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!
My weekly Comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (8.9.26), calling for mobilisation against the far-Right racists and fascists. Plymouth now has two elected Councillors representing Restore Britain. They have to be challenged. And the thugs have called a march and rally in Plymouth Hoe on Saturday 19th September – they have to be stopped! Stand Up To Racism, while you still can.
My full article below or expand the picture to read the edited version in print.
We haven’t forgotten fascism. There are routine reminders in this newspaper of the blanket bombing of Plymouth and the heroism of the fight that defeated fascism in the Second World War. Yet now we have two councillors who proclaim themselves members of a fascist party they were not elected to, sat in Plymouth’s Council House. They mimic the racist policies of Hitler and his Nazis.
Restore Britain is a fascist party. The two councillors were not voted-in as fascists but have now declared their true colours, exposing the deceit. Restore Britain is an ethno-nationalist racist party and they know it! Their call for “remigration” – a euphemism for the expulsion of all non-white people – is a racist threat illegal at Law.
The black clad thugs blocking roads in Dover and Portsmouth last weekend are intent on banning the Islamic burqa and niqab whilst themselves wearing full head coverings and masks. The Islamophobia of Restore UK and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon aka “Tommy Robinson” and his associate Daniel Thoms – aka “Danny Tommo” – are front and centre, whipping-up lies about Muslim invasion and refugees as sexual abusers.
Refugees arriving in boats are a tiny fraction at 0.29% of the population compared with the 70 million people living in Britain, and impossible to be responsible for the low level of wages or the crisis in our Housing, NHS and Education. But the powerlessness of the refugee makes them an easy scapegoat. The fascists are the real threat.
Make no mistake. The “Tommies” are out for power and control. They use fear in their political propaganda and street violence to build support for extreme responses to made-up threats. These are not people who believe in “live and let live”. They are people with pretensions that they have the right, the privilege and the entitlement to tell others how they should live and who they should be. They believe it is they who should determine our beliefs, both political and faith, the relationships we are allowed and identities that must be proscribed.
The majority of us don’t want to be ruled by a militaristic fascist State machine. But times change, the global economic darkening towards deepening war, fuel disruption and price hikes, food shortages caused by climate change and a predictable global banking crash as the AI Bubble bursts are making us fearful, seeking safety. If there is a fascist party in place with its street boot boys terrorising all opposition, the People may acquiesce.
Under fascism the working class will receive nothing but pain. The far-Right financiers and paid-for politicians will censor all talk of opposition and omit to speak of the neighbourhood atrocities perpetrated by the politically empowered criminal street gangs. It’s happening already. And the Police, already institutionally riddled with right-wing culture, will facilitate the Black Shirts just as they did for Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in the 1930’s.
The Public Order Act 1936 was designed to stop extremists like Oswald Mosleys Union of Fascists “Blackshirts”. The Act makes it illegal in the UK to wear a uniform in a public place or meeting to show support for a political organisation. Why do police mass in force and the government use all their powers to arrest and incarcerate Just Stop Oil protesters demanding climate action while a paramilitary force terrorise our towns and go home unchecked?
Why won’t authorities or journalists call it out the fascists for what they are? Name it! Because they’re scared? Because they know the fascists use brutal, illegal force and intimidation against their enemies. The entire political class is looking to appease the far-right, not condemn them. This mistaken appeasement – the idea that fascism is a passing aberration – is precisely what allowed Hitler to gain power in the 1930’s.
The far-right extremist AfD has won a majority in East Germany. They are fascists. Their success is largely due to the failure of the Left to address the economic pain experienced by the working class. Fascism is the political management of capitalism through a dictatorial leader, centralised autocracy, exclusive party organisation enforcing ultranationalist militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived interest of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
Fascism uses democracy to demolish democracy. But this is not a repeat of the twentieth century. Fascism today is a far more class-centric movement organised to sure up the ideology of Capitalism and the power of the super-rich at the expense of everyone else in a period of global economic crisis. Fascism favours the well-off middle classes but offers the working class nothing. Once the Blackshirts have smashed dissent the new fascist rulers will quash them on behalf of the transnational corporations.
The billionaire, Elon Musk, himself ready to use Hitler’s Nazi fascist salute publicly, funds both Restore’s fascist leader Rupert Lowe and the fascist Tommy Robinson. Indeed, the tech billionaires from Peter Thiel to Curtis Yarvin are widely recognised as Techno-fascists, arguing for the end of democracy in favour of a technocratic rich elite running society worldwide.
The global crisis of capitalism is seeing fascism funded as the System’s saviour. Those conned by its promises of salvation will ultimately be disappointed. But it is vital that we rise-up to ensure the defeat of fascism before it can take hold. The Trades Union Congress in the South West supports the organisations of Stand Up To Racism and the Together Alliance against the far-Right to rid our streets and political chambers of the fascist menace. Join us.
The fascists from outside the city are invading Plymouth Hoe on September 19th – they must be stopped.
My weekly Comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (1st September 2026), trying to counter the wall-to-wall right-wing media coverage of the prisons crisis, each and all focussed on the threat from criminals when there is less threat now than for decades. Of course, a separate piece would place the issue within the wider crisis of the entire public sector, detailing the politics and impact of Austerity. But on punishment versus rehabilitation alone, the issue of humanity and welfare rips large. My unabridged article below, or click on the picture to expand to read the printed version. Please subscribe to my Blog (below)
There are some very very nasty people who should not be free in any decent society. That’s why we have prisons, largely due to the absence of any community resources that can adequately manage their behaviours.
The record numbers of prisoners represents a societal demand for punishment rather than rehabilitation, not an increase in crime. Right-wing governments have demanded longer sentences whilst cutting community provision to the bone. Politicians believe voters want vengeance not welfare.
As a consequence, according to the Prison Reform Trust, over the past two decades the prison population has grown dramatically. Sentences have become longer, and the use of custody has expanded. Yet It may be of some solace that the nearly 88,000 prisoners constitute just 0.13 of the population.
Domestic burglary and vehicle-related theft have fallen dramatically. Robbery has also fallen substantially. Most of us behave.
The victims of crime are rightfully pained and mostly traumatised, the threat of repeat a constant nightmare. Many simply demand that rehabilitation of the offender is offered to ensure common safety when back in the community. The right-wing media’s Hue & Cry over early release should demand closer scrutiny. The hang’em-and-flog’em brigade want jailor’s keys thrown away. Most of us do not.
Vengeance is rarely the demand. Firstly, the majority of manslaughter does not occur at the hands of psychopaths. Killings happen due to a wide range of immediate circumstances and are not predetermined, the families of the convicted suffering for their imprisoned loved-one almost as much as the bereaved.
The majority of those convicted represent little further risk, although the Dickensian conditions of our brutal prison environments may well dehumanise them into a mindset of survival that embitters them before release.
Secondly, violent crime in Britain has decreased by 80% since the mid-1990’s, the chances of being a victim of violence today are lower than anytime in our history. You may not know this because there is a current focus on vicious criminals roaming our streets being whipped-up in a politically directed media frenzy.
There are fewer than 500 homicides a year, 499 in 2025-6 – the lowest since 1973: murder, manslaughter and infanticide representing 1 murder in every 130,000 people or fewer than 2 across the entire population of Plymouth expected in a year. All manifestations of violence have declined, according to all crime surveys and recent research by Cambridge University. Knife crime is down, decreasing as shown by admissions to hospitals for stab wounds, a fall by a third since 2019 from 5,000 to 3,800.
And 60% of those in prison have committees sexual offences or crimes against the person, none due for “enhanced early release”. 4% are people who can be described as “political prisoners”, those who have protested against elements of the system, including people of conscience opposing climate devastation or genocide and received harsh sentences.
18,000 places are taken-up by those on remand, held for long periods due to the court backlog – doubled since 2018 and the highest number in 50 years. 10,000 of those are foreign nationals on-remand, easily identifiable and instantly imprisonable by the Police, with many of those found not guilty when finally brought to trial. The racial profiling in the “justice system” is well documented.
Looking through the prism of class society, the latest study in 2021 found that people from England’s 10 most deprived local-authority areas were imprisoned at about 307 per 100,000, compared with 30 per 100,000 in the 10 least deprived areas, a roughly 10-to-1 difference. Prisoners are disproportionately likely to have experienced unemployment, homelessness, debt, unstable housing and other forms of disadvantage.
Poor and deprived people are disproportionally over-represented in prison, while multi-millionaires are vastly under-represented. That the rich commit crime cannot be questioned. We don’t need to interrogate the Epstein Files or Baroness Bone to recognise the ruling class’s range of sexual offences and domestic abuse through to grand larceny, huge tax-evasion and fraud. They are facilitated to defend themselves. We are not.
There is one law for the rich and another for the poor. The ruling class promotes and creates the fear and judgement upon thugs and “illegals” in order to divide the working class one from another and prevent us challenging the gross inequalities.
After nearly 20 years of austerity economics, the super-rich doubling their personal wealth, it is not just the prison service that is in crisis. Community provision and welfare support has been slashed. Courts are in backlog and Probation Services on their knees following failed Privatisation that sucked public money into the profits of private contractors and demolished the services, requiring expensive renationalisation..
In London, the investment in community services including youth centres and provisions has reduced knife crime. The £50k a year cost of keeping someone in prison is better spent on preventive services in the community, and restorative services including support after release from prison.
