Author: Tony Staunton

I have spent more than 40 years as a social worker and socialist activist campaigning for peace with social justice. My day-to-day reality has been in support of children and families in challenging circumstances. I have sought social reforms through active participation in Britain's trade union and socialist movement. The Big Picture has always driven me to take part in the political history of humanity, acting to promote equality and hope through anti-discriminatory practice. To constantly challenge imperialist war, racism and Islamophobia, homophobia and sexism, disablism and dog-eat-dog competition is to expose the entire System of Capitalism. I attempt to utilise the Marxist methodology of historical materialism as best I can (not being of super-intellect) to understand the politics and economics of Capitalism. I consider praxis to be vital for understanding - action without theory, or constantly theorising without testing out ideas in practice are behaviours that produce no progressive change. More than anything else, the local and global Environment has been my passion, from gardening to travel, climate science to rebellion against extinction!

We are in a new age of war and extremes

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (10.3.26) ensuring a statement against the bombing of Iran and identifying some of the dangers of US imperialism. Most essentially, the need to protest. Right now 56% of UK voters (and 51% of US voters – none of whom read this(!)), oppose Trump’s murderous illegal bluster, and we must ensure their views are seen on the streets and in the media. If all that is seen is BBC pro-war nonsense and far-right media memes, populations will shift into acceptance of war economies and war ideology. “Protest and Survive” as the old saying goes!

Unedited version below or expand the pic for the published article.

We are in a new age of war and extremes

Stability has been blown away. We are In a new age of war and extremes, Most of us don’t want life to get any worse than it is now, and yet it is getting worse. The most dangerous sensation in such circumstances is that gnawing feeling of powerlessness.

Yet another illegal war has begun, unapproved by the democratically elected majority in Washington USA or Parliament UK, this time bombing the ninety-three million people Iran. Various opinion polls have shown the majority in Britain to oppose the war on Iran, from a simple self-interested concern for the financial impact if not a humanist care for the lives of civilians everywhere. But what can we do?

The years of imagery of the total destruction of Gaza, the crumpled concrete and mangled steel of apartments, streets and entire neighbourhoods, the burnt and crushes bodies of children in Palestine are now accompanied by the familiar mushroom smoke plumes and colossal streaks of flame over Tehran, Iran. Humanity must not become desensitised to the cries of and for Humanity.

US Secretary of State for War, Pete Hegseth, has set out his endgame for Iran: the total destruction of the country’s infrastructure and many of its people: “With complete control of the skies, we will be using 500-pound, 1,000-pound and 2,000-pound bombs, of which we have a nearly unlimited stockpile.” Some of his military commanders have been invoking far-right extremist Christian rhetoric about biblical ‘end times’ to justify involvement in the illegal Iran war to US troops.

We can oppose the Iranian government and oppose the imperialist war against it. We can support the Iranian civilians who bravely protested against Khomeini’s brutal Police last month, at least twenty-thousand shot on the streets, and at the same time understand that bombing children from on-high does not liberate the children. Under the rockets of Israel and the bombs of the USA, some flown out of the UK, we shall see more mass murder not freedom.

We may be able to understand the logic of the Iranian diaspora across the world protesting in favour of Trump and Israel as liberators. But we should not agree with them. We only need to reflect upon the illegal invasions of Iraq and Libya to understand that western bombing leaves formerly modern economies in ruins, the infrastructure crushed back, in the words of president George Bush Jnr, “to the Stone Age”.

Then the western corporations moves-in to rebuild in their own image, for their own profit, leaving the local economies devastated and impoverished. The war on Iran is an imperialist war like all others, Israel the preferred launching pad for the US in the Middle East, seeking complete control in the interests of US economic security and power, not those of Iran or anywhere else.

The potential to destabilise the adjacent countries and, indeed, the West, is very real. The autocratic governments of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar and even Egypt are already very vulnerable and in tension against each other. Not least, against all the deniers, the very real impact of global heating caused by climate change is having dramatic impacts on their people’s access to drinking water, any loss of electric power stopping their energy-thirsty desalination plants and wrecking both food production and social stability.

The very idea that the bombing or Iran will have positive outcomes for the people of Iran, even in “the long term”, goes against all evidence from history and today’s material conditions. Contrary to the pretext for the bombing, Iran had no nuclear weapons and no stated intent, whilst Israel has 400 nuclear warheads and is threatening their use. But what can we do?

We can demand our own government plays no part in this destruction. The fact that US B-1 Lancer bombers flew from UK’s RAF Fairford this weekend means we are party to the war, whatever defamatory names Trump calls Starmer. Turkey’s attacks on Iran represent the engagement of NATO – an escalation of itself.

We can support the people of Iran and the Middle East in their demands for human rights, the end to dictatorship and the fight for the self-liberation of their own countries. Last weekend a hastily-called demonstration of over 50,000 marched through London to the US Embassy, calling to stop the bombing. In opposition to the protests there and across the country, Neo-fascist organisers and far-right protesters joined with Iranian royalists to counter the anti-war demonstrators, echoing the war cries of Trump and Netanyahu.

We have to protest against war. If we don’t, the voices for more conflict will grow louder. If we do not stand up now, the organisers of division, promoting war, racial hatred and western “white supremacy” will be allowed to grow more powerful, the lack of opposition imposing passivity. We must prove in practice, in person and in public that we, the majority, want Peace.

Trade unions must be involved in processes to end conflict and build a peace grounded in social justice. Join us on the streets!

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Bombing Iran will NOT liberate the People

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (3.3.26), damning the suggestion that bombing women liberates women, anywhere. International Women’s Day on 8th March should see a battle cry rage against Trump’s misogyny, racism, anti-Trans bile and deadly military imperialism. They’re all linked!

Bombing Iran Will Not Liberate the People!

Welfare not Warfare!

The illegal Israeli military mass-bombing of the girls’ school in Minab in the south of Iran killed at least 153 women and girls last Saturday. This cannot claim to be in the interests of the liberation of women in Iran.

The rights of Iranian people have never been on the agenda of Western powers. Women, and men in Iran have protested heroically to change their government towards women’s rights, with death their only answer. The bombing of Iran offers no solution to women’s oppression there or anywhere. War always treats women as targets.

There’s so much hypocrisy spoken about women’s rights that we should all take responsibility for calling it out. We live in a deeply sexist human world. A global system based upon individual power and control vested primarily in super-rich men. The Epstein files show how corruption and sexism are so pervasive and entrenched. Andrew represents the corruption, both financial and sexual, of unaccountable wealth. Trump symbolises white male supremacy. Women’s oppression and capitalist class society are intertwined.

The genocide in Gaza has exposed the brutality of war and the unique impact on women, famine, physical abuse and incarceration impacting menstrual health and pregnancy. We still have a long way to go to win a world free of women’s oppression.

Let’s be clear: women’s oppression encompasses all social, economic, and political spaces causing personal subjugation for simply being a woman. Its is based upon class: wealthy women whilst suffering the indignity of being considered primarily as sexual objects have sufficient agency to combat much of the oppression. They side with the class privilege of wealthy men and collude in the exploitation and oppression of other women as low-paid nannies, personal assistants and cleaners.

Most working class women’s experiences of oppression are internalised into self-blame. Interactions and relationships are all based upon sexism – the portrayal of women as objects to be used, owned and controlled permeate all aspects of women’s lives. The modern capitalist family requires women to fund the domestic budget by working as well as running the home as carer, educator, nurse, chef, bottle-washer and on-call lover.

Next weekend we celebrate International Women’s Day, March 8th, in deteriorating circumstances. The backlash against campaigns for women’s liberation is well-funded and growing. In the name of women’s rights, the far-Right now proclaim themselves the defenders of the “traditional” heterosexual family as the “natural order”, recruiting women to specific roles in political organisations, “Pink Ladies” mobilised to protest outside refugee hostels for traditional women’s roles and heterosexual family values, and to keep white children safe from Black men. Disgusting!

Farage and his Reform UK private business echoes vice President J D Vance in demanding women should have more babies, referring to Musk’s “population apocalypse” of white families in the face of migration, inter-marriage, LGBT+ parents and left-wing “wokism”. The far-Right are reawakening the fascist campaigns of last century, for “children, kitchen and Church”, opposing women’s rights and imposing a woman’s place apart from any self-determination.

International Women’s Day (IWD) has been celebrated for over 100 years, born from mass revolts of young women workers challenging exploitation and the abusive power of the Boss class. Today many companies and businesses use IWD to sell cosmetics and gimmicks to reinforce the cardboard cut-out female rather than address the issues women face.

But IWD has radical roots and is a day to remember those who have fought for women’s liberation – from the Suffragettes in the UK to the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement in Iran. The women trade unionists and the men who have joined their cause remain clear-eyed – the working class have nothing to gain from women’s oppression. Free domestic labour, tasks still primarily allocated to women, protect the profits of big business not having to pay for the child care and raising of the next generation of the workforce.

And so, women are kept down. One-in-four women in Britain suffer domestic violence and abuse, often sexual, an average for a period of 6 years of their adult life. Rape in this country is lawless, only 3% of alleged cases followed through to a conviction. Child sexual abuse is reportedly on the increase again, the vast majority of cases girls abused inside the family, the majority of families being white. Sexual abuse is not the preserve of the black male refugee but the privileged white misogynist.

The cuts to social welfare, repeated and enforced in order to divert essential funding away from our health and welfare services and into war and military spending, affect women most acutely. Women’s rights depend upon a well-funded Welfare State alongside the ideological struggle for liberation from this system enforcing roles and relationships of power-and-control.

Here in Plymouth, trade unionists are fighting the cuts to health services, including stopping the closure of Plymouth’s Sexual Abuse Referral Centre, reducing the support that women and children receive following rape and abuse. You won’t see the far-Right protesting about that except as a “drain on the tax-payer” and a symbol of the “Nanny State” they want demolished.

For socialists, the challenge to class exploitation has to have the fight against oppression at its heart. We encourage and support the struggle by women against all forms of oppression, including gender stereotyping, role-segregation and being made scapegoats blamed for the imposition of low wages, high child care costs and poor social conditions. Welfare not Warfare! On this International Women’s Day we must remember the struggles of the past and unite for social justice and women’s liberation today!

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Britain’s role as USA’s 5lst State is Proven

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (24.02.2024) continuing the scrutiny of warmongering and rearmament. Since writing this (deadlines are Monday mornings), today – the fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – the French President Macron has stated his intention to place nuclear weapons in Ukraine…with Starmer likely to follow his lead (or is it Trump’s?). its time to protest against nuclear weapons – Marham, Suffolk, Saturday 28th February 2026.

