Our country – Our democracy
Britain is Wales, Scotland and England, combined and co-operating. One economy, one currency, one people.
Britain is the workers and their families who make the country what it is.
We want neither war, nor destitution, nor division, nor inequality and prejudice.
We want creative lives, science, art, free health and social care and education, housing, a better life for future generations.
We want stable employment, dignity at work and a voice that is respected.
We want a better approach to environmental protection and high tech production, industry and energy supply.
To achieve these things we need the economic and political independence to respond to the democratic wishes of the people.
It took over 134 years of sacrifice and struggle to achieve votes for all at 18 years of age.
It is the people and their unions and progressive organisations that created the democratic structures and practices required for social and economic advance.
The universal franchise was handed away when Britain became subservient to the unelected powers of the European Union dominating our trading, labour, capital, agricultural, industrial, public service and fishing policies.
The voice of the people was further muted by retaining a ‘special relationship’ with the United States which dominated our foreign policy.
Having very significantly weakened our energy, manufacturing, utility, transport and public service sectors and put large sections of them under foreign ownership, US and EU forces are now competing to privatise the NHS.
The EU and US relationships demanded the free movement of capital. The removal of exchange controls on capital in 1979 opened the door to the industrial vandalism of the neoliberal period.
In the 40 years since capital was given free rein, we have seen many of our industries destroyed in the pursuit of higher profits. We have lost most of our shipbuilding, steel and car manufacture. We have sold off key infrastructure to hedge funds and asset strippers and, in the modern era, we have allowed high-tech giants to plunder our country, paying little or no tax on their trade and moving all profits abroad.
To rebuild and transform Britain and return its key assets and resources under the democratic control of a British electorate, we need to be able to determine our own future again.
As internationalists we oppose the globalising agenda of capital and support the self determination of nations to co-exist, trade and relate in peace and solidarity. We oppose the dominance of financial institutions governing countries by debt and the transfer of created wealth.
To support the struggles for freedom and self-determination elsewhere, we now need a revival of a socialist commitment to the self determination of our country.
Unite to create a new deal for workers, to end overseas control of our country and reclaim what is ours.
May Day 2019
May Day is International Workers’ Day. It has its origins in the fight for an eight-hour working day. A fight that workers waged throughout the 19th century.
This fight is still relevant today.
It remains relevant today for the millions of unemployed, especially in the European Union, as unemployment represents a fundamental war on
workers. The right to work and the right to work in your country of birth are fundamental.
It remains relevant for the millions on zero hours contracts never knowing how to make ends meet.
And it remains relevant for all those working way more than eight hours a day yet still only being able to survive by gettng food from food banks.
Precarious work, unemployment and overwork in unacceptable conditions are all part of the same drive by capital to make workers slaves to labour.
Download Full May Day Leaflet as a PDF
Populism
Some commentators say that populism can be left wing or right wing. We do not accept this. Maduro has different objectives to Trump, Corbyn has different politics than Farage.
Populism is not anti-capitalist. It is not therefore popular. The Labour Party and trade union movement are more popular numerically, culturally and with historic achievements. The working class is rooted, real and revolutionary. Populists are lumpen, volatile and reactionary.
Populists bring together maverick billionaires with disaffected, unorganised workers in an unholy, mutually loathing alliance. They substitute a notion of ‘the people’, in place of the reality of class. They imagine the people against the corrupt elites, they do not seek the replacement of the capitalist economic system. Populism arises when there is general increasing alienation from lack of popular sovereignty offered by the political system. It represents frustration and legitimate concerns about the failings of bourgeois democracy.
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Britain and the World
Socialism is a recent, infant development in the whole, long history of the human species, yet its seeds and embryos have grown within each previous social formation worldwide. Its essence in collective labour, sharing, solidarity, mutual support and human empathy has been evident in every human society. What has been unnatural and inhuman has been the theft of the collective production of people and the private ownership of land. This has occurred in relatively recent, class divided history since the first City states in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago. It was this division into various forms of haves and have nots over the centuries that gave rise to new ideas of socialism which aspire to and predict a future without class division, the oppression of women, or ethnic groups.