Please accept my New Year greetings on behalf of the Communist Party, and my thanks for your efforts to build the labour movement and our party in the fightback against Britain’s unelected government of the bankers.
It has been an eventful year which has witnessed a shift from sporadic and isolated opposition to austerity and privatisation to something bigger, with a higher political quality that could prove much more durable. We have some way to go but it is clear that workers will not leave the battlefield to the ruling class. 2011 was the year history caught up with the Murdochs and their hit men and women. How fitting that at the same time, the labour movement rallied to save the Morning Star, the only newspaper owned by its readers.
It is now more necessary than ever for organised workers to speak out and to act. We have millions of unemployed. Young people cry out for decent jobs. Public services are being plundered and packaged up for sale. Education and the NHS, in particular, are being prepared for privatisation. Unnaccountable bankers, though rumbled and despised, continue to hold economic and political power. The fight continues to establish the sovereignty of the people against big business and European Union diktat. Ruling class aggression at home feeds British imperialist aggression abroad. Funds that should be used to build homes for the people are used to bomb others into submission.
Your actions have made a difference. We now need you to step up your activity and bring others into the fray.
We have seen mass action in England, Scotland and Wales. First came March 26 followed by June 30. There was the commemorative march in Cable Street on October 4. Then came the mighty display of working class and popular anger on November 30, which the government found impossible to shrug off. The active participation of millions in every village, town and city of Britain did the government damage. Everywhere workers are asking ‘What now, where next?’
We communists are very much part of this struggle and debate. Our aim has been to turn the economic crisis into a political crisis. We have asserted all along that this was a government lacking in legitimacy because it was not elected, hid its aims and has since sought to impose them through minority rule and without a shred of popular consent.
The view that this government is a reactionary and dangerous regime that must be evicted from office is widely held. In the advanced sections of organised labour many would have it removed now. In the year ahead, one of our aims is to help make this the general view of wide sections of the population.
Such a level of political consciousness does not come easily or readily. It results from the struggle of ideas, through street campaigning and through propaganda by word and deed. We have launched the new edition of our party’s programme, Britain’s Road to Socialism, and at our recent successful Festival for 21st Century Marxism, we set out the ideas that make workers better organised and stronger. In 2012 we have even bolder plans, with new publications, events and initiatives. We will be launching new commissions and advisories to create arenas for debate and action within and by the party. We will be inviting you to take an active part in them.
A highpoint in 2011 has been the two national speaking tours on the theme ‘Britain Needs Socialism’. I want to thank all those who made these tours a success. They enabled us to reach new forces and gather new recruits. They led to the formation of new branches and strengthened existing ones. They were the biggest party initiatives of this kind for a generation. In 2012, with your active participation, our meetings will be even more effective and reach an even wider audience.
Together with our national women’s organiser Liz Payne, I have recently returned from representing our party at the 13th international meeting of communist and workers parties, held this year in Athens. The Greek people have been a courageous example to us all. We met the Russian communists who recently gained 13 million votes and who are battling to rescue their society from oligarchs and thieves. Other parties present in Athens – for example Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, South Africa, Brazil – are in government while others struggle against bans and imprisonment. The Communist Party of Britain proudly takes its place in a movement that fights all the time and everywhere for a better world for working people.
In 2012 I would ask you to put the case for socialism whenever and wherever appropriate in your trade union and community organisations. Introduce comrades and friends to Britain’s Road to Socialism and its ideas. Again, where appropriate, invite them to join and strengthen Britain’s Communist Party, and thereby strengthen the labour and progressive movements and the fight against capitalist crisis.
We also need your help to promote the People’s Charter. Winning wide support for it would help put Britain on a path away from the waste and exploitation of capitalism.
Next year will be one of enormous dangers and challenges – but together we can turn it into one of enormous challenges, struggles and advances.
Yours in comradeship,
Robert Griffiths
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