Speaking to the Communist Party’s political committee on Wednesday the 11th of June, international secretary John Foster warned that events in Ukraine once more demonstrated the dangers of Britain’s membership of NATO.
‘Current US secretary of state for Europe, Victoria Nuland, was foreign policy adviser to former Vice President Dick Cheney and closely associated with the neo-con Project for a New American Century. US support for the February coup in Kiev has resulted in an administration dominated by nationalists and fascists and oligarch president Petro Poroshenko who was previously a pro-NATO foreign secretary in the years following the 2004 Orange Revolution’, Mr Foster pointed out. He declared the relentless military assault on the Russian-speaking provinces since Poroshenko took office to be in clear defiance of the 17 April Geneva agreement.
Mr Foster also noted that events in Ukraine had to be seen in the context of massive NATO military exercises currently taking place on Russian borders, the new US agreements with Moldova and Georgia and the pressure from the EU and NATO on Bulgaria that has halted construction of the South Stream gas pipeline from Russia.
‘These moves mark a dangerous escalation in US plans to turn Eastern Europe into a militarily active front line against Russia’, the CP international secretary accused, which makes it doubly important to mobilise support for the demonstration against the NATO summit in Newport on September 4-5.
Reaffirming his party’s opposition to Britain’s membership NATO, he called it ‘an aggressive first strike nuclear alliance that is a threat to the peoples of Britain and the world’.
Mr Foster also condemned the ‘increasingly chauvinistic tone’ of the British Con-Dem government’s statements on immigration and its attacks on Islam.
‘These follow the electoral advance of UKIP and the rise of extreme right wing forces across Europe, which itself is the product of worsening labour market insecurity and the use of austerity cuts, deregulation and mass unemployment by the EU to boost big business profits’, he remarked.
Britain’s communists urged the labour movement not only to stand firm against all forms of racism, but also to expose the role played by EU neo-liberal policies in fanning the flames.
The CP political committee agreed to:
• Hail the advances made by communist and left forces across Europe in last months elections and congratulate all who took part in the No2EU – Yes to Workers Rights campaign in Britain.
• Urge a massive turnout for the People’s Assembly demonstration against austerity in London on June 21 and for local days of action on July 12.
• Call for solidarity with plans for generalised public sector strike action on pay and terms of employment on July 10.
• Condemn the failure of the Queen’s Speech to take serious steps to end workplace super-exploitation with its ‘normalisation’ of zero hours contracts.
• Welcome the formation of a Unity Government in Palestine.
