue is naturally dominated by the pandemic. Its normal mixture of articles on contemporary India, articles on international themes reflecting the views of parties belong to the International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organisations (ICMLPO), rounded off by materials reprinted from the Soviet archives, is unchanged, however.
    The impact of COVID‑19 on India made Boris Johnson and Donald Trump look like strategic geniuses. In India a hastily imposed lockdown caused a mass migration of suddenly unemployed migrant workers in the towns and cities (for whom there was no such thing as furlough) having to return (unassisted) to their native villages, which only made the spread of the disease worse. Additionally, the BJP Government took advantage of the pandemic to force through new labour laws that are, naturally, detrimental to the working classes.
    Also relating to contemporary India are articles on the recent farmers’ protests against three agrarian laws speedily rushed through Parliament by the right-wing BJP government.
    On a more optimistic note, there is an interesting piece briefly surveying the Soviet Union’s measures against epidemics that made a better job of things even in the midst of revolution.
    The longest article is a serious study of the post-Soviet Russian economy tellingly entitled The Crisis of Neo-liberal Economics in Russia, which argues that “the revival of some of the Soviet symbolism are used by Putin opportunistically to conceal the true neo-liberal essence of his economic policies”. The recent elections suggest that this is wearing a bit thin.
    The archival materials deal with two separate matters, firstly with the Comintern’s support for a separate Black Nation in the USA in the late 1920s and other matters relating to the CPUSA’s work amongst the African Americans. This notion was based on the assumption that there was a peasant-based African-American nation in the Black Belt South. But the campaign for self-determination had little support amongst its intended beneficiaries, who were struggling for equality within the USA, and in any case it was made redundant by the Depression-era migration of farm workers into the northern cities.
    The archival-based article reprints interesting notes of the February and March 1951 discussion between Stalin and representatives of Communist Party of India on the possibility of an armed rising in India. Some elements in the Indian party’s leadership favoured such an undertaking, seeking similar support from the Soviet Union as that given earlier to China. Stalin told them firmly that situation was rather different, however. He reminded them of the fact that the Himalayas stood in the way of supplying the necessary arms and in any case, there was no mass working class or peasant support for such adventurism at a time when the triumph of independence over British colonialism was still fresh.
    The ICMLPO is strongly supportive of the political line of Enver Hoxha of Albania. This is most evident in a translation of parts of a brutal 2000 Serbian novel Goli by Miroslav Mika Ristić, which deals with “Goli Otik – sadistic prison for communists in revisionist-capitalist Yugoslavia”. This is introduced by Ristić’s grandson and is based on the prison on the barren island off the Croatian coast, which is now a bleak tourist attraction.
    Partly due to Covid, this issue concludes with a number of obituaries including those of Nina Andreeva, the long-term General Secretary of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, who first raised a Marxist-Leninist banner against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1988. Michael Lucas, the Canadian editor of Northstar Compass and long-standing Revolutionary Democracy contributor Naba Kumar Bhattacharya are also memorialised.
    If one were to make a small criticism of the journal it would be to suggest that the editors ought to make a few concessions to readers beyond India. In the report on the Indian farm protests I came across my first ever reference to “Arthiyas”, which needed a consultation with the good Dr Google to establish that they are grain commission agents in the Punjab.

Brighton rocks…

...but clearly not for everyone at Labour Party conference this week. Maybe not the factional blood-bath predicted in the Tory media but nevertheless still a battleground between the Blairite bureaucracy and what’s left of the Corbynistas.

