I WATCHED the film Dunkirk recently at the Home cinema in Manchester; I was like others moved by the efforts of the small and big ships to rescue our soldiers. On the way out I saw the ‘new’ statue erected to Friedrich Engels who wrote the communist manifesto with Marx in Manchester in the 1840s.

It’s actually an old statue; it formerly stood in the Ukraine. Ukrainians, who, unlike its Manchester promoters, had to actually live under Engels ideas, saw fit to tear it down and send it to the scrap yard.

The irony for me as I left the cinema is that at the time of the Dunkirk deliverance the Communists in the Soviet Union, that included Ukraine, were allied to Germany via the Molotov/Ribbentrop pact.

Communism was one of the 20th centuries great evils perhaps a museum to commemorate the 100 million mainly working class people who died under it would have been more appropriate for Manchester than a statue of its chief promoter.

Cllr Martyn Cox

Westhoughton North and Chew Moor