What will communists be striving for in 2015? Asks CP general secretary Robert Griffiths, looking towards a year of struggle for social justice, peace and socialism.
Britain is a society disfigured by poverty, food banks, mass unemployment, enormous social injustice and chronic corruption.
Our top priority must be to help sweep away the unelected Tory-LibDem regime at the General Election on May 7. The only realistic alternative is a Labour government. But we also realise that Labour’s manifesto will not provide the radical alternative needed to challenge state-monopoly capitalism in Britain.
That’s why we must redouble our efforts to strengthen the trade unions and trades councils and build the People’s Assembly and the National Assembly of Women as broad popular movements against austerity, privatisation and inequality.
After putting a Labour government in office, the workers and peoples of Britain will have to put the maximum pressure on it to put the interests of the millions before those of the millionaires. Before, during and after May 7, renationalisation and public ownership must be pushed towards the top of the political agenda.
This perspective would provide the best conditions in which to resolve the crisis of political representation in the labour movement.
Communists also have to win urgent support for our policy of ‘progressive federalism’, placing real powers and resources in the Scottish and Welsh parliaments and in English regional assemblies to implement left and progressive economic and social policies.
Attempts by UKIP, the Tory right and other reactionary forces to divide the working class and people generally along national, racial or religious lines must be met by the case for unity against big business and British imperialism.
In particular, the advance of UKIP can be rebuffed by pointing to its pro-austerity, pro-privatisation and pro-City agenda. However, reactionary opposition to the EU will not be defeated by reactionary pro-EU arguments, but by opposing the EU from the left and winning more people to that position.
Whoever comprises it, the next government will decide whether the Trident nuclear weapons system is renewed or replaced. Communists must help strengthen determination in the peace, labour and other progressive movements to scrap Britain’s weapons of mass destruction altogether, as part of the ongoing struggle against militarism and imperialist war.
On the international front, too, intensifying momentum behind the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign and for recognition of Palestinian statehood should be a top priority.
In all this work, a stronger Communist Party and bigger readerships for the Morning Star and Britain’s Road to Socialism can play a key role.
We must therefore turn decisively outwards, projecting the party at every level, taking our own initiatives alongside even greater engagement in broad campaigning movements, drawing new members into public activity, political education and cadre development.
Building Britain’s party of working class and people’s power is the single biggest contribution we can make to the struggle for social justice, peace and socialism in 2015.