Britain’s role as USA’s 5lst State is Proven


In military terms, Britain is undeniably, umbilically tied to the United States of America. There is a network of at least 19 US military bases across Scotland, Wales and England each assuming autonomous legal status as the blood and soil of Trump’s USA.
With Europe being coerced into developing a continental army to rapidly rearm, Britain’s long-perceived role as America’s 51st State is practically borne-out. The rapid rearmament of Germany is reducing its role as the USA’s second military carrier after the UK, whilst Britain expands its reliance on US power.
The primary evidence of this has to be the return of US nuclear warheads and infrastructure to these shores. All reports from observers prove that the US Air Force base at Lakenheath, Suffolk has now taken delivery of B61-12 nuclear bombs, only to be launched from here on the specific orders of the President of the United States. Yesterday, US F-22 “Raptor” fighters flew from there towards Iran without Starmer’s approval.
Down the road at Marham, Starmer is spending billions on refurbishing the Royal Airforce Base, ready to accommodate 12 nuclear-capable fighter jets, a significant expansion of Britain’s nuclear capabilities. This country will now be able to launch nuclear weapons from both the sea and sky.
Be clear, theses are American nuclear weapons. The Trident nuclear warheads and systems, supposedly ready to be launched within minutes from one of Britain’s four “independent” nuclear submarines, are actually owned and controlled by the United States.
Britain’s home-bred ultra-nationalists and xenophobes are wholly unperturbed by this, many wearing Make America Great Again caps as if staking their claim as part of Trump’s Republic! The contradictions are bizarre.
The far-Right criticise Starmer for not spending enough on the military and, in particular, nuclear weapons. In the face of rabid nationalist fervour Starmer is bound to back down from blocking Trump’s intention of utilising British bases in the bombing of Iran. Ours is a vassal State of US Imperialism, the Stars & Stripes the real Flag Force!
Plymouth’s Devonport MP, Pollard, the Minister of State for Defence Readiness & Industry, echoes his right-wing predecessor David Owen, SDP MP, in glorying Starmer’s ever expanding tax-investments in nuclear arms.
Starmer jumped to Trump’s command last week, increasing military spending by an additional £14bn a year, much of it on US equipment. Pollard and Owen sang the praises of Babcock, owners of the Devonport nuclear dockyard, about to receive a further £4.4BN of tax-payers money for increasing nuclear weapons readiness.
Devonport and neighbouring St Peters wards have the highest indicators of social deprivation in England, published on the Council’s website. One-in-Three of our children here live n poverty, the life-expectancy of a working class man some 14years lower than a professional living in Plympton.
Babcock’s profits (£73m last year) do not engorge Plymouth’s economy but get banked oversees, the well paid workers live and spend elsewhere. Following a 4.4BN bung, talk of 20,000 new jobs was a pie-in the-sky figure easily debunked by any scrutiny of similar claims made for Plymouth’s Freeport.
Britain’s Ocean City is about to be renamed, “Nuclear City”, Babcock taking over the city centre and University in pursuit of its nuclear military profiteering. At the same time as Starmer’s additional £14BN will be found from budget cuts to our crumble schools and hospitals and welfare benefits.
Trump has removed all Treaty safeguards from nuclear proliferation including nuclear weapons testing, and domestically ended rules on the safety of nuclear facilities, military and power plants alike. Expect the same here, soon. Forget any information on the impact to the environment of radiation leaks and nuclear accidents.
The end of a rules-based system for military conflict has now ensured a free-for-all. The increasing reliance on nuclear weapons in the face of a declining infrastructure of conventional weaponry and military forces makes us ever-more reliant on the threat and actual use of nuclear weapons.
That’s why we’re campaigning against all nuclear weapons, starting with any and all nuclear United States nuclear weaponry based in Britain. A delegation from Plymouth will be at the national protest at Marham on Saturday, opposing the purchase and basing of US nuclear-armed jets there. Join us: cnduk.org

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US Bombing of Iran will Threaten Us All

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My weekly comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (17.02.2026), identifying the threat of imperialist war to the interests of the international working class. The fight for Iran is the battle for ownership of people’s labour power and natural resources by competing ruling classes and super-rich corporate executives. Imperialist war is never on our side.

The unedited version here, or expand the picture to read the published column.

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Today’s talks between the United States of America and Iran hold imminent war in the balance. To argue against war is not to support one side or the other. The drive for peace is a valuing of humanity, of people, of life.
But it is naive to think that competing interests do not exist. The USA’s century-long domination of the Middle East has won unconscionable levels of extreme wealth to the corporations of America and the West, at huge cost to Arab peoples of all denominations and cultures across the region. The people of Iran no longer enjoy their own land’s treasures, the strategic value of the territories dwarfing the extensive oil and mineral wealth plundered and stolen by the West.
Iran’s economy is all-but destroyed, more by the brutal long-term sanctions from the USA and western allies than by the rigid authoritarian State dictatorship in Tehran. The USA’s military outpost in the Middle East, the Apartheid State of Israel, has pointed nuclear-armed missiles at its neighbour for decades.
The USA funded Saddam Hussein to wage a ghastly and costly 8-year trench-war between Iraq and Iran from 1980 following the country’s revolution a year earlier. More than 500,000 were killed, Iran’s economy intentionally demolished in the process. The US, UK and more than 30 western countries supported Iraq, with France sending Saddam £5BN in weaponry and the chemical weapons that he later used in Halabja and against Iraqi Kurds. Indeed, Kurds of all factions continue to be attacked by all sides today, the length of their suffering almost unimaginable. War often spills-over.
The racists who hate Muslims and Asian people won’t care a jot about yet another conflagration in the Middle East. Indeed, they may well cheer-on yet another war as if seeking the death or total subjugation of the entire world’s Muslim population of two-billion – one quarter of all humanity. That’s not going to happen. People like Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson are arguing to slam the door shut in the face of Iranian refugees through their toxic anti-migrant campaigns.
Failed diplomacy over Iran will directly affect western economies and the livelihoods of western people whatever their prejudices. We are no longer living in the 1980’s, today’s military tensions far higher than for two generations past. Not least, the transfer of State funding away from health and welfare at home towards arms manufacturing. Only this week Starmer is planning an additional £14bn a year for military spending, leaving our schools and hospitals in tatters.
There is and always has been a global component, Iran strategically placed and becoming more-and-more a region set for a proxy war between imperialist rivalries. Just as North America and Europe funded Iraq, so Russia and China armed Iran back in the ‘80’s and continue to do so. And those imperialist rivalries continue today in more volatile and far less manageable circumstances.
At the pressurised and unpredictable centre lies the issue of nuclear weapons. Israel has them. The two US aircraft carriers, their accompanying bombers, jets and naval fleets, are carrying nuclear weapons, threatening Trump’s “major destruction far worse than previous attacks”. There is no evidence anywhere (Israel and the US would publish it were there) that Iran has nuclear weapons or any capability.
Last Friday Trump said regime change in Iran would be the best thing that could happen. Even if standing as only the 58th largest economy in the world, beleaguered by sanctions and inflation but holding 10% oil and 15% gas of world reserves, and with a population of 95 million, any assault would trigger an international crisis. Mass bombing of Iran will not ensure regime change and will only push ordinary people towards the regime again.
The outcome of western invasions of countries including Iraq and Libya have killed millions and destroyed any stability. The western-supported war in Sudan has forced tens of millions into famine and starvation. The occupation of Palestine and genocide in Gaza has killed tens of thousands of civilians, women and children, and destroyed an entire region. We can see what an invasion of Iran will do.
There are those liberals and on the Left who therefore side with the Iranian State, Russia and China against the obvious aggression and threats of the the USA and NATO. This is a misplaced and blindly comfortable but false position to take. All sides have regional imperialist ambitions none of which are in the interests of the working class, either of their own countries or internationally. It is we, the ordinary citizens, who lose and die in those wars, the rival ruling classes stamping our bones into the ground on which to build their next dynasty. It is reasonable and responsible to not take the side of any ruling class.
In a world of capitalist competition, the cry for “Welfare not Warfare” has to be in the interest and therefore the demand of the overwhelming majority of humanity. The Iranian people have a long and proud history of standing up to oppression and dictatorship. It must be for the Iranian people to determine and create their future, however difficult. And that will take another revolution, not a plundering Trump-inspired death-fest. Don’t Bomb Iran!

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A Crying Need for a new mass Socialist Party

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (10.2.26), identifying my support for the new Your Party project towards a mass socialist party in the UK. The need should be obvious – the far-Right are demolishing all notions of social justice, multiculturalism and anti-racism, women’s liberation and Trans-rights, health support including for mental distress, comprehensive education for all, accessibility and democracy. But the new Socialist Party is, probably necessarily, being borne out of strife and power-plays because that is what politics is. We’re voting for our first leadership, necessarily taking sides between between conservative and radical socialism. Following print deadlines and publication, Rob Rooney, a member of the Trotskyist Socialist Party and seasoned militant trade unionist, was debarred from his candidacy and expelled from Your Party despite being on the ballot papers. It is a signal that the election is indeed a battle, not some gentle guide towards consensus, just as have been all elections before. Without socialism to vote for, the working class will be conned and enticed by far-right lies suggesting they, at least the white working class, will be better off with an authoritarian and discriminatory government of exclusion, racism and misogyny. We cannot let that happen.

The unedited version here, or stretch the picture below to read the published article.

New Political Party will give Power to the People (the Herald editor’s rather cynical headline)

“Starmer’s Toast!” 2026 will see the fifth UK Prime Minister installed in the last five years. Who cares? They’re all the same – one elite political class all in it for themselves. This tiny cabal appear to rumble inside their own sealed bubble, most of us innocent victims of their intrigues and power plays.

Our collective cynicism, if not outright despair, is palpable. In the face of political convulsions and continued enforced austerity, and amid the continuing erosion of all facets of democracy, it can appear that universal suffrage is of the lowest priority for hard-pressed working class people.

And yet there are elections happening this week. Indeed, in trade union circles we have democratic all-member votes on various issues most weeks, from strike ballots to the election of a new General Secretary or a fresh union steward in our local workplace. 

The importance of political agency for the masses, for the working class, has been a cornerstone of trade union and socialist organisation for hundreds of years. The Labour Party was formed out of the trade union bureaucracy responding to the demand for working class representation in Parliament but intentionally and woefully separating the economic from the political struggles, stamping down on extra-parliamentary activity and political strikes in particular.

Labour has failed as a direct consequence. Today’s overwhelming disengagement of working class voters, borne of repeated disappointment, is dangerous. We could soon lose what few rights and powers we still enjoy.

The elections that opened yesterday are for the Central Executive Committee of “Your Party” – the latest parliamentary formation stepping onto the UK political stage. The mass media began and continues to deride and slur the Party, referring to it only as “Corbyn’s Lot” and denigrating the contest as in-fighting between “loony lefties”. Don’t get fooled again.

Elections are contests. People stand representing different strategies and tactics towards different goals. Of course that requires rigorous arguments and taking sides. Before Your Party is dismissed due to in-fighting, just consider the all but constant warfare at the heart of the Labour lot, Badenoch’s sinking Tory ship, and Farage’s chaotic ReformUK. Truth be told, there’s ideological strife inside Polanski’s squeaky clean Greens too! It’s politics! In any case, none of them are socialist organisations.

Your Party, when announced, gathered 800,000 people interested in the formation of a new socialist party in Britain. The launch Conference in Liverpool last November voted for an outright socialist constitution for workers’ rights and the redistribution of wealth from the billionaires back to the People. 

Tens of thousands of activists are engaged in meetings, debates and organisation for this new socialist party, in essence echoing the Webb’s 1918 Clause Four of the Labour Party Constitution:  “for the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange…to secure for workers the full fruits of their industry and promote equitable distribution”.

