The CPB’s rotten curate’s egg

The Communist Party of Britain’s executive committee, meeting on May 31st, agreed a statement which duly appeared in the Morning Star under the heading “Block the far right. Bin Starmer. Build the united front!”

The statement can fairly be described it as a curate’s egg, but only if you use that expression in its original, ironic, 19th century sense (see below).

The statement begins by noting that “the collapse in authority of the Starmer government is paving the way for a government of the far right.” But what do the comrades propose to do about it? Building the so-called Together Alliance, a top-down amalgam of celebrities and a few union leaders, urging “unity” in the face of the far right, but little in the way of a challenge to the politics of austerity, privatisation and cuts that the statement itself identifies as “fuelling the rise of the far right.”

When Tommy Robinson and his supporters marched in London on 16 May, the Together Alliance didn’t call a properly stewarded counter demonstration, but hid away inside the annual Nakba demonstration, called on the same day.

The statement correctly calls for a vote for Andy Burnham in the Makerfield by-election, while noting that “Burnham’s own politics are famously opportunist” (so much for the CPB’s earlier declaration that only proper “left” Labour candidates could be supported). It says that he’s the candidate best placed to defeat Reform (true) and that his victory would trigger a Labour leadership contest (also true).

Guidance

But beyond supporting Burnham in Makerfield and hoping he goes on to “sweep Starmer’s failed leadership from office”, there’s no guidance as to what the left and affiliated unions should be doing in the Labour Party (the channels for union input still exist but are rarely used) and no indication of the policies that we should be campaigning for - just what the CPB is against: “austerity, privatisation and war.”

That word “war”, it turns out, actually means one war in particular. When the statement eventually gets round to proposing a positive policy (the only one in the entire document) it is counterposed to support for Ukraine: “We need public investment in new green technologies to transform Britain instead of endless public money for war in Ukraine and profits for arms manufacturers.”

Russia

The CPB/Morning Star’s de facto support for Russia against Ukraine, always thinly veiled, is now becoming more and more obvious. These days they rarely bother with even the perfunctory condemnations of the invasion that used to appear in the MS and in CPB statements.

It seems that for the CPB, the choice is between either investment in green technologies or providing Ukraine with the weapons it needs defend itself: the idea of, say, taxing the rich to pay for both doesn’t seem to occur to the comrades. And as for the profits of the arms industry, what about nationalisation under workers’ control?

So it’s no surprise that the statement closes with a call on “peace campaigners and trade unionists” to support the so-called International Meeting against War on 20 June – a gathering organised by fake-left charlatans whose idea of “peace” is to undermine Ukraine and hand military victory to Putin.

By the way, Wikipedia gives the following explanation of the term “curate’s egg”: it is “something described as partly bad and partly good. In its original usage, it referred to something that is obviously and entirely bad, but is described out of politeness as nonetheless having good features that redeem it. This meaning has been largely supplanted by its less ironic modern usage, which refers to something that is in fact an indeterminate mix of good and bad, possibly with a preponderance of bad qualities”.