RECENT polls confirm that public opinion supports markedly progressive taxation and public ownership of the energy utilities and railways, while opposing new nuclear weapons and British membership of the European Union.

It's a general election irony then that the only political party which sides clearly with majority sentiment on all these issues is not primarily an electoral party and is, anyway, largely excluded from political debate by the mass media.

It should come as no surprise to Morning Star readers that this paper broadly endorses the popular policies unveiled in the Communist Party's general election manifesto yesterday.

So, too, will many other people on the left, to a greater or lesser degree.

Like the Communist Party, they understand that austerity is a gigantic fraud inflicted on the people of Britain in the interests of a minority of rich and powerful capitalists based mostly in the financial City of London.

Slashing public expenditure reduces tax pressures on the wealthy and big business, who already enjoy among the lowest levels of taxation on incomes and profits in the developed world.

Privatisation of Royal Mail and the NHS and other public services hands them over to transnational corporations for shareholder profit.

Britain's communists are right not only to oppose austerity but also to warn us that the struggle to end it will have to go on after May 7 whatever the election result.

The national demonstration called by the People's Assembly for June 20 will provide a valuable rallying point for the left and progressive alternative - indeed, for many of the policies outlined in the Communist Party's manifesto.

It is refreshing to read something there other than vague and time-worn promises to clamp down on tax evasion and avoidance.

The communists demand that a British government use its sovereign reserve powers to end the tax haven status of 28 or so British crown dependencies and overseas territories.

Support for the democratic national rights of Scotland and Wales has featured in communist election manifestos since the late 1930s, whereas others on the left have often been agnostic or hostile.

With so much demagogy and hysteria surrounding the advance of the SNP today, only the Communist Party's perspective of "progressive federalism" combines maximum devolution to the nations and regions of Britain with working-class unity in the fight for left-wing policies.

Communist opposition to a new post-Trident generation of nuclear weapons is shared by many in the Labour Party and SNP.

But this latest Communist Manifesto for the 21st Century goes further, pointing out that NATO itself should be rejected. Recent warmongering ejaculations from its military and political chiefs confirm that this US-dominated atomic alliance and its relentless expansion eastwards is a far greater menace to stability and peace than are Russia or Iran.

Then there is the rampaging elephant in the room that is the European Union.

When large sections of the trade union movement and the left embraced EU commission president Jacques Delors and his phoney Social Charter in the 1980s, they handed the whole EU question to the outside right.

A series of millionaire charlatans from James Goldsmith to Nigel Farage have since been able to pose as champions of democracy and sovereignty against the EU juggernaut.

The Communist Party alone reminds us that the EU is still a pro-big business, anti-democratic alliance of capitalist ruling classes.

Except that it now drives forward austerity, privatisation and militarisation without and pretence to creating a "social Europe."

Would that there were more Communist Party and other candidates exposing and challenging that reality in the current election campaign.