Election rally sees off fascist attempt to disrupt. Large audience supports the case for socialism and clearing parliament of corruption and nepotism.
This was the election rally for Communist Party candidate for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney constituency, Robert Griffiths, where more than a dozen fascists failed to disrupt the big public meeting in Merthyr Tydfil on Monday evening (February 23).
Members of the National Front and a new outfit calling itself the ‘Valleys Frontline Firm’ turned up at the Soar centre in the middle of the town, where CP general secretary Robert Griffiths was launching his general election campaign. Bemused locals looked on as an NF organiser with a pronounced West Country accent led the fascist protestors in a chant of ‘Whose streets? Our streets’ as a large crowd filed into the venue.
Inside the hall, Mr Griffiths urged an enthusiastic audience to help return an MP who would fight for ‘public ownership, a wealth tax on the super-rich and the rejection of the European Union, NATO and nuclear weapons’. He vowed to uphold the staunchly socialist and anti-imperialist politics of the town’s legendary former MP S.O. Davies, echoing the call in the latter’s 1955 Government of Wales Bill for ‘a Welsh parliament in a federal Britain’.
In true S.O. style, Mr Griffiths also launched a vitriolic attack on ‘chief war criminal’ Jack Straw, Labour’s foreign secretary at the time of the Iraq War, his fellow disgraced MP Malcolm Rifkind, Bedroom Tax minister Iain Duncan Smith and ‘category A greedy bastard’ Stuart Gulliver, tax dodging chief executive of HSBC bank.
‘They epitomise Britain’s utterly corrupt ruling class and its craven political establishment’, he charged, reaffirming the Communist Party’s commitment to uniting with left and progressive forces inside and outside parliament to fight for radical and revolutionary change.
Respect MP George Galloway had been due to address the rally, but withdrew following the recurrence of a back injury suffered when he was attacked in the street and hospitalised last year by a man wearing an ‘Israeli Defence Force’ t-shirt. In a message to the meeting, Mr Galloway warmly endorsed Mr Griffiths as CP prospective parliamentary candidate. ‘We share an undying commitment to peace, justice and equality – the heart of our mutual socialism – and an absolute opposition to Western imperialism which has brought so much horror to the world’, he wrote.
‘Rob Griffiths is the sort of person we desperately need in Parliament – he would speak up for the working class people whom New Labour has so miserably abandoned and, whatever the result, will put up a great fight and keep the red flag flying high’.
Chairing the rally in a personal capacity, Merthyr Tydfil trades union council secretary Tommy Roberts announced that Mr Galloway had readily agreed to reschedule his speaking commitment in the town for March 30.
http://communist-party.org.uk/britain/elections/2056-ge2015-the-sort-of-person-we-desperately-need-in-parliament.html