But these are not the nineteen hundreds. Your Party cannot and must not try to be a Labour Party Mark2. That formation failed the working class – tried and tested over a hundred years and more, cutting the welfare state and restricting workers wages all in pursuit of supporting and maintaining the capitalist system.

We have to should focus on socialist demands including:

1 End the cost of living crisis, end austerity policies and tackle obscene levels of inequality;

2 Welfare not warfare, invest in public services, no to privatisation, kick the market out of  service delivery;

3 Initiate an urgent council house building programme;

4 Renationalise water, energy and all public utilities without compensation;

5 For peace and against war. For the liberation of Palestine, against imperialist assaults in  Venezuela, Greenland and the Middle East;

6 Against all forms of oppression, and specifically including trans-Rights;

7 For the abolition of anti-trade union legislation;

8 For action on the climate crisis including the end of fossil-fuels, to invest in jobs and protect  our environment;

9 Defend civil liberties and the right to protest, against Starmer’s authoritarianism.

We face far more global turmoil than did our ancestors of the turbulent twenties and war-preparations of the 1930s. The economic, political and moral corruption of big corporations and their billionaire owners is greater than ever. The militarisation, rearmament and drive to greater war is fast-tracking. Most of all, the collapse of climate stability – accelerating extreme weather events destroying the fundamentals of food security – demands there can be no more “business as usual”.

In response to the obvious crisis we are living in, current parliamentary politics is dominated by the fast-tracked drive of far-right, nationalist and fascist organisation here and across the world.

Your Party will emerge from its first election period dead-at-birth if it tries to mirror the old parties of a bygone era. A pointless waste of focussed enthusiasm and finite energy. This has to be an activist party, an organisation of organisers, an insurgent mobilisation of working class power that can combat the billionaire corporations and the toxic, racist, misogynist, divisive far-Right.

This is not a project that can plan a thirty-year slow-build towards parliamentary power. There’s no time. This week’s elections have to produce a leadership that will represent and build collective working class power, immediately!

Tony Staunton

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reStart START!

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An additional comment on an historically significant day. The end of the START Treaty on nuclear arms limitation. Please share and publicise our meeting on 17th February. We have to get organised!

START Treaty

We are very likely to hear of a nuclear explosion somewhere, soon. It is not just that Strategic Arms Reduction Talks on nuclear weapons came to an abrupt end last Thursday, it is that nuclear proliferation is part of the New World Order, deregulated, un-inspected. 

The START Treaty, regulating and controlling the numbers and development of the nuclear weapons of Russia and the United States of America, has expired. Trump is not bothered. Russia has said it will keep to it, for now. This is the last remaining agreement to mutually prevent nuclear weapons testing and limit the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal – Russia and the USA own and control at least 87% of all nuclear warheads, many fired-up and ready to launch.

There has been nuclear arms controls for over 50 years, as part of the rules-based international order established after the second world war, the first treaty signed in 1963 after the horror of the Bay of Pigs crisis where US warheads sited in Turkey and retaliatory Russian nuclear missiles placed in Cuba very nearly sparked a global nuclear war. 

The old cliche is that “the world stepped-back from the brink”. Well, we’re back at the brink again today. There are at least nine nuclear powers including Israel and North Korea, in a world where there are no restrictions on nuclear weapons whatsoever. 

There is now no agreement that morally or legally can deter any State from developing or using nuclear weapons. Cynics may suggest that Treaties aren’t really worth the paper they’re written on, but START has certainly been raised in the midst of any and all tensions and negotiations as the basis for de-escalation in recent history.

It is now the case that the traditional axiom of “Mutually Assured Destruction” no longer applies. The UK is at the forefront of global research and development of new nuclear warheads and the infrastructure with which to launch them, focussed upon “battlefield nuclear weapons”, “low-yield” and “useable”. 

The Trident replacement programme is effectively a project to prove nuclear weapons can be exploded in war and the world will not end. It represents humanity’s greatest gamble, and a Great Lie from beginning to end. The lowest yield nuclear warhead designed for battlefield use has the power and intensity of the first bomb dropped by the USA upon Hiroshima in 1945. That’s their definition of “useable”: 85,000 humans killed by one bomb, and tens of thousands more left unwell with shortened lives caused by the radiation that one explosion spread trans-generational toxic contamination.

The entire Trident launch system is owned by the United States and leased to the UK, any notion of Britain having an “independent nuclear weapon” a complete fallacy of public relations spin.

Now, Starmer, in his final days, has agreed to the Royal Air Force carrying US nuclear-armed missiles, making the UK Europe’s frontline of US offensive forces, with navy and airforce ready to fire Trump’s nuclear weapons.

Trump may agree a new nuclear treaty if it has his name on it and it includes China. But that’s not the point. The regulation and inspection of nuclear facilities has prevented accidental launch or detonation of nuclear weapons. The technology is intricate, and the litany of accidents across the nuclear industry, releasing deadly radioactive contamination into our land, air and waters, too long to list here. But inspection has prevented explosion, to our knowledge.

The Treaty and its protocols can be said to have prevented accidental nuclear war between the super-powers. Nuclear weapons are on hair-trigger standby at all times, the timing of launch and counter-launch measured in seconds rather than minutes and managed primarily by computers armed with Artificial Intelligence. To prevent the machines taking-over, there were international agreements on the human element in decision making, checks and double-checks, giving time for reflection and negotiation before the launch of Armageddon.

No need for all that woke health-and-safety nonsense now. Let’s just get on with it! The new Arms Race has been unleashed. The new nuclear countries outside of the obvious top three have no tradition of Treaty or constraint. They have never adopted the protocols for nuclear war. They have no constraints. And without START even the big players have no witness or knowledge of what their competitors are doing. No checks and balances. 

The simplest solution is to not make anymore nuclear warheads and to disarm. Nuclear Weapons are already, according to the totally debunked United Nations, illegal under international law as weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction. They obliterate everything and everyone. There’s little point in firing back once the other side has launched except as an act of vengeful mass suicide.

In the meantime we have to campaign for a new Treaty as soon as possible, as some form of safeguard without any illusion in it preventing the possibility of nuclear war. The end of START opens-up fresh and immediate possibilities for nuclear escalation in Ukraine and the Middle East. In Plymouth we have the infrastructure and machinery that carries the US’s Trident nuclear warheads. This is not someone else’s problem. 

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, with our world famous CND Peace Sign and seventy years of active campaigning, is at the forefront of challenging nuclear weapons. We will protest at Marham Royal Airforce Base on February 28th where the F35A Lightning II fighter jets will be loaded with US nuclear missiles, and at Lakenheath US Airforce Base on 4th April where Trump’s B-2 Spirit and B-52 Stratofortress Bombers carry B61 nuclear bombs.   

At the very least let’s get US Nukes off our soil, and campaign to scrap the £210billion Trident Replacement programme in the UK. Please attend our CND meeting in Plymouth at 7pm at the Quaker Centre, 74 Mutley Plain, PL4 6LF and on Zoom, Tuesday 17th February 2026.

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Whitey on the Moon #2

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The Full Moon was a glorious sight on Sunday, even if witnessed through the omnipresent rain-haze that produced a lunar halo. We gaze skyward in joy and awe, reminded of the sheer wonder of life and the universe around us.

The moon, however, is a dead rock. We enjoy its reflection of sunlight, not its dark side.

Yet this week we will all be expected to enthuse to, if not exalt, the “return of mankind” to Earth’s satellite. Journalists will exaggerate the adventure in the competition to be the greatest cheerleader for  the launch the Artemis II rocket carrying astronauts to have a spin round the rock.

School projects this week will entice our children to colour-in the NASA logo and parents to buy the overpriced t-shirt made in Chinese sweatshops to prove allegiance to western superiority. 

The Artemis project has officially cost at least $93billion to get to this point. But the true cost is far higher. This is the latest propaganda exercise in the technological Cold War, the United States in competition with China and India to prove superiority and dominance in Space as well as on Earth. It is a military exercise, and our children should be advised of this.

The Artemis missions are promoted as part of NASA’s long-term plans to build a space station on the moon called “Lunar Gateway” run by nuclear power plants to be launched from Earth (what could possibly go wrong), where astronauts will live and work and, they suggest, prepare for missions to Mars from where life will be cut short by such high doses of radiation that the gallant heroes will never return. 

It is a science fiction, a distraction from all the challenges of our world. The moon and the planets are hostile to human life, and the projected US lunar base is a hostile statement of imperialist domination, part of the Space Wars already active around our globe. 

Last time around we exposed the waste of human focus, time and energy, chanting Gil Scott-Heron’s brilliant poem, “Whitey on the Moon”. He documented the poverty and medical debt, untreated ill-health, war and environmental destruction in 1970, emphasising the stark dislocation between the fit White men bouncing on the moon’s surface, the oppression and destitution of millions of Black people across the US, and the billions in absolute poverty across the Global South.

Today we’re in an even worse state. No wonder there’s efforts to force us to look away. 

More than 2,000,000,000 people have no  access to safe drinking water, sanitation, and handwashing – a basic human need. Get that sorted! There are 300 million people living inside the 130 active military wars, 120million war refugees, genocide in Gaza and Sudan. Stop that! 

With all the high-tech SpaceX machismo fronted by the fascist billionaire, Elon Musk, how comes 28million people in the USA live without income or state support? And ICE paramilitaries murdering civilians on the streets of America? Really? 

Look Up! Look Away! Enjoy childlike space fantasies instead!

They’ll tell you that humanity has benefited enormously from the science of space exploration. Which particular part of humanity are they referring to, exactly? The mobile phones that they’re now seeking to ban for children under 16? The “Teflon” frying pans, a by-product of the heat-covers to allow space capsules to return to earth safely, now found to contain toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl “forever” chemicals polluting all life on earth including every human brain? Is that progress?

Worst of all, they’re using the Artemis mission to spread complacency about the climate crisis. Look how blue the Earth appears from the moon! Everything’s fine! NO ITS NOT! Have you seen the extreme weather events across the USA, hardly reported amidst the gloss of Artemis. The floods and waterlogged pitches here, and the fires raging in Africa, Indonesia and South America are because of global heating caused by burning fossil fuels. The Gulf Stream is weakening. Don’t look away, invest in our common future not some Hollywood-inspired sci-if spectacle!

The anti-Vietnam War, pro-human rights protests and international workers’ strikes of the early seventies forced government to return to the issues of home. The space programme was stopped because it was a complete waste of finite resources. It still is.

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The Holocaust must Never Happen Again

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly Comment in the daily Plymouth Herald, on Holocaust Memorial Day 27th January 2026. I have witnessed that some Leftists who are rightly campaigning against the racist creed of Zionism are falling into antisemitism, blaming the genocide in Gaza on all Jews. In doing so they are effectively regurgitating the fascist ideology falsely alleging an international Jewish conspiracy for global domination. I wanted to write to say that’s wrong, but where would you start? 

It cannot be assumed that everyone knows details of the Holocaust. It also cannot be assumed that there is general recognition of the Very acute differences between Zionism and Judaism.  And just as it is not antisemitic to expose and condemn the genocide perpetrated by the far-Right Israeli State, so it is antisemitic to allege that all Jews across the world support the genocide in Gaza. We see huge protests by Jews against the genocide. 

