GIVEN BY BEN STEVENSON

Comrades

I bring fraternal and sororial greetings from the Executive Committee of our Party to this the 12^th Northern District Congress. Your Congress could not be meeting a more auspicious time for our class, our movement and our Party. In just two weeks time the first nationally co-ordinated industrial action between unions in response to the ConDems swingeing cuts to jobs, pay, pension provisions across the public sector. This of course is merely the opening salvo in what could be a protracted and sustained period of intense class conflict.

There are of course many challenges, in this period, in which we as Communists have a particularly significant role to play. The perception is growing and becoming entrenched, even amongst working people that these cuts are necessary and inevitable. The ideological barrage launched by the ConDem government, to which, in parliament at least, there is no opposition to, is doing the job of dividing our movement, of pitting worker against worker, of ensuring an acceptance, at least in principle, that the way to tackle Britain’s economic problems is by cutting public expenditure.

We have continued to make the argument that these cuts are unnecessary, ideologically motivated and class orientated, that the policies being carried forward by the ConDem government have received no democratic mandate and represent the interests of a tiny section of the population rather than the interests of the vast majority of the population.  The central case being put as to the necessity of these cuts is the supposed necessity of reducing the deficit. But just how necessary is it for Britain to immediately reduce the level of its deficit? Our National debt is lower today than in 70 of the last 100 years. In fact as a proportion of GDP our deficit in 2009, immediately after the £1,350 billion bailout package for the banking and finance industry was actually lower than in 200 of the last 250 years. Our level of national debt is substantially lower than that of the USA or Japan and any of the other European industrialised countries.

So deficit reduction in and of itself is not a necessary step, but even if we did decide to lower the national debt, after all there are some good reasons to do so, chiefly because as with any other debt, you obviously accrue a larger debt overall because the interest builds up pretty quickly if its a large amount to begin with and you spend a long time paying it off. Whilst that would obviously be good news for Bankers and spivs in the City of London it’s not particularly good news for working people. But cutting jobs, services, benefits and pensions isn’t the only way that we could potentially reduce the deficit. Since the general election, the Communist Party has made it quite clear that there are alternative ways to tackle the national debt rather than the £203 billion worth of ConDem cuts. Rather than doing it over the course of five years we could do it all in one fell swoop simply by introducing; a 2% Wealth Tax on the richest 10% of the population; a 20% windfall tax on monopoly super-profits in the energy, retail, food, armaments and pharmaceutical industries; a ‘Robin Hood’ tax on each financial transaction made in the City of London; Closing the tax loopholes and making the super-rich and big business tax dodgers pay what they’re supposed to in the first place; and forcing those banks that we bailed out to repay the money owed to the treasury.

Of course this type of an economic programme is unlikely to come from a cabinet, which contains 22 millionaires in it. Instead the ConDem government will seek to preside over the most savage cuts in public expenditure in generations, which will dwarf the levels of unemployment and deprivation we experienced under Maggie Thatcher in the 80s, whilst   big business and the super rich will and are experiencing a bonanza. Corporation tax, already one of the lowest in the developed world is being cut once again from 28 per cent last year to 23 per cent by 2014. In France, a country with the same population as Britain, it's one third. In Germany, the country closest to us economically it's 30 per cent. Even in the centre of big business capitalism the United States it's 35 per cent.

Of course for most British monopolies, even 23 per cent is too high, companies in retail, banking & finance, energy and communications like HSBC, Tesco, Vodafone to name but three, despite making record super-profits during a period of severe economic crisis, have ended up paying less than 10 per cent, with some having the gall to pay as little as 1 per cent or 2 per cent overall. Instead of millions spent on advertising campaigns and investigators targeting the paltry amounts of government revenue lost through benefit fraud, why don't we see a dedicated unit to chase up and challenge these criminals who go to great lengths and great expense to ensure they don't have to pay their due? 

Instead we’re being treated to the slashing and burning of public services, which will actually damage the potential economic recovery. The cuts in spending will of course not only destroy and damage millions of lives across Britain but it will also remove purchasing power from the economy, precisely when we should be stimulating it to boost demand and employment. Economic growth means more work, more wages, more spending, more production and therefore, more tax revenue for the government. It’s a pattern for economic recovery that has been successfully applied by capitalist governments across the world for much of the last century. Of course we would like to go much further, and the economic policies contained within our left wing programme such as democratic public ownership of the towering heights of the economy, the introduction of capital control, full employment, education and training guaranteed free of charge to all young people regardless of means, a sustainable agricultural programme, cancelling Third World debt, the establishment of new trade relations with developing countries based on technology and infrastructure, all of these are achievable by a government which has the political will to implement it. Indeed it wasn't so long ago that these or similar policies could even be found in a Conservative Party election manifesto. 