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (25.08.2026), trying to evade the censors whilst raising the issue of the Ukraine War. So many on the Left, as well as everyone else, supports Ukraine against Russia. I, too, feel for the Ukrainian working class experiencing such barbarism and powerlessness. But I find any identification of the Ukrainian State being a beleaguered victim against Russian totalitarianism so devoid of historic understanding as to be without any foundation. In short, Western governments provided Ukraine with economic, political, and military assistance, especially after 2014 and heavily after 2022. NATO expanded eastward after the Cold War and pressed hard, with NATO expansion including countries such as Poland and the Baltic states seeking membership. It was intended place NATO bases with nuclear weapons on the borders with Russia, now about to happen. This is a provocation not unlike the lead-up to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 after Turkey accepted US nuclear-capable Jupiter missiles and Russia tried similar placements. We came close to nuclear Armageddon back then. Of course, Russia was a Communist State-Capitalist regime at the time and is now an authoritarian gangster-capitalist regime, both situations representing war between rival imperialisms. Socialists do not support Russia’s full scale invasion in 2022 but can explain it. Challenging NATO does not imply support for the Russian State. This unwinable war is engaging wider forces towards terrifying scenarios. My problem is, when I try to have this discussion let alone put the facts into print I am censored. Mainstream media censors not only any criticism of Ukraine’s role as proxy for NATO in this war, but also the more simple call for Peace, ceasefire or negotiations. I’m surprised this even got into print. Whatever your analysis, the UK Prime Minister has just ramped-up the anti and pulled Britain into the conflict. Idiot!
My unedited version below, or expand the picture of the newspaper article to read the acceptable version (carefully crafted):
The years ahead are largely uncharted. There is little if any certainty. This may evoke thoughts of disruption caused by climate change or the AI technology revolution. Or the global economic debt crisis, USA’s $4TN debt, record personal debt across the UK, or inflation rising so much faster than the officially distorted CPI figures. Public services deprioritised, privatised and crumbling. And the rise of a new and heavily financed far-Right, being fast-tracked internationally.
Any talk of the future evokes a wholly different emotion from 20 years ago.
One vision dominates above all others. War.
War is in every headline every day, the Prime Minister offering blueprints for Storm Shadow SCALP missiles to Ukraine, the Russian Ambassador being recalled from Britain, and Putin threatening UK cities due to the use of British-made drones on civilian targets inside Russia.
Images of today’s war highlights, should we choose to watch them, are of civilian blood and gore, massive fireballs, collapsed homes and smoking lands. The narrative is of military expansion, widening and worsening violence, displacement and immiserisation.
The politicians and administrators who seek to create our future a first priority – rearmament. And fast. It is almost impossible to enter a war overnight. You need more guns, and as Trump has learnt, to establish the arsenals to produce more missiles than you fire. Indeed, a complete infrastructure is required as a “war economy”.
War preparations are well under way: virement of taxes from every social need to fund military hardware; state propaganda shifting from community cohesion to emergency alerts of “enemies without” and “enemies within”. We are coached to believe that the Russian hoards are set to invade, despite Russia struggling to find the soldiers required for the current front lines.
At the moment, most people in Britain don’t want anything to do with war. But this can change very quickly. Between 1911 and 1914 Britain saw the Great Unrest workers suffering not much more than the cost-of-living crisis we are experiencing today. But workers took mass strike action, and had collective confidence and consequential power back then. War did a job for the government, nationalism and patriotism defeating all calls for decent pay, conditions and services. Amongst other things, the First World War sought to crush working class resistance to raw exploitation and authoritarian governance. In fact it led to revolution.
Can we expect a similar historic period? Workers in Britain are overwhelmingly dissatisfied, disenchanted with government and fearful for the future. There is an ideological battle in full swing for hearts and minds – the rebuilding of social welfare and workers rights versus a descent into the self-sacrifice of national (and racial) supremacy through bloody warfare.
Across Europe, plans are afoot for the return of conscription. The tech propaganda encouraging the future of war imagines battles between robots from each side. It’s a nonsense! Through the four-and-a-half years of the Ukraine War, more than a million deaths prove the lie. The Nations are seeking to provide enlarged armies of human soldiers ready to die.
Volunteers applying to fight have dried-up on both sides. Snatch squads on Ukrainian streets are grabbing civilians to go to the front. The desertions and draft avoidance, and the continuing conscription of ordinary Ukrainians as cannon fodder is causing social discord. Russia is equally desperate, recruiting African mercenaries on false promises and battalions from North Korea ahead of the inevitable Autumn offensive.
Such war fatigue should offer opportunities for a negotiated peace. Instead, Europe and the UK are preparing to join in.
Germany is debating conscription and stopping young men from leaving the country for more than three months, the number of young men applying to be conscientious objectors and refuse armed military service increasing rapidly.
Britain last operated conscription of civilians into a period in the armed forces back in 1960. Ten European countries still do with others now considering its reintroduction. Various British political parties are debating the potential here, the shocking number of one million young people unemployed being an excuse for the warmonger’s arguments. General Sir Patrick Sanders is calling for a “citizen army”, reservists now on call until 65 years of age.
Russia has threatened revenge against Britain this week after Ukraine used British-made drones to target Russian oil refineries and transport networks. Britain is directly engaged in endless war over Ukraine and it makes us all a target. The war in Europe is intensifying and expanding. Lithuania and Finland are preparing to accept NATO nuclear weapons following on from Belarus’s readiness to accept Russian nukes. The stage is being set for nuclear warfare.
Germany is rearming faster than Britain, and everywhere there are signs of wider military engagement against Russia. What might the conclusion look like? Mutually Assured Destruction? Why is no-one discussing de-escalation? Why is there no planning for an end to the war, indeed no plan at all, just demands for more tax money to produce more heavy weapons, sponsored by arms manufacturers such as the MBDA multinational corporations that owns the SCALP technology? They have the government’s ear. Why is there no democratic process to ensure that the collective voices of citizens are considered, measured and accepted?
The Third World War will be even more barbaric than the First or the Second. Only the urgent quest for Peace can possibly stop it. Oppose conscription. Oppose War!
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (18.08.26), kinda repeating myself. So much evidence of climate change, so little protection for the people. It is difficult to focus on any key link that can pull the movement forward and back into action, yesterday heat, tomorrow floods, January freeze…Britain, shielded by the “Gulf Stream”, has infrastructure only resilient to weather between +5C and +25C. We are woefully ill-equipped for anything outside that, including the extreme weight of rain modelled and expected this winter. Pressure has be brought to bear on government for massive investment in both adaptation and mitigation – but the opposite is happening: more oil and gas extraction. A declaration that the bulk of working people are expendable. Protest!
The unedited version below, or spread the pic for the published article.
The fires are still not out yet already we are looking forward to Autumn floods. When the rains come, the hardened and baked soil will reject the drenching, water left standing on the surface and fast-flowing downhill. There shall be floods.
Five heatwaves on, Summer not yet finished, the section of the international culture-wars concerned with Climate Change has projected a grotesque level of disinformation. Despite all the evidence – record temperatures rising year-on-year; dramatic sea temperatures rise off-the-charts; acceleration of glacial melt and antarctic ice collapse the size of whole nations; a reverse of the decline in fossil fuel emissions – the deniers persist in negating the climate emergency.
Tory Leader, Badenoch, pledges to repeal the 2008 Climate Change Act, which includes the target for net zero emissions by 2050, representing a U-turn from her party’s previous commitments to climate action. This is in response to Farage’s rants about “woke Britain” needing to embrace higher temperatures, pledging to scrap “net zero” to cut energy bills and replacing it with a focus on energy security and expanding oil and gas extraction, the precise opposite of what is needed.
The British Psychological Society has researched this media coverage, discovering one-third of the published heatwave images offered positive “fun in the sun” narratives. Our newspapers have overwhelmingly reflected the right-wing climate sceptics. Approximately 80% of UK media coverage of this Summer’s heatwaves has depicted people enjoying the weather, often overlooking the serious risks associated with extreme heat. It is a form of climate denial, a default propaganda downplaying the impact, the threats and the suffering. We must be “woke” to worry.
Pictures of burning houses have a commentary the omits to explore the lack of insurance coverage or government assistance. Film of exhausted fire fighters says nothing of the 30% cuts to this emergency service over the past 12 years which has left sparse protection despite heroic efforts. Coverage of wildfires barely mention not only the wildlife losses but the destruction of the local ecology. The loss of insect and plantlife would take 15-20 years to replace if, that is, there was a return to normal conditions. But there won’t be.
These images have a serious impact on how we understand and think about climate change. They’re shared and amplified by the conspiracy theorists and far-Right Climate deniers across all social media to glorify our descent towards catastrophe. And the broadcast “positive spin” is sponsored by the fossil fuel companies seeking to maintain their industry’s prestige and profits.
Such media-wide positive spin on this immediate and growing threat to life has had an impact. The question is asked, “where have all the climate protesters gone” at a time of the most obvious climate crisis? Draconian laws implemented against protesters from Just Stop Oil, Insulate Britain, and Extinction Rebellion has jailed or muzzled most of the most able activists. Corporate control of mass media has muffled the rest of us. And it has been too hot to run about!
Climate Change is no “Act of God”. The extra weather is a result of the accumulation of gases in the atmosphere that prevent the escape of excess heat from the planet. These gases are created by humans burning fossil fuels. Global heating emissions are rising again across the Earth’s North West, a direct result of the success of oil and gas corporations and their paid-for politicians to downplay and obfuscate the scale of destruction they are wreaking.
The crossing of the 1.5C global temperature increase means more heating is built-in. Geographic Europe is the fastest heating continent. Britains will increasingly suffer. The 3,000+ excess deaths from this summers heatwaves, reported by the Met Office, are a symbolic and very partial example of the disruption to come. This year’s harvest failures, food shortages and food price-hikes will be replicated and worsened next year.