Remembering and commemorating the Holocaust does not show any implicit support for the Israeli State. Writing for a popular tabloid daily is different from writing for a left-wing audience. It’s the right-wing and local political class who read it, including church leaders. So, with a public Holocaust memorial service on the morning of the publication of this article, it’s essential to begin by saying we remember and condemn, unconditionally and forcefully, the Holocaust. We condemn antisemitism!

And then, how to condemn the genocide in Gaza without condemning all Jews and Judaism. It must be done by noting the implicit comparisons of dehumanisation and barbarity, and most importantly to identify the Islamophobia now being driven by the fast-growing far-right racist and fascist movement, as the latest mechanism to produce the same outcomes. 

Next, Don’t Bomb Iran!

One column of 600 words a week is not enough. Read Socialist Worker for a more comprehensive coverage of this world in crisis, chaos and turmoil: https://socialistworker.co.uk

But most importantly, take to the streets on Saturday 31st January for Gaza, and challenge and fight back against fascism wherever it rears its head!

The unedited version below – expand the picture of the article to read the edited version.

Every year, socialists commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day, 27th January. All year round, socialists challenge and oppose antisemitism. It has never been more important than now to remember the Holocaust – the detestable systematic murder of more than 6 million Jews by fascists across Europe – one of the greatest outrages across humanity’s long history. 

We demand “Never Again!” knowing full-well it can happen again. The potential for the dehumanisation of an ethnic group is always with us.

Hitler’s Nazi fascist party and his allies in Axis States across Europe and beyond joined together to identify, round-up, incarcerate, torture, kill and dispose of the bodies of at least 6 million Jewish women, men and children inside four years of the Second World War, 1941-5.

Nazis had a worked-out plan in 1920-21 to exterminate all of Europe’s Jews. It didn’t happen overnight. It took advanced planning and decades of racist propaganda. The fascist military elites who rose to power across Europe used the idea of racial purity to scapegoat ethnic groups and project the threat of “The Other” and “The Enemy Within” into the minds and communities across the continent. 

These were state-driven mass killings with an ideological purpose of winning white supremacy, militarised caste-systems, and Apartheid States as the basis of future society. Fascism’s core idea, that those born to a specified ethnic community all share the same characteristics, behaviours and beliefs, is racist. There is no social homogeneity implicit in an ethnicity.

Racism is a tool of power and control. In the conditions of economic crisis and war, the defence of the Capitalist order required the destruction of all opposition. Most jews were poor, and many jews in the working classes supported socialism, at that time primarily organised by communist parties in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. 

The Holocaust was proclaimed by the Nazis as an “ideological war of extermination” against the “Judeo-Bolshevik” enemy, many business people joining the Nazi Party in defence of Capitalism against the mass socialist movements of the time. The fascist party’s name adopted the term “socialist” alongside “nationalist” in order to confuse and supplant the Left.

Millions were forcibly taken from their homes and off the streets by armed state militia. Mass killings took place in Nazi extermination camps designed to murder millions. 2.7 million Jews of Nazi-occupied Poland murdered at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau along with tens of thousands of Roma and Sinti people. Jewish families were herded into filthy cattle trucks, daily transporting train-loads to the gas-chambers.  But millions were killed by other methods too. 

Nazi Germany launched its invasion of the Soviet Union in the second half of 1941. Einsatzgruppe C, aided by a local Ukrainian militia, shot 33,000 Jews over two days – over 1,000-an-hour. This “Holocaust by bullets” was responsible for 1.5 million Jewish deaths between late 1941 and the spring of 1942, the largest single massacre 54,000 people, mostly Ukrainian Jews, at Bogdanovka.

In addition, Hitler’s Protection Squadron, the dreaded SS selected some to go to slave labour “subcamps” to be rapidly worked to death, whilst another half a million Jews died from starvation and disease in the guarded ghettos – open air prisons without facilities – the Nazis created initially in occupied Poland and the western Soviet Union. By late 1944 the Nazis evacuated the camps forcing the 750,000 or so surviving Jewish inmates onto “death marches” with 250,000 victims shot by SS guards when they could no longer walk.  

The Nazis drew on historic antisemitism, now portraying the Jew as responsible for all current economic and social ills, and as the greatest threat to the white-skinned Aryan “race”. The fascists’ war was promoted as the life-or-death struggle for survival of the “pure Whites”, promoting nationalist aspirations to create “ethnically homogenous nation-states”, subjugating “inferior races”.

The Nazis falsely presented themselves as revolutionaries who would eradicate the unhealthy “parasitic”Finance Capital linked to international markets. 

“Aryanising” Jewish assets would leave healthy “productive” national capital in place and able to thrive, they shouted. Without evidence or fact they projected Jews as “The Rich”, running Capitalism for themselves – the forerunner of the ludicrous “Great Replacement Theory” being spouted by fascists today.

The Nazis promised national regeneration, the end to national humiliation at the hands of foreign powers and the elimination of “the enemy within” – the Jew. In fact, it was organised labour that was suppressed by the Nazis, trade unions and workers rights broken, not capitalism. Socialists and trade unionists were killed in the death camps too. 

Fascism was, and is, a counter-revolutionary mass movement from below, using the power of racism to divide us and to rule us with an iron fist.  They continue to represent a brutal militarised world overseen by their own oppressing and exploiting super-rich ruling class.

Today we see the white-supremacist fascist parties of Europe rising again, this time pretending to stand alongside Jews, waving Israel’s national flag whilst calling for the forced removal of Muslims. The fascists’ latest enemy within, their latest scapegoat, their racist target, is Islam. Their manipulation should not be tolerated. We should have no truck with their lies and fear-mongering. Fascism is the real threat, not Jews and Muslims. Say No to antisemitism and Islamophobia!

Interests of a Few Can’t be Allowed to Rule Us

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (20.1.26) raving mad about the billionaire jamboree in Switzerland courting Trump and his cronies. It’s deadly serious, this carve-up of the world and it’s people’s for the wealth and power of a tiny minority. It’s why I want a revolution!

The unedited version here, or enlarge the picture for the original.

Those of us seeking to further the interests of working class people should keep a close eye on what the ruling classes are doing. Once every year, the world’s billionaires and their toady hangers-on meet together, parking record numbers of private jets on the tarmac outside Davos, Switzerland. The World Economic Forum. They’re there now.
Trump is attending, with the largest and richest-ever “Team USA” following-on as the Emperor’s entourage. The great pretender, Nigel Farage is also there, pretending to be part of the elite he derided only last year as a “gathering of the globalists”. He wants to offer his services.
Let’s breathe for a moment. In a world of nearly nine billion human beings, fewer than 60,000 people own and control most wealth in the world. 0.001% of the world’s population control three times as much wealth as the 4,000,000,000 bottom half of humanity.
They’re coming together at the Swiss Alps resort to discuss how to further carve-up the world’s wealth between themselves. Their deliberations have more power and impact on every one of us than all the fluff and nonsense of every parliament. The People’s democracies have very little influence upon the real decisions made inside the corporate boardrooms across the continents.
Fifteen of the world’s richest exploiters are American. Musk has a personal wealth of $682billion (a billion is a thousand million), Bezos only $260BN, nine of the ten richest making their money in the technology business. Clearly we pay far too much for tech.
But they have problems. The world’s economy is in a deep crisis of debt and inequality. The climate crisis is documented, with dire medium-term economic consequences. So the rich aren’t investing in anything that doesn’t make a short-term hefty profit. Most of that private accumulation comes from gambling on projected future prices in an era of catastrophe. The immediate task is to raise prices to us as high as possible whilst cutting the wage and welfare bills to the lowest.
And so the Bosses compete against each other for ownership of lands and workers. The big corporations have real power but this is no world conspiracy – they’re all in competition against each other, undermining all planning and subject to the anarchy of the Capitalist System. When they come together at Davos they smile and shake hands, laughing all the time with a knife ready behind their backs, doing deals and hostile takeovers. They hold their pet politicians in tow ready to change laws to keep their scams legal.
Posturing over regional influence, possession and wealth extraction, such as over Greenland, is happening alongside who can afford the $1BN to sit on Trump’s “Board of Peace” with war criminals Blair and Rubio. Carving-up the Middle East and carving-out the Palestinians, profiteering from genocide, is symbolic of the rabid clawing for power and resources. The certainties of global “rules-based order” has broken down and the Nations attached to the big corporations are preparing for “geoeconomic confrontation”. War!
This week they will headline a “Spirit of Dialogue” whilst bitterly negotiating their competing interests over Venezuela, Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, Taiwan, Iran and Greenland. Davos replaces the United Nations for a week. They will not let democracy stand in their way.
As a band of warring brothers, a giant corrupt cartel, the Capitalist’s common enemy is us. The Rich fear the potential power of the working class. The Mass Strike and revolution from below is their greatest foe.
The Big Bosses work together to keep us in our place. In this fevered era of instability they are turning away from democracy and towards autocracy, ready to allow military conflict and fascism to prevent revolt and protect their wealth and power.
The billionaires are living in a bubble, and they know it. The absurd scale of $trillions of cryptocurrency investment in Artificial Intelligence cannot be sustained and will crash, hurting a few of them but destroying entire social economies and hundreds of millions of our jobs and lives. Investment in arms manufacture and the military suck tax cash out of social welfare. The rent and mortgage rate increases – the cause of the international housing crisis – is mirroring the investment bubble that led to the global financial crash of 2008 for which we’re all still paying. Enforced austerity is intensifying discontent.
Workers’ real spending-power is lower today than it was in 2008. The spending-power of the average full-time worker is 25% less than in late 2021. Their corruption screwed us for decades. It’s gonna happen again, but worse.
The super-rich know all this. Their champagne-fuelled seminars in Davos may publicly play-down the scale of the global crisis, but in the back rooms the real wheeler-dealers are drawing-up the blueprints for a refreshed Bosses offensive, ever-intensifying the exploitation of the working classes, by force. They will continue the accelerating descent into war and barbarism. The super-rich must be stopped by the collective power of the international working class!

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UK must Not Accept the Euqivalent of US’s ICE!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (13.01.2026) making the links between ICE in the USA and the political direction of travel in the UK. It’s obvious really. If you agree, please build the largest ever anti-racist/anti-fascist protest in London on 28th March. You have time to recruit at least 10 of your colleagues and friends, through patient explanation and exposure of the implications of a far-Right government in Britain by 2029.

UK must Not Accept the Euqivalent of US’s ICE!

