ACTIVISTS in the East of England and beyond are eagerly looking forward to this weekend’s Burston School Strike Festival, which is just a shade north of Diss in south Norfolk and now firmly re-established post-Covid.

This year’s festival has a special character and is likely to be the last before a general election and certainly before several important local elections that will take place in May 2024 in Peterborough and Southend-on-sea, with most county councils following on in 2025.

These are an opportunity for local campaigners to open up a new political path. Burston is a great place to meet activists from all over the East of England, and the Communist Party and the Morning Star will be fully involved.

The past year has seen a number of changes to the political landscape.

At the last local elections, the conservatives lost three of their most reliable county councils in Broadland, Kings Lynn and West Norfolk, the latter ending two decades of decline and mismanagement at their hands. In Great Yarmouth, they also lost control by a slender majority.

In each defeat, the state of the NHS and the “cost-of-capitalism” crisis featured prominently.

So, those attending Burston can readily grasp that political change becomes possible where alternatives are clearly defined and work is put in to mobilise. It is also clear that behind the electoral changes are the strike struggles of 2022 and the many new workers won to trade unionism and class consciousness.

Pride of place in this changing landscape goes to the long-running campaign to save the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Kings Lynn. This more than two-year-long campaign with its weekly hospital gate vigils and parliamentary protests has resulted in QEH and Hinchingbrooke Hospital being included in the programme for new hospital builds. Now we need to nail the government’s hands to the table to ensure these are delivered.

In nearby Suffolk, the Toothless in Suffolk campaign which never seems to be off our screens or radio airwaves has entered negotiations, based on sustained lobbying and protests, with the Integrated Care Board to provide emergency dental relief.

Plans have been agreed to use a mobile unit to help children and the homeless and to take the lead on changing its contract with dental providers to raise the number of NHS patients.

Another major investment — for all the wrong reasons — comes with the rebuilding and re-siting of nuclear weapons at Lakenheath, which has met strong local opposition and a series of protest actions.

CND, Stop the War and the Young Communist League have prioritised the threat to peace and lives that this dramatic escalation of nuclear capability represents.

In recent years there have been small signs of regroupment in the labour movement. Two events in the last year, to relaunch Ipswich Trades Council and establish a trades council in West Suffolk, have met with renewed interest and success. It is painstaking but vital work.

Visitors to the festival will receive an open letter from the Communist Party in which it calls for all progressive political forces, the labour movement and community organisations to work together.

The aim is to present a united front that can inspire and mobilise activists to campaign for a new political direction for the East of England. The letter says, “Now more than ever we the people, need unity. But we need more than that — we need a region-wide united front of local unions and trades councils, people’s assemblies and community groups, political organisations and local councillors. Division leaves everyone vulnerable. United we are stronger.”

It goes on to state that the communists will be campaigning for a conference to discuss a united approach, to be convened by the regional TUC.

At Burston, visitors will be able to read a new edition of the CP’s programme Eastern Rising. This “is an attempt to take the core principles of Britain’s Road to Socialism and apply them to how we live — and to quote the great British communist William Morris, ‘how we might live’ — in the East of England.”

At a pound, it’s worth a punt and you can be sure that no other political party has produced such a thought-through programme of political change for the local area.

Also available will be a new pamphlet, Homes for the People, with policies to establish a regional assembly with tax-raising powers — to invest in skilled jobs for the youth and an extensive programme to build new council homes, refurbish existing properties and put in place building regulations that match the challenge of climate change.

If you visit the Communist Party stall you can take away an invitation to our Paxton Chadwick Memorial Lecture to mark Black History Month, featuring historian David Horsley and international editor of the Morning Star Roger McKenzie followed by four evenings of political education.

These evening courses focus on rebuilding unions, Artificial Intelligence and Marxism, building the Women’s Charter movement and the future of political education in the labour movement.

We look forward to seeing friends and comrades old and new and reforging connections that can be used to strengthen the struggle.