BRITAIN’S communists have welcomed the Tory Party’s crushing defeat at the general election, saying it should raise the morale, expectations and demands of millions of working-class people.

But Communist Party general secretary Robert Griffiths warned that Labour’s so-called landslide was based on a fragile minority slice of popular support.

“Under Keir Starmer's rightwards-shifting leadership, his party has lost three million votes compared with the 2017 general election and more than half a million since 2019,” he told the Communist Party’s executive committee today.

“Fortunately, Reform UK and the Lib Dems rode to Labour’s rescue, helping to slash the Tory vote in half while Labour’s share remained stagnant.”

Mr Griffiths warned against the inroads made by Reform UK into working-class communities, spreading anti-migration disinformation and prejudice while downplaying its own anti-working-class social and economic policies.

“The new Labour government faces serious problems of deindustrialisation, chronic underinvestment, energy and food costs, child poverty, housing shortages, investment in public services, public-sector pay, climate change and imperialism’s drive to militarism and war,” he pointed out.

“Unless Labour meets these challenges with policies that put the interests of the mass of people before the profits of big business, the danger is that more people will look to the far-right for alternatives instead of to the genuine left.” 

The party’s executive committee congratulated its own 14 candidates for their hard-fought campaigning and emphasised the need to build a united front of working-class organisations around a left-wing programme and against Labour’s pro-big business and anti-peace policies.