The election race has begun
THE New Communist Party will be calling on working people to vote Labour in the general election, not because we support the venal right-wing policies of "New Labour", Blair and Brown, or because we think a Labour government can solve the problems of working people. That isn’t possible in a capitalist "democracy". It is simply the best possible outcome in the current circumstances.
In our view a Labour government, with the yet unbroken links with the Labour Party, the trade unions and the co-operative movement, offers the best option for the working class in the era of bourgeois parliamentary democracy. Our strategy is for working class unity and our campaigns are focused on defeating the right-wing within the movement and strengthening the left and progressive forces within the Labour Party and the unions.
Working people have made some gains since Labour returned to office in 1997, gains that would not have happened under the Tories, like the peace process in Ireland, devolution for Scotland and Wales and the restoration of the Greater London Authority, improved terms and conditions for workers and reduced child poverty.
The alternatives, all ultimately based on the revisionist thinking of the old communist party’s "British Road to Socialism", are nothing more than an illusion. Running left candidates against Labour divides the movement and the class. It doesn’t strengthen the left within the Labour Party and ignores the obvious fact that the only realistic alternative governments are those of the Tories or the Liberal Democrats that would be much worse than any Labour government.
Blair & Co hope that the election will force the class to close ranks around their class collaborationist, war party "New Labour" agenda. We must campaign for a Labour victory that strengthens the genuinely progressive and democratic trends within the labour movement that ultimately are the only force that can defeat them.
