LONDON — “I like that the Communist League says workers need our own party,” Hussein Mohammed, a member of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union in Manchester, told Peter Clifford.
Clifford is the CL’s candidate in the Manchester Rusholme constituency in the U.K.’s general election called for July 4. The CL is also running Pamela Holmes in London’s Tottenham constituency. Mohammed is currently involved in a fight by 150 “gateline” ticket takers over union recognition, pay and conditions. Clifford, who is also a rail worker, has built solidarity with their struggle.
Mohammed accompanied Clifford as the CL candidate campaigned May 10 in the Moss Side neighborhood of Manchester where Mohammed lives. He introduced Clifford to people in a cafe and the shops he frequents.
“It was good getting the word out,” Mohammed said. “We found a lot of interest. Peter was speaking about how the bosses’ parties all claim they can fix capitalism, and all we get is more of the same.”
Living standards have been cut and workers are hit by a lack of health care, social care and housing, alongside a rise in gang violence and drug addiction. A statement by the CL candidates calls for building and strengthening unions to fight “for pay and conditions that prevent families in the working class from being torn apart.”
“We explained that in the face of the capitalist rulers’ devastation and march to war, the central question is which class rules,” Clifford said.
“Jew-hatred is on the rise today,” Clifford told customers at the Moss Side cafe during a wide-ranging and lively exchange. “It’s an anti-working-class poison that blinds us to the class realities, to what’s behind today’s social convulsions, turmoil and war and their brutal consequences for working people. It diverts workers from seeing the real enemy — capital.
“The example of the Cuban Revolution is decisive,” Clifford said. “It shows that the choice workers face isn’t between different capitalist parties but forging our own political instrument to lead the revolutionary struggle for workers power.”
Mohammed and Clifford have talked up the campaign among fellow rail workers. One has invited the communist candidate to meet his family.
Bosses’ parties to expand military
The leaders of both main capitalist parties — Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Labour’s Keir Starmer — have placed boosting government military spending at the center of their election pledges.
“Our nation’s defense must always come first,” Starmer said April 12, adding that the U.K.’s nuclear weapons would be the bedrock. He voiced support for the AUKUS military pact signed by the governments of Australia, the U.K. and the U.S., and he committed Labour to increase military spending from its current 2.1% of gross domestic product to 2.5%. Days later, Sunak said he backed an increase to 2.5%.
Sunak has now added that a new Conservative government would reintroduce “National Service,” a form of military conscription for 18 year olds that was ended in 1960. He says the plan would fill some 30,000 vacant positions in the military and “strengthen the country’s security.”
There is debate among U.K.’s capitalist rulers about the rundown of their armed forces and the sort of military they need as they seek to defend their overseas investments and what remains of their clout abroad. Some still crave a place at the top table of the imperialist powers.
Last year, former Armed Forces Chief Richard Dannatt complained that London could no longer wage simultaneous military campaigns of the scale it did in Iraq and Afghanistan. But neither Labour nor Conservatives are committed to reversing previous cuts to armed forces personnel. They’re constrained by Britain’s decline, rising government debt and ongoing economic weakness.
“Whenever Labour or Conservative politicians speak of ‘British interests,’ they really mean the interests of the country’s ruling capitalist families, not workers,” Holmes told the Militant. “We need our own policies on all questions. The CL says not a penny, not a person, for the imperialist government, its budget and its military.”