We need emergency mitigation and adaptation in equal measure. For this to happen we need to shout out with all our might against the prevaricators, the distractors, the fossil fuel spinners and liars. This is a climate emergency, an existential crisis, the greatest threat to humanity across all our history according to the scientific consensus.
Amidst all this, the legal case for opening of the new Rosebank oil field and Jackdaw gas field in UK waters is still being pursued by the government. Whilst the public consultation closed yesterday, the corporate pressure continues. We must protest!
My weekly Comment column on the daily Plymouth Herald newspaper (11.8.26), beginning what should prove to be a series of arguments against the rise of Artificial Intelligence and its gas-guzzling infrastructure. My comments are edited at the paper each time, and you may spot the changes by use of the word “I”. I don’t write it in the first person for any publication, so this is a glaring correction signifying other changes. The process has been exaggerated since the legal challenge to an earlier column of mine, by Zionists. Ho hum, such are the times, but I can assure you I check my facts and research daily, not once a week!
It’s also never my headline.
The unedited version is below and at my Blog site, or expand the picture below to read the published version.
Stop AI Now!
What is the very worst thing we can do in a drought? Commit to more water use. It’s obvious really. Consequently, we are each told to preserve water, from fewer showers to hosepipe bans. Suddenly water is our individual responsibility.
That is a Great Lie. One of the many of this freshly dystopian era. We know that the water companies who have invested over the past half-century in their shareholder’s dividends rather than our water infrastructure leak a quarter to a third of all the treated drinking water through rusted pipes before it reaches our homes.
We know that industry uses 80% our potable water, only 20% coming through our taps for rehydration, washing and gardening.
Clearly it’s not all down to us.
Yet, in this Age of Climate Change, the industrial corporations supported by government are creating new demands on water supplies that eclipse anything we can manage in terms of water conservation.
The Data Centres being fast-tracked in the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) require quantities of clean, processed drinking water as the first priority for the privatised water companies who already cannot maintain domestic supplies.
It is not the private consumer who is profligate. We are not guilty parties.
By 2030 data centres across the world will require the same water-useage as 1.3billion people. Currently there are at least 2.1 billion people in the world living without access to safe water at home, with one in four people without safely managed drinking water.
This is not just an issue for people in the Global South, already reeling from fires and floods. Climate change is hitting the rich North West is suffering too. In the United States, the sudden investment in AI Data Centres, representing the deepening Cold War competition with China, is resulting in these new massive industrial facilities pulling millions of gallons of the precious public water reserves dependent on groundwater, springs, wells, and aquifers that recharge too slowly. The long-term effects on farms, livestock, creeks, tourism, fishing and conservation are already visible.
Parts of the US are not only in drought but in a crisis caused by the diversion of water from agriculture and homes to Data Centres. Entire electricity generating plants have been diverted away from domestic supply to provide the huge power required by these computing hubs, with decommissioned old nuclear power plants reopened. Fossil-fuelled electricity generators feeding these megawatt guzzling computers are exacerbating the climate crisis. Microsoft has released emissions data showing an increase of 25% in the past year alone, matching Google’s increase of 25% and Amazon 16%, breaking all climate pledges to mitigate the climate catastrophe.
The International Energy Agency estimates that a typical AI-focused data centre consumes as much as 100,000 households. Some of them that we’re seeing built are 20 times that amount. Ofgem has reported on 140 applications for proposed data centres requesting connection to the already creaking national grid, together requiring 50 gigawatts of energy- an energy demand that would double the amount of electricity that the UK currently needs to produce.
The lesson for the UK is that we should think very carefully before supporting AI Data Centres. Ofgem has reported on 140 applications for proposed data centres requesting connection to the already creaking national grid, together requiring 50 gigawatts of energy- an energy demand that would double the amount of electricity that the UK currently needs to produce.
Burnham’s government has just appointed a Minister for Artificial Intelligence. The job of Rt Hon Kanishka Narayan, MP, is to work with private AI companies, offering them billions of pounds in tax incentives to fast-track the “AI revolution” here in the UK. It’s likely to be money down the drain.
In North Devon, A data centre covering 850 acres including a Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) is set to be twice the size of the largest AI data centre so far approved in the UK. Whilst our farmers will lose their lands and food production, the most serious loss is water access, already precarious.
Data centres not only require fresh drinking water from public treatment centres, they then have to further purify the water to remove particulates, limescale and so on, that can clog the cooling systems of the hot computer chips and batteries. The water is not recycled but mostly lost through the process.
This loss to our public supplies is serious.
There are many, many reasons for opposing Artificial Intelligence, the so-called jobs revolution is another falsehood. AI represents the opposite of human progress. Automated to minimise human employment, the Great Lie of a beneficial revolution for human liberation is best recognised through its priority use for military weapons development, autonomous drones and missiles, AI-designed biological weapons, trojan hacks destroying public service infrastructure and corrupting government information. The so-called jobs revolution is another falsehood – AI offers the opposite, automated to minimise human employment.
There is a growing list of reasons to oppose and shut down Artificial Intelligence. It’s the last thing we need right now. We appear to have given up on human intelligence – all the evidence and information surrounding AI should offer any rationale brain an abundance of proof that we have to stop it, now.
My weekly published Comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (4.8.26), responding to the previous day’s outrageous press conference staged by Reform UK detailing the use of naval warships to prevent refugees crossing the English Channel “by all means possible”. They had the audacity to invoke the European Human Rights Charter in defence of their proposed military challenge to asylum seekers, all the while pledging to delete human rights laws the moment they gain office. RUK must be stopped! Prior to their announcement I had planned to publish commemoration of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and the peril we face with continued nuclear proliferation and threats. We have a stall on Saturday 8th challenging the nuclear weapons manufacturer, Babcock, in Plymouth City Centre (Armada Way Piazza, 11-2pm). But that has to wait – the immediate challenge to the far-Right has to remain paramount. Expose the threat of fascist rule.
The full text below, or expand the pic for the published version (much the same):
There can be no such thing as an illegal human being. Our individual actions may break a nation’s laws, and different countries have different laws, making The Law different from universal human conditions. But no-one can be called “an illegal”.
Those who choose to label others as illegals are dehumanising the person and devaluing life. It suits those who seek power and privilege and status in the pecking order of class society. Creating division through proffering privilege and entitlement does a job for class rule. Identifying a group as unworthy, undeserving or illegitimate has been an overused and ancient ploy of those seeking or wielding power.
So calling refugees “illegals” has a big job to do for the far-Right everywhere. Trump deploys his power through his ICE thugs kicking down doors to seize “illegals” from their beds or workplaces. The neo-Nazi AfD in Germany organise street gangs to burn migrants homes. The far-Right nationalists, Reassemblement National, rabble-rouses for xenophobia and antisemitism. Spanish fascist groups smash-up migrant meeting places.
In Britain, Reform UK and their fascist breakaway, Restore Britain, utilises all the lessons from the far-Right across the globe to build hatred and division here, targeting Black people seeking refuge by undertaking one of the ostensible perilous sea journeys across the English Channel.
On the surface, “Stop the Boats” is a very sensible suggestion. No-one should need to risk their life to reach safety. And no-one should profit from another person’s misfortune. But the boat campaign is a cover for ultra-nationalism, white-supremacy and racism.
The call of reform UK for a “Fortress Britain”, pledging to launch ‘the biggest military operation in the Channel since World War Two’ to end migrant crossings. They picture British warships capsizing small boats and dumping survivors back on “foreign” shores. Engaging the UK military against Africans and Asians is designed to evoke a mythical and fanatical patriotism from a British Empire that was always questioned and can never exist again.
In truth, they seek power for themselves by blaming and scapegoating the most powerless and stateless of human beings for all the ills of the society.
Be clear, an immigrant is someone who has crossed a border and can still go home in safety if they choose. A refugee is someone who has crossed a border because home is no longer safe at all. Asylum seekers are simply refugees waiting for that truth to be recognised on paper.
Confusing, misnaming or bad-mouthing these categories is a purposeful and deceitful lie with the intention of “othering” the “foreigner” and people-of-colour in its broadest racist incarnation. It is the tip of the ice-berg of propaganda aimed at putting a white-supremacist government into power to protect big business and the billionaire financiers of this bile.
The people on boats are homeless and stateless. Those seeking refuge come mainly from countries where UK-based corporations have sold arms for the wars over extraction of fossil fuels or rare metals, wars that have pulverised entire regions. And they escape regions rendered no longer habitable for human communities because of the climate catastrophe scorching and deluging their lands with floods and famine. Should we expect them simply to die, presumably because we view them as lesser humans, inferior to us?
Let them in! Refugees are Welcome Here!
Britain can afford to help. Our NHS is not in crisis because of migrants – it depends upon them. Our housing is not in crisis because of migrants – rents and mortgages are too high and property speculators only invest in high short-term returns. Our water is not overpriced and rivers wholly polluted because of migration – it’s the avarice of private shareholders! Our low wages are not caused by immigration – Capitalist, large and small, always seek to pay the least to gain the most private income from their business.
Racism is whipped-up intentionally to divide the working class one from the other and prevent collective opposition to the profiteering, landlordism and exploitation of the ruling class. We should not be fooled. Trade unions will openly expose and challenge racist and fascist organisations targeting Plymouth.
