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| Raising a glass to the NCP! |
by New Worker
correspondent
Forty
years is a long time in anyone’s book. For a Party that some said would only
last six weeks it’s an immense achievement said Andy Brooks at the New
Communist Party’s foundation day celebration at the historic Marx
Memorial Library in London last weekend. The NCP leader paid tribute to all the
effort, sacrifice and hardship that comrades had endured to ensure the survival
of the Party over the years, during the formal part of the commemoration on
Sunday.
Comrades gathered in the hallowed hall of
the building that was once the centre for the pioneering socialists of the 19th
century and the base for Lenin, who worked there for nearly two years editing Iskra, the Bolshevik newspaper that was
smuggled into Czarist Russia to help build the revolutionary movement.
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| Andy Brooks: We are the Party of Lenin and Stalin but also of Sid and Eric |
“We are the party of Lenin and Stalin but
we are also the party of Sid French and Eric Trevett,” Andy Brooks said. Sid
and Eric were lifelong communists who founded the NCP in 1977 on the principles
of working-class unity, Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism.
Forty years later the NCP and its weekly paper, the New Worker, continue to keep up the fight. This was reflected in
the contributions from the honoured guests that included old friends from the
Italian communist movement (PC) and the Revolutionary Communist Party of
Britain (ML) along with ambassadors and other diplomats from Cuba, Democratic
Korea, Laos and Vietnam.
Two ambassadors, Laotian Comrade Sayakane
Sisouvong and Comrade Nguyen Van Thao from Vietnam, spoke highly about the
NCP’s solidarity work, and Comrade Jorge Luis Garcia from Cuba warned about the
new American threats to the socialist island in the Caribbean. The consistent
work in solidarity with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was
highlighted by Comrade Song Gi Kim from the Democratic Korean embassy and this
was also taken up by Dermot Hudson, the chair of the UK Korean Friendship
Association (KFA).
National Chair Alex Kempshall recalled the
NCP’s efforts over the decades to build working class and communist unity when
he called on Michael Chant of the RCPB (ML) to say a few words about the
long-standing friendship between our two parties. And soon after Michael and
Lesley Larkum, both accomplished musicians, played an interlude of light
classical music that included a Korean folk-song and a piece arranged by one of
their comrades, Cornelius Cardew, who died in mysterious circumstances in 1981.
No NCP celebration ends without an appeal
for the fighting fund and this was given in rousing style by our national
treasurer, Daphne Liddle. It clearly went down well with the comrades who
raised £1,338 for the New Worker on the day!