However, over the last twenty years successive Tory and New Labour governments have presided over the largest single redistribution of wealth in British history. The difference being unlike at other points in the last century, this redistribution has been from the poorest to the richest. Currently the richest 10 per cent of the population collectively own private wealth of well over £4,000 billion, that's 71 per cent of the total wealth. Whilst the poorest half, the majority, own collectively less than 1 per cent of the wealth, down from 12 per cent in 1976. (Incidentally these figures have not been cobbled together by the Communist Party, they are freely available through the office of national statistics and the Inland Revenue if you know where to look) Now you might have expected the economic crisis to redress the balance somewhat after all, we're now directly responsible for much of the banking and finance sector having bailed out most of it, and we are going through a period of recession. However last year in the midst of all this, the 1,000 richest people in Britain saw their personal fortunes increase by more than a third, the largest single increase for the entire 22 years that the Sunday Times has run it's rich list.  With corporations boasting record profits this year and Britain's status as a tax haven assured, we can be sure than this year's figures being published in a couple of weeks will record a similar bonanza for the super rich. After all capitalist crisis is not bad for individual capitalists especially when we have a government that will defend their interests at the expense of ours.

And the situation is only likely to deteriorate further. Much has been made by the ConDem government of its supposed fairer deal for poorer people, by increasing the level of income tax personal allowances. However even if we ignore the elimination of child tax credits and scrapping or reduction of other benefits, for most working class families this 'saving' will be gobbled up and surpassed by the rise in inflation on it's own. The often quoted by government CPI or consumer price index, simply because it is always the lowest as it doesn't include housing - an argument that I don't suggest you try making to your landlord when paying your rent - is currently running at 4 per cent. The slightly more realistic RPI, which does include housing and is therefore always higher and thus never quoted by government, currently stands at 5 and a half per cent. But this includes dining out, luxury holidays and a whole gamete of other indicators that working class families don't have any realistic hope of forking out for. So if we were just to take the basic rise in food, fuel, energy, housing and other bare necessities then the true scale of inflation rises to well over 10 per cent wiping out the meagre breadcrumbs offered to the working class in Gideon Osborne’s budget designed to make us swallow swingeing cuts.

This is before the cuts start to bite, the Institute of Fiscal Studies have stated that even with just this first batch of cuts only just beginning to take effect, working class households have experienced the largest single drop in their living standards since the early 1980s. Even the government and the Bank of England's most conservative projections, i.e. the ones they've actually released show that once all of the cuts that have been announced so far, we'll experience the single largest drop since the 1920s!

And yet Britain is not a poor country there is no economic reason why even within the capitalist framework there should be such a gross disparity between the super-rich minority and the working class majority, why it should be the working class who shoulder the entire burden of the capitalist economic crisis. Britain is still the 6th largest economy in the world! The British capitalist class still own more economic and financial assets around the world, outside their own country, than any other capitalist class except the United States. British capitalists today have £3,000bn worth of economic and financial assets in other countries and around the world. Britain is a fantastically rich country We could afford all that we have, and much, much more – the problem is, that wealth is owned and controlled by a tiny minority of the population.

So, comrades, we have to continue to make the case that there is no justification for any cuts in public services, welfare, jobs, pension etc. But the real question that we as a Party and a movement have to face in every part of the country, including this one is how do we bring about the removal of this illegitimate government of the capitalist class especially when we consider that the only viable political alternative currently on offer would deliver practically the same policies albeit at a slower pace, over a more prolonged period of time. What we really need is a movement with the power and level of consciousness required to bring about a fundamental break with the neo-liberal consensus that has dominated British politics for the last three decades.

Getting half a million people out to March for an Alternative on 26th March, although if you asked 100 random people on that march what 'the alternative' is then you'd probably get 100 different answers, and the first round of co-ordinated public sector action are all good starts, but that’s all they are. The Ruling Class’s offensive may be well under way, but the opposition to it, is only just getting its boots on and beginning to flex those rarely used and often forgotten muscles.