I started this blog in 2019 with a first short entry entitled “Why Am I Emotional?” I’m more emotional now. Huge swathes of Europe on fire, as predicted, and floods elsewhere. I was engaged with campaigns for climate action in the 1990’s advised by Jonathan Neale, convinced of the emergency by South American climate scientists offering mentorship at the World Social Forum, and educated by experts through the Campaign against Climate Change, helping with the Climate Jobs manifesto and mass engagement through the trade union movement. The level of climate denial, sponsored and funded by the billionaire oil and gas corporations, has effectively dwarfed all our efforts. Perhaps now, as the world burns – as predicted by Greta Thunberg back in 2019 – the penny has dropped and the climate emergency can be acted upon. But it doesn’t look that way.
Here’s my first blog entry, fyi:
6th September 2019
Global Heating, the recently revised term for what is happening to the Earth’s climate, is accelerating at an unpredicted rate. Not only had the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) failed to include acceleration in it’s 2018 forecast of a 1.5degree rise in global temperatures, but the best scientific modelling has proved to be decades out in its predictions of fires and floods.
This week alone we have seen three super-hurricanes form and develop at the same time, historically unheard of. Dorian caused storm surges, floods, widespread death and devastation across the Bahamas. At the very same time, uncontrollable fires blaze across all corners of the globe, not just the Amazon but the Arctic, Africa and Australia.
Anyone watching must experience at least a passing surge of anxiety. Anyone directly involved will be experiencing trauma, with lasting effects. There is no peace from the recurring memory of a firefighter friend dying fighting a fire, a neighbour drowned in a building collapsing under water, a relative trapped in their car.
Now consider what it is for a child or young person perceiving these events. With the rest of their lives spanning a length difficult to perceive when young, the image of global heating excites a fear and despondency equitable to the feelings of youth in the late nineteen thirties or during the broadcasts at the time of the Bay of Pigs.
We face a catastrophe. Many in the know suggest we face extinction. School students have taken strike action and will, once again, in 26 countries and over 1,000 cities worldwide on 20th September. This time the school refuser and environmental activist, Greta Thunberg, has called on adults for support. We can’t leave the future to the kids.
We can stop the coming Climate Catastrophe, but, as detailed by Extinction Rebellion rather than the IPCC, we have to go to a global war footing and diminish all use of carbon-based fuels towards zero emissions by 2025. This requires such a radical transformation of production and consumption that only mass mobilisations of millions of humans worldwide can ensure politicians and corporate bosses are forced to comply.
The question of the hour shouts out; have the People the emotional resilience to take part and sustain system change? Will the repeated images of horror caused by human-made “Acts of Nature” become too awful to watch or too numerous to evoke any emotional response? Like civilians in a war zone, will we be rendered powerless? Like soldiers on a battlefield, will we become dehumanised and heartless?
There is a great need to speak the Truth about climate change. An essential ideological battle to be won, here and now, against The Deniers. But in so doing, the individual trauma faced by each of us as we perceive the coming catastrophe has to be openly acknowledged and managed.
We have to talk about global heating. We must feel we can do something, such as offering solidarity to the flooded of the Abaco Islands and those driven by flames in New South Wales. We must link arms to challenge the unnatural anti-human, anti-environment, anti-science nonsense of Trump and Bolsonaro.
We must challenge the Great Denial in all its forms. And to do all this we must acknowledge the emotional impact of our times, manage our inner pain, and offer solace and support to each other in this unprecedented tense and anxious emotional climate.
My Comment column this week, printed in the daily Plymouth Herald, challenging the deceit that there is no money for Welfare. At an ailing 72 years of age I declare a personal interest – we need more money for Adult Social Care. And the money’s there! I hope you agree.
Do we care so little for ourselves? The majority of us will suffer with a chronic condition by the age of sixty-two. One in seven of us will require others to care for us full-time through our final years of life in full-on residential nursing care. Many more will need three-times a day home care with washes and toileting. It could be you!
Yet, in a State budget of £1,220 billion in 2024/25, Adult Social Care – looking after those who have difficulty looking after themselves – has an overall spend of just £35 billion, itself part of the “social protection” budget which includes housing benefit to a total of £130bn. Paltry compared with Health (£165bn), the state pension (£124bn) and debt interest (£105bn).
Prime Minister Burnham has staked his “political capital” (whatever that may be) on sorting out social care. Clearly, this can’t be done without spending more money. The narrative has already been skewed in the direction of us all having to pay more even while Britain is the 6th wealthiest of 195 countries and Britain’s richest having increased their private wealth by 65% since 2019.
That the money for social care could be found if politicians desired, is proven by the simple fact that governments can find the money whenever they need it. Take COVID, £35bn (yes, the same amount as the total for social care) spent on Lockdown inside 20 months, including the missing £10bn lost in contracts to “preferred suppliers” (political mates) in contracts for protective items never supplied.
And never mind financial rules, outside of political party pledges and manifesto commitments, this year alone, some £25bn is being added to the arms and military budget in a single fell swoop, £14bn of which is to be spent on illegal weapons of mass destruction – nuclear warheads.
We can find the money for social care easily if we want. The money for adult social care is paltry at the moment, the tiny sum excused by government pleas of poverty and indebtedness. How about changing the debt repayments, the bankers and financiers could live well on half the interest rates currently paid – a government action first applied at a time of war or social crisis. We are in a social crisis.
And a rent cap, and mortgage interest cap, preventing excessive profiteering by landlords and banks from our essential requirement of a roof over our head, would cut Housing Benefit costs significantly, the money transferred to social care. The government could replace the sacked tax inspectors to ensure the more than £60bn per year in current taxes left unpaid by evasion and fraudsters is collected. They could nearly triple the adult social care budget overnight!
A Wealth Tax, by whichever permutation you would wish to enact it, would rebalance to a limited extent the gross inequality found in Britain today. The top fifth of UK households own 63% of the country’s wealth, while the bottom fifth, including two-thirds of those needing social care support, holding together only 0.5%. The richest 10% of UK citizens possess nearly half of all the nation’s wealth.
Britain’s social care system has been broken by the neoliberal free-market brutal system of raw capitalism. Privatisation. More than 85% of adult social care operates inside the private for-profit sector of the economy, relying on an an abused migrant workforce paid minimum wages. Social care workers are the most exploited and oppressed of all our 6.2 million public service workers who together have not had a real-wage increase in the past decade despite rampant inflation caused by excess profits. Cap profits, pay the workers!
In fact, Capitalism depends upon the Family to sustain a society based upon class exploitation and private wealth. The National Care Association identifies that more than 4 million of us operate as the primary carer for adult relatives, unpaid and ill-considered, representing at least two lives plunged into poverty for every one of us in need.
Don’t accept the lies and deceit of arguments for us to pay more if we are to enjoy a comfortable old age. We already pay enough, our taxes simply falling into the wrong hands through the wrong priorities. Engage with the current “national conversation” to demand prioritising social care over private profit!
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (21.7.26), only to find someone else had already thought of my strapline! Original ideas are only original to the thinker. It’s all been said before. And I must admit, now living through the second Labour Chancellor called Denis Healey, another Big Cuts cavalier, the deja vu of life is finally overwhelming me. Plus ca Change? Revolution, please. Please.
The unedited version below, or expand the pic for the printed version:
Burnham by name, Burn’em by intent:
This is not scaremongering! It is Science. Fact. “What we used to think of as extreme, we increasingly consider as normal.” That is the summarising comment from Mike Kendon, the UK Met Office lead author of the latest edition of the State of the UK Climate report. It has political undertones far wider than the weather.. The climate is not the same as the weather. Weather refers to the short-term conditions of the atmosphere, while climate describes the average weather conditions over a long period of time. The rapid and accelerating rise in average global temperatures is happening because heat is being trapped in the atmosphere and cannot escape. The sea sucks in 90% of the heat, expanding and evaporating ever faster, the increased moisture amplifying extreme heat and storms, winds and floods. It is the agglomeration of gases we have been emitting by burning fossil fuels that has caused the climate change. Scientifically speaking – that is, as a matter of fact – to stop an accelerating and intensifying process towards ever greater extremes we have to stop emitting the gases that are the sole cause. So, when the latest Prime Minister opens his term of office by announcing the extraction of more fossil fuels, oil and gas, from the Rosebank and Jackdaw North Sea stores, it can only be deduced that he, like all the others, defies science and flails in the face of Fact. Burnham becomes a double entendre, both literal and ironic. Burnham by name, burn’em by intent. Let the country, nay, the World, fry. Yet another politician caving-in to the immense power of the fossil fuel lobbyists and oil corporations from Day One. The current status quo of Capitalism is safe in his hands. Nothing to worry about, fossil-fuel shareholders! This is the extreme of idiocy. For survival, the entire energy infrastructure of the United Kingdom has to be transformed, right now, away from fossil fuel dependence. At a political level of imperative equal to the national engagement in a world war, all possible resource has to be diverted into cutting emissions and investing in localised energy production based upon renewable electricity generation. Our transmission grid and storage capacity has to be replaced, our energy use reduced. Reindustrialisation should not continue Starmer’s rearmament, new tax-billions for the military-industrial complex should be diverted immediately to the millions of new engineering and technology jobs required for energy transformation. War is the greatest emitter of climate changing pollution, sucking life and livelihoods away from any sustainable future. Nationalisation should end the £13bn a year tax support for the oil and gas companies here. They don’t need it and shouldn’t have it! The corporations making tens of thousands of millions of pounds in annual profits should repay, the money used instead to refurbish our homes ready to protect us from the extremes of heat and rain and damp. More than one million new jobs are urgently required to insulate at least 14 million of our existing homes and install solar panels on every roof, domestic thermal water heating and communal heat pumps. The end of neoliberal economics should mean wealth and land taxes to redistribute resources to protect the working class from the climate extremes. The endless cuts to our emergency services have to be reversed. The thousands of lost jobs cut in the Fire Service reinstated and more, to manage the wildfires threatening rural and urban populations, and the flash floods causing homelessness and impoverishment. Homeland security should prioiritise making us safe. Hospitals need restaffing now to organise for the hundreds of thousands of excess deaths from the extreme weather. Security forces refocussed to provide rescue and refuge for the huge numbers of us now affected. Employment rights and employer liabilities must be strengthened and enforced by powerful inspection regimes to ensure climate-proof workplaces and working conditions. We should not be forced to suffer for the climate-destroying greed and short-termism of the Capitalist class. Climate Chaos is here. The first UK climate refugees are those in North Wales losing property and livelihoods to wind-whipped wildfires. This Autumn the flash floods will produce new homeless from the swamped basement flats in Plymouth. Somerset will be awash again. More than 1 in 5 UK homes are built on flood plains, all now threatened by extreme storms and sea level rise. This is the climate emergency, declared a decade and 7 prime-ministers ago. For all the rhetoric, the true scale of the threat to the working class from climate change has not been addressed. With Burnham’s support for the new Cambo oil-and-gas field it would appear we have a leader even worse than Starmer. What a Con! We will be protesting tomorrow at Downing Street to demand no new extraction and massive cuts to global heating emissions. Stop Rosebank! Invest in Climate Action Now!
