COMMUNISTS from across the East of England gathered in Bury St Edmunds at the weekend to hold their district congress. Two years on from the previous congress, it has been a busy period of rebuilding party organisation, campaigning and standing in local and general elections.
 
Welcoming delegates to the town on behalf of the trades council, secretary Kevin Nunn, a Unison activist in a local hospital, pointed to the history of a wonderful Suffolk town “which has its own class structure and conflicts with large local employers such as the landmark Greene King brewery shedding jobs.”
 
District chair Steve Marsling and secretary Phil Katz opened the proceedings with a report covering local activism in areas as far apart as Bedford and Milton Keynes, Basildon, Norwich and Cambridge.

Katz said: “Delegates are united by a common aim: to rebuild local labour movements, to unite community and union campaigns and to face down the challenge of Reform UK in working-class areas.”

In particular, he told the congress, “the Communist Party is expanding its campaigning reach to market towns where we would prioritise ending the isolation brought on as a result of monopoly transport control with modern solutions based on public ownership, the failure to fund and equip councils to build new homes and the decline in public services. Access to health services is now a major concern.”
 
Communists agreed policies to campaign for a regional assembly with fundraising powers to support planned local intervention in the economy, a plan to revitalise town centres and village life and to extend trade unionism into the rural, food, multiple retail, fishing and horticulture sectors. The congress proposed convening a conference of trades councils to develop an alternative economic strategy for the region.
 
The Communist Party district recently published a rural charter, The Land is a Common Treasury for All, translated into Polish, Russian, Chinese, Portuguese and Spanish. This calls for workers to unite and for an amnesty for foreign migrant workers facing super-exploitation.

Focused on the food sector, the party is campaigning for the establishment of a university of food and agriculture — and its collaboration with local science parks to look at new farming techniques and combatting soil erosion.
 
The Communist Party campaigns for price controls on essential food items in the giant supermarkets which dominate the region. It also calls for the establishment of a Wages Board so that wages can be bargained collectively by trade unions and a Marketing Board to take control of prices paid to producers, currently squeezed to extinction by monopolistic control of the giant retailers.

The party has called for the establishment of a vibrant sector of start-ups aimed at encouraging young people to work in rural areas — bridging farming and technology — based on co-operative principles. A delegate called for the party to take “much more notice of issues of environment and coastal erosion and the threat posed by climate change and rising water levels.”
 
A priority, emphasised time and again from the congress floor, was the need to step up the campaign to remove nuclear weapons from the US base at Lakenheath.

Said one delegate, “Lakenheath and Mildenhall bases are also the largest civilian employers in the east, so we emphasise the need to remove the weapons, not the jobs that locals rely on. Those jobs linked to weapons of mass destruction must be subject to a worker-led programme of transition to jobs and skills put to peace production, not war.”
 
Mark Jones, convener of the Toothless in Suffolk campaign who has led delegations to meet Conservative and Labour health ministers, stated: “Government plans have failed to materialise. They have failed to see the absence of dental services for what it really is … a health emergency.”

Jones called on the Communist Party to step up its campaigning on this situation, which leaves as many as 40 per cent of citizens without access to dental care and “a whole generation of school pupils without preventative care or education around dental health and hygiene.”
 
In addition to the main motion, “For rebuilding the rights and communities and meeting the needs of the people of the East of England,” policy was agreed on local transport and opposition to new waste incinerators.

According to St Ives delegate Simon Brignell: “These so-called solutions merely displace environmental issues into the future, as economic viability, profit and greenwashed terminology become the main impetus, rather than science and the need to save our planet.”

A further emergency motion, “Westminster’s dirty dealings,” lambasted central government sponsorship of a plan to close the main bridge between the two wings of Mill Road, the most vibrant community and an arterial road into Cambridge.
 
Guest speakers included Alan Tait, a leading CND campaigner in Cambridge, who warned of “the low level of public awareness of the dangers of nuclear weapons, which effectively turns Suffolk and surrounding areas into targets,” and Yacine, who has played a vital role in building a powerful solidarity movement with Palestine in Ipswich.

Yacine said, “The bombing of Gaza is an international issue, but it is also a local issue.” He spoke forcefully against censorship and the murder of so many journalists by the Israeli government. Solidarity with the Palestinian people threaded throughout the congress, with calls for a ceasefire and a retiring collection for Medical Aid for Palestine, which raised £165.
 
Speaking on behalf of the party executive, Lorraine Douglas from Kings Lynn ripped into the government for its failure to back councils to build homes and local plans to sell off housing estates. Douglas called for the extension of the ban on the sale of council homes in Scotland and Wales to the east of England, too.
 
The congress congratulated its members active in the campaign for NHS dentistry. A week of action before the end of the year will combine collections in support of local foodbanks — with a focus on toothbrushes and toothpaste — alongside street campaigning for the Toothless in England campaign across the party district.
 
Following the congress, delegates and supporters listened to a presentation, “The Spectre of Gramsci,” as part of the programme of commemoration for local communist and council leader Paxton Chadwick.
 
Key decisions include the holding of a residential weekend political education school, contesting the May 2025 elections across the east, holding a symposium to develop party policy on transport and health services for the east, including resolving views about east-west transport links for the region, producing two new pamphlets — on “Gramsci and political strategy” and on housing.

Plans have been put in place to open two new branches with the aim of getting party organisation as local as possible to help with ease of attendance at meetings and working with local communities.
 
The congress paid tribute to Steve Marsling, who as a London Recruit fought clandestinely in South Africa under apartheid. In the week leading up to Congress, another veteran London Recruit, Peter Smith, had joined our party district.

Steve announced exciting plans for showing the new feature film on Oliver Tambo’s London Recruits in as many as 10 cinemas across the east of England, including a launch in his hometown of Leiston, Suffolk.
 
As tradition dictates in communist circles, the congress was closed with a hearty rendition of the revolutionary anthem, the Internationale.