LONDON — “Nothing fundamental will change for working people and youth whatever the outcome” of the July 4 general election, said Peter Clifford, Communist League candidate in the Manchester Rusholme constituency. He was responding to questions from Manchester University Students’ Union executive members Tesnime Safraou and Hannah Mortimer in a wide-ranging interview June 20. It will be available on YouTube and Instagram.
“We fight for a crash program of public works” to build the homes, schools and colleges, hospitals and infrastructure we need, the CL candidate said. “But under capitalism, education, health, the rail industry, where I work, are all commodities, run as businesses to make money.
“The fundamental question is which class rules,” he said. In Cuba working people made a socialist revolution that put an end to education as a commodity and embarked on making learning a lifetime experience. “Our campaign is addressed to how we can fight together to settle that question here.”
Workers need our own party, a party of labor based on the unions, that will defend the interests of working people, Clifford said. Such a party would fight for amnesty for undocumented immigrants and equal rights for all, whether born here or abroad, as the capitalist parties pledge to ratchet up restrictions on so-called overstayers, including students from abroad, and intensify anti-immigrant demagogy. It would fight against rising Jew-hatred. And it would defend a working-class foreign policy.
“Such a course means building and strengthening the trade unions,” he said, pointing to how his union, the Rail, Maritime and Transport union at Manchester’s Piccadilly rail station, organized solidarity with nurses on strike last year. Clifford, with a 50-year record as a union-builder and communist leader, has been invited to address three election “hustings” where candidates in the constituency will respond to questions from the public and debate out their platforms.
London campaigners are soapboxing in the busy Tottenham shopping area, where Pamela Holmes is the CL candidate for Parliament.
The Communist League has centered its campaigning in the working class, with candidates reaching out to workmates, to union fights and going door to door in working-class neighborhoods. With the capitalist parties concentrated upon reversing the declining fortunes of the propertied rulers and deepening attacks on workers’ living standards and rights, there is an openness to the CL’s class-against-class program.
“Not a penny, not a person for the imperialist government, its budget and its military,” CL candidates say as the Conservative and Labour parties both pledge to boost the armed forces.
Clifford has been joined by Militant subscribers living in the Manchester Rusholme constituency, introducing him to friends and neighbors. Uber driver Asif Kamal, originally from Pakistan, was skeptical when Clifford knocked on his door. There’ll be no “revolutionary change in my or your lifetime,” he said.
“The rulers teach workers from when we’re very young that we are not capable of much, but the class struggle tells a different story,” the CL candidate replied. “Our class has a fighting history, including revolutions in Russia in 1917 and Cuba in 1959.” Kamal bought a subscription to the Militant and donated 6 pounds ($7.60) to the campaign.
John Knight, 91, a retired rail worker, also subscribed. He spoke with Clifford about his experience as a soldier in World War II. “These wars are just for the rich and it’s working people who suffer, and we’re getting closer to another one today,” he said. “It’s only through taking political power away from the capitalist rulers into workers’ hands that can stop future wars,” Clifford replied.
Passing around her campaign flyer at a protest by RMT union “gateline” ticket takers on Northern Trains fighting for union recognition, Holmes was greeted by “Yes we do!” when the CL candidate pointed to the campaign leaflet’s headline, “Workers need our own party.” The June 24 protest at the headquarters of the ticket takers’ subcontractor employer, Carlisle Support Services, in Luton, Bedfordshire, is the latest in a campaign involving days of strike action.
Some 110,000 copies of the leaflet have been printed by the campaign and distributed free by the Royal Mail to every household in the two constituencies where the CL candidates are standing.
Campaign wins a hearing
Campaigners have participated in protests against Jew-hatred. They got a good response to election flyers at a June 7 protest of 120 just north of London demanding release of the hostages held by Hamas since the group’s Oct. 7 pogrom. Six participants picked up copies of The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch: Stakes for the International Working Class.
“At the center of our campaign is defense of Cuba’s socialist revolution against the Washington-led economic and political war against it and the U.K. government’s complicity,” Holmes told a meeting of 30 in Southall, west London, hosted by the Indian Workers Association, the U.K. branch of the Students’ Federation of India and the local branch of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign.
The meeting was addressed by Rigoberto Zarza, European director of the Cuban Institute for Friendship with the Peoples; Aymée Díaz, second secretary at the Cuban Embassy in London; and Students’ Federation of India-United Kingdom Secretary Nikhil Mathew.
The speakers called for an end to the U.S. blockade and the removal of Cuba from Washington’s “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list. The placement of Cuba on the list has led to further damage to access to the world financial system, reducing income, expenditure and foreign investment, Díaz said. “It has depressed tourism, a major foreign currency earner, with a decline of almost 1 million tourists from Europe.”
“In today’s crisis, we point to the example of how through their revolution, Cuba’s working people took political power,” Holmes said. In the process, they renewed communist leadership in the Americas and internationally.
“Working people are inspired when they learn of Cuba’s international solidarity, defending Angola’s sovereignty from invasions by the apartheid regime in South Africa and the contribution that made to freeing Nelson Mandela and the unbanning of the African National Congress; and when they find out about Cuba’s international health missions, including during the pandemic,” she said.