February 2026
Alex Gordon was elected general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain in January this year. Unity editor Nick Wright caught up with him at the Marx Memorial Library in London.
Unity: Congratulations on your election as general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain. The first general secretary, Albert Inkpin, was a leader of the clerk’s union; Harry Pollitt was a boilermaker, John Gollan a sign writer, Gordon McLennan a draughtsman. Nina Temple – who dissolved the CPGB – was trained as a materials scientist, Mike Hicks was a printer, your immediate predecessor Rob Griffiths was a university lecturer and writer. You are the first railway worker to be elected. How did you become a train driver?
Alex: I joined British Rail as a railway Guard in 1989 at the high point of Thatcher’s offensive against organized labour and the post-war political settlement. Let’s recall that between the 1984/5 miners’ strike and Thatcher’s eventual dethronement in 1992 by her own MPs after ‘Black Wednesday’, we mounted a fierce resistance to her anti-working-class crusade. It is sometimes forgotten, that in the 1980s an actual war was taking place in the north of Ireland.
Civil uprisings against racist policing took place in 1981 in Bristol and in 1987 across dozens of British cities. In1988, the National Union of Railwaymen took six days of national strike action – the first national strike by a trade union since Thatcher’s onslaught against the miners (1985), the printers (1986) and seafarers (1987). The rail workers won a modest pay increase through strike action, but importantly they showed that organised labour wasn’t broken. I thought, that’s where I want to be.
And as many others have discovered, the railway quite quickly becomes a way of life. I was soon deeply involved through my union RMT in industrial trade unionism, representing my fellow workers in the fight with the newly privatised railway companies. I owe much of my early political education to my union, and through RMT I was privileged to meet and work with incredible comrades, such as Bob Crow, John Hendy and Kevin Halpin to name just three. I became a train driver in 1998, which I have alternated with full time trade union and political work for over 25 years.
Unity: Rob Griffiths guided the party through very difficult years when the labour movement was in retreat following the counter revolutions in the Soviet Union and Europe and the defeat of the miners’ strike and was a key figure in maintaining a rigorous Marxist critique of the British capitalist formation and its place in the new world order. Your task is to lead the party as it is revitalised by its revolutionary take on the present crisis and its now far-reaching renewal. What is the party’s role in the next period?
Alex: The role of Rob Griffiths’ and other leading comrades in re-establishing our Party in opposition to the liquidationist Eurocommunist tendency in the 1980s was historic. Let’s recall that the successful intervention of the Communist Campaign Group including Rob, Mick Costello, Mike Hicks, Kevin Halpin and others, not only re-established the Communist Party, but also saved the Morning Star, the only socialist daily newspaper in the English-speaking world. Our party owes them much.
Our Party’s congress in November 2025 expressed a comprehensive Marxist-Leninist perspective on imperialism and the crisis facing workers and peoples in Britain and the world. We will shortly publish our Congress resolution as Capitalism’s General Crisis and the gleam of socialism — Build the United Front against War and Austerity!
Under Rob Griffiths’ 27-year tenure, our Party consistently argued the centrality of Marx’s class analysis and theory of crisis. Our congress noted that capitalism’s general crisis is reasserting itself just as socialist China emerges as the world’s leading economic, scientific and technical power challenging US imperialism’s economic and political supremacy.
Faced with this challenge, US imperialism and its lackeys (amongst whom the UK plays a key role ensuring subservience to US goals) are escalating regional wars to isolate China and delay the eclipse of their world order. The choice between socialism and barbarism is clear.
The Communist Party’s role in this period is critical. Our party must take forward resistance to imperialism and renew the long overdue project of building socialism in Britain.
Movements of resistance to capitalism in Britain need a stronger, more dynamic Communist Party implanted in every town and city, in trade union struggles, to defend workers’ wages and jobs, and in campaigns defending working-class communities against austerity, racism, fascism and attacks on women’s rights.
Unity: The political order in Britain is dissolving with the main parties of capitalist continuity in near-terminal crisis and new political forces arising. How do you understand the present political situation in Britain?
Alex: The UK political establishment’s complacency was shattered in 2016 by our democratic vote to leave the EU, which confounded a core project of the British state, the City of London, most UK political parties and our corporate mass media. The British ruling class historically has relied on the Conservative and Unionist Party both for a parliamentary majority and to ensure continuing profits from imperialism. Today’s Tory Party is mired in structural and political crises making it unable to resolve British state monopoly capitalism’s crisis as it has emerged during the last decade.