    The Starmer clique used every trick in the book, including last minute suspensions of delegates to smooth the passage of their most contentious rule changes, at the Labour conference. But they didn’t get their own way on everything and on the key issue of individual voting in the leadership elections they were forced to back down by the unions.     This was meant to be a defining moment for Sir Keir Starmer at his first sit-down Labour conference since he was elected leader in April 2020. His minions told the press that this week Starmer would lay to rest the ghost of Corbynism and revitalise the Labour Party in the run-up to the next general election. But Jeremy Corbyn was still there rallying his troops at fringe meetings far more livelier than the old ennui that permeates the Brighton Centre when a Blairite takes the mike while Starmer’s followers had to make do with a mediocre pamphlet that no-one will read and a maudlin speech that few will remember by the end of the week.
    Now Blairite MPs, which sadly make up the overwhelming majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party, can sleep safely in their beds following de-selection rule-changes which will strengthen their grip over their constituencies and make it near-impossible for another Corbyn-style leadership challenge in the immediate future.
    Being a Westminster MP is reward enough for most but some want more. They want the honours, power and patronage that comes with high office. But that depends on Labour winning a general election and with Starmer at the helm the chances are pretty remote.
    The Tories are still ahead in the opinion polls while a recent poll by Opinium for Sky News showed that many voters think Starmer is weak, boring and out-of-touch. That just about sums him up and the one thing that most delegates in Brighton could agree on despite their factional loyalties, is that Sir Keir must go. The question is when and who’s going to take his place?
    Its an easy one for the Corbynistas. They’ve got no-one willing or even capable under the new rules of mounting a challenge to the current leader. It’s not so simple for the right-wing. There’s plenty who think they can do a better job than Starmer at the moment – his deputy Angela Rayner is one. Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester is another. They both claim to be old school “centre-left” social-democrats and have the street-cred Starmer so plainly lacks. But now’s not the time. They clearly don’t think Labour can beat the Tories at the next election – and they certainly don’t want to take Starmer’s place simply to lead Labour into a further defeat at the polls. They believe time is on their side and when Starmer goes Labour will then turn to them to pick up the pieces.
    That may be their timetable. It’s not ours. Labour could win the next election if it mobilises its core vote around a working class agenda drawn up by the unions and the labour movement as a whole. Corbyn showed what even a modest shift to the left can achieve on the street drawing crowds of Biblical proportions to his rallies when he was leader.
    We have to campaign to sweep the careerists out of the labour movement. We must strive to elect genuine working-class leaderships who are prepared to represent and fight in the unions against the employers and the right-wing within the movement. We must struggle to put the communist answer to the crisis back on the working class agenda.

A new take on an old tale

by Ben Soton

Troy: Our Greatest Story Retold (Stephen Fry's Greek Myths 3)} by Stephen Fry. Paperback: Penguin Books (2021), 432pp, RRP: 9.99. Hardback: Michael Joseph (2020), ‎432pp, RRP: £10. Kindle: Penguin Books (2020), 411pp, RRP: £4.99.

Some stories have lasted the test of time. One such example is the Iliad, believed to have been written by the Greek poet Homer in the ninth century BC. Who hasn’t heard of the Trojan horse or the face that launched a thousand ships?
    Modern readers including myself may have struggled with the Homeric style; written as a poem of 15,693 lines and made up of 24 books. Stephen Fry has converted the original text a more modern format, essentially a novel containing elements of commentary on the original story. Elitists will probably accuse Fry of dumbing-down, although the process of dumbing-down actually began when the Iliad was first translated from the original Ancient Greek.
    The original Iliad was a legend of the siege of Troy: a story where fantasy and reality meet. Many of the characters are off-spring of ancient Greek gods. For instance: the almost invincible warrior Achilles had a human father, Peleus, whilst his mother was an immortal sea nymph; and Helen of Troy, or to be correct Helen of Sparta, was the daughter of Zeus and a human mother.
    There probably was a city on the Aegean coast of modern Turkey. Evidence of its existence comes from the excavations of the 19th century German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann. The location of the site, close to the Dardanelles on a major trade route, suggests trade may have been the source of the conflict. Notice the emphasis on suggestion. The lack of written records meant that the story was passed down orally for generations until Homer finally recorded many years later.
    Why has the story of Troy stood the test of time? It contains the heroism of a classic war story, depicting the bravery and military skill of the likes of Achilles and Ajax, heroes who are often the victims of the whims of the gods. Sometimes viewed as a love-story between Paris and Helen, in fact Helen is abducted by the Trojan prince and although initially falling for him, she eventually sees through his falseness and vanity and after the fall of Troy reconciles with her husband Menelaus of Sparta. Viewers of modern soap-operas may recognise this story or at least ones like it.
    The story also contains the double-crossing Odysseus, who pretends to be insane in order to try to avoid the conflict. Odysseus later becomes the hero of the book’s sequel, the Odyssey.
    The Iliad became the inspiration for other stories such as the Aeneid, the work of the Roman writer Virgil centuries later.
    With this in mind, there is plenty of potential for similar translations of classical texts into a more readable format. I very much look forward to reading them.