The media headlines were bold. “Bring ICE to Britain, says Farage” and “Trump should put Starmer on trial, says Tommy Robinson”.
The racist ultra-nationalist, Farage, multi-millionaire owner of the ReformUK brand, would wish to see hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people of colour from across Britain snatched from their homes and workplaces and forcibly expelled.
The fascist misogynistic white-supremacist, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, is so keen on national sovereignty that he would like a foreign President to reign over us, and accepts cash from fascist groups from across Europe and the USA. He wants to see millions of Black and Brown British citizens rounded-up and deported.
The violence implicit in both far-right leaders is for all to see. Britain’s far-Right are applauding the violence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Trump’s federal law enforcement agency under the Department of Homeland Security. In 2025 more than 131 people died while in ICE detention, agents filmed pepper-spraying clergy and medical staff, tear-gassing children and systematically terrorising Latino communities.
ICE is a $12BN armed paramilitary wing of the central State, empowered to carry out armed raids on schools, hospitals, courts, places of worship, weddings, funerals and workplaces. These involve raids by masked agents carrying automatic weapons who drive unmarked armoured vehicles.
ICE targets people of colour, anywhere and everywhere, regardless of their status.
ICE is a paramilitary group, intentionally recruiting from the volunteers of the organised far-Right, encouraged to pursue a racist white-supremacist ideology. Trump openly targeted the Somali community in Minneapolis, calling them “garbage”.
The video of a high court judge, a Black citizen, assaulted by ICE in a supermarket car park offers one picture of the millions of public assaults taking place across the USA with, as vice-President Vance insists, total immunity from legal challenge or charge. No rules.
Other film shows women being dragged across tarmac roads and beaten, children forcefully taken from private residencies, families crammed into wired cages without proper sanitation or drinking water. This is the imagery of a fascist state, of Hitler’s militia in 1930’s Nazi Germany, of the concentration camps across fascist Europe a century ago.
The murder in Minneapolis of Renee Good, 37-year old mother, shot three times in the head by an ICE agent, was greeted by Trump suggesting she deserved to die and labelling Renee as a ”professional agitator”. Thankfully, more than one thousand protests took place across America last weekend by those who do care, chanting “ICE is Trump’s Gestapo!” and “No justice, no peace—get Ice off our streets!”
A month earlier more than 7 million Americans marched against Trump. Opposition and challenge to the President’s federal boot-boys is rising, from elected officials and Police through to local white citizens outraged by such flagrant injustice and ready to defend multiculturalism and democracy.
The anti-racist majority in Britain today, thus far quite quiet and acquiescent, had better get out in the streets too. We have to show the far-Right that we will not accept the equivalent of ICE in the UK.
Whilst Starmer and Mahmood seek to appease the racists with tougher immigration laws and the incarceration of civil rights protesters, Farage and Yaxley-Lennon are preparing for power. They are stating their racist intentions should Farage be prime minister. Yaxley-Lennon is building his Black Shirt street squads in preparation for a far-Right government that will target and scapegoat minorities in order to divide the working class and rule by fear. Trump offers them a blueprint, and they are applauding him.
We have to get organised and get active here, now. Down with racism and fascism! Join and build https://www.togetheralliance.org.uk

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message to Trump: “Hands Off Venezuela”

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column daily Plymouth Herald (6.1.26), attempting to challenge the media blanket-lie condemning Maduro as a drug-cartel boss and international criminal. The media suppression of facts is so absolute as to deny any possibility of a full response in 600 words or less. Here’s 900 words, still inadequate, but more fleshed-out than the printed edited version in the paper (which you can read by expanding the picture below). My intention is singularly to ensure there is a left voice in the local paper – to suggest it has any real influence would be nonesense, but please share if you agree.

Stop Trump – Defend Venezuela

Let’s just get this straight. It is perfectly acceptable for Trump to invade Venezuela, bomb homes and kill over 50 people, abduct the President and his wife, and install an administration run by US oil corporations. Really?
No! We are told that, because “The West” never accepted Venezuela’s government of Maduro, it is only right to overthrow it. Like Iraq, and Libya and Chilé and so many other countries.
Regime change follows the logic of unbridled Capitalism – the rule of the most powerful. Power and Control behaviours, nationalist military might and domination, plunder, wealth extraction and accumulation, colonialism and imperialism. The logic of the armed privateer, the legalised gangster.
In the specific case of Venezuela this week, we see the proclaimed right of the United States of America’s Capitalist ruling class to dominate and control the Western Hemisphere.
This is not an interpretation, it is the statement of Trump himself, quoting the doctrine first espoused by President Monroe in his Doctrine of 1823 that warned against interference in the Americas. Monroe declared that the USA owns and controls the American continents.
That means the USA has the right to the subjugation all the peoples, and the exploitation and extraction all the resources of the lands and oceans. By force. Because it can. And for so long as it can.
The people of Latin America have fought back for self determination and national liberation for centuries. From the revolution led by Simon Bolivar in 1797 Venezuelans have fought back against colonialisation from Spain, attempts by Britain and Portugal, and then Corporate domination from the USA. It is a history of the illegal seizure of assets for foreign personal gain versus the use of national resources for national social and local economic collective development.
Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, drove the Bolivarian Revolution into the 21st Century, seeking national control with an emphasis on using Venezuela’s extensive oil revenues to lift the mass of the Country’s poor out of poverty. This was a democratic socialist programme, taking control of the country’s oil assets and beginning the redistribution of the huge wealth away from the richest elite and foreign corporations and towards the country’s population, housing, education, health and social infrastructure. Nationalisation but not workers’ control of industry.
Of course, those in support of Capitalism have fought back. Capitalists hate socialism. They seek to destroy all and any semblance of it, because every social programme eats into their opportunities to hoard private wealth for themselves. Billionaires hate the very ideas of common wealth and social justice. In any class society, one groups’ profits come at great cost to the other.
The invasion of Venezuela has the purpose of the seizure of the country’s valuable natural resources by the USA. But is is also a far-Right ideological assault on democracy and socialism.
Nationalisation of oil reserves is an anathema to the Capitalist Class and their wealthy middle class beneficiaries. Oil is the most profitable of resources. It symbolises power and domination. Those who control oil control the world. That’s fine when owned by self-appointed dictators in Saudi Arabia, compliant with the western corporations, but wholly unacceptable when owned by the Venezuelan State aiming to use the revenue for the good of the People.
Venezuela, as with the rest of the countries of central and southern America, has been constantly beaten down by the military power of the United States for the past centuries. The Bolivarian Revolution was constantly weakened by attempted coups and para-military insurgencies funded and controlled by the USA. The resulting frailties of the Maduro administration was hammered for years by US and Western economic sanctions and blockades, left open to corruption and subject to powerful assaults by well-funded far-Right insurgents, and infiltration from agents of the country’s own super-rich class and Trump’s military.
Maduro’s government became beseiged, the economy in crisis and inflation rampant. The repression of dissent undermined his base. Trump’s justifications – that Maduro is the boss of a drug cartel, that his regime is undemocratic, are fake. By their own analysis the US State concludes that Venezuela is not one of the world’s major drug exporting countries.
Trump is continuing the same old practices – nothing new there. The bombing of Caracas is a naked act of imperialist aggression. Donald Trump’s declaration that “we are going to run Venezuela” sums up the arrogance of US power. This is about removing a regime that has long been a thorn in Washington’s side and seizing the largest oil reserves in the world.
By overthrowing Maduro, Trump is pointing a gun at the head of every other Latin American president, and is challenging the economic links between South America and China. Cuba may be the next target.
It is the sole right of the Venezuelan working class, with their long revolutionary history, to determine governance of Venezuela. Trump may have control of the military, but the mass of the working class support socialism in their own interests. Their fight against recolonisation by US corporations must be reinforced by a global movement of solidarity with the Venezuelan people.
Trade unions in Britain have long supported the rights of workers across South America, just as we support the struggle of the Palestinian people against Israel’s genocidal occupation. The struggles are linked and from the same source. Trump has threatened to take-over Cuba, Panama, Greenland and Canada. These threats continue and will escalate.
Keir Starmer has refused to condemn the coup, incoherently mentioning support for “international law”. He is guilty of active support for genocide in Palestine and now by his silence he makes himself complicit in the assault on Venezuela.
We must protest. Hands of Venezuela! Down with Trump’s pirate empire!

Here’s Hoping for a Happy New Year!

Tony Staunton1 Comment

My final weekly comment column of 2025 in the daily Plymouth Herald (30.12.25) inevitably rounding-up my priorities for the coming year, whilst coldly acknowledging how much more needs to be addressed. No, I haven’t mentioned Your Party, not from any lack of commitment but because this new socialist potential will only succeed by the action it takes to secure the priorities as listed below. If it is yet another organisation created of and for itself, a Party existing in order to simple exist, then it will fail. The point is to raise the socialist banner high and, most importantly, know what we’re fighting for!

Here’s hoping for a Happy New Year!

New Year, whichever and whenever it occurs for you, offers space for reflection as well as projection. The Gregorian calendar fixes ours as 1st January each year, irrespective of the position of the sun or the moon, but close enough to the winter solstice to symbolise new light and fresh beginnings.
New Year is worthy of a wish list, fresh aspirations. In a human world of significant turmoil and uncertainty, so much needs fixing that it’s difficult to prioritise. But here goes. Let’s hope in 2026:

  1. The fascist-led racist movements of Farage and Yaxley-Lennon are finally and overwhelmingly defeated by mass mobilisations of working class people outraged by racism and misogyny and challenging the false culture-wars that decry empathy as weakness;
  2. The £13billion a year UK tax-funding for illegal nuclear weapons of indiscriminate mass-destruction is ended, the cash transferred into the National Health Service to fully fund our health and welfare needs rather than warfare. Let’s also ensure an anti-racist campaign in hospitals to value the one-in-three doctors working here from oversees, and encourage our health staff to stay because we value, not abuse, them. Oh, and ensure the NHS is protected from plans to fully privatise our services – the selling of our health records to the private corporation Palantir to be roundly rejected;
  3. An emergency plan for funding to address the housing crisis, including skills apprenticeships for our unemployed young people, for good quality new build of social housing and refurbishment of our 13 million homes in need of repair and insulation, placing rent caps and legal liabilities on private landlords and taxing large landlords to fund the reparations they should have undertaken;
  4. The end of this seemingly endless period of Austerity economics, where workers wages have stagnated since the banking crisis of 2008, our real spending-power actually fallen despite our taxes bailing out the banks without any prosecutions or detriment to the bankers incomes, dividends and bonuses. End the low wage long working hours culture where employers are subsidised by our taxes to keep our wages low. Make the rich pay proportionally the same taxes as the working class instead of being allowed to hide their riches in off-shore accounts;
  5. The acceleration, depth and seriousness of the Climate Crisis is finally accepted and understood, all the lies and denial defeated and replaced by urgent action to end emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, Britain playing a lead role on the international stage to force climate action onto the US Presidency and win funding for the vital transformation of the world economy away from oil and gas and into funded renewable energy delivery North and South. Stop subsidising the oil companies who are reaping record profits from inflated prices causing our fuel poverty;
  6. Child poverty is ended, the 1 in 3 working class kids no longer deprived of some of the basics of life, and our schools refunded under state control;
  7. The genocidal racist Netanyahu is brought to trial and jailed, his far-Right government collapsed. Starmer’s Government support for Zionism and funding of arms to Israel is ended, the protesters against the persecution of Palestinians vindicated and applauded.
    There are so many more issues that must be addressed. Well, we have to live in hope. We are in a period of very fast moving human history, and nothing is impossible. The course of human history has always been determined by the mass movements of working people, not the feeble compromises of the self-promoting political class.
    Best wishes for a campaigning New Year for Peace with Social Justice!
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We Must Defend the Right to Protest

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (23.12.25), repeating the point – political prisoners yet to be found guilty of anything and on hunger strike for over two months, remanded in squalid prison conditions way past the maximum time legally allowed to be held on remand, are being left to die – in Britain 2025, under a Labour Government. Worth repeating. Write to your MP. Please.

