Britain’s communists will launch an all-out effort to help put the left and progressive case against EU membership over the coming seven weeks.
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The Communist Party’s political committee decided on Wednesday evening to make the forthcomingEuropean Parliament election campaign a top priority in tribute to Bob Crow, former RMT general secretary and leader of the No2EU – Yes to Workers’ Rights electoral alliance who died two weeks ago.
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The alliance has brought together the RMT transport union, the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the Indian Workers Association and other progressive forces to contest the EU elections on May 22.
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‘As recent election results in France confirm, abandoning the anti-EU field to racists and fascists is a recipe for disaster’, the Communist Party’s Greater Midlands district secretary Graham Stevenson told the meeting.
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‘Instead of allowing UKIP and the BNP to mobilise against the EU on reactionary grounds, the labour movement needs to join with other trade union and left-wing forces across Europe to expose the role of the “troika” – the EU Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund’ – in driving forward the whole austerity and privatisation agenda, he argued.
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Morning Star editor Richard Bagley pointed out that when the 2012 Stability and Governance Treaty is incorporated into EU law in 2018, Britain is likely to be bound by its rules outlawing government spending deficits.
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‘While people march throughout Spain against EU policies dismantling the welfare state, large sections of the labour movement and the left in Britain are sleep walking into an EU straitjacket’, Mr Bagley warned.
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CP international secretary John Foster reported that at a meeting in Brussels last week, a dozen communist and workers’ parties had agreed that the EU was ‘unreformable’. Among the signatories to a statement about to be published are the French Communist Party, Akel in Cyprus, the Left Party in Germany and the Portuguese Communist Party.
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The Communist Party of Britain will immediately launch an emergency financial appeal to maximise its participation in the No2EU – Yes to Workers’ Rights election campaign, ensuring that communists head the lists in some key Euro-constituencies and that the party publishes its own anti-EU materials to supplement those produced by the alliance.