For A Democratic Labour Party

Labour movement elections, like those of the bourgeois parliament Labour’s leaders have consistently upheld, were historically designed so that the smallest number of people could manipulate the largest number of votes. The old block-vote system was based on the principle that those who paid the most in membership affiliation fees got the most votes. Whilst this did put enormous power into the hands of faction chiefs, it did allow the activist rank-and-file a say in mandating their representatives. But even this was too much for Labour’s MPs, who simply elected their leader from amongst themselves in much the same way as the Conservatives and Liberals in the “mother of all parliaments”. Although the unions carried considerable sway at the annual Labour Party conference, this forum was in practice reduced to an advisory committee and their collective decisions could be, and indeed were, often ignored by the Parliamentary Labour Party.
    The unions didn’t get back into the leadership race until 1981, when an electoral college was established to broaden the electoral base. The tripartite college gave votes to all of the major stakeholders in the party, including MPs, affiliated trade unions and constituency parties, and this system continued until the introduction of the one-member, one-vote (OMOV) voting system in 2014 by the Blairites, who wanted to cut the unions out of the decision-making process altogether.
    So it’s amusing to see those who slagged off the collegiate system now clamouring for its return in order to ensure that another Corbyn doesn’t return to plague them again. Whether Starmer & Co get it through Conference next week remains to be seen. But with the careerists swarming round Starmer and the Corbynistas ducking for cover, resistance is likely to be confined to protests outside the Brighton Centre and impotent rallies for those who’ve already been purged.
    Starmer says this move, which is part of a large tranche of rule-changes designed to strengthen the grip of the bureaucracy over the Party, is returning some power back to the unions. In a sense that’s true. But it’s equally true that none of the major unions were calling for it and few, if any, were consulted about the proposals in the first place.
    The New Communist Party opposed OMOV from the start precisely because it cut the unions out of Labour’s democratic process. But simply returning to the old collegiate system that gives Labour MPs the same clout as the massed ranks of organised labour is not the answer.
    Communists must campaign, through their unions, for a democratic Labour Party that reflects the wishes of all its affiliates and not the whims of the class-collaborators in parliament. That was the intention of the old Labour Representation Committee (LRC), founded in 1900 as an alliance of socialist organisations and trade unions to increase representation for labour interests in parliament.
    We must campaign for a democratic Labour Party controlled by its affiliates. A Labour Party whose policies reflected those of a democratic union movement would become a powerful instrument for progressive reforms that would strengthen organised labour and benefit the working class.
    The fight for a democratic Labour Party is linked to the fight for a democratic trade union movement. In the unions, we must struggle to elect genuine working-class leaderships, who are prepared to represent and fight for the membership against the employers and against the right-wing within the movement and to campaign for the removal of all anti‑trade union legislation.
    At the same time we must build the revolutionary party and campaign for revolutionary change. Social democracy remains social democracy whatever trend is dominant within it and, as we know, it has never led to socialism.

