At a packed meeting in Southall last Friday (10 January), George Galloway – broadcaster, writer and leader of the Workers Party of Britain – launched a new and much-needed antiwar campaign group – one with anti-imperialism at its very heart.
No Gulf War was created in response to the US and Britain’s attempts to start yet another conflict in the middle east, this time with Iran.
Such reckless enthusiasm for the certain death and displacement of many millions of people is not in the interests of the British people, nor of the rest of humanity.
It is no exaggeration to say that the blatant provocations from the US and British ruling classes, whether in the form of sanctions, assassinations, or propaganda, could lead to World War 3.
Comrade Galloway outlined the recent history of imperialist intervention in Iran, going back to the overthrow by Britain and the USA of the country’s democratically-elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, carried out after Mosaddegh’s government nationalised Iran’s oil, depriving US and British oil cartels of the fabulous profits they had made by looting Iranian resources.
Among many other important points made by Comrade Galloway during the course of the meeting were the fact that assassinated general Qasem Soleimani was a war hero and not a terrorist, that the British Labour party has always been an imperialist party, and is thus incapable of offering meaningful resistance to the aggressive imperialist wars perpetrated by Britain’s ruling class, and that the imperialist system itself is the root cause of war in today’s world.
The meeting was chaired by Workers Party deputy leader and Communists vice-chair Joti Brar. During her brief opening remarks, Comrade Joti made two important points. The first was that if we want to stop any particular war, we will need to harness the collective power of the organised working class in a campaign of non-cooperation with the war effort.
Joti’s second point was that if we want to stop wars altogether, we will have to end imperialism. She urged all those present to join the Workers Party and start to build a real anti-imperialist fighting force for the working class in Britain.
You can watch the livestream of the whole meeting on George Galloway’s YouTube channel, including the full Q&A session which followed the main speeches.
Learn more about the campaign at NoGulfWar.org.
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Editor’s note: Our party was a motive force in launching the Workers Party of Britain in December 2019, and communists were at the heart of its most vibrant campaigns. However, developments since that time have led our comrades to consider that the WPB has failed in its stated aim of becoming a truly broad movement within which communists could work openly, transforming itself into a left-social-democratic vehicle for bourgeois parliamentarism and anticommunism. We have therefore withdrawn our members’ efforts from the Workers party project. Our stance towards the Labour party in particular and social democracy in general remains unchanged.
