If we start to look at where the insurrectionary revolt and anger of the proletariat have simmered and sometimes erupted into flame, it has been from amongst the communities of the most oppressed.

During the formative years of the communist movement in the British state, and some of the most glorious chapters of the history of the proletariat in this island, we see that the storm centres were here on the Clydeside, in South Wales and in the East End of London.

The famous Red Clyde sustained intimate links with the Irish revolution. Indeed one socialist of that period aptly observed that “politics in Glasgow meant the Irish question”, Glasgow itself simmered in revolt and the great revolutionary John Maclean acquired a mass following through his open mass work on the streets and his revolutionary educational work.

The South Wales Miners’ Federation were known as indomitable practitioners of class struggle, and although it only earns a meagre few lines in their current official history, some of its members, inspired by the Easter rising, made their way over to Ireland to join the insurrectionary forces in the difficult conditions of the First World War.

The East End of London saw the work of revolutionaries such as Eleanor Marx, who helped to organise the poorest and most oppressed workers such as women gas workers and garment workers, and Sylvia Pankhurst who continued this fine tradition, both of whom were also committed supporters of the Irish struggle.

Many of the cadres of the socialist movement in East London came from the Jewish national minority.

These Jewish workers in many cases maintained intimate ties with the revolutionary movements of Russia and Eastern Europe,

just as today many of the Bangladeshi workers who toil in the selfsame tailoring sweatshops retain close contact with the Marxist-Leninist movement in Bangladesh.

They also received the same hostile ’welcome’ from the chauvinist labour aristocracy. Dockers’ leader Ben Tillett, a hero for some on the British middle class left .., said in a speech to Jewish workers in East London, “We wish you had not come”.

As for the Communist Party of Great Britain … its moments of real glory are associated with the assertion of the most oppressed.

The fiercest struggles of the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement took place in Birkenhead and Glasgow.

In Birkenhead on the Merseyside in 1932 the struggle of unemployed, and mainly Irish, workers was sufficiently stormy to invite comparison with the unemployed workers’ uprising in Belfast that same year.

In this period Glasgow was noted for its huge demonstrations of unernployed workers, one of which was defended by 500 workers carrying heavy sticks.

In the anti-fascist movement the famous Battle of Cable Street in East London was a battle waged by the Jewish community supported first and foremost by Irish workers from the docks….

When attempts were made to organise an anti-revisionist movement starting in the early 1960s, the most enduring sector of this work was undoubtedly the work of the Indian Workers’ Association, led by Comrade Joshi and mainly based in the West Midlands, and the other national minority organisations that rallied around this work.

The Indian Workers’ Association built and sustained a mass base, it rendered effective solidarity to the Indian revolutionaries…

It built close links with socialist China. It assisted in practice the work of Irish revolutionaries as well as other national liberation movements.

It spearheaded the unionisation of Indian workers in the foundries of the West Midlands.

It built the Black People’s Alliance.

It worked to unite anti-fascists and supported the struggles of the English working class. It made efforts to build a Marxist-Leninist party.

Much of this work is continuing up to and including today.

The names of the areas where the new era of struggle that began with the St. Pauls (Bristol) Uprising of 1980 has centred will be well known to everyone:

Brixton

Liverpool 8

Chapeltown (Leeds)

Bradford

Mosside (Manchester)

Southall

and many others.

Less well-publicised in the bourgeois media, but no less tenacious and courageous, has been the continuous fight-back in areas of Cardiff and Glasgow.

One essential fact runs through this brief historical survey.

That is that the most militant, the most successful, the most insurrectionary and the most meaningful class struggles that have been waged in this island have been led by the most oppressed, the people of no property.

They have not been led by the middle class left, the labour aristocracy or even the majority working class.