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‘The Communist Party of Britain sends New Year greetings to workers and peoples across the world who are fighting exploitation and oppression’, CP general secretary Robert Griffiths declared on Wednesday evening (January 4).
Addressing the party’s political committee, he expressed solidarity with ‘nurses from Britain to New York, people resisting the CIA-backed coup in Peru, the courageous women of Iran and their supporters, Palestinians confronting the far-right and murderous regime of Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Ukrainian civilians under bombardment from Russian invaders and the NATO-backed Kyiv regime’.
Welcoming the resurgence of strikes in Britain, Mr Griffiths described mass coordinated action as the ‘most direct and effective weapon the working class has in response to a “cost of capitalism” crisis that is plunging millions more families into poverty’. He urged trade unions to work together and present a united response to the new anti-strike legislation being prepared by the Conservative government.
Turning to the crisis in the NHS, the CP leader blamed ‘decades of underfunding, privatisation and mismanagement under both Tory and Labour governments’.
‘Staff vacancies, waiting lists, training levels and A&E and GP services demonstrate the breadth and depth of this emergency, made all the worse by the impact of the same right-wing policies on social and community care services’, he added.
As an immediate response, Britain’s Communists called for private sector hospital and medical facilities to be requisitioned by the state and put at the service of the NHS.
‘All health facilities and services should be planned and coordinated in a unified system that puts public health before private profiteering’, Mr Griffiths insisted, pointing out that most private sector medical staff were trained at public expense and still work in the NHS.
The CP political committee urged socialists, workers and NHS campaigners to attend the People’s Assembly and Stop the War trade union conferences on January 14 and 21, respectively.