A Petty Move against China

China's new ambassador Zheng Zeguang was banned from entering Parliament in response to the Chinese government's decision to impose sanctions against a number of anti-Chinese peers and MPs.
`    Five MPs and two members of the House of Lords were sanctioned by China in March for spreading slanderous rumours and disinformation about the situation in the Chinese autonomous region of Xinjiang. They were singled out after the Johnson government imposed asset freezes and travel bans against four Chinese government officials as well as a Xinjiang security body for alleged “gross human rights violations” against Uyghurs and other minorities in the Chinese region.
    Zheng Zeguang was set to speak in both Houses of Parliament, but Peers and MPs led by former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, Lord Alton and Baroness Kennedy, campaigned to bar the Chinese diplomat from entering the Palace of Westminster. The Speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, said: "I do not feel it's appropriate for the ambassador for China to meet on the Commons estate and in our place of work when his country has imposed sanctions against some of our members. If those sanctions were lifted, then, of course, this would not be an issue."
    The Chinese embassy has rightly dismissed this as “a short-sighted, reckless and cowardly move. We despise and strongly condemn this”.
    So do we. This petty and vindictive act, done to ingratiate themselves with the Biden administration, can only make things worse. Instead of crawling to the USA, the British government should take advantage of the economic freedom that came with Brexit to expand our trade with China, and indeed everyone across the world, without strings and without the blessing of Washington.

Johnson’s new tax is grossly unfair to workers

Boris Johnson was back on form this week fending off a backbench revolt over his plan to raise National Insurance rates to help the health service and social care for the elderly while at the same time mocking the ineffectual Labour opposition which takes its lead from the utterly useless Keir Starmer.
    Johnson’s new tax is grossly unfair to working people and it will raise nowhere near enough to address the current problems of the care home community.
    Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is calling for a “National Care Service” for all, funded by progressive taxation, including a wealth tax while Richard Burgon from the Corbynista camp spelt out the demand for a 10 per cent tithe on the super-rich - those with assets over £100 million – that could raise £69 billion to deal with the funding crisis.
    Even Dame Margaret Hodge, the Blairite MP for Barking, said Johnson was ignoring a "raft of better alternatives" including raising income tax or dividend tax. Sir Keir Starmer, however, confined himself to the usual platitudes, accusing the Tories of “putting their rich mates and donors before working people” while avoiding making any concrete counter-proposals.
    Starmer’s crowd will make the usual ineffectual statements. Union leaders will make paper calls for “action” and the assorted left poseurs will tell us that the only answer is to sign their petitions and join their factions. We shouldn’t be surprised at this. They've been doing the same thing for over 100 years.
    Labour’s first Prime Minister was Ramsay MacDonald in 1924. He talked about “socialism” – but only as a dream for future days. His job, he said, was to administer capitalism which he loyally did in the 1920s before openly betraying the labour movement to join the Tories in the bogus “National Government” of the 1930s. Tony Blair never talked about socialism at all. Nor does Starmer.
    Well, we need to talk about socialism. The capitalists do it all the time. Before the Russian Revolution they said that socialism sounded good in theory, but it could never work in practice. After 1917 they said it wouldn't work in the Soviet Union. And when the Soviet Union did survive they argued that it wasn' t really socialist and they presented it as a distortion of what it really was.
    They say, in essence, that the only economic and political system which works is one in which a tiny minority -- themselves -- exploit the rest of the population to ensure that they live lives of ease and luxury.
    If we were Martians observing the Earth from afar we would see how absurd and self-serving this theory is. Unfortunately many working people believe this because they are brought up to accept their own slavery.
    We have to prove them wrong. We have to say that capitalism is brutal and oppressive system that exists solely to ensure that the rich can continue to live the lives of Roman emperors on the backs of workers and peasants.
    Capitalism is the dictatorship of the rich. Their “democracy” is democracy for the exploiters and dictatorship for the exploited. Bourgeois elections are used so that the smallest number of people can manipulate the largest number of votes
    We don' t need to make any concessions to the ideology of the ruling class. Its system is failing and socialism is the only way forward.
    Capitalism had a progressive role once when it emerged from the feudal period. It's certainly not the case now. It's outlived its sell-by date. It's an oppressive and backward system which stifles the hopes and ambitions of the people who produce all the wealth of the world. The 21st century belongs to us.

