It is being held on the eve of the Anglo-US imperialist assault on the Iraqi people, which will ignite the Middle East and result in oil supplies being cut off to Britain and Western Europe.

Driving on the US imperialists and their British running dog is the growing worldwide economic crisis. They are determined to reorder the world, that is to reimpose the handcuffs of colonialism onto the free peoples of the Middle East, robbing them of their oil resources in the process.

There is not the slightest doubt that the insurgent peoples of Iraq and Palestine are in the same trench as the British and American workers, who are under full frontal attack from the same imperialist forces.

As Blair went out of his way to explain at the Labour Party conference, he is accelerating his privatisation and public sector busting war against the working class in Britain.

In just the same way he is stamping hard on the youth and preparing to introduce up to £15,000 top up fees that will see poor universities closing and university education becoming a preserve of the idle rich.

It is the deepening worldwide economic crisis that is driving imperialism onwards, stirring up discontent and revolution as they proceed. In fact, there is now an objective unity between the struggles of the Iraqi and British workers. This is emphasised by the fact that the British Military Staff has openly said that it will not allow soldiers to cross FBU picket lines because it will need all of its power for use against the Iraqi people.

A victory for the Iraqi people will be our victory. Remember how Thatcher strutted back from the Malvinas war the ‘iron lady’ and the idol of the military and the capitalist state, and then spent tens of billions preparing to crush the ‘enemy within’, the NUM miners and the News International, Fleet Street printers.

Blair would love to do the same, but the unity of the Iraqi and British workers will defeat him and remove him. Blair has already spelt it out that he is determined to crush the FBU and destroy the Fire Service with his slogan: ‘You can’t defeat the government’.

He has placed the struggle for workers’ power on the agenda, since achieving this power is the only way that working people will be able to win a decent standard of living, create a decent future for their children, and prevent the new Thatcherites completely destroying the Welfare State and the Public Service.

The crisis in the workers’ movement, that will be addressed at the News Line rally, is not a crisis of the working class in itself, since it is determined to fight to defend its historic gains. It is a crisis of the working class leadership, made up of Labour party reformists who do not want to fight the Labour government, and will do anything to avoid it, rather than assist the working class to take the power, and will sell it out in the most devastating way to the ruling class.

The working class has to have at its head a revolutionary leadership, which is not only not frightened of fighting the government, but recognises its historic weaknesses and is prepared to defeat it, remove it in the name of the working class and move forward to a workers’ government that will carry out socialist policies.

This leadership is the Workers Revolutionary Party and it must be built up in the trade unions and in the communities as the organiser of the much needed general strike, and from the general strike, the organiser of the working class taking the power.

The post-war period of reformism has completely gone, since the party that was forced by the working class to bring in the Welfare State reforms, is now allied to the bankers to destroy every one of them.

Reforms and concessions will only be won today by the revolutionary action of the masses, and will only be sustained and maintained by the working class moving forward to take the power.

Only the Trotskyist movement has the practices and the theory to organise the working class to defend its historic gains by overthrowing capitalism and going forward to socialism. This will be the content of this Sunday’s rally. Make sure you are there.