Communist League candidate denounces UK war drive

LONDON — “Working people need to oppose Prime Minister David Cameron’s deployment of more armed cops on the streets and British military intervention in the Mideast,” Jonathan Silberman, Communist League candidate for mayor of London, said at the Nov. 19 Militant Labour Forum here.

British imperialists, like their French counterparts, have used the Islamic State-organized terror attacks in Paris that killed 130 people to justify airstrikes in Syria, the demonization of Muslims, stepped-up police presence and the closing of political space, Silberman said. Mickey McCarthy, a hairdresser attending the forum, asked Silberman whether the rulers were happy to have an excuse “to divert people from the crisis happening here, like the terrible state of housing.”

“Imperialist wars are not a diversion from their attacks on workers at home, but an extension of them,” Silberman said. “The working class needs its own voice. We need to organize independently of the exploiters, to form a labor party based on the unions to lead workers and farmers to take power from the capitalist class.”

— PAUL DAVIES