by Our News Desk

TORY dissent on tax credit cuts has obliterated doubt that Labour under Jeremy Corbyn can win the next general election, Britain’s communists have said.

“The right-wing claim that Labour has no chance of winning the next general election is looking more threadbare by the day,” Steve Johnson told the Communist Party’s political committee on Wednesday evening.

According to the CP London district secretary, proposed cuts in family tax credits were already threatening to create a major crisis in the Tory Party.

Labour estimates that 71 Tory MPs could lose their marginal seats because of the effects of the cuts.

“Who in the Parliamentary Labour Party will now say that Jeremy Corbyn was wrong to vote against the Tory government’s Welfare Bill?” Mr Johnson asked.

But he warned that a “band of anti-democratic malcontents” on the Labour benches were still determined to undermine their newly elected leader by supporting Tory government policies to impose fiscal stringency, renew Britain’s nuclear weapons and join the US-Nato military drive to partition Syria.

He called on the labour movement to continue the battle of ideas in favour of a “left-wing and anti-imperialist” programme of alternative policies.

Britain’s communists also warned that the steel industry faced a “mortal threat” as the result of private ownership, poor investment, EU rules and “market anarchy.”

“Instead of whingeing about cheap steel imports from China, the British government should take a leaf out of Beijing’s book by taking our own steel industry into public ownership, investing in new technology and protecting it with emergency, selective controls on EU as well as other steel imports,” Mr Johnson proposed.

The CP political committee welcomed warmer relations between Britain and China on the occasion of President Xi Jinping’s visit this week.