An open letter: CP answered on calling police

THIS IS THE TEXT of a leaflet being circulated among Communist Party members concerning the CP demonstration in Leeds on November 5, when organisers of the march used the police to prevent Young Socialists participating. The leaflet has also been sent to the "Morning Star', "Challenge', newspaper of the Young Communist League, and the four organisers of the demonstration.

An Open Letter to the Communist Party fulltime organisers responsible for the Leeds demonstration of November 5 1966.

Dear Howard Hill, Bob Wilkinson, Dave Priscott and Bill Moore, On November 5 this year you organised a Communist Party demonstration in Leeds against the wage freeze and associated Labour government policies. When our contingent of 30 Young Socialists lined up with their banners, End Wilson's Wage Freeze' to join in your demonstration, you called upon the police to exclude them.

Dave Priscott led an inspector to the spot, and this officer duly read out the relevant section of the Public Order Act.

When the march moved off, eight police officers barred the way to the Young Socialists, who were told they would be arrested if they attempted to march. Naturally we went on to hold a meeting on the Town Hall steps to explain what had happened.

Your leaflet distributed to Young Socialists and Socialist Labour League members at the march is arrogant and unprincalling cipled. You had in fact written to the police telling them that other organisations and their banners would not be allowed in the march, and yet your leaflet has the impertinence to blame us for the intervention of the police.

By calling in the assistance of the police in this way you reveal a quite new stage in the development of the politics of the Communist Party.

It has long been our opinion that your policies stand in the way of the workers in their struggle for socialism. But to actually call in the forces of the capitalist state against other tendencies in the labour movement is a clear identification with the class enemy.

This was not an isolated incident. Earlier this year, members of our organisation were arrested and heavily fined after insisting on participating in a similar demonstration.

Recently in Rotherham your members, including Bob Wilkinson, who were part of a 'Peace in Vietnam' demonstration, pulled down their banners and went home without demonstrating at all because Young Socialists refused to haul down their banner 'Victory to the Vietcong'.

If it meant marching with Trotskyists, then they preferred not to demonstrate against the imperialist war! Who are the sectarians, you or us! !

This lining up with the forces of the capitalist state, in our opinion, flows naturally from the consistent failure of the Communist Party to fight for revolutionary leadership against the Labour leadership and the Labour government of Wilson.

Instead of characterising this government as an instrument of the class enemy you have put forward the theory that it is at least better than the Tories. Thus you help all those 'lefts' who want to avoid a fight against capitalism by appealing for loyalty to the Labour government.

But now you have actually worked openly with the police of this capitalist state against those who are in fact conducting police a consistent struggle against the capitalist policies of Wilson.

Your own banner carried the legend: 'Unity of the Labour left, militants in the Unions and the Communist Party can change Wilson's Tory policies'. • We will tell you one thing: unity of the police and the Communist Party against the Trotskyists will help to strengthen Wilson, without a shadow of a doubt.

But let us analyse your slogan. Does it make any sort of sense to demonstrate for left unity" and then to devote all your efforts outside of the Party membership to excluding other organisations.

We know that kind of unity: we are asked to pack up our own policy and our organisation entirely. So these are the conditions for unity?!

When we were in the Labour Party we fought for se cialist policies: despite the witch-hunts and expulsions and the banning BLANCO W. Paynter, Secretary.

Paynter in fact recommends in his next paragraph.

of our paper 'Keep Left' we won the majority of the Young Socialists for three successive years in battle against the right wing under both Gaitskell Wilson. They accused us of being splitters and called upon us to unite. .. behind Wilson !

We insisted, and we insist to which is in the interests of the working class is unity in struggle, in which Communists (and we regard ourselves as Communists) strive to take the struggle forward to the mobilisation of the working class in the fight for state power.

Your kind of unity is specifically designed to exclude those who fight for revolutionary policies, and it is a unity protected by the police.

This kind of, 'left unity', in which the participants accept the politics and bureaucratic control of Stalinism, was similarly maintained only by police repression, this time the police of the Stalinist bureaucracy, in Eastern Europe after 1945.

Everywhere the methods of bureaucracy are the same: to prevent above all the emergence of the workers behind such a leadership spells the doom of the Stalinist bureaucratic caste in their hangers-on in the leadership of the other 'Communist' Parties, as surely as it does of the imperialists.

When Howard Hill referred to our members " fascists', Leeds demonstration as , he showed he had learnt nothing from the long history of Stalinism and the crisis which it brought to the USSR, Eastern Europe and China and to the workers' movement all over the world.

Have a whole number of Party members become so steeped in the opportunist politics of peaceful roads to socialism' that they must cynically revert to the epithets invented by Stalin, which their own leaders in the USSR now. themselves admit were based on torture and forced confessions ?

We for our part shall continue to work politically in the traditions of Lenin and Trotsky and the Bolsheviks.

Above all we fight to build the independent revolutionary Marxist leadership. We will fight alongside all sections of workers struggle, whatever their political affiliations, in order to conduct the struggle for political leadership.

Your policy of left unity' is a waiting policy, hoping that with the betrayals of Wilson the workers will turn in desperation to your policies.

You hope that all the weak elements in the Parliamentary