Of course we will have a second and a third round of co-ordinated industrial action in the public sector, but we need to go much further than this. We will need to have more generalised industrial action, because despite the furore over supposed gold-plated pensions and lucrative wages for public sector workers, the interests of private and public sector workers are indivisible. Industrial action cannot ultimately be restricted to reactive opposition to government policy The assault is far wider than cuts to pensions and jobs in the public sector and so ultimately our response must be so also. The prospect of encouraging workers to take illegal solidarity and political industrial action is an understandably serious one and it is not something that will spring sporadically out of the ether. Yet Communists have never shirked from calling for and working for politically necessary actions by the working class just because it is difficult or dare I say illegal, and we cannot and will not shirk that responsibility now. We have long understood that the anti-trade union laws installed and strengthened by successive Tory and New Labour governments over the last 30 years would not be defeated by an act of parliament. As with every other attempt to shackle the trade union movement and working class militancy, it will be defeated by workers making inhuman legislation unworkable and impracticable. Despite all of the shifts in the balance of forces over the last 30 years the power of labour still remains unchallengeable by the ruling class under the right conditions. And there are clear signs that there is a mood of defiance, which threatens to break through the British labour movements traditional attachment to legalism. At the Unite rules conference last week, 53% of delegates voted in favour of removing Unites commitment to operating within the current legal framework for industrial relations. Of course Unite’s Executive Committee opposed the amendment and it failed to achieve the two-thirds majority required, since it may have led to the government sequestering the union’s funds and frankly passing rule changes is not the most effective strategy for defeating the anti-union laws but it is nevertheless an indication of the frustration that ordinary workers are beginning to feel as they continue to be subjected to ridiculously laborious procedures, intractable employers and idiosyncratic judges who appear to add more and more loopholes for employers to exploit every day, before workers can use the only real weapon at their disposal, the removal of their collective labour.    

Of course it's still early days; comrades shouldn't be too disheartened or alarmed that the movement is only just now beginning to build effective campaigns in localities across Britain. After all the British working class is as Engels, put it a sleeping giant, and at the moment it's only just beginning to yawn and wipe the sleep from its eyes. People are only just now beginning to experience the first round of cuts. There may be £21bn worth of cuts this year, £40bn more cuts planned for next year! The cuts planned for next year will be twice as deep as the cuts that are being made now. Even more cuts the year after, and the year after that. And when people see what cuts in public expenditure really means, when they see their public transport, their libraries, their schools, their leisure centres, their youth centres, when they see their children, neighbours, grandchildren, friends saddled with levels of debt they never escape from, when they or their partner, or their parent or their child loses their job and finds it next to impossible to get that even just pays the minimum wage, and as we, and others on the left and in the labour movement, show that none of this need take place, we can be assured that at the very least the potential is there,  over the coming months and years, to build up a really mass, militant movement, rooted in local communities, with the trade union movement at its heart.

However, this government is not, as was the case in the 1980s, conducting an assault targeted solely at one particular section of our class, but rather it is conducting an assault on our class as a whole. There is therefore a kernel of truth in the ConDems often repeated mantra. Most of us are, all in this together. The only way that we can possibly defeat this assault is to successfully mobilise every section of our movement and our class, be they students, children, public or private sector workers, pensioners, the unemployed, community groups and service users. We'll need more regional marches, more days of action, we’ll need to continue to build broad effective anti-cuts organisations in every single locality – but we also need to put forward a positive alternative.

It won't be enough just to oppose what this government is doing. We must show that there are alternative policies, we have the Left Wing Programme, most of the policies of which are reflected, albeit not at the same level of detail in the People's Charter, that is now official TUC policy. Brendan Barber and his fellow TUC apparatchiks, not to mention the Labour Party Machinery of course didn't want it to be, and used plenty of tricks dirty and otherwise to try and stop it but the Communist Party and our left-wing allies won the victory 2 years ago at the TUC Congress. The TUC of course did nothing with it but now that there's a different government in place and it's okay to rock the boat a little, they seem to be remembering yet So the TUC is now actually beginning to promote the People's Charter, and we have 14 national trades unions, currently affiliated to the Charter campaign.

The point is, the potential exists, as we build up a mass movement, and if we can get the kind of coordinated action that is needed from trades unions and workers as well as establishing locally based broad an politically conscious movements in every locality, the potential is there, if we can bring down this government to really begin the power of state monopoly capitalism in Britain for the first time in nearly four decades.

Now you may question the wisdom, given the scale of the work before us, in choosing now to debate and produce a new edition of our Party's programme. However if it is to have any value then it precisely at this juncture, in the wake of an unprecedented ruling class offensive, when the labour movement rouses itself in defence of the gains made over the last century, that a debate across the labour movement and the working class about the necessity for a new form of society is needed.

I’m sure most of you will have read the new EC draft edition or at least the edition by the drafting commission but for those of you who haven’t done so or aren't quite clear yet, what it is that is new about this draft programme, then let me just briefly highlight a few key areas where I think strategically significant and substantial changes in our analysis have been made.