My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (14.7.26), considering the recent statement of Prime Minister Burnham apologising for Starmer’s support for genocide in Gaza. Written the same day as the Church of England Synod debates and supports a report critical of Israel and accepting the existence of Palestine and the need to actively defend Palestinian Christians. The conclusion has to be – Protest Works! The constant protest, indefatigable and massive demonstrations in London and campaigning across the UK, indeed the world, has isolated and exposed the Israeli State and Zionism to a point where it is now dangerous for politicians not to oppose Israel. But Israel and the Zionist cause has a job to do for the global system of Capitalism: the maintenance of nationalism, racism (especially Islamophobia) and the logic of imperialist competition. The mass protests must be sustained and increased, especially the direct challenges to the military-industrial corporations linked to Israel. So, to London 18th July and Elbit on the 23rd – 11am, 38 Bolingbroke Way, Bristol, BS34 6FE.
The edited version below or expand the pic for the printed edit (at least something got printed!)
They say the Lord’s Prayer in Westminster. The two Houses swear to the Christian God, and to the King, whose official title is the “Supreme Governor” of the Protestant Church of England. But we do not consider opposition to Government policies and practices as opposition to Christianity.
Britain is a secular, multi-cultural country, with less than 5% of the Nation’s 68 million citizens actively attending Christian church once a month or more. One in four British Muslims worship weekly in a Mosque, and one-in-three Jews attend a synagogue weekly. Majorities everywhere do not devote their lives to religion, and in Britain the majority are practical agnostics.
It stands to reason that being critical of “the State”; challenging Government policies and practices, isn’t the same as challenging a religion. If we condemn the Government’s stance against asylum seekers we are not condemning Christianity, indeed we may well be invoking Christian principles. If we protest against British Imperialism and Colonialism – the exploitation and colonialism subjugating peoples and nations – we are not implicating the Christian Church, necessarily.
Yet now, there is an attempt to declare that any criticism of the Israeli State is an attack on the religion of Judaism and an offence against all Jews worldwide. The Israeli State is presented as a special case, exempt from usual political rules. It is proposed that all Jews are Israelis, not British or American or Russian or Chilean Jews. Every Jew alive today is supposed to ascribe to the policies of the Israeli State. They do not!
So criticising the Israeli State is declared to be antisemitic – religious and political hatred of Jews. There is an attempt to criminalise any damning the destruction of the civilisation of Palestine and calling the extermination of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Gaza genocide, alongside the illegal mass ethnic cleansing there and across the West Bank.
The creed of the Israeli State, the non-secular Apartheid politics of a country formed for a “single Race” called the Jews, to develop separately from the rest of humanity in their own interests, is documented as “Zionism”. Zionism is a political creed not a religion even if it refers to Judaism in the same way our State refers to Christianity. There are Christian Zionists, Hindu Zionists, Buddhist Zionists.
Zionism is a political ethno-nationalist far-Right philosophy steeped in the demand for each ethnic-religious group within humanity to have its own separate “homeland”. The State of Israel represents the military-industrial and cultural centre for this racist creed. This “separate development” explains why some fascist groups in Britain are supporting Israel’s military expansionism alongside their bigoted hatred of Muslims.
Today, Nurses and Doctors and Porters working in the National Health Service in England and Wales have now been told they face the sack if they declare or show any symbols of opposition to Zionism or to the Israeli State, as if they are acting from prejudice and racial hatred. In fact, they are expressing humanist principles for the valuing and protection of all life, echoing their Hippocratic Oath. Yet now, Palestine flags, attendance at protests and even portrayals of watermelons are banned, despite trade union policies in support of Palestine.
Little wonder that the British Medical Association has voted to reject The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of anti-semitism (2016). The IHRA has been re-interpreted by police forces, the Crown Prosecution Service, the NHS, and local authorities across Britain to proscribe criticism of the actions and policies of the Israeli State or Zionism. This, despite the British State formally recognising the right of a Palestinian State to exist!
Such hypocrisy and injustice must not stand!
The overwhelming majority of governments across the world have condemned Israel’s atrocities. Spain has closed it’s embassy in Tel Aviv, the Israeli government calling the Spanish government “highly antisemitic”. Andy Burnham has declared that Starmer’s full support for Israel’s actions was wrong. He could put words to action by removing all charges against the 3,000 protesters labelled as terrorists. He could, as first act as Prime Minister, end the licences that allow the armed-drones manufactured here by the Israeli firm Elbit to be exported to Israel and used to kill civilians.
The Norwegian Football Association has donated all its income from the World Cup to Doctors Without Borders operating in Gaza, as a show of support for Palestine, The Egyptian team and fans flying the Palestinian flag. Yet these campaign statements are banned from our mainstream media. A brutal UK crackdown on our right to protest is happening right now, those standing in solidarity with Palestine bearing the brunt. We are being criminalised for daring to oppose the corrupt international war criminal, Netanyahu and his Zionist State. Throughout history, the greatest change has come from those brave enough to take to the streets. If we lose the freedom to speak out today, we lose the power to fight for anything tomorrow.
Let’s stand together to oppose Zionism and the perpetrators of genocide! Let’s defend our right to protest for Palestine, its land, its peoples and their rights. Saturday, 18th July, London and everywhere!
I have been challenged in formal complaints to the Plymouth Herald, now under legal review. The legal challenges are provided in italics. For the purpose of clarity, I offer reference points below:
a) Staunton writes that the IHRA working definition of antisemitism “has been interpreted by the NHS, police forces, the Crown Prosecution Service and local authorities across Britain to proscribe criticism of the actions and policies of the Israeli State or of Zionists.” The IHRA document itself contradicts this. Its accompanying illustrative examples state, in terms: “criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.” … the Herald has printed as fact a claim about British public institutions that is contradicted by the plain text of the document he is describing.
The issue of interpretation of the IHRA is not contested here – the complainant recognises there are conflicting interpretations, as do I in the piece. Indeed that’s the whole point. I posit that the IHRA is being used to define any criticism of the Israeli State as antisemitic. In practice, as seen by Police arrests of Palestine protesters, condemnation of the genocide has been used as “hate speech” and antisemitism. Interpretation is key here, anti-genocide protesters arrested under anti-terrorist legislation, UK citizens actively engaged in the genocide supported and free from challenge: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/london-police-refuse-investigate-british-nationals-accused-war-crimes-gaza Criticism of Israel is conferred by any support for Palestine and, indeed, opinion that the IDF assault inside Gaza is genocide. The UN has identified genocide since September 2025 (https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-committed-genocide-gaza-strip-un-commission-finds
b) Staunton describes the Israeli state as built on “separate development”, for a supposed “single Race”. Both in quotation marks. Neither attributed.
The State of Israel is indeed, a racially hierarchical State: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, informally known as the Nation-State Bill or the Nationality Bill, is an Israeli Basic Law that specifies the country’s significance to the Jewish people. It was passed by the Knesset—with 62 in favour, 55 against, and two abstentions—on 19 July 2018 and is largely symbolic and declarative in nature. “Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people”: https://www.knesset.gov.il/constitution/ConstP22_eng.htm
c) Staunton writes that nurses, doctors and porters in the NHS in England and Wales “have now been told they face the sack if they declare or show any symbols of opposition to Zionism or to the Israeli State.”
In particular, the British Medical Association with direct links to the Trades Union Congress has asked this month (its the reason I wrote the piece) for a pause in the implementation of the IHRA because of “the risk it poses to staff by the implication that criticism of Israel’s genocide is an act of antisemitism”: https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/nhs-palestine/ My comment warns of the “…attempt to criminalise any opposition…the illegal Israeli settlements and mass ethnic cleansing.” That is how I read the BMA challenge, and as a trade unionist, interpret the current employment challenges:
d) He writes that Christian nationalists, naming the US Vice President and “Tommy Robinson”, are supporting Israel “to further their bigoted hatred of Muslims”…an unsourced assertion about private motive, stated as fact rather than opinion, and it is of a piece with the rest.
