Socialist Party fighting fund


Over £20,000 collected in summer quarter

Ken Douglas, Socialist Party national treasurer

Socialist Party members strove might and main to collect over £20,000 for the fighting fund in the last three months, which included the holiday period covering the summer months of July and August.

The Socialist Party doesn’t have any rich backers – we rely on the fundraising efforts of our members and the support of ordinary people who back our opposition to the Con-Dems’ cuts and their destruction of our public services.

Fighting fund enables us to produce the campaigning materials, the banners, placards, posters and leaflets that helped make our demands for a mass campaign to save the NHS and a 24-hour general strike against the cuts the most prominent on the TUC demo at the Tory Party conference in Manchester.

One member in Nottingham raised £62 selling ‘Save Our NHS’ stickers on the coach and on the demo itself!

Fundraising can be hard work, but our members do it because they know that they are building support for a workers’ paper and a socialist alternative to the miserable future that capitalism holds out.

Showing grit and determination, Swansea branch members got up at 5am on a Saturday morning to bag a pitch at a car boot sale and then stood in the rain for three hours, raising a fantastic £115!

A new branch in Plymouth has soared to the top of the fighting fund league table, raising 302% of their target by holding regular campaign stalls two or three times a week, selling the Socialist and with branch members also putting in donations themselves.

In four weeks’ time the Socialist Party will be holding its biggest public event, Socialism 2013, and at the rally for Socialism on the Saturday night we will be asking all our members and supporters to make a donation to the Socialism appeal.

Our message is simple: why can’t the great wealth in society be democratically owned and controlled and used for the benefit of everyone? It is obscene that a few individuals amass huge riches at the expense of millions of ordinary people – yet this is the future held out to us by the politicians of all the main parties.

We want as many of our members and supporters as possible to come to the Socialism weekend and rally, but whether you can or can’t come, please consider making a donation to our appeal.