We Must Defend the Right to Protest!

There is a Christmas meme doing the rounds. It is a picture of a couple with baby born in a shed fit only for animals. The reference is simple and effective. According to the Bible, Jesus was a man of colour, born as a Palestinian refugee in Bethlehem, his family chased by a totalitarian State militia.

This online imagery is not religious blasphemy but a reminder both of the horror being perpetrated today against Palestinians, and a call-out against the abuse of Christianity by the racist Islamophobic far-right. You don’t have to have Faith to understand the injustices being called-out.

But there is a very real ideological assault against such so-called “left-wing” demands for Peace with Social Justice.

Speaking-out against murder and genocide should be respected. Actively challenging the production of weapons to be used against civilians, trapped and unable to flee any assault, should be a duty. Standing-up against unaccountable authority is a basic requirement of citizenship.

Yet there are concerted attempts by those in power to shut-down reference to the genocide in Palestine, and severely curb protests generally. It is, indeed, as if we are returning to the totalitarian rule of Ancient Rome of two-thousand years ago that Joseph and Mary were fleeing with their baby, resulting finally, as the story goes, Jesus crucified for his opposition.

Starmer’s is an authoritarian government using anti-terror laws against peaceful protestors as an emotive scare-tactic to enforce general compliance. It is likely that a young woman on hunger strike in a UK prison will die this week. Queser Zuhrah has been on remand for over 20 months despite denying charges relating to a break-in and criminal damage – not terrorism. She has been 49 days without food and punished through lack of due attention and care.

The Labour Government is implementing restrictions on protest and harsh penalties against protesters. Undoubtedly right now the government’s main target is the national marches for Palestinian rights, but new laws will impact on a wider range of causes. New police powers will effectively ban protests based on their ‘cumulative impact’, neutralising their purpose on course towards making mass protest for any social or political change illegal.

A future government could use these powers to effectively stamp out protests of any kind.

The political misuse of remanding into custody – breaking the rules governing time on remand – is one of the core reasons for the Hunger strikes, but represents a much broader political offensive against citizen’s rights. The Government no longer considers it should be held to account.

Put together with the new restrictions on rights to trial by jury we are experiencing many of the political restrictions rightly condemned when identified in Russia or China. Include the proposal for compulsory digital identity cards and democracy as we have known it is finished.

The right to protest is fundamental to democracy. Indeed protest is generally how social change and improvement happens: the right of workers to vote won by mass action of the Chartists; women’s vote won by direct action of the Suffragettes; the fight for workers rights, the working day and collective pay deals won by mass strikes; British fascist movements repeatedly defeated by mass working class action on the streets; the National Health Service and council housing won by the threat of mass working class revolt as the troops returned from the Second World War; the mass movements for civil rights for Black people and for Gay Rights through the 1960’s and beyond. The mass protests against war across generations.

We must defend the right to protest against injustice, and oppose this fast-developing political dictatorship.

Tony Staunton, President, Plymouth Trades Union Council

Hunger Strikers must be Freed from Jail now!

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald newspaper (16.12.25), pleased that they published my article days after the ghastly terrorist attack on a Jewish celebration at Bondi Beach, Aus. I have organised all my adult life to challenge and defeat antisemitism and continue to do so. The tensions and contradictions in the approach to Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people result in Zionists conflating antisemitism with anti-Zionism. They are not the same. I am not prejudiced against Zionism, I am well-informed as to the formation and purpose of this political creed which is thoroughly racist, imperialist, colonialist and militaristic. Israel is an Apartheid state. Zionism must be defeated, not from any ill-informed pre-judgement or discrimination but from a strong starting point of anti-racism. Stand up to racist antisemitism, stand up to racist Zionism!
So, whilst sending support to the Jewish community in Australia and everywhere in the wake of a racist mass-murder, its vital to counter the weaponised pro-Zionist media flood by re-asserting the horror and revulsion felt at the genocide of Palestinians over the past two years and indeed, the past 100 years. Right now, in the UK, that means highlighting the State repression of our protests against genocide, and demanding freedom for the hunger strikers and justice for those imprisoned, and all Palestinians!.

Hunger Strikers must be Freed from Jail now!

Britain has political prisoners. 29 political activists who were part of Palestine Action have been in prison on remand for more than 18 months. They have pleaded not guilty to various charges including aggravated burglary and criminal damage, allegations that the law says cannot lead to remand of more than 6 months. They’ve been incarcerated without proof of guilt for three-times the maximum period in law.
The Police say they may pursue charges of terrorism, but no such charges have been laid. Four protesters were arrested at the RAF Brize Norton military airbase on June 20 for using red paint and crowbars to spray-paint the engines of two Voyager jets used for air-to-air refueling. The planes were seen ready for operation three days later, the damage having been superficial. The four, all between the ages of 22 and 35, are charged with conspiracy to commit criminal damage and conspiracy to enter a prohibited place for purposes prejudicial to the interests of the U.K. not terrorism.
Why were these protests happening? The protesters, alongside millions of us across Britain, are witnessing the destruction of Gaza and the armed dissolution of Palestine. We are protesting to stop the Genocide as identified by the United Nations International Courts and the majority of countries across the world.
The British State has supplied weapons to the Israeli State to carry out indiscriminate bombing of civilians non-stop for two years. The bodies of more than 65,000 Gazans can verify the facts, including more than 20,000 children. Many more are presumed dead according to international aid agencies, amounting to at least 168,000. The killings continue, the broadcast ceasefire not honest, the systematic attempt at the extermination of Palestinians and indeed the Palestinian State (a State recognised by the UK government) the clear and present definition of genocide.
Palestine Action activists determined to expose Britain’s complicity in this ongoing international crime. The arms manufacturer, Elbit, was a focus of protest, as were the military aircraft assisting Israel in surveilling Gaza to target civilian buildings including homes, hospitals and schools. The people’s protests were political and symbolic, physically challenging the sources of genocide without threat to life or limb.
Many weeks after the Brize Norton protest the direct action organisation, Palestine Action, was declared a terrorist organisation by the government, re-writing and severely loosening any definition of terrorism. Thousands of people of conscience have been arrested since for sitting silently holding placards saying they oppose genocide and support Palestine Action, charged in absurdity with terrorism. These are political arrests – protesters threatened and sanctioned for thoughts and ideas that challenge existing power relations in our society, undermining the democratic right to freedom of speech and expression.
Eight of the Palestine Action prisoners have been on hunger strike for 44 days now, 5 having been hospitalised, at least one facing death before Christmas. They want to be released on bail while awaiting trial, in line with the standard pre-trial custody limit of 182 days. They deserve a fair trial, not a show trial, the censorship of their hunger strike suggesting they have been condemned as guilty ahead of any hearing. Of course they continue to demand the deproscription of Palestine Action as do millions of us across the country. And the British government should cut ties with arms companies complicit in the ongoing genocide in Palestine.
Their treatment is a disgrace. These protesters do not pose any threat to the public. It is the perpetrators of genocide who should be facing trial, the politicians and arms manufacturers.
The Government, and those prepared to let them die prove the point. These are political prisoners. The law is not being applied correctly towards them, with political motive. This is the latest act of a government seeking to severely limit the right to protest. The latest announcements to severely limit the right to trial by jury should only deepen our concerns for the future of our democracy and the rule of law. Free the Hunger Strikers now! Stop the Genocide! Freedom for Palestine!

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National Flags used as Weapons to Intimidate

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (9.12.25), almost incandescent with anger at the amount of apolitical claptrap being spouted about “finding common ground” with the flag-waving, hate-spouting racists. I’m being told I should “listen to the other side” and “respect the opinions of others”. I refuse! After 50+ years of political activity I know very well what a fascist is, thank you. I know humanity is capable of such a vast spectrum of beliefs and actions that you cannot have common cause with them all. There is a left and a right of the political spectrum, and always has been. And it’s not me but the fascists who will be the first and last to shut you up and shut you down. They must not only be opposed, ardently and collectively, but they must be defeated.

Unedited:

Another racist march through Plymouth last Saturday, and more threatened. A small and bedraggled and of fewer than 60 paraded huge union jacks and flags of St George around the Barbican and Frankfort Gate with clear intent. To use Britain’s national flags as weapons to intimidate all people of colour.
They wish for Britain to be a white-supremacist Apartheid State, those of colour to be subjugated as second or third-class citizens or forcibly deported in their millions. They spout absurd assertions that Britain has been taken-over by Muslims or Black power.
They scream “save our kids” to present the lie that migrants en-masse are sex-abusers, without any evidence and when the vast majority of child sexual abuse occurs in white families, because Britain is an 85% white-skinned population. They demand “stop the boats” when the total costs of offering asylum to those suffering is a fraction of one-percent of the country’s gross domestic product, and Britain is fuelling the wars and climate chaos from which they’re escaping.
Those who called the demonstration publicised their rallying cry across the entire South West from Bristol to Truro for extremists to converge upon Plymouth. A few of the most mouthy on the day have been seen demonstrating outside a hotel where traumatised people who are totally innocent and have every right to be here. They brandish emblems of “Britain First”, a fascist organisation formed out of the failed British National Party in 2011 and allied with fascists across Europe such as Germany’s AfD, supported by Donald Trump.
Members of Patriotic Alternative, a white-supremacist hate-group have also been involved. Flag Force Plymouth, the ones hanging flags from lampposts to intimidate and claim communities as ruled by them, are directly allied to these far-right and neo-nazi groups. The question has to be asked, by what right do they have freedom to march in Plymouth or anywhere else, spouting racial hatred and misogyny?
Police data, publicly available, shows that over 40% of the far-Right protesters arrested in the last year had previous offences of violence against women or had been reported for domestic abuse. Perhaps their calls for justice for women and girls are another example of the actual perpetrators hiding in plain sight.
Thankfully, the people wanting to expose the lies of the far-Right turned-out on Saturday, as we always do, to swamp the fascist-led flag-usurpers, trade unionists and human-rights protesters outnumbering them three-to-one. But the vast majority of decent Plymothians should be up-in-arms against the far-Right, not just a dedicated few.
The media and government are broadcasting much of the same racist mythology, with one aim in mind. To distract and desert attention from the crisis of low pay and high prices, poor housing and the fragmentation of health and social care services. “Blame the Boat people” just doesn’t work. Asylum seekers are not the landlords hiking unaffordable rents, refugees are not the directors and shareholders of the banks extorting our cash through high interest rates, and do not own the energy companies creating our fuel poverty. Black migrant workers are the ones propping-up our caring services despite the efforts of Starmer’s government to expel them.
Now, trade unions and campaign groups have formed a fresh alliance to challenge the lies and hatred. The Together-Alliance against the far-Right is uniting the country, from civil organisations through to celebrities, Friends of the Earth to Paloma Faith and Lenny Henry, to Stand Up To Racism. Join us and defeat hatred. http://www.togetheralliance.org.uk

it’s Your Party for the Working Class! Join Now!