Tommy Robinson keeps on saying it, eg: https://news.sky.com/story/tommy-robinson-set-to-debate-suspicion-of-islam-at-oxford-union-despite-outcry-13553595 A UK High Court case record (2019) describes Tommy Robinson as an “anti-Islam activist” and notes he referred to people in a case using inflammatory anti-Muslim language (e.g., calling defendants “Muslim child rapists”), which was part of why he received a custodial sentence. European Union A UK Parliament written-evidence document also describes associations between him (aka “Tommy Robinson”) and Islamophobia, saying it is “well-documented.” UK Parliament 4.13
Perhaps I should have written more clearly, with sources taking-up much of the space. I try to link issues in my writing, which necessarily makes the word-count technically challenging. The complainant writes correctly the exact wording of the IHRA but that is not how it is being enacted. The IHRA guidance states antisemitism includes: “Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.” I clearly do not.
Referring to the shut down of shows of support for Palestine by staff across the public sector, I specifically wrote, “…now there is an attempt (my emphasis) to declare that any criticism of the Israeli State is an attack on the religion of Judaism and an offence against all Jews worldwide. Every Jew alive today is said to subscribe to the policies of the Israeli State. They do not!” Indeed, “many British Jewish people do not associate Zionism simply with support for the existence of Israel. Research published in 2015 by City University found that 90% of British Jewish people support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state and 93% say that is forms some part of their identity as Jews, but only 59% consider themselves to be Zionists” Para 28: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmhaff/136/13605.htm
There is an enormous level of argument and controversy inside the British State about the laws and draconian impositions against the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and, specifically, the designation of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. More than 3,000 protesters have been arrested under terrorism legislation – why no outcry? (E.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp38z9lylddo )The Trades Union Congress specifically questions the designation as part of a questionable State assault on the right to protest (eg https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/09/10/trade-unions-demand-starmer-repeal-palestine-action-ban/), the issue I conclude with in the article: “This brutal crackdown on our right to protest against genocide must stop. We are being criminalised for daring to oppose the corrupt international war criminal, Netanyahu and his Zionist State.” I stand by that.
My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (7.7.26), intentionally poking a sideways jab at Nigel Farage, his £5million bung from a billionaire, alongside many other dubious “donations” much in the news right now. I was encouraged by a Vox pop 10 second interview with a working class woman on BBC radio, saying “if someone gave me £5 million I’d take it…”, as f anyone was ever going to! Farage says “nothing to see here”, and indeed, his is the tip of iceberg of corruption for which he’s neither the first nor the worst. But he’s a far-right racist bigot, and his corruption should be made an example of, even if he and his followers think there’s “nothing to see here!”. Unbridled vicious Capitalism, very visible indeed.
The unexpurgated version here or read the printed version by expanding the pic below:
One million pounds is a lot of money. £5million is a lot more. Based on current UK tax and National Insurance rules, a worker employed full-time from age 18 to 67 (a 49-year career) will finish with lifetime earnings of just over £1m if they earn the National Minimum Wage, or £1.5m if they earn the average UK median full-time salary. £1million is a working class lifetime.
The median UK household disposable income (after taxes and benefits) is approximately £37,000. Roughly 30% of UK households share an income below the minimum acceptable standard, well below the national median. Those households never see £1m in their entire lifetime.
And for those of us who earn a million or two in our lives, the fact is it mostly goes out again – we have to spend it all to survive. The lucky minority, investing in property, may accumulate a package by retirement age, much of which will be spent on our own health and social care in our final years, and what’s left may help the next generation. Working class wealth largely depends upon inheritance – it’s far harder to become wealthy and shift up a class by your own efforts.
If you’re born into wealth, it’s a doozy! An investment of £1m in the UK will earn a return interest of between £30,000 and 75,000 per year, cash, about the same or more than the average income from working. One million pounds is a lot of money. Imagine the investment income of a billionaire (a billion is a thousand millions) or a trillionaire (a million million)!
The above is an explanation of why socialists call the working class “wage slaves”. The employer-class pay us to make money for them, only for us to have to pay them back to be fed (badly), watered (hmm, water companies) and housed (poorly, overall), with little or no personal agency except for a week’s holiday if we scrimp and save. And for this we have to do as we’re told, watch what we say, and serve “The Man”.
Yet, as President Trump eulogised last week at his, albeit spartan celebration of the founding of the Great USA, the American, nee Capitalist, Dream is a back. The myth that we can all be millionaires is being sold to us again. We should aspire to millionaires, value and adore millionaires.
It’s here in the UK, too. we are expected to believe that millionaires are best placed to lead us and make decisions for us. Most strangely, the far-Right MPs who receive millions of pounds in “donations” are targeting the poorest in the country for votes and extra-parliamentary support. There is a tradition here dating back to the first working class suffrage of 1867 – the wealthy bought the votes of ordinary men with bribes or jobs or gin.
In return, MPs were bought by big businessmen seeking legal privileges and a competitive edge. Today, the proportion of multi-millionaire MPs in the House of Commons is over 50%, hidden but assessable, much higher than the population where fewer than 5% are millionaires.
When we read of a single politician, self-publicised as being “anti-Establishment”, receiving £5m from a billionaire and “millions” more from a billionaire convicted felon, his claims of being “a man of the people” must fall far short. Those who support what Trump stands for may argue that we need rich businessmen to run society because they know best how to manage “The System”
This is probably true. But why should we support this “System” that enslaves us? Britain is seen abroad as having one of the most corrupt Establishments in the world. The City of London is joked about as the western world’s laundry, cleaning wealth gained illegally – drugs, people trafficking, prostitution and illegal arms sales. As a direct consequence, the spending power of the working class in England has fallen by 20% since 2008 – when the wholesale corruption of the millionaire bankers and financiers cost us all very dearly.
MPs routinely receiving bungs weds them to corruption as the condition of the status quo. We should expose and depose every single one of them.
My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (30.06.26), having to address the mythology and lies of the government’s Defence Implementation Plan published the same day. It’s a huge document offered and fast military rearmament and the effective militarisation of society. I focus on the government lie in suggesting a doubling of military spending can relate the economy. Whilst not wanting to rely on outdated (to the point of equally mythological) Keynesianism, the very fact, across all sectors, finance investment in any sector other than armaments and soldiery creates and sustains more jobs, is a single point that demolishes the entire document. There is, of course, far more to say, such as the capitalist crisis driving war. But I’m simply answering the government foil of a headline. War doesn’t produce growth!
The unedited version below, or stretch the pic of the published article to read:
Here comes yet another dip in our welfare funding. Who said Austerity was over?
The DIP – the Defence Investment Plan, published this week – has been delayed by in-fighting between competing UK government departments and the heads of the armed forces. Tensions represent the politics of speedy rearmament versus social refurbishment.
The Generals, Admirals and Corporate Executives of the western military-industrial complex have besieged UK governments with demands to quadruple, or more, arms spending as a proportion of the wealth Britain produces each year. Strict fiscal controls mean that money has to be found by cutting government spending elsewhere. Cutting our Welfare.
The argument, aside from warmonger’s thrust for ever more war, is that rearmament produces jobs and reflates the economy. This so-called “defence Dividend” is a complete myth. Cutting investments in civilian employment in order to fund a larger military budget harms growth. And in this climate crisis, the absence of funding for fast adaptation collapses our nations security.
Military procurement creates fewer jobs than the equivalent funding for transport, health, education, social care and even libraries and museums (congrats to The Box btw!). Spending £1million on military procurement, by government’s own figures, creates 9.4 jobs. The same £1m produces 12 jobs on the railways, 13 in healthcare, 15 in education, 20 in social care and 25 when invested in cultural activities! The jobs required to adapt to new climate and extreme weather dwarf these figures, if the investment should ever be agreed.
Military spending is capital intensive, with a shrinking workforce. Jobs in the military industry have plummeted since the 1980’s despite comparatively higher spending in real terms. Much of the tax cash investment goes to overseas firms and profits for the private arms companies. The billions do not trickle down into the general economy.
There is no defence dividend! Today’s DIP will mean another £15 billion for deadly weapons of war, paid for by cuts to critical public services and investment in action to halt climate breakdown. The new Prime Minister Burnham looks set to increase military spending even higher.
Why? In part it’s the political ideology of nationalism. Some bizarre drive to “Restore Britain” as the colonial military Empire of the 19th Century. Britain is directly engaged in warfare right now, billions in armaments going to Ukraine to attack Russia, and billions more spent in support of weapons for Israel’s devastation of Palestine, Lebanon and the US war with Iran.
Ahead of next week’s NATO meeting, the UK Establishment want to show its power. There is competition for such rearmament across a fast-militarising Europe. Germany wants to be the primary military power in Europe. The US F35 jets delivered to France represent more power and influence to the French. The German rearmament is very serious, reflecting a far-Right section of the ruling class actively wanting military conflict with Russia – even arguing for the “righting the wrongs” of the outcome of the Second World War.
2026 has seen the highest amount of global conflict since the Second World War. Nuclear weapons clearly do not prevent war – they actually increase conflict. Yet the UK is investing heavily in nuclear weapons – unusable unless the intention is to destroy all human society.
Truth is, the UK’s status in NATO relies upon nuclear weapons. The value is not in weaponry but in a seat at the big boys table: the P5 dedicated diplomatic forum where the five permanent UN Security Council members meet to discuss strategic stability and nuclear doctrines. UK consequently also sits on the NATO Nuclear Planning Group (NPG), dependent upon State alignment with US military policy. Nuclear War is the sum total of the “special relationship” with the United States of America.
The illegal Iran War has cost the global economy dear. The UN calculates that at least 32million people will be plunged into poverty as a result of the war, largely through its impact on energy and fertiliser supplies. We will suffer the consequences of shortages and price hikes this Autumn and Winter.