Crimes at sea

by Ben Soton

Vigil : six-part series. BBC1, 9pm.Also available on BBC iPlayer. Stars: Suranne Jones, Rose Leslie, Shaun Evans, Paterson Joseph and Martin Compston.

Underwater adventure is a genre that’s been around for over 150 years. Jules Verne kicked it off in 1869 with Captain Nemo and his Nautilus in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas and hundreds of books, films and documentaries have followed set in both World Wars, the Cold War, and fantasy and science fiction scenarios.
    BBC1’s latest Sunday night drama, partly set on a nuclear submarine, raises issues over Britain’s so-called independent nuclear deterrent, the Trident nuclear weapons system.
    In episode one a sailor, Petty Officer Craig Burke (played by Martin Compston), is found dead and a civilian police officer, Amy Silva (played by Suranne Jones), is sent aboard to investigate. Tension mounts between Silva and senior members of the crew who view her as an interfering outsider. In an earlier scene Burke had raised concerns about the sub’s descent causing the sinking of a fishing trawler.
    Back on dry land Silva’s partner, Kirsten Longacre (played by Roe Leslie), discovers that Burke was in a relationship with an anti-nuclear campaigner, opening up possibilities for a conspiracy or cover-up. Meanwhile, events on the sub show that those in charge of this highly dangerous and not to mention expensive piece of kit (according to CND the total cost comes to £205 billion) are not as competent as they should be.
    The series is a reminder that Britain has not faced the threat of invasion for 80 years, whilst raising issues around the dangers of this country’s independent nuclear deterrent in the form of the Trident submarine. Firstly, it is not independent but under de-facto US control. Secondly, in terms of deterrent, it is comparable to using a hand grenade to swat a fly. In other words, more of a danger than a deterrent.
    After watching this drama, I’m relieved that this county’s risk of invasion is so small – but one might ask the question that if Britain is in any danger at all why does it have so many troops stationed abroad?
    As the series continues it transpires that a foreign sub may have been responsible for the sinking of the trailer. In total, six world powers have nuclear submarines: Britain, the USA, France, People’s China and India. Any of these states, with the likely exception of China and India, could have had a submarine in the North Sea at any time. But the opening credits of the drama show footage of the Russian President Vladimir Putin giving viewers the idea that the responsible vessel must have been Russian.
    Could this be part of the New Cold War against Russia (and China) with the narrative that Britain is not adequately defended with naval personnel involved with naïve but well-meaning peace campaigners, thus encouraging viewers to support increased defence spending and a further crack-down on dissent and protest?

A planned energy policy now!