Firstly we’ve sharpened and developed our analysis of the changing class relations in Britain and how this obviously impacts on the struggle for Socialism. In fact arguably we've rediscovered our Marxist-Leninist theory in defining the character of class relations today. There have been several key developments over the last two decades, which the last edition failed to address sufficiently, that have led to substantial shifts. Of most significance has been the continued growth of capital and its increasing tendency to become monopolised and particularly in the recent period the increasing convergence and fusion of monopoly capital and the state. Not only has this produced a system where the political representatives of monopoly capital have tended to dominate across advanced capitalist countries over the last 30 years, but additionally other class forces, which may have been identified as separate from the working class in the past, have become increasingly proletarianised. All people in Britain who owe their survival wholly or predominantly to the sale of their labour power are part of the working class. This includes private sector workers and public sector workers, white-collar workers and blue-collar workers, workers in the North of England and workers in the South of England. This may seem obvious but given the scale of false class consciousness that has been cultivated amongst the working class over the last thirty years thanks to the work of bourgeois academics, ideologues and culture, as Communists we have to express with absolute clarity that our definition of class relations begins with an economic analysis based on an individuals relationship to the means of production and whether, directly or indirectly, their labour power is exploited in the production of surplus value.

Secondly, we have some would say, rehabilitated the much maligned and misunderstood notion of the general crisis of capitalism. This doesn't mean that we're proclaiming the inevitable collapse of the capitalist world order and the triumph of socialism in the next decade, rather were returning to an understanding that capitalist crisis is much more than just a crisis of overproduction, although that is of course still the trigger for it. The current capitalist crisis is not just a financial or economic crisis it is a systemic crisis, as it's own contradictions have reached breaking point. There is a social, political, ideological, environmental and technological dimension to the general crisis of capitalism, which I don't need to spell out here, since you can read Martin's article in the latest CR.

Thirdly we have taken into account the shifting balance of forces internationally and begun to answer the question 'What comes next...' We are after all Communists and so our perspective clearly spells out, that the mobilisation of the entirety of the working class behind an alternative economic and political strategy which challenges the power of state monopoly capital and propels a left government into power, is only just the beginning.

Of course to paraphrase and collaqualise Lenin it's not what's in the programme, it's what you do with it that counts. Well we want to use this process as an opportunity, an opportunity for debate and education across the labour movement and working class. The subjects that the BRS touch on are ones that are and have always been relevant to the working class of Britain irrespective of the precise formulation expressed or historical epoch in which it was rooted. All too often we, as a Party and a movement, expel most of our energy arguing over minor differences in formulation and pay little or no heed to the analysis, which has brought us to these conclusions. This is a recipe for a sterile and repetitive debate, which is absent the scientific methodology of Marxism. The nature of class relations, the balance of class forces internationally, building alliances, the character of reformism, the nature of revolutionary struggle, democracy and dictatorship, the coercive and consensual character of the state, are concepts which Communists have been grappling with for 150 years. If we are merely throwing respective, uncontextualised, contradictory quotes from Lenin at one another then we are failing to live up to our mantle as the Marxist Party of the Labour movement and the leading revolutionary force in Britain.

To aid this work, the EC will be assisting local Party organisations in the second speaking tour in October and November around those themes contained within the BRS. Additionally the annual Communist University of Britain is to receive a major boost this year, with a big expansion of the diversity and breadth of the programme, a central London location, a real cultural programme and a shift in emphasis towards more collective, participatory discussion and debate, and we're continuing to work with local party organisations to establish regional and local CU's. Today of course the Midlands are holding their annual CU, jointly with the Association of Indian Communists and I notice in your report of work that your hold another CU of the North all of which continue to demonstrate our growing commitment to theoretical discussion and debate across the labour movement. The EC has also committed to developing resources a centralised programme of Marxist-Leninist education, the first of its kind for thirty years.

In October we will also be holding a march and rally to commemorate the 75^th Anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, given the continued rise of the fascist EDL and BNP. Coaches are being organised from Wales, the Midlands and perhaps this is something that comrades in the North of England should also be considering. Or if a 5 hour coach journey is too much maybe a series of local events which draws in the trade unions, anti-fascist and community groups which are supporting the initiative nationally, in a celebration of Britain's diverse and rich working class history.

Other initiatives on the campaign to defend the NHS, a major unemployment initiative, building the People's Charter, anti-cuts movements and local trades councils, a new issue of the re-launched and revitalised Country Standard and the launch of a complementary Countryside Charter to kick start Party activity in rural areas, an overhaul and further expansion of our public online presence as well as the introduction of online organisational tools for Party organisations and cadres, the continued growth of our publishing company Manifesto Press and of course our daily paper, the Morning Star, a weapon of the working class movement which is sharpened every day. Our Party is not lacking in ideas, but all to often what we lack is the cadres to carry out this work. The simple fact is that we are entering a critical phase in this phase of capitalism and imperialism, if we as a Party, as a movement, as a class do not grow and fight and do so rapidly then we will see all the gains won over the last century tossed on the slag heap.

So, comrades, the challenges that face us over the coming period are of monumental significance, and without a much larger, stronger, Communist Party in which every member can work in a disciplined collective way, combining theory and practice, balancing immediate priorities and demands against. Let this congress be the Launchpad for the growth of the our Party in the North of England, when we break out of our isolation and reclaim our position at the vanguard of the class struggle.