Thankfully, the majority of the UK population do not want a war. But what does that mean? To stop war we need a show of demand for peace and against rearmament across the country.
It is clear that the warmongers are in power. We have to build a mass anti-war movement, challenging rearmament and militarism now, and placing our social welfare and climate security first and foremost!
My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (23.6.26), glad to see the back of Starmer! One thing at a time…he’s a neoliberal free market bureaucrat for the Capitalist Class, championing Israel’s genocide and Trump’s imperialism, and smashing into working class living standards and worker’s rights to accumulate more wealth and power at the top. There’s more, far more, but, in short, good riddance to the slimeball.
Burnham is quite probably to the Right of him, so there really is no alternative to collective class struggle on the streets and workplaces.
The unedited version below or enlarge the picture to read the printed version.
Starmer Only United the Nation Against Him!
“Starmer’s Toast!” runs one headline. The sixth UK Prime Minister in just ten years has only one legacy: Starmer united the entire country…against him. Of course, the historic dislike of Starmer, the most disliked Prime Minister in British history, represented a failure on all fronts. He alienated all, Left, Right and Centre.
For the far-Right, Starmer was not racist and authoritarian enough, for the Middle the global crisis stopped any progressive reforms. For the Left his appeasement of the ultra-nationalists, warmongers, Zionists and climate deniers had no link with a Labour Party based upon representation of the working class.
All of this is unlikely to be changed by the seventh Prime Minister in a decade. Tensions are heightened in this time of polycrisis. Could Starmer have done better? Certainly. But he was specifically installed as a corporate careerist managing a short-term systemic restructuring of The Party plc.
Starmer inherited the largest-ever membership numbers in an active Labour Party. His back-stabbing treachery and continuing vengeance against Corbyn and Corbynistas emptied-out the Party’s activist base at the behest of his wealthy donors, the capitalist elite benefactors of media entrepreneurs, bankers, oil and arms companies.
Trade unions funding the Labour Party were neglected and delivered far-short by comparison with Labour’s corporate whoring.
Despite the Labour Party’s complete reliance on the tens of millions in funding from the trade unions, he knocked us aside. Starmer copied and amplified many of the policies of the previous Tory governments that had bled-dry the Exchequer and handed our tax-billions across to the private sector.
He alone cannot be blamed for the crisis of housing and health services, nor the maintenance of four million working class children living in poverty. But his immediate support for the Tories’ two-child benefit cap (poor judgement) and cuts to disabilities funding provoked universal distrust from the beginning, and stayed despite U-turns.
The far-Right and Reform UK were the sole benefactors of Starmer’s bureaucratic elitism, No 10’s careerists completely cut-off from our day-to-day lives and pandering to brutal neo-fascist demands of vengeance against refugees arriving in boats, offering no safe route for asylum. These past two years have materialised an ideological and violent assault on democracy and human rights characterised best by the race-riots in Belfast that Starmer failed to call-out as terrorism.
Under Starmer, Labour sought to prove its nationalist credentials, echoing calls to restore Britain’s empire and bowing to Trump despite constant rebuffs. He committed to raising defence spending to 3.5% of GDP as the world’s third biggest spender on nuclear armaments – illegal weapons of indiscriminate mass murder – at the expense of our welfare.
Let’s be clear, Starmer slashed disability welfare; armed a genocide; arrested pensioners for protesting against genocide; allowed Trump our bases to bomb Iran; diminished rights to trial by jury; appointed a convicted child sex offender’s best pal as us ambassador; ripped up Indefinite Leave to Remain rules plunging migrants into homelessness and fear.
And, given that the climate crisis threatens every element of our social fabric, means of production, security and stability, Starmer’s readiness to cut cash for transition away from fossil fuels exemplifies the hypocrisy of a State tied to the billionaire corporations rather than our basic human requirements.
What now? We should expect more of the same. No new leader can change the general conditions. The next Labour Prime Minister, whoever, will continue the austerity assault on the majority and follow in the footsteps of Starmer’s demise. Unless directly challenged, the far-Right will continue to grow out of the disillusionment with democracy.
This epoch of instability and collapse of the old world order demands a socialist revolution, to oppose the racists and fascists, redistribute the disgusting levels of wealth from the corporations and restore working class living standards.
We should not rely upon politicians – the future is ours to create. That requires extra-parliamentary activity, for an end to war, an end to fossil-fuelled industry, and end to poverty. We have to fight for ourselves as workers, in collective activity that challenges power at the top. This means campaigning on the streets, and in our workplaces for progressive policies based upon worker’s rights and social justice.
The heat is on, and with millions of workers suffering from record temperatures this week, the immediate demand is for a top temperature after which we are not expected to work but still get paid – just like the statutory minimum temperature. That’ll make a far greater difference to worker’s lives than any new Prime Minister. Everybody out on Heat Strike this Thursday!
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald newspaper (16.6.26), exposing Starmer’s hypocrisy once again. This time, the rampant authoritarianism of banning children online. Socialists are for individual empowerment and informed choice towards full self-determination in a society based upon equality and diversity. Not regimentalism and authoritarian micro-management of behaviours. We cannot allow the infantilisation of another generation, bred to be wage slaves and cannon fodder. It does not require us to pander to AI and the Big Tech billionaires in order to uphold children’s rights – we are required to challenge the corruption of the internet in the pursuit of outrageous profits.
The unedited article below and online, the printed version able to read by buying the paper (!) or expanding the picture:
Children’s Rights are Human Rights! (not my headline, but hey)
There are few experiences more painful and devastating than that of a parent having their child die. We want every child to grow into adulthood in a society safe enough to ensure love and nurture over anxiety and pain. Child safety is a focus of any democracy, balancing individual freedom of choice with collective safeguarding from undue harm.
One contemporary example is the required wearing of seat belts during private car journeys. The change to social behaviour was managed over generations with few people objecting to the law when finally introduced in 1983, saving tens of thousands of lives, children restrained in safety belts in the rear seats since 1989. Significantly, manufacturers were instructed by law on the provision and effectiveness of seatbelts back in ’63.
This should inform the debate over banning children from social media. Behaviour change is best managed through informed choice. Children, and indeed adults, are helped to learn safe practices over time – belt up! Over time, such a culture becomes second nature. Making things illegal doesn’t infer consent – explanation and education does.
Most importantly, manufacturers should be forced to take the lead responsibility in providing safe-enough goods and services.
By definition, every law that restricts or prohibits human behaviours is an imposition by the State. All decisions about restrictions to civil liberty are political. They can be made from a position of human rights or from authoritarian control – there’s a broad spectrum between freedom and force.
New laws also reflect the times they are made in. Banning children from social media, by Law, is an extraordinarily authoritarian imposition. It is arguably the latest example of the infantilisation of the population, the paternalistic approach to social control, enforcing passivity. Children should not be taught to accept micro-management from adults – the surest way to abuse, exploitation and servitude. Children should be helped to keep themselves safe. Its called “growing-up”.
The policy headline is to save children’s lives lost to suicide following online abuse or social stigma, a proportion of the ghastly 200 suicides of under-18’s each year in the UK. Perhaps allowing children a louder voice and a receptive listening by adults would do the job better?
By comparison, the social media Tech Corporations will be cautioned to produce safeguards, tho’ their owners are unlikely to ever limit their profiteering or be prosecuted in a way that parents and over-14’s will be. There’s an imbalance to the advantage of Big Tech, these giant Corporations grossing income many times most countries each year. It is a brave Government that legislates against them. Children are a far easier target.
Anyone accessing social media today experiences the insecurity of constant advertising based upon very accurate targeting of our interests, from sports and recreation to household appliances and intimate health conditions. If Big tech knows so much about us, why can’t they be forced to behave safely? How comes its consumer rights that are restricted and not Corporate freedoms to exploit and abuse that are made subject of legal sanction?
Yesterday’s announcement by Prime Minister Starmer of a ban on children’s access to most of social media included the wonderful pledge: “I am not prepared to compromise on the safety and happiness of our children”. Yet the announcement comes ahead of, and perhaps a cover for, more government cuts to frontline services including health and social care – of which the safeguarding of children is a major component – to fund rearmament. Plymouth Child Protection services are in chronic funding crisis.
Across all age groups, children and infants living in the most deprived areas of the UK or experiencing socio-economic hardship are disproportionately at risk of mortality due to conditions completely separate from the use of social media. Four million of “our” children.
Two-thirds of the 3,200 child deaths in England and Wales occur in the first year of life. Addressing the chronic underfunding of our maternity services would be a more effective, money for Youth Centres and recreation would be more timely and vote-grabbing pledges rather than “banning children” ahead of Thursday’s historic by-election.
This is headline-grabbing hypocrisy.
If Starmer really wanted to save children’s lives, he wouldn’t have cut international aid by £6bn a year leaving millions to starve in Sudan and elsewhere. He wouldn’t be cutting the cash to address the climate crisis – the crucial safeguard for all children’s futures. Most controversially, he wouldn’t have supported the manufacture and provision of the armaments produced by UK-based Elbit Systems and others that are illegally bombing civilians and their children in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran. Nor would he condemn as terrorists and incarcerate our young people for protesting against such injustice.
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (9.6.26), predicting the outcry by Tory leader Badenoch, calling today for “Common Sense”! Her focus, racism experienced by white people in a predominantly white society! Another weaponisation of prejudice in the pursuit of power. No mention of institutional racism that systemically marginalises and criminalises people of colour. The culture wars continue, amplified to the extreme by an Establishment fragmented and floundering. We must keep up the pressure – no to racism, fascism and misogyny!
