MANCHESTER, England — “The Communist League explains that the only way to prevent another world war and the mounting devastation workers face, is for the working class to take political power,” Hugo Wils, the CL’s candidate in the Gorton and Denton constituency, told former airport worker Samantha Wilson as they talked on her doorstep Jan. 31.
“We are the peace party,” he said. Wilson signed to nominate Wils in the parliamentary by-election Feb. 26.
Wils, 38, is a leader of the Communist League, a shop floor worker in an aerospace factory and a member of Unite the Union. Two of his workmates who live in the constituency signed up to propose and second him. One took out a subscription to the Militant.
“Our campaign is on the front lines of today’s working-class battles that lay the groundwork for building the party workers need,” Wils told them.
The first day of his campaign, Wils joined a solidarity picket line with Unite union refuse workers in Birmingham, who have been striking since March 2025 against a wage cut. Delegations from the Rail, Maritime and Transport union and the Fire Brigades Union were among the several hundred trade unionists who joined the Jan. 30 action.
Danny Taylor, one of the strike leaders, hailed the support the strikers received. He told Wils that agency workers — who the bosses tried to use to break the strike — were now joining the union’s fight despite the bullying and harassment from bosses at the Labour-run City Council. Taylor and other strikers welcomed Wils’ campaign.
The strike “is an important fight and an example for all workers, in the face of the never-ending erosion of living standards,” Wils told an interviewer from the Politics Joe YouTube channel on the picket line. He said workers need to organize independently of the bosses’ parties, which try to lure workers into the dead end of trying to fix capitalism.
That afternoon Wils and campaign supporters joined some 300 Kurds in Manchester protesting the military assault by forces of Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa against Kurds in Syria. With Washington’s backing, al-Sharaa is trying to seize an autonomous region in northeast Syria carved out by Kurds, denied their national rights for decades by successive Syrian rulers.
Roddeen Osman and Mazloum Chike told Wils that their hometown of Kobani in northern Syria had been cut off during the fighting and they feared for their families who they can no longer contact. Wils spoke at the rally.
‘Workers need own foreign policy’
“Your fight today is in the interests of all working people” he said. Washington and London “can’t be trusted. They care more about their relation with the al-Sharaa regime and business deals with Arab regimes than about the Kurds. The U.S. rulers care more about their so-called Board of Peace than the fight by Israel to defeat Hamas and prevent it carrying out a new Holocaust.
“The British rulers’ foreign policy is an extension of their course against working people at home,” Wils said. They defend the interests of the capitalist class. The CL advances the interests of working people worldwide. Its campaign calls for “US/UK hands off Cuba! Defend Cuba’s socialist revolution!”
The by-election was called after Labour Member of Parliament Andrew Gwynne quit. He’d been suspended from the Labour Party after allegedly making a series of abusive comments about working people, Jews and Labour MPs Angela Rayner and Dianne Abbott. The election is pitched by the media as make-or-break for the increasingly unpopular Labour government, headed by Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
“Our campaign begins with the world and the class questions that underlie all politics,” Wils told campaign supporters as they set out to get nominations Jan. 31, “not with the turmoil between Labour, Conservative, Reform, Greens and other capitalist parties.”
“One party says they are on the left and the other on the right, but they are part of the same team,” Diarietou Coulbaly told this Militant reporter on her doorstep in Gorton. She liked the Communist League’s perspective for working people to organize independently of the capitalist parties. She got a subscription to the Militant and the book Cuba and the Independence War in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde: The Fall of the Last Colonial Empire in Africa.
After four hours campaigning, CL supporters got the 10 nominees needed to put Wils on the ballot.
“Why does Hugo Wils say that immigrant rights are a union question?” one person asked CL member Andrés Mendoza.
“The attacks on immigrants are an attempt to divide working people,” Mendoza replied. He pointed to attempts by rail bosses in Manchester “to caution immigrant workers not to join a fight for union rights, but the union made clear that it had these workers’ backs and the fight won out.”