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My weekly comment column in today’s Plymouth Herald, unedited below or expand the photo to read the print version. Oh, and share and join Your Party!

A thoroughly exceptional weekend. Historic! A point in the social and political story of Britain that will be recorded, referred back to and celebrated by generations to come.
A gaping hole in the electoral firmament has been filled. There is, at last, a political party of and for the working class, that is committed solely to improving the lives of workers, challenging and ending the wealth and power of a ruling class that is sucking the lifeblood from our labours, destroying our health and welfare.
Your Party was founded on the 30th November 2025, voted into being by a process whereby all subscribers could participate, propose organisational structures and purposes, and vote online and in conference for the establishment of a mass democratic socialist organisation.
Socialism is alive, vilified by the Capitalist media owned by billionaires, and hated by the far-Right. Socialism is the drive for a fair and just society ensuring equality and welfare for all. In essence, a collective society where each person offers their skills and labour towards the common good, and every person has their individual needs met as a result.
Socialism is not characterised by the dictatorship of an elite. Quite the opposite, socialism requires the opening-up of participation and agency for all who contribute to the common wealth. The producers, creators, thinkers and carers, empowered by a society that values every contribution from every ability. Socialism values humanity and the natural environment we inhabit.
Capitalism has developed into very much the opposite. The extraction of value from we who have to sell our efforts in exchange for a wage or welfare, the fruits of our labours lining the pockets of the landlord class, the corporate executives and bankers. A vicious, exploitative and oppressive system of class rule.
Just 50 families in Britain own and control more than half our country’s wealth. They consider themselves untouchable, exuding privilege and entitlement largely due an accident of birth. The super-rich tightly transfer their money and power through generations of family ties, heavily protected by the laws they make for themselves.
We have had almost no chance of any social mobility for generations. Britain’s economy, five times as large as in the 1950’s, all built on working class effort, has seen all the wealth trickle-up and out of the country, hoarded in off-shore accounts and preventing investment at home.
A housing crisis, a health crisis (both physical and mental), one-in-three of our children living in poverty, 60% of our elderly undeservedly isolated and impoverished. All in the pursuit of profit and power for the very elite few.
This has to be turned over. The world is in a crisis caused by capitalism. The descent into barbarism is sensed by all: the billionaire-backed rise of fascist organisation across the West; the forever wars and genocide pursued by the profiteering arms manufacturers; the climate catastrophe the result of the record profits from fossil-fuel emissions creating extreme weather events that force hundreds of millions from the homelands.
We can fight back! And we are getting organised. The Old Order is dying. Both the Tories and Labour Party have lost their base, all-but indistinguishable in their policies and vying with Reform UK to scapegoat migrants and refugees to hide their own corruption.
Workers need a collective voice of our own. The millionaires Farage and Yaxley-Lennon offer only racist and misogynist hatred, continued privatisation of services and attacks on workers rights. Starmer and Badenoch seek only to further the interests of the wealthiest. The two-Party system that has dominated Britain for two centuries is at an end.
The gap on the Left has been filled. The rise of our new socialist party has been long and painful in formation and is now speeding forward in unity of purpose. Redistribute the wealth, challenge inequality, defend and protect minorities in a society based upon meeting our needs, not the profits for the rich! It’s your party!

Tax the Rich again and again!

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (25.11.25) – the eve of the Autumn Budget. Tax the Rich! Enough said. We protested at the budget eve lobby of Luke Pollard MP Armed Forces Minister in the afternoon at Frankfort Gate, demanding Wages not Weapons, Books not Bombs, Welfare not Warfare!
Tell Rachel Reeves to Tax the Rich properly (not my headline but good enough).
The unexpurgated version below, or expand to read the printed article.

Oh no! The Bosses are threatening to go on strike! They may even leave the country! What ever will we do? Why is it OK for the rich to hold us to ransom but not the poor when we down tools and strike because we can’t live on the official minimum wage?
It is one of those basic truths that the owners of big businesses don’t create wealth. Workers make the goods and products and provide the services. Bosses simply reap the profits because they own the businesses, usually on the inherited wealth from their ancestors who stole it in the first place.
The threat, made-up by the right-wing press, is that the rich are going to be taxed more in tomorrow’s Budget. In response the super-rich might leave the country. Oh no they won’t! They’re having too good a time in Britain, at our expense.
British billionaires make an additional £35million every day by doing nothing more gambling on the stock exchange! Their wealth has more than doubled since 2010 when together they were worth £250,000,000,000. Now they’re “worth” £620billion, half the entire annual tax-spend of £1.2trillion. The 5- richest families in Britain own more than 50% of the population – 34 million people.
Their super-wealth means price hikes for us, the tax cuts and accountant-managed tax-evasion for them costing the Exchequer and our social infrastructure at least £36billion. There’s the mythical spending-gap filled twice over! Tax the Rich, Make Them Pay!
For workers, the average cost of living has risen overall by more than 25% since the Pandemic. Our incomes haven’t. But Reeves is set to tax the elderly, 60% of whom have no real private wealth. Of course, some do, but working class pensioners don’t have huge incomes. Landlords do (some of them are pensioners), big shareholders do (some of then are pensioners), the directors of the private water companies and utilities do (some of them are pensioners). It’s all about class, not age!
Start with taxing the super-rich properly. The British based banks have been making a billion pounds surplus to costs every week of 2025. That’s one-thousand-million pounds every week, £143million private profit every day for the past 337 days (and back before that). That’s a 14% increase in profits made on the backs of the debt and overpriced interest payments of working class people, underpaid and overcharged across Britain.
Our bank accounts and insurance contracts are protection rackets continually making us offers we can’t refuse. Banking is business that we can’t do without because of the salary and mortgage systems. They have us over a barrel and should be nationalised as public services, not private corporations.
The rich shareholders are laughing all the way… You might think that a Labour Chancellor would not only raise the surcharges on the banks’ bulging vaults – Barclays, Lloyds and Nat West – to ensure they pay taxes commensurate with the rates we pay, but heavily cap their charges and profit margins to stop this level of corrupt exploitation. Yet the Banks’ total tax bill was less than 24% last year, lower than the average wage earners’ and piddly compared with Germany or Japan’s 32%. And they’ve wasted so much. £100billion on HS2 nowhere, £36billion on a test-and-trace that didn’t work. The rich pocketed our dough.
Tax the rich! But no. Labour, once up on a time branded as the “workers’ party”, is a friend of the financiers, the hedge-funders, the asset-strippers and the speculators.
The profits for the arms manufacturers and those trading in war are going up exponentially – all arms are funded by the tax payer. We pay Them! Stop funding war from our taxes! War is always paid for by the very poorest in society, from the tents of our homeless on our streets because of cuts to welfare expenditure to the deaths of millions of civilians across the world.
The rising tax-spend for arms funding to over £76bn, 40% of it for illegal nuclear weapons of mass-destruction, is a confidence trick. And the nuclear levy to build Sizewell C won’t produce cheap electricity or energy security. It’s another speculators scam, the price-hikes passed on to we the choiceless consumers. We desperately need honest Climate Jobs to address the very real Climate Emergency, not unproven high-profit techno-fixes. Stop paying the £10.5BN a year to fossil fuel companies making huge profits out of energy prices the highest in Europe!
And never mind stealth taxes, create a land tax now and sort out the incredible inequalities of the Council Tax. Overall, the richest 10% pay far far less tax than the middle 60%. With tax evasion and business subsidies, a cleaner may well be paying more as a proportion of their income than the owner of the office block they’re dusting, and more than the multi-millionaire directors of the businesses in the offices.
The free-Market “trickle down” economics does exactly the opposite – money flows upwards for the super-rich to hoard. It’s socialism in reverse – wealth from the many to the few. Tax the Rich! And stop the lies. The companies paying the minimum wage are subsidised by the tax-payer to do so – we pay to raise the pay of the poor through Universal Credit effectively allowing the Boss to pay less wages…and less tax! Raise the Minimum Wage to £15ph to cut the benefits bill!
The Rich always blame the working class for our suffering. We are expected to self-loathe: “pensioners are a burden”; “migrants are scoungers”; “the sick are scammers”. Don’t believe the mass media – all of which is owned by billionaires!
We want our taxes to be used as intended – to pay for our social infrastructure, not subside the Rich. Jobs for our one-million unemployed young people, food for our four million children in poverty, help and support for our eight million under-resourced elderly, cash for the privately-plundered NHS!
The simple fact is that the Boss Class are liars, scammers, scroungers and a burden on us all. We’d be far better off without them, in the hundreds of billions! Tax the Rich!

Labour feeds far-Right Racism

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My weekly Comment in the daily Plymouth Herald (18.11.25), seriously outraged by the latest racist policy drive of the UK so-called Labour government. Writing on Sunday for a Monday morning deadline, the article could not consider the later praise heaped-upon Home Secretary Shabana Mahmoud by the Tory Badenoch and Reform UK’s Farage. Most notably the fascist Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) claimed a victory over the government, won by street protest and flag-hanging he boasted. Of course, the open racists bay for more – the more you give the more they demand – arguing for the withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights. And of course, the few Labour backbenchers raising concerns are too few and too whimpy to have any effect on the coming Commons vote. Starmer emptied-out the Labour Party of the entire Left – there’s no-one to call-out Mahmoud’s reactionary anti-human bile.

The unexpurgated original below:

