Defend Polish communists!

Gerry Downing and Andy Brooks on the line

By New Worker  correspondent

THE POLISH embassy in London was picketed last week by demonstrators protesting against the reactionary Polish regime’s persecution of socialists and communists and the mass desecration of monuments erected in memory of Polish International Brigaders, communist partisans and the Red Army that liberated Poland in 1945.

    New Communist Party leader Andy Brooks and Gerry Downing from the Socialist Fight movement led the protest, that was also supported by the British Posadist movement, opposite the Polish embassy in London’s West End. Gerry Downing and Dermot Hudson from the NCP took the mike to denounce the “decommunisation” law that bans all communist symbols from public display and the crackdown on communist and socialist activists in Poland in a lively two-hour protest that attracted considerable attention from passers-by.

        Last year four members of the Communist Party of Poland were give nine-month suspended sentences for propagating communist ideology on the internet and in their newspaper, Brzask (Dawn).

    Poland was once a people’s democracy where everyone had a job with a welfare state that provided free education, a health service and benefits from the cradle to the grave. Now the country is a paradise for the landowners, capitalists and petty exploiters who rule the land.

The sell-off and destruction of Poland’s public sector has forced millions of Polish workers to seek work in Britain and the rest of the European Union. Though the Polish regime can count on the support of the Catholic church, which itself is a major landowner in the country, it fears a resurgent socialist and communist movement, and that’s why they’ve launched a campaign to virtually outlaw all communist and revolutionary socialist parties.

Solidarity with Ukraine’s anti-fascist resistance

By New Worker correspondent

The call to build solidarity with the anti-fascist resistance was renewed at a meeting in London last week called by the New Worker

Gerry Downing, Marie Lynam, Theo Russell and Andy Brooks

to discuss the current situation in Ukraine. Comrades returned to the Cock Tavern in Euston to hear NCP leader Andy Brooks, Theo Russell (NCP London), Gerry Downing of Socialist Fight and Marie Lynam of the British Posadists kick off the discussion, which ranged from the role of the Ukrainian left to the concrete problems facing the solidarity movement in the Britain today.

When the Ukrainian fascists seized power in February 2014 in an imperialist-inspired coup the bourgeois lie-machine went into top gear to call these people “democrats” in order to mask the real nature of the new regime. They were echoed by some self-proclaimed Trotskyists who set up a solidarity campaign that claimed to support the Ukrainian labour movement but largely repeated the anti-Russian hysteria peddled in the bourgeois press to justify NATO support for the fascist regime. But attempts to build a bogus pro-Kiev regime front inside the labour movement have failed, largely due to the work of the Solidarity with the Anti-Fascist Resistance in Ukraine (SARU) campaign and a number of left movements, including the NCP and Socialist Fight.

Labour after the election

Gerry Downing, Marie Lynam, Theo Russell and Andy Brooks

by New Worker correspondent

That was the theme of the panel of speakers who opened a New Worker meeting at the Cock Tavern in central London last week. Chaired by Theo Russell, the panel included NCP leader Andy Brooks and Gerry Downing of Socialist Fight, who was expelled by Labour on trumped-up charges of ‘anti-Semitism’ last year, and Marie Lynam, a Posadist who is a Labour Party activist and supporter of the Labour Representation Committee.
 Labour’s strong showing in the June election against all expectations from the media pundits has left the Tories dependant on the votes of the sectarian bigots of the Democratic Unionist Party in the occupied north of Ireland. How long can they cling to power was the question and the general answer was that it largely depended on the mobilisation of the mass movement.

NCP leader Andy Brooks said we must focus on Jeremy Corbyn’s call to bring down the May government to force another general election this year and when that takes place to work for the maximum Labour vote to give Corbyn a working majority in parliament. Labour will be a hostage to fortune if ends up relying on the votes of the nationalists or the Liberal-Democrats to form the next government he said. But the June efforts show that a Labour majority was winnable through the mobilisation of the working class up and down the country. In the meantime the campaign to stop the Blairite bureaucracy’s witch-hunt against prominent left-wingers must continue unabated until all those unjustly suspended or expelled are reinstated.

Gerry Downing , Marie Lynam and Theo Russell made similar points reflecting the broad spectrum of left opinion that has united behind the call from Corbyn for a new direction for Labour. A lively discussion followed on the pros and cons of Brexit and the central role of the trade union movement in the future.