Forty Fighting Years!

by New Worker correspondent

FORTY YEARS is a long time in anyone’s book. For a Party that some said would only last six weeks it’s an immense achievement said Andy Brooks at the New Communist Party’s (NCP’s) foundation day celebration at the historic Marx Memorial Library in London last weekend. The NCP leader paid tribute to all the effort, sacrifice and hardship that comrades had endured to ensure the survival of the Party over the years, during the formal part of the commemoration on Sunday.

Comrades gathered in the hallowed hall of the building that was once the centre for the pioneering socialists of the 19th century and the base for Lenin, who worked there for nearly two years editing Iskra, the Bolshevik newspaper that was smuggled into Czarist Russia to help build the revolutionary movement.

“We are the party of Lenin and Stalin but we are also the party of Sid French and Eric Trevett,” Andy Brooks said. Sid and Eric were lifelong communists who founded the NCP in 1977 on the principles of working-class unity, Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism. Forty years later the NCP and its weekly paper, the New Worker, continue to keep up the fight. This was reflected in the contributions from the honoured guests that included old friends from the Italian communist movement (PC) and the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (ML) along with ambassadors and other diplomats from Cuba, Democratic Korea, Laos and Vietnam.

Two ambassadors, Laotian Comrade Sayakane Sisouvong and Comrade Nguyen Van Thao from Vietnam, spoke highly about the NCP’s solidarity work, and Comrade Jorge Luis Garcia from Cuba warned about the new American threats to the socialist island in the Caribbean. The consistent work in solidarity with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was highlighted by Comrade Song Gi Kim from the Democratic Korean embassy and this was also taken up by Dermot Hudson, the chair of the UK Korean Friendship Association (KFA).

National Chair Alex Kempshall recalled the NCP’s efforts over the decades to build working class and communist unity when he called on Michael Chant of the RCPB (ML) to say a few words about the long-standing friendship between our two parties. And soon after Michael and Lesley Larkum, both accomplished musicians, played an interlude of light classical music that included a Korean folk-song and a piece arranged by one of their comrades, Cornelius Cardew, who died in mysterious circumstances in 1981.

No NCP celebration ends without an appeal for the fighting fund and this was given in rousing style by our national treasurer, Daphne Liddle. It clearly went down well with the comrades who raised £1,338 for the New Worker on the day!

From The New Worker