COMMUNIST PARTY IN BRITAIN WANTS NEW GOVERNMENT

Greymouth Evening Star, 25 February 1948, Page 5

COMMUNIST PARTY IN BRITAIN WANTS NEW GOVERNMENT

LONDON, February 23

The British Communists, at their twentieth national congress, agreed on an anti-Government and antiTrades Union Congress policy. The party wants a new Government which will be without Mr Attlee, Sir Stafford Cripps and Mr Ernest Bevin, and which will also be ‘Left” or “Progressive.” It refrained, however, from mentioning the men it has in mind to lead such a new Government since “it would be wrong at the moment to place any undue emphasis on particular personalities.” It opposes the T.U.C.’s acceptance of the Government’s White Paper on wage stabilisation and maintains that it is the task of every trade unionist and shop steward, every trade branch, district committee, and shop stewards’ committee, to demand, in the words of Mr Harry Pollitt, the party’s general secretary, “that their executive stands firm and fights for wage advances to meet the rising costs of living.’

The party pledges support for the trade unions now claiming wages advances and warns them against “passively accepting” adverse decisions of arbitration tribunals. The decisions of the national arbitration tribunals are, of course, binding by law. While opposing both the Government and the T.U.C., the Communists deny that they will hamper production. This point was made by Mr Arthur Horner, the miners’ leader, who said that the charge that the Communists were opposed to production was “a foul lie.”

Mr Pollitt, in a two-hour speech, bitterly attacked two Labour members of the House of Commons, Mr R. H. S. Crossman and Mr Michael Foot, whose “rebelliousness” apparently has not taken the course he wished. He also attacked Mr Bevin because of his attitude twards Russian foreign policy, and the Minister of Food (Mr John Strachey), whom he presumably regards as a lost friend. He gave honourable mention to one non-Communist, Mr J. B. Priestley, “who so often reflects the thought of the common man.”