Building a people's alliance

If Communist Party leader Rob Griffiths had a fiver for every time he's been told that there's no point in Communists standing for election because they can't win, he'd be able to sort out the Morning Star's monthly Fighting Fund on his own.

He's heard the same refrain during the Cardiff South & Penarth by-election in which he's representing the party - but dismisses "waste of time" suggestions.

"The main impact of our campaigning has been to help ensure that vital issues are raised, particularly those ducked by a Labour candidate who doesn't want to engage in political debate," Griffiths explains.

He is scathing about Labour candidate Stephen Doughty's failure to attend constituency hustings debates on local radio and organised jointly by Cardiff Trades Union Council and civil servants' union PCS.

Griffiths notes that despite the ruling class, mass media and military trying to kill any debate about the war in Afghanistan, it remains an issue on the doorsteps.

"Communists, like the Greens and Plaid Cymru, continue to reflect public opinion on this issue and to oppose a new generation of nuclear weapons in Britain, but the silence of the Labour candidate on these and other important issues is deafening. He's apparently got nothing to say," he says.

Cardiff Communists are not like exotic orchids that blossom only when elections are called.

They have a local organisation that is active all year round in the constituency, so the party's electoral work is an extension of this.

"We have stood in elections at every level in Cardiff for several decades, winning friends and influencing people, including others on the left and in progressive movements," says Griffiths.

The candidate is as local as they come, growing up in Llanrumney, a huge council housing estate on the east of the city, and has lived for the past decade in the heart of the constituency in Splott, an old steel area near the docks.

As well as his political involvement at national and international levels, he has a record of campaigning locally on issues, whether against the housing leasehold system, in favour of Welsh-language nursery facilities or in defence of jobs and public services.

"I have chaired the local all-party campaign against plans to dump a polluting giant incinerator in our local area," adds Griffiths.

"More and more people know me and the record of the Communist Party, which is why there are more CP window posters in this election than ever before - even in the window of one of the few surviving pubs in Splott."

Around a third of households in Cardiff South and Penarth live in fuel poverty, which is why Griffiths and the Communists are campaigning to cut gas and electricity prices and to take the privatised energy monopolies back into public ownership.

The Griffiths campaign has been running a series of hard-hitting adverts in the local evening newspaper, emphasising that Britain is run by a wealthy, corrupt and arrogant elite.

In addition, tens of thousands of leaflets distributed door to door ram home the point that City of London crooks and spivs have swindled people out of tens of billions of pounds through pension and insurance "mis-selling" and manipulation of interest rates.

"That the same corporate gangsters fiddle wholesale gas prices should come as no surprise," says Griffiths, reiterating his party's policy of renationalisation.

"Gas and electricity industries in Britain flourished without fat cats running them for 40 years - we can do so again," he argues.

"The City has been bailed out with £1.3 trillion in public funds. As we have paid for the whole finance sector, we should own it as well and use it to invest in housing, small businesses, co-operatives and productive industry."

More than 12,000 people are on council housing waiting lists in Cardiff South and Penarth and the number grows every month, so Griffiths is calling for a major public-sector house-building programme, financed by taxing the rich and big business.

As well as supporting a legal challenge to Viridor's incinerator construction work, he commends the role played by Cardiff trades union council in alerting people to the cuts in social provision and building the broad-based anti-cuts campaign that is needed to stop them.

The Communist leader is irritated by suggestions that working people have no choice but to wait until 2015 to vote out the conservative coalition in Westminster.

"This is an unelected, illegitimate government cobbled together at the behest of City banks and hedge funds. Nobody voted for it," he declares.

"The opposition so far to the austerity and privatisation programme shows the potential that exists to build a wide alliance against it, one which can resist and even help split the unstable Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition."

But Griffiths recognises that a passive Labour leadership appears content to allow the Con-Dem government to carry out its cuts agenda, perhaps hoping that electoral victory will drop easily into Labour's lap like a rotten fruit in 2015.

He rejects such fatalism and insists that the organised labour movement has a key role in ensuring that the coalition's days are numbered.

"Given the feeble response of the Labour Party leadership, the trade unions have to take the lead in bringing together a democratic, people's alliance against this government and the big business interests that it represents," Griffiths says.

And he adds that a higher profile for the Communist Party, including growing membership, will help significantly to build such an effective alliance.