Burns Night Supper in Ilkley to raise money for Palestine Solidarity Campaign
The fundraising event is being organised by the West Yorkshire communists who shed a little more light on what they’re all about …
Next week, West Yorkshire communists are holding a Burns Night Supper in Ilkley at the Clarke Foley Community Hub to raise money for the Palestine Solidarity Campaign while celebrating the life and radical poetry of Robert Burns. Everyone is invited.
Musician and comedian Tim Dalling, formerly of the legendary folk group The Old Rope String Band, will read The Immortal Haggis, propose a toast to the “immortal memory” and generally entertain us with an evening of silliness, socialism and song.
Born in Burns’ home town of Ayr, Dalling has been described as the Scottish love-child of Randy Newman, Jack Thackray and Ivor Cutler. He can even play the accordion underwater. Music, poetry and politics, haggis, neeps and potatoes, comradeship and laughter – we think that Burns would have approved:
See the smoking bowl before us!
Mark our jovial ragged ring!
Round and round take up the chorus,
And in raptures let us sing.
A fig for those by law protected!
Liberty’s a glorious feast!
Courts for cowards were erected,
Churches built to please the priest.
Burns was a republican, a radical and a rebel. He argued for the rights of the labouring poor and for the rights of women. He opposed the slave trade, the monarchy, war-mongers and wealthy landowners.
He wrote on behalf of the oppressed and against tyranny everywhere. As he famously put it:
Man’s inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn!
Robert Burns wanted things to change.
British communists have been trying to change things for over a hundred years – in workplace struggles, local communities, the peace movement, international solidarity campaigns, the women’s movement, the pensioner’s movement, in cultural struggles and in battles with fascism and racism at home and abroad.
In West Yorkshire communists have always been involved in industrial disputes and community campaigns. The party was very active in the 1930 West Yorkshire wool workers’ strike and, in 1936, at the Battle of Holbeck Moor, where local anti-fascists prevented Oswald Mosley from speaking at an out-door meeting in Leeds.
Among the Yorkshire communists who were killed fighting for democracy in the Spanish Civil War was the Halifax-born writer Ralph Fox. In the 1950s we campaigned against nuclear weapons.
In the 1960s we campaigned against the US war in Vietnam. In the 1970s we campaigned against apartheid. In the 1980s we were involved in the People’s March for Jobs. Relatively recently West Yorkshire communists have campaigned against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today we are busy raising money for Palestine.
Prominent West Yorkshire communists have included trade unionists like Felix Walsh (president of the Yorkshire Warp and Twisters Society), Lou Baruch (president of Bradford Trades Council) Beryl Huffinley (secretary of the Yorkshire regional TUC), Urdu poet Javed Akhtar Bedi, and Walter Greaves, the Bradford-born cyclist who, despite only having one arm, once held the world-record for endurance cycling.
Elsewhere, historians EP Thompson, Arnold Kettle and Dave Parker all taught at Leeds University, while the communist folk-singer Karl Dallas (The Family of Man) lived in Bradford for many years.
The peace campaigner Eileen Daffern, who worked closely with Bruce Kent in CND, also joined the party after attending a meeting of the Left Book Club in Ilkley. Dick Hebbert, meanwhile, well-known as an actor and director, is currently the chair of the board of the trustees at Ilkley Playhouse.
Today the Communist Party is involved in local activities like the Toothless in England campaign (championing an “NHS Dentist for Everyone”), the tenants’ union ACORN, Palestine Solidarity, CND, the co-operative movement, the Menwith Hill Accountability Campaign, North Yorkshire Justice for Palestinians, the End Food Poverty campaign and the “Come Dine with Palestine” fundraisers in Ilkley and Otley.
After all these years, communists are still angry at the state of the world and all the useless, greedy, short-sighted liars, knaves and fools responsible for the mess we are in.
We believe that politics is about more than just casting a vote once every five years. It’s not about slogans and soundbites, but about involving people in changing things. We want to mobilise the maximum number of people to unite around winnable positions. Here are just some of the things we want to do now:
Cut military spending
Support the Palestine people
Scrap Britain’s nuclear weapons
Fight fascism
Repeal racist immigration laws
Abolish the House of Lords
End tuition fees
Tax the super-rich
Save our libraries
Build more public sector and sheltered housing
Take the railways and utilities back into public ownership
Increase the minimum wage
Cancel developing nations’ debt
Repeal anti-trade union laws
Not much to ask, is it? The Communist Party may be small, but we’re still here. Our paper, the Morning Star, is still the world’s only daily English-language socialist newspaper. And we still hope that one day we can end the existing capitalist system of exploitation and replace it with a socialist society, where everyone contributes according to their ability, and benefits according to the work that they do. Or as Robert Burns wrote:
Then let us pray that come it may,
(As come it will for a’ that)
That Sense and Worth, o’er a’ the earth,
Shall bear the gree an’ a’ that.
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
It’s coming yet for a’ that,
That Man to Man, the world o’er,
Shall brothers be for a’ that.
The Burns Night Supper for Gaza takes place from 7pm–10pm on Friday 23 January at the Clarke Foley Community Hub. Tickets: £15
For more information about the event – or about the Communist Party – contact Dick Hebbert on 07866479489
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