BETWEEN now and July 2 nearly 200,000 homes in three constituencies in the East of England will receive a communist manifesto.

Thousands more have been distributed at high streets, in colleges, town centres, at hustings meetings, train stations and solidarity meetings and marches for the people of Palestine.

There would have been a fourth challenge in Herts but the candidate was threatened with the sack by their employer and had to pull back … but that episode isn’t over yet!

Communist candidates are standing in Ipswich, South West Norfolk and the recently redesignated Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket.

Communist campaigners and supporters and, with thanks to your readers, some non-aligned Morning Star supporters, have been out canvassing since the day Rishi Sunak called the election. 

We have been looking forward to the challenge and, back in October of last year, the Communist Party district committee established a hardship fund for members facing difficulty arising out of austerity and an election fighting fund.

We also discussed our aims, which dovetail closely with our alternative economic and political strategy for the East, summed up our local programme, Eastern Rising. This programme, according to district chair Steve Marsling, “puts the interests of the people front and centre stage and makes a powerful case for socialism as the answer to the challenges of our region.”

Our focus was fivefold: the first was to put up a serious contest. We have a legacy of communist councillors in Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire and a mayoralty in Colchester.

We know that with a long-term view, elections can be won. We want that responsibility of defending the interests of the people and representing them in local democratic structures.

And we want our communities to have thriving democratic cultures. So as communists we take the lead in giving people the inspiration to stand, run campaigns and seek more control over their lives. 

Second, we agreed at our last district congress — the next will be held in Bury St Edmunds in October this year — that we would focus on rebuilding the local labour movement and our comrades played an important role in the 2022-23 strike wave and in local trades councils. 

Third we understood that the working class in the East of England was diverse, with some in big cities, but many living in small- and medium-sized towns, which had become isolated because of the destruction of transport links and the attack on local services, through privatisation.

We wanted to test the message of Eastern Rising among rural workers. A focus of our campaign has been to take our message to these villages and small towns. 

This is especially important because the East is a centre of agriculture and horticulture and of food processing, so our candidates were able to argue the key issues for these sectors with a newly minted rural policy.

Says Darren Turner, candidate for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket, “Food is a big issue. People have limited choice because of supermarket control on supplies and they are charged way too much, because the same monopolies set the price of goods.

“Britain produces too little food and imports too much. The workforce that live and work locally in the sector are exploited, often by unregulated gangmasters and paid a pittance for back-breaking work.

“We want to see those workforces unionised. We want the development of a co-operative sector and we want to break up the big supermarkets, starting by putting a limit on the price of essential items such as milk, bread, eggs, vegetables, meat, fish and fruit, with much more being grown and sourced locally.” 

Local voters can legitimately ask, what power could make such an intervention in the local economy and community life.

The communists alone of all the parties tackle this question by calling for the establishment of a regional assembly with tax-raising powers to intervene, in a planned way, to take important industries into public ownership, socialise them where possible and with a focus on a mass jobs programme linked to one for council housebuilding. A first challenge of any regional assembly would be to sort out transport and health provision — both of which have collapsed under the weight of privatisation.

The Communist Party designated two weekends in June, the 22-23 and this weekend, June 29 and 30, as Red Weekends.

Comrades would campaign in constituencies where there is a candidate with adjacent branches lending a hand. Others with no candidate would set up stall in areas where we have stood for local elections and to reach out to new areas.

Many of these have not had a communist campaign in their area in years. We campaigned in Thetford, Downham Market, Cambridge city centre, Bury St Edmunds, Stowmarket, Swaffham, Great Yarmouth and Ipswich. We will be back in these areas again this weekend and if Star readers want to lend a hand, contact us on [email protected].

Candidates and their teams have been out and spoken to people on scale not seen since the 1990s. We have taken part in hustings at colleges, for Friends of the Earth, with Chambers of Commerce and in churches.

Lorraine Douglas has received high recognition for her performance at the packed hustings held by Friends of the Earth in West Norfolk.

Says Lorraine: “The campaign has resulted in great contacts being made with people on the left in South-West Norfolk many of whom are completely disillusioned with Starmer’s lack of ambition and Labour’s lurch to the right. 

“A major local issue is the proposed Cranswick chicken and pig mega-farm sandwiched between Feltwell and Methwold, strongly opposed by local residents, though Liz Truss has so far refused to condemn it and indeed claimed she’d ‘happily’ live next to a pig farm. People I’ve spoken to are in despair at the cruelty of the welfare benefits system, the appalling state of our NHS and in particular the lack of dentists, the lack of affordable housing and the lack of hope for our young people.

“It’s a very large constituency and very rural so we haven’t been able to get out to as many areas as we’d like, and bans on political campaigning in local markets has hampered our ability to speak to as many people as we would have liked.”

Overall, we have been particularly pleased at the level of coverage in local newspapers, online local papers and the BBC. The Morning Star is always to be seen on or around our stalls.

Fourthly we wanted to extend our local branch structures in the new campaign areas such as Ipswich and around King’s Lynn and to develop a district-wide social media presence that could build on the many excellent local social media channels that the Communist Party uses. In recent weeks, new recruitment to the party has brought each of these goals nearer.

Finally, says Ipswich candidate Freddie Sofar, a hospitality worker and, at 21, the youngest candidate of any party in the East of England, “We have not limited the campaign just to local issues — indeed we have seized on the opportunity to campaign in the internationalist tradition that characterises the CP.

“We have made an end to the destruction of Gaza, illegal seizing of land on the West Bank and support for national rights of the Palestinian people a major part of our campaign and in Ipswich and elsewhere, we have taken an active role in solidarity protests.” 

Sofar recently graduated as a philosophy student and follows in the tradition of the local and legendary communist philosopher Maurice Cornforth. Cornforth was the only student at Cambridge on a specialised course in logic and was taught by Wittgenstein.

Cornforth worked for many years as a farm labourer and as district secretary of the Communist Party in East Anglia. Comrades joke with Sofar that he has big boots to fill.

Our campaign has been energised by the activity of members of the Young Communist League, with virtually every member playing some sort of a role. A bond of comradeship has been built through relentless campaigning and the seeds of our next stage of development as a political force in the East of England has been laid during and as a result of the gains already made in our election campaign. And that is before the votes are counted.

To read our manifesto visit tinyurl.com/VoteCP24.

To sign up for our Eve of Poll Rally at tinyurl.com/CPeveofpollrally.

To help with the last days of the campaign, write to [email protected].