Meetings A Ramble  on the Green Chain Walk in South-East London, approx. 6 miles. Sunday October 28th, meet Eltham station 11 .00 am. Contact Richard Botterill on 01582 764929 or Vincent Otter on 020 8361 3017 for more details. Autumn Delegates’ Meeting 2007 Saturday 20 and Sunday 21 October 10.30am to 6pm on Saturday 11 am to 6pm on Sunday. Socialist Party Head Office,  52 Clapham High St, SW4 (nearest tube: Clapham North). Manchester Monday 22 October, 8pm Discussion on The Prospects for Socialism The Deansgate,  321 Deansgate  (note new venue). Map Central London Sunday 28 October, 7pm to 9pm Screening and discussion of Adam Curtis’s film The Power of Nightmares   ( Part 1) Socialist Party Head Office, 52 Clapham High St, SW4 (nearest tube: Clapham North). (Parts 2 and 3 will be shown on the following two Sundays, 4 and 11 November) East Anglia The next meeting of  East Anglia Regional Branch  will be  Saturday 17 November,  12 noon to 4pm at The Rosary Tavern,   Rosary St,   Norwich.

Sinn Fein policy is futile Speaking against the internment and the “jailing of Irishmen” by the authorities at Curragh, Mr. Seamus South “appealed to the people to join Sinn Fein, which, he said, was a lawfully constituted organisation… Their aim was the re-unification of Ireland as a thirty-two county republic and the re-establishment of an All-Ireland Parliament. They had been accused of wanting to create a civil war, but they did not want that.” (Mr. South was speaking at a Sinn Fein meeting at Listowel, and was reported in The Kerryman (24/8/57). Whether Sinn Fein achieved their aim of re-uniting Ireland and re-establishing an All-Ireland Parliament, they would not solve the problems facing the Irish people—the problems of poverty and general insecurity. The mass of the people suffer from these problems because they own little or no property in the means of life. They are either propertyless industrial or farm workers—when they are not unemployed—or their farms are too small to enable them to make sufficient money to live a comfortable life. Only when Irish workers and poverty-stricken small farmers unite together to make the land and the other means of life the common property of all, together with the workers of other lands, will they be able to solve their problems. Emigration is not the solution—only Socialism is! (From article by PETER E. NEWELL, Socialist Standard, October, 1957)   Declaration of Principles This declaration is the basis of our organisation and, because it is also an important historical document dating from the formation of the party in 1904, its original language has been retained. Object The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community. Declaration of Principles Britain holds, 1. That society as at present constituted is based upon the ownership of the means of living (i.e., land, factories, railways, etc.) by the capitalist or master class, and the consequent enslavement of the working class, by whose labour alone wealth is produced. 2. That in society, therefore, there is an antagonism of interests, manifesting itself as a class struggle between those who possess but do not produce and those who produce but do not possess. 3. That this antagonism can be abolished only by the emancipation of the working class from the domination of the master class, by the conversion into the common property of society of the means of production and distribution, and their democratic control by the whole people. 4. That as in the order of social evolution the working class is the last class to achieve its freedom, the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind, without distinction of race or sex. 5.  That this emancipation must be the work of the working class itself. 6. That as the machinery of government, including the armed forces of the nation, exists only to conserve the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers, the working class must organize consciously and politically for the conquest of the powers of government, national and local, in order that this machinery, including these forces, may be converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation and the overthrow of privilege, aristocratic and plutocratic. 7. That as all political parties are but the expression of class interests, and as the interest of the working class is diametrically opposed to the interests of all sections of the master class, the party seeking working class emancipation must be hostile to every other party. 8. The Socialist Party of Great Britain, therefore, enters the field of political action determined to wage war against all other political parties, whether alleged labour or avowedly capitalist, and calls upon the members of the working class of this country to muster under its banner to the end that a speedy termination may be wrought to the system which deprives them of the fruits of their labour, and that poverty may give place to comfort, privilege to equality, and slavery to freedom.

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