Andy McSmith's Sketch: The communists are here – but they are too nice to scare anyone
Not everybody knows that the Communist Party of Britain even exists
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Your support makes all the difference.The first Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848, began with the stirring sentence: “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.”
The opening of the latest Communist manifesto, launched yesterday from an upstairs room a short walk from parliament, is not so punchy. “This 2015 general election is being held against the background of open class warfare by the unelected Tory-Lib Dem coalition government, on behalf of the monopoly capitalist class.”
Not everybody knows that Britain has a Communist Party. When the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, the leadership of what was then the Communist Party of Great Britain – or Seepie-Geebie, as it was colloquially known – decided that their party was over, and reinvented themselves as a pressure group called the Democratic Left.
But a few stalwarts disagreed, and carried on as the Communist Party of Britain, minus the “Great”. They say that they are recognised by the Electoral Commission as the continuation of the party launched by Sylvia Pankhurst and others nearly a century ago.
They have links with foreign Communist parties, and with The Morning Star, which was the daily paper of the Seepie-Geebie. In this election, they are fielding nine parliamentary candidates, which may not sound many, but is 50 per cent more than in 2010.
They also report that while the old comrades from the generation who signed up after the Russians won the Battle of Stalingrad have been dying off, younger replacements have come in. Laura-Jane Rossington, Communist candidate in Plymouth South, is 18 and studying for A-levels. “It is the future of me and of people my age that is being debated in parliament and I think we have every right to have a part of it,” she said.
Membership is “just over a thousand – that’s a true and verified figure, by the way,” its general secretary, Robert Griffiths, said. “I know that there can be a tendency to exaggerate these, especially in the far left, and far right, but that is our fully paid-up membership.”
Their manifesto calls for an end to austerity, the bedroom tax, and tax avoidance, and for the renationalisation of public utilities. They want Britain out of the EU, and out of Nato.
“I know Ukip also call for British withdrawal from the EU, but they do that because they don’t like foreigners,” Mr Griffiths said. “Well, we’re the original internationalists. We’re for an exit from the left.”
There was a time when people were really scared of the spectre of communism. A communist is like a crocodile, Winston Churchill told his cabinet – “When it opens its mouth you cannot tell whether it is trying to smile, or preparing to eat you up.” But these communists are too nice and too few to scare anyone.
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