MANCHESTER, England — “The Communist League stands in the front lines of battles by working people,” Hugo Wils, the CL’s candidate in the Gorton and Denton parliamentary by-election said. He was talking with seven workers, originally from Pakistan, at a meeting in their house here Feb. 1. Wils was accompanied by Sajad Ahmad, an aerospace worker at the factory where they both work. Ahmad had set up the gathering.
“Our campaign begins with the accelerating military moves by the U.S. rulers to assert their domination around the world. The U.K. rulers want a piece of the pie too,” Wils said. The Labour government is pushing forward plans to make the U.K. “war ready,” including upgrading its nuclear weapons capabilities.
“This goes hand in hand with the erosion of workers’ living standards and attacks on immigrants. The only way out is to fight to change which class rules, to bring working people to power,” he said.
“The fight against Jew-hatred is key for the working class,” Wils added. Following the killing of two Jews in an assault on a north Manchester synagogue last year, Wils had joined actions in solidarity with Jewish worshippers there. As the crisis of capitalism deepens, the bosses will try to scapegoat Jews for the disaster facing workers, rather than the real cause — the system they profit from.
“Whether you are Jewish, Muslim or Christian, we must fight together for our rights,” Ahmad added.
Asad Khan, a warehouse worker, asked Wils why the government is “planning to increase the waiting period for immigrants from five to 10 years before you have the right to remain in the U.K.? They’re making it much harder.”
“They do it to divide working people,” Wils replied. “The CL fights for an amnesty for immigrants in this country, so all workers would have the same rights from day one. This is in the interests of all workers, whether you’re British or foreign-born.”
When Labour Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced the new measures, both the Conservative and Reform party spokespeople agreed. Mahmood, Wils pointed out, has now extended the wait time for some immigrants to 20 years before they can apply for citizenship.
Oppose U.S. blockade of Cuba!
Communist League members introduced Wils’ campaign to working people on their doorsteps in Denton Feb. 8. In the course of discussions, they pointed to the stakes for workers in opposing Washington’s oil blockade against Cuba, which aims to advance the U.S. rulers’ goal of overturning Cuba’s socialist revolution.
“What’s this got to do with me?” one person angrily asked this Militant reporter when I knocked on his door. “Let’s sort this country out first.”
I explained that the rulers’ foreign policy and their wars abroad are an extension of what they do against working people at home. After some further discussion we shook hands and he said he’d appreciated talking with us.
“I wish Trump had attacked the rulers in my country, Iran, like he did with Venezuela,” airport worker Mojtaba Habibi told Wils on his doorstep.
The U.S. rulers only intervene to advance their own class interests, Wils said, and their military intervention in the Middle East should be opposed by workers everywhere. “Today, they fear instability and a new revolution in Iran far more than they fear the country’s bourgeois clerical rulers.”
“The clerics stole the 1979 revolution,” Habibi said, pointing to the uprising that overthrew the U.S.-backed shah of Iran and the cleric-led counterrevolution that came later.
By the end of the weekend CL members had sold six subscriptions to the Militant and five books by revolutionary working-class leaders.
A lively Feb. 7 campaign meeting was attended by 17 people. “In previous campaigns people often told us they didn’t want to talk about the election,” Wils said. “But this time there’s a real search for answers and interest in what the CL is presenting.”
The increasingly unpopular and crisis-ridden Labour government hopes to retain the Gorton and Denton seat. Its main opponents “are the Green and Reform parties, which campaign on what they are against, not what they’re for. The Greens say a vote for them is a vote for ‘hope’ not ‘hate,’” — a reference to Reform’s anti-immigrant policies — “while Reform says a vote for them is a vote to get rid of the Labour government.”
In sharp contrast, the CL starts from the capacities of the working class to join together and fight for the measures it needs. It urges a union-led fight for jobs with wages and conditions that make it possible for workers to raise families. It advances a course for workers to organize independently of the capitalist parties — Conservatives, Labour, Green and Reform — in order for workers to take power into our own hands.
Wils told the meeting that one person who had nominated him, Rose Whelan, said she was concerned that “the unions don’t seem as strong as they were.”
Wils replied that “a corner has been turned from decades of retreat by the unions. There are more union fights today, and these struggles win support from fellow workers.” He pointed to recent union backing “for protests against the deportation threats to immigrants. Union support for these kind of struggles is something new and positive.”
Wils described a discussion with retired worker Michael Pope, who had told him he thought “there should be a wealth tax on the rich” — a policy promoted by the Greens. Wils explained there isn’t a way to use the tax system to make the rulers pay. “Such measures lure us into thinking capitalism can be reformed and away from working people’s own potential to fight to change the conditions we face.”