Britain is NOT being torn apart by illegal immigration. We are NOT divided by migrant workers or cultural differences. This country is NOT being overwhelmed by asylum seekers or Islamic Sharia Law. Labour’s Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is completely wrong.
There IS an attempt to tear Britain apart – not by young Black men but by racist and Islamaphobic hatred. People of colour are being threatened by violent white thugs on our streets, organised and whipped-up by Nazi-Seig-heiling fascist cadre. The Union Jack and Cross of St George flags have been weaponised as public emblems of white supremacy, flying lamppost-high, hoisted on the testosterone of male dominance spewing misogyny as well as racist threats throughout our communities.
It is the far-Right that must be challenged, not those escaping war, climate devastation and famine. The flaggers follow a fascist ideology, an import from the White-nationalists of the USA and the so-called-Saxon Aryan descendants of Nazis from greater-Germany and Scandinavia. Check out the AfD in Germany or the rebranded ultra-nationalists of Denmark and France. Patriotism my arse!
Britain IS at risk of being torn apart by false propaganda of the far-Right, much of it imported and funded by white supremacists in the United States of America and Europe, including the World’s wealthiest man, Elon Musk. Mahmood, Badenoch and Farage are shifting to echo the fascists Yaxley-Lennon and Tenconi in importing Trump’s violent deportation policies. Will we soon see plain clothes thugs deputised as Border Force state agents terrorising the streets and rounding-up non-whites in workplaces and communities, caging and deporting them without appeal?
People seeking refuge and asylum from are human beings with families. Yet Labour is looking to end Article Eight of the human Rights law – the right to family life – and Article three, the right to protection from violent or degrading treatment. Asylum seekers in permanent limbo, refugee families at risk of eviction, their children whisked away from schools, deported to a country they fled with no means to survive.
Labour is looking to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights. Just what the fascists have demanded! Idiots! Fewer than two-and-a-half thousand asylum seekers have used human rights legislation in their appeal to stay. It should not be an issue.
Withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights will mean the end of the rights to family life and protection from abuse. This will make us all more vulnerable, especially children experiencing abuse from relatives – 83% of which occurs inside white families here. The withdrawal will produce no material benefits, it will only strengthen the far-right.
Mahmoud’s announcement is an official call to white racists: “it’s official – refugees are not welcome here, regard people of colour with suspicion, as cheats and “illegals”, as people who should be hounded-out of their accommodation and communities.” She thinks she’s appealing to the mass of voters to support Labour, but in fact she’s only appeasing the racists.
The history of the twentieth century proves you can’t appease fascism. This month’s Poppy Day commemorated more than half-a-million Brits who died fighting fascism in the Second World War. They would be outraged to see the flags now adopted by the far-Right they died to protect us from!
People who have lived here for up-to twenty years will, under Labour plans, be liable to be sent back to the place they fled. The threat to kick out refugees having first offered them protection is unprincipled and immoral. Mahmoud is viciously perpetuating a living condition of vulnerability, statelessness, discrimination and “otherness”. People who “look like refugees – obviously Black people – will be branded as “do not belong”, creating a caste-system of racist hierarchy.
This Labour government should be held to full account on the basis of fact and human decency. Working class people in Britain are not mean and spiteful. Our culture is inclusive and diverse, and we must keep it that way or we will live under the yolk of far-Right militarised authoritarian control.
Labour’s Mahmoud is not producing a more harmonious and stable nation at all, she is whipping-up the divisions advocated by the far-Right!
In Plymouth the fascist-led “Flag Force” racists are planning a march through the City on 6th December, terrorising people-of-colour and spouting fascist threats against humanists and whoever they consider to be “lefties”. We are all at risk from them. Their racism and misogyny must be exposed, and they must be stopped. Stand Up To Racism!

Forest Loss is a Disaster for Humanity

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (12.11.25), continuing a series on climate issues and priorities. Faith in the UN Climate Conference COP30 is at a realistic and informed all-time low, not least that government pledges of funding to the Global South have been proved as empty promises over the past ten years. But for Starmer to withdraw from the smallest of pledges after the Tory Johnson being an initiator … of protecting rain forests, ffs … is of such political symbolism as to not go unnoticed or without comment. A government totally in hock to big agrobusiness including the Palm Oil lobby. What a wretched idiocy this entire Labour government truly is.
As for the Herald’s chosen headline, blimey mate, deliver me unto obscurity.
My preference would be:

Forest Loss is a Disaster for Humanity

Unexpurgated below:

A central feature of the Capitalist mindset is to view everything and everybody as a potential commodity with a monetary value. Possession confirms the ownership not only of the “thing” but its potential value. This can be applied to people in the capitalist market place – we are products and commodities, our labour-value and our CV’s to be bought and sold.
But not everything can have a price. Some things are priceless. Like forests.
The debate at this week’s COP30 – the United Nations annual delegate Climate Conference of all parties of interest – centres upon the “Tropical Forests Forever Fund”, so far supported financially by 55 countries including Germany. The British Prime Minister Starmer has refused to donate despite Britain having been key to setting up the Fund.
Absurdly, Starmer’s more scared of upsetting the far-Right climate deniers and his oil company friends than the threat of social disruption from weather extremes and climate chaos. The ultra-nationalists are demanding we don’t look beyond our national borders, whilst the climate doesn’t recognise nations, cultures or religions and is set to disrupt all life on Earth. We are all at risk from extreme weather caused by climate change and all need to act to minimalise the causes.
As the sixth largest economy in the world, the UK has money. All the nonsense about “broken Britain” obscures the political priorities for increasing spending tax money on armaments, military forces and subsidies to fossil fuel companies. Trees are clearly less important than tanks and fighter jets and the oil to fuel them.
Trees are also far less important than billionaires, obviously. The numbers of individuals hoarding more than one-thousand-million pounds each has tripled in 5 years to 3,000+ bloated fat cats, these fools amassing more than sixteen trillion (that’s million-million) dollars between them (the UK’s GDP is 2.5tn per year). They could, as Starmer points out, donate to the Fund without losing sleep. But they won’t.
Trees are less important than all “market imperatives”…or are they? The COP30 process is focused upon trees with good reason. They produce our oxygen! Owning ten million gold bars is of little value if you can’t breathe! Trees covering the size of eighteen football pitches were destroyed last year every minute, of every hour, of every day in 2024, doubling the amount lost in 2023.
Consequently, the release of the carbon dioxide they stored – 4.1billion tonnes last year through burning alone – has continued to warm the Planet and pollute the air we breathe. Agricultural clearance for short-term profits from land-speculation rather than food production, and wildfires more frequent as a result of hotter temperatures, are a great threat to our global security.
Trees firmly rooted in the ground are of far greater value than stripped landscapes. It takes a tree upwards of thirty years before positively sequestering greenhouse gases, so the loss of a forest today creates a thirty year gap in that natural maintenance of atmospheric balance. The current rate of replanting is well below the rate of destruction, but it’s that gap in functionality that is the biggest problem. There is no way to maintain the natural equilibrium. It’s tipped.
The loss of forest is a disaster for all humanity. And it’s the big corporations, headed by the big billionaires, who are driving the land speculation gambling on stock exchanges. They must be stopped and held to account, but at the same time we have to ensure our taxes help pay for forest protection right now. And since money doesn’t grow on trees we have to make trees a political priority for funding.
Why? The Amazon, where COP30 is taking place, is tipping from a carbon sink – the “Lungs of the World” to a carbon emitter. Likewise the great forests of New Zealand, Nicaragua, Sumatra,Alaska and Canada, Australia and the Andes, New Guinea and the Congo are all burning. The vast Siberian forests lost their status as a carbon sink years ago through fire and drought – the release of methane from the permafrost there 100 times more powerful a climate heating gas than carbon dioxide.
We have to stop cutting trees. And yes, replant, but the young saplings won’t be of help in time. We have to urgently cut down the rate of emissions from fossil fuel production ever faster if we want to survive. The UK Budget is all wrong.
With global heating emissions now one third higher than in the last one million years, and average global temperatures speeding past the 1.5C manageable limit, we are all in trouble whether we live in a rain forest or urban sprawl. The extremes are deepening fast – the hottest year on record, the hottest decade on record, the season creep, the mass extinction of plant and animal species…
The Climate Emergency is the single greatest threat to us all. Join us and protest on Saturday 15th November from 11am at Guildhall Square, and join our workshops all afternoon at Sherwell Church Hall, North Hill to discuss what we can do to save the Planet…and ourselves.

COP30 – Stop Climate Denial! Act Now!

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My weekly comment in the daily Plymouth Herald (4.11.25) continuing to expose the hypocrisy and corruption of tax-funding the capitalist climate chaos. The climate denial is orchestrated, massively funded and coordinated across the global capitalist ruling class. They may be raising war against each other, but they combine against any and all opposition to their acquisitive lust for accumulation of personal wealth. Little matters like climate collapse with billions of ordinary people displaced and dying cannot get in the way of this anti-human system of competition and destruction.

Stop Climate Denial – Act Now!

On Thursday 6th November, UK Prime Minister Starmer will attend the COP30 Climate Summit of world leaders in Brazil. It will be a fleeting visit. This last-minute decision is more a reaction to political competition than any commitment to reducing global heating emissions or preventing climate collapse.
The sudden almost doubling of Green Party membership following the election of Zack Polanski as “left-wing” leader could take more voters from Labour than Reform UK was able to. The majority of voters recognise climate change as a real and present danger, even if they don’t want tax rises to deal with it. Labour has to pretend to “Green” credentials even while maintaining core commitment to the future of the fossil-fuel economy and infrastructure – the industries that are destroying the Planet at speed.
From the Right, the flailing Tory Badenoch is competing with Farage to be the greatest “climate denier”, of use to Starmer in being able to argue we must not go too far or too fast.
Climate action is under attack with false claims that the cost of living crisis and job losses are caused by green policies and ‘net zero’. But the UK is facing increased heatwaves and drought, alongside more extreme floods threatening homes and farmers’ crops. The impacts of climate breakdown are already here, and are hitting hardest those who have actually done least to cause the crisis. Here in the UK, temperatures reached a previously impossible 40C record in 2022 with higher to come. Our workplaces and homes are poorly equipped to cope with these heatwaves, which cause not just stress and discomfort, but thousands of excess deaths.
But current government policy is hopelessly influenced by the corporate fossil-fuel lobby instead of concern for the safety or food security for the working class. The UK government currently provides at least £17.5 billion in fossil fuel subsidies and support per year – the highest level since 2016 despite the gross inefficiency in price, infrastructure and climate-heating emissions of the fossil-fuelled energy system compared with renewables.
Starmer’s policies will result in a slight increase in fossil fuel subsidies over this parliament compared with the previous Tory Government, totalling an estimated £87.5 billion over five years. Little wonder the world’s big banks have handed nearly $7tn (£5.6tn) in funding to the fossil fuel industry since the failed COP21 Paris Agreement of 2015 to limit carbon emissions. No major bank has yet committed to stop funding new oil and gas fields or coal capacity.
The fossil-fuel industry is too highly profitable compared with renewables for climate collapse to get in the way. The billionaire speculators gambling on the stock exchange are not going to let the government get in the way of a rise in the projected share prices of oil and gas in 2040. Yet extraction has to stop now if we are to survive.
The Labour government has pledged £22bn for projects to capture and store carbon emissions from energy, industry and hydrogen production, unproven technologies that cannot possibly contribute in time towards the scale required for reducing harmful carbon emissions. Indeed it is a Trojan horse for extending the life of planet-heating oil and gas production and an entire waste of tax money.
Reform UK has pledged to scrap all climate action just as the UK experienced its hottest summer in history with widespread drought across England. Reform UK’s Mayor of Greater Lincolnshire Dame Andrea Jenkyns says climate change does not exist, and has declared war on climate action, describing wind and solar as ‘eyesores’ whilst promoting fracking in the British countryside.
The world’s largest oil and gas companies made £437billion profit last year and are still asking for further tax subsidies for the North Sea drilling. Unite the Union identifies the average household to be paying more than £500 to energy companies profits, not services.
The UK-based oil companies pocket at least £20bn a year from the tax-payer, with an extra £2.7bn announced this year, far more than the entire cost of support for refugees and asylum seekers – but you won’t hear any complaints from the far-Right about such subsidies for the super-rich! Blame the super-poor!
As environmental tipping points are crossed and the crisis rapidly deepens, scaling up renewables, energy storage and efficient usage has to be the priority. Transformation to green energy policy is cheaper, cleaner and job-rich. Start by ending all tax reliefs for the trillion-dollar oil and gas corporations and collect the due taxes.
Continued support for the fossil fuel industry goes against the interests of working people in the UK and globally. We shall be protesting for climate action in Plymouth on Saturday 15th November, and debating all these issues at the Climate Summit in Sherwell Church Hall, North Hill, in the afternoon. Join us!