The Communist Party is calling for maximum mobilisation for May Day events as a show of strength amid the greatest strike wave in generations.
With the Tories engaged in a vicious assault on the right to strike, demonising refugees amid a rise in far-right street activity and determined to make workers pay for the cost-of-capitalism crisis, May Day rallies should demonstrate the scale of resistance, the party’s political committee urged on Monday night.
‘A highly visible left presence in towns and cities marking May Day this weekend would also build for a strong anti-Tory vote at next week’s local elections in England and show support for workers engaged in strike action’, Ben Chacko told the committee.
The furore over Labour MP Diane Abbott’s letter to the Observer on racism underlined the need to build a mass anti-racist movement rooted in class struggle and focused on uniting all anti-racist forces.
Her letter’s apparent attempt to set a hierarchy of racisms should be condemned — but so should a shallow, purity-test approach that turns anti-racism into a matter of etiquette and ignores the decades of actual anti-racist struggle by veterans like Ms Abbott, Mr Chacko argued.
He reaffirmed the Communist Party’s commitment to oppose all forms of racism, noting the leading role long played by socialists and communists in the fight against anti-semitism.
Given Ms Abbott’s swift apology, Sir Keir Starmer’s withdrawal of the whip was a cynical attack on a leading left MP, Mr Chacko declared.
The CP political committee called for support for Communist candidates where they are standing for council seats next week and for non-sectarian left candidates elsewhere in cases where Labour candidates are unworthy of left support, except where the far right present a threat, in which case it calls for a vote for the candidate best placed to defeat them.