Extinction Rebellion (XR) campaigners are back in town this week doing their best to “tell the truth about climate change” in colourful street protests to demand the urgent action needed to tackle the climate and ecological emergency.The ecology movement was established following a call from several academics and veteran green campaigners in 2018 to set up a movement that embraces Gandhi-style civil disobedience to take their demands to the streets and fire a common sense of urgency to tackle climate breakdown.
    Their sit-down protests and efforts to paralyse traffic in London over the last two weeks are part of XR’s long-term campaign to compel government action to avoid tipping points in the climate system, biodiversity loss, and the risk of social and ecological collapse.
    Few would disagree with them on this. Twenty or so years ago the jury was still out on climate change. The capitalists deployed battalions of well‑paid ‘experts’ to deny global warning, to claim renewable energy is costly and that nuclear energy is cheap and clean. Now only the likes of a Donald Trump are in denial. UNICEF has warned that a billion children are now exposed to a deadly combination of climate and environmental crises and with some changes to our climate now inevitable and irreversible, humanity has now been given an unequivocal ‘code red’ warning.
    XR says that if we are to have any hope of coping with the emergency, we must move beyond the politics that have so far held us back and into listening, dialogue and towards unity and action. The eco-warriors say they don’t want to seize power but simply want to place power in the hands of citizens through “citizens’ assemblies”.
    Members of a citizens’ assembly are typically assembled at random from the general public – like a jury – to look at an issue and then make recommendations to parliament or other elected bodies. To a limited extent they already work as advisory committees to bourgeois parliaments. The Climate Assembly UK is one of them.
    All bourgeois politicians, left, right and centre, now pay lip-service to the eco-lobby but few, if any, are prepared to challenge the super-profits that the banks and corporations get from their fossil fuel investments.
    The key issue is winning over the unions and the working class their leaders claim to represent to an ecological agenda to meet the pressing demands of the day.
    The Johnson government has set an ambition for two million green jobs by 2030 – jobs in insulating homes, making electric vehicles and rolling out wind turbines. And last year the Government launched the independent Green Jobs Taskforce, which includes representatives from the TUC and the Prospect union as well as industry and academia – to ensure that the climate transition delivers quality jobs and leaves no workers behind.
    Back in 2010 a major academic study, Zero Carbon Britain 2030, showed that with existing technology Britain can almost entirely eliminate its dependence on fossil fuels in two decades.
    Britain’s onshore and offshore wind and wave potential alone could provide two‑thirds of future carbon‑free energy need; available energy‑efficient construction can cut domestic housing energy needs by 70 per cent; and transport energy use can be cut by 63 per cent.
    What we now need is a planned and integrated national energy policy to reduce Britain’s dependence on energy imports and giant energy corporations, and to create skilled employment in new technology industries.

Days of hope in Stuart London

by Ben Soton

The Royal Secret by Andrew Taylor. HarperCollins 2021. Hardback: 480pp; RRP: £14.99; Kindle: 476pp; RRP: £7.99.

This is the fifth novel in the Marwood & Lovett series set in Restoration London. James Marwood and Cat Lovett are children of Puritan republicans, which puts them in a difficult position under the restored Stuart monarchy. By the fourth novel however, they are both doing rather well for themselves. Marwood works for Lord Arlington, Charles II’s intelligence chief. Meanwhile Lovett owns a thriving architecture business inherited from a late husband.
    Being a male and female in their 20s or early 30s, the novels contain an element of suspense as to whether there will be any romantic involvement between them.
    Taylor manages to bring Restoration London to life by giving a warts and all account of the period, covering all social strata from lowly servants to the king himself. Although the message of his novels is somewhat disappointingly pro-monarchy, he correctly points that there were many, including Catherine Lovett’s late husband, who harked back to the Commonwealth. They also show a period rife with corruption where most people seem to be on the take; an atmosphere common to periods of political demoralisation, such as after the collapse of a progressive regime.
    The Royal Secret centres around a Dutch plot to disrupt the signing of the Treaty of Dover between Stuart England and Bourbon France. Charles II was expected to convert to the Catholic faith at some later date and support France militarily in a war against the Dutch Republic in return for a £230,000 annual pension, a huge sum of money in those days.
    In those days the Dutch Republic was a bastion of Protestant progressive capitalism whilst France at the time represented reactionary feudal absolutism. Many Protestants would sympathise with the Dutch in a similar way as progressives today would side with Cuba, China or People’s Korea.
    In the novel Catherine Lovett is tricked by a Dutch agent into assisting his attempts to disrupt the treaty. Meanwhile a jealous Marwood chases a trail of murder and mayhem involving, amongst other things, a blackmailing servant and a pet lion. The question is will Lovett succumb to the seduction of the mysterious Dutchman, who may attempt to play on her possible republican sympathies? After all, this is a time of divided and complex loyalties – again, not everyone was glad to see the back of the English Republic.
    With the main characters still young, I look forward to seeing the adventures of Marwood and Lovett develop as the Stuart monarchy lurches from crisis to crisis until its eventual overthrow in 1688. Meanwhile, Taylor’s novels give an all-round insight into a sometimes-overlooked period in English history.