Attempt by fractions of capital to establish Reform UK party as a right-populist political alternative to the Tories should be understood as symptom of the weakness of Britain’s ruling class: one faction appeases US Fin-Tech [financial and technology] oligarchs and revives [Enoch] Powellite Tory racism, the other faction vies with New Labour to represent City of London financial interests. The problem of the right in British politics is that both factions are built on quicksand. The US AI-Tech bubble that partly funds Nigel Farage will implode, possibly as soon as this year. The City of London, which became a portal for global (US and Japanese) finance capital into Europe in 1986 following the ‘Big Bang’, now relies on US banks that are also deeply implicated in the coming crash. Britain was de-industrialised under Thatcher and her successors. Her heirs today have nothing of relevance to say.
Some in the Labour Party, under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, saw a possibility of escaping the EU ordo-liberal [free market] orthodoxy through a People’s Bank and a New Green Deal to reindustrialise Britain by investing in carbon neutral technologies. This was rapidly quashed by Reeves and Starmer who are beholden to City of London financial interests, which see reindustrialization as a threat to their political domination of the British state.
The resulting political vacuum has bequeathed a more unstable political situation than at any time since the birth of the Labour Party in 1906. Boris Johnson’s Tories came to office in December 2019 with 365 seats (a parliamentary majority of 80) from 43.6 per cent of the popular vote, the highest percentage for any party since 1979. In just five years an era-defining fight back by trade unionists, along with familiar stories of Tory sleaze and corruption destroyed their political authority. In the July 2024 general election Labour won 411 seats (a parliamentary majority of 174) based on just 33.7 per cent of the popular vote. Eighteen months later bookies won’t give you odds on Labour retaining a parliamentary majority at the next general election.
This unprecedented volatility in British politics presents a real possibility of developing new mass politics based on an alternative economic and political strategy, which the Communist Party advocates. Our party will continue to develop this strategy working with our allies and comrades across the labour and trade union movement.
Unity: The long-standing party programme, presently Britain’s Road to Socialism, was originally formulated in the postwar period when a third of the world was on a socialist path of development and the national liberation movements were stirring in the wake of the victory over fascism. We are in a vastly different situation today. How can these changes be reflected in the party’s programme? Is such a schema appropriate in a fast-changing world? Are our theoretical tools adequate for the task of formulating a new programme?
Alex: Our Party is guided by the highest theory, Marxism-Leninism, which makes our analysis revolutionary once it is in the hands of the masses. The left and the working-class movement in Britain has often displayed an antipathy to theory, which made it possible for opportunism, careerism, chauvinism and individualism to pose as alternatives to Britain’s establishment politics, and which isolated the left from real material concerns of the mass of working people in Britain. We reject anti-intellectualism and eclecticism.
Britain’s Road to Socialism – the BRS – is now in its seventh edition. It was last revised in 2019, reflecting the defeat of the Corbyn project in the Labour Party, as well as the increasing urgency of capitalism’s ecological and environmental crisis. The Communist Party’s recent congress instructed the Party’s executive committee to carry out a review in consultation with party organisations and to produce a new edition reflecting current trends and developments.
The point you raise, of how the global context and perhaps even the character of imperialism has entered a new phase from that of the past 140 years, is a subject of debate amongst Marxists. The Tricontinental Institute for Social Research published its thesis, Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage in 2024. Our party has not accepted this analysis, although it continues to be discussed. What seems clear, is that the unipolar moment of hegemonic US imperialism that began with the fall of the Soviet Union, has proved too costly for US capitalism to sustain faced with socialist China’s planned economy and global economic partnerships. This partly explains US performative militarist aggression against Yemen, Iran, Nigeria, Venezuela and socialist Cuba. This latest imperialist phase is intended to conceal US decline and imperialism’s failure to restore economic growth and profitability after half a century of neoliberal ‘reforms’. Neoliberalism eviscerated the state and left a corporatist shell inhabited by the corporate interests.
This can be clearly seen in the rise of privatisation and outsourcing, and the decline of mass political party membership. A consequence of this is to place the question of the state back into public debate.
In Britain today, local government is bankrupt and infiltrated by private corporate interests, while the US military industrial complex leads calls to scrap what remains of our welfare state. The question of democracy becomes again a revolutionary demand. Our party calls for Progressive Federalism for the nations of England, Kernow [Cornwall] , Scotland and Wales and for an end to the British state presence in the north of Ireland. The party programme – as it is revised by our incoming executive committee – must provide a practical programme for political action by the organised working class and its allies to deliver democratic political accountability and class power.
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