And yes, I know Palestine is not in the World Cup finals, but, just like FIFA, we should still fly the flag!
My unedited text below (not my chosen headline) or expand the pic to read the printed version.
World Cup: Let’s hope the Best team Wins!
Everyone’s shouting for Common Sense! Apparently, the Truth should be obvious to all. The only problem being, there is no such thing as common sense. We each have different experiences and receive the world differently. This diversity makes humanity dynamic and resilient. We’re not all the same – enjoy!
We commonly live in a class society. Deny that if you can. The stratification of the 70+ millions of us is such that the entire experience of the 20% (14 million people) at one end of the class spectrum has absolutely nothing in common with the opportunities and privileges afforded the 20% at the other end. That much is obvious the moment we walk down the street. Rolls Royces speeding past the tents of the homeless.
Fewer than one million of us, one in 70, will ever experience flight in a private jet. However much we dream of it or transport ourselves into the lives of the billionaires, the class system will not allow any level of social mobility that can possibly allow you to get that rich.
The private schools for the top 6% of society protect offspring and inheritance from seeping down let alone having any poor wretch be accepted into the multimillionaire class. We speak different languages inside broad the English vocabulary. We perceive a very different world, Britain, England dependent upon our class placement.
The England-based company director, protected by private millions of pounds in share holdings, expects returns on stock market gamblings many thousands of times greater per day than we, the majority, looking for a 10% return on a £10 bet using the smartphone bingo app. Or the 14m:1 potential of Lotto. The dice is heavily weighted. Money goes to money.
The banking investor wants maximum returns on capital, benefitting from high interest rates. The working class family whose home is mortgaged to the bank wishes for low interest rates. No commonality there.
The house-builder expects to make a hefty profit and stops building unless so assured. The large landlord wants to charge the highest rental, and does so to such a degree that we have a housing crisis. The renter wants a fair if not low rent in exchange for a well cared-for building. One side’s gain is the other’s loss.
Oxfam’s research gives evidence that the wealth gap between rich and poor in the UK is stark: just 58 billionaires in the UK hold more combined wealth than 27 million other people (39% of the population). Oxfam highlights that an estimated 14.5 million people – nearly a quarter of the UK population – live in poverty, while the richest 1% own over a fifth of the nation’s total wealth.
It makes no sense for working class people to demand that the rich get richer at our expense! What’s the sense in that? It does make sense for billionaires to tell the working class we must accept welfare cuts and higher prices in order to protect and grow their profits! That is the “Common Sense” spouted by the politicians seeking to protect the current state of things, a status quo that has overseen serious deterioration to working class living standards and expectations over the past forty years.
Nationalism is the primary vehicle for demanding common sense. After all, we all live on this Island and therefore should have something in common, shouldn’t we? It’s only common sense for us to support our military for our shared security, isn’t it? It is apparently common sense that we should ration health, education and welfare in order to put more billions into the private military-industrial arms corporations. Only sections of society benefit from military arms expenditure, by no means the majority. Surely, common sense would agree that war is not in our interests.
And there can be no common sense where racism and sexism exist in society. Racism divides on the basis of one perceived ethnicity or skin colour being superior to another, with a baseline of white supremacy. Sexism is the exercise for imposing male supremacy. White people do not commonly experience the different and detrimental looks and behaviour experienced daily by people of colour. Men do not experience levels of rape and domestic abuse that women daily receive in Britain. The prejudice that flood the senses of being Black or female in a society based upon competition and discrimination are not common to all.
Perversely, those demanding common sense usually align such an imposition with racism and religious prejudice. Their common sense is meant as common only to Christian white-skinned people. Right now, such nationalist common sense demands for us all to support England at the World Cup. We should be proud to be British as opposed to care about any of the 48 competing FIFA Nations, shouldn’t we, even when Scotland has a much better squad!
Hold on, why should we compete to be superior to the peoples of other nations and regions, when all the other countries live under the same class divisions, their working class experiencing the self-same exploitation, oppression, repression and deprivations as us? We have more in common with working class people living in Africa, South America and Asia than we have with the English billionaires holed-up in the Cotswolds.
Can we have some “Class Sense” please? Can we prioritise and cheer-on what’s in the interests of the majority – the working class – not seek some fake allegiance with billionaires who push nationalism and “common sense” in their property-owning class’s self-interests, not ours?
In the meantime, wouldn’t a human, caring common sense want the best team to win, or care for the underdog? It’s only a game of football after all, but, for what it’s worth, c’mon Palestine!
My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald Newspaper (2.6.26), rehearsing the necessary arguments against Starmer’s forthcoming increase in immediate arms spending, again. He is under pressure to deliver more UK war-preparations ahead of the major NATO Summit in July, and has to “find the money” – that is, defy his Chancellor and demand cuts to welfare. There is an element of Whitehall tittle-tattle, but the final analysis has to be that UK will be a frontline aggressor in the West’s drive to more warfare, pushed by Trump. Meanwhile, we dissolve into worker-on-worker violence – both social and military – or organise collectively to stop the warmongers.
The unedited version below:
We need a sharp turn away from military expenditure. Arms expenditure is a waste of money. This may sound offensive to many in Plymouth, but the reality is we are as divided a set of communities as anywhere else. The retired ex-military who have settled here, and the Yardies of yesterday and today, will stake their lives upon loyalty to armed forces and the arms corporations they’ve worked for all their lives. They are not alone in feeling pride in their work.
The majority of the working class in Plymouth have not worked inside or even adjacent to the local military-industrial complex. There are more employed at our regional hospital at Derriford than inside Devonport dockyard, and twice as many again employed through the services managed by Plymouth City Council, in education, social care and environmental services.
We have in no way benefitted from Plymouth being characterised as a Naval City, and we’re not about to benefit now. Plymouth Dockyards require a healthy level of craft services, but the higher-than-average salaries are for the technicians and military personnel. They live outside and away from the City and their comparatively high incomes are spent elsewhere.
Equally, the Dockyard companies are private, their profits also stored and spent way away – across Europe and America. Consequently, in the neighbourhoods bordering the dockyard we have one-in-three children living in poverty and across-the-board indicators of social deprivation higher than the national average. Plymouth is a poor city. The health and life-expectancy disparities between the working class living in the West of Plymouth and the white-collar professionals to the East, totally unacceptable.Our small middle class live around 14 years longer and with twenty years of better health than manual and semi-skilled workers.
Once again, our political leaders propagandise that the £4.4 billion of tax money promised to Plymouth’s military business over the next ten to fifteen years will bring us the prosperity promised to previous generations. It won’t.
We need huge investment in welfare services, our children’s education, health and social housing. That £4.4billion could serve us well, locally paying off the £1bn debt owed by Plymouth City Council and turning round the decades of cuts to essential services. It could refurbish our local housing, much of it acknowledged as poor by national standards – damp, mouldy and dilapidated.
Instead, Starmer’s Defence Investment Plan (DIP) committing to a £18 billion per-year increase in military spending ahead of next month’s NATO Summit, includes nuclear warheads, drone swarms and missile interceptors for Britain’s armed forces. In reality, it will increase national debt and divert State expenditure away from social need and towards wholesale human destruction. Preparation for war always atrophies social spending and cuts wages across the entire economy.
For Plymouth the DIP will continue our descent into a Company Town, visibly dominated by Babcock and associates, reeking of militarism and the drive to rearmament ahead of the apparently inevitable next war. Beware a society dominated by the military security services, embedded everywhere. For example, Plymouth University is a likely sign-up as a “Defence University”, in a strategic relationship with arms companies that will deplete the college’s commitments to health and education training even further.
Compulsory conscription is advocated by the political Right, our primary Schools now being encouraged, with funding, to invite and embed military personnel into the fabric of classroom life and curriculum, the better to prepare the next generation as twenty-first century “cannon fodder” for the wars of the 2030’s.
Future wars are portrayed as robot-wars conducted by technical experts fielding underwater and low-flying drones as if in a computer game. The reality of current wars in Ukraine and the Middle East show something very different. Drones and missiles destroying civilian targets, from high-rise flats to entire towns. This is the destructive force being the sole area of investment for Plymouth.
And at the City’s heart, the illegal mass exterminator, the weapons of mass destruction costing us at least £14billion a year and unmanageable toxic pollution. The nuclear weaponry that, if and when used will herald the end of human society as we know it. That is absolutely nothing to boast about!
When endless tax money is dedicated to warfare the truth is exposed. The money can be found. We can have a society where every child is comfortably housed, growing healthily with nutritious food and well-resourced schooling. Now that’s worth fighting for – Welfare Not Warfare!
Written while sweating, my weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (26.5.26) documenting the obvious. We are in the Year of Trade Union Climate Action, and you’d hardly know it. Last September the Trades Union Congress agreed to force transfer away from fossil fuels and demand action, not least fr a maximum workplace temperature, esp for drivers, construction workers and kitchen staff. Now even government advisers have said the same, but with no response given the employers’ hold over government. They’ll lose money if we down tools at 30C+. Actually it’s dangerous to maintain manual labour when conditions are over 20C, so we’re only asking fr the very least in health & safety. It will take mass strike action to force the issue – refuse to risk your life at work, or is that too extreme? I think not!
My unedited column below:
Hot again. Records ripped-through again. These extremes of weather are confirming the scientific truths of climate change. There’s no denying it now.
Everyone accepts that the global climate is changing rapidly, and despite some silly obfuscation from the oil and gas lobby, there’s little objection to the fact that the burning of fossil fuels is the cause. CO2 and methane emissions heat the planet.
The hostile debate today is about what is to be done. Our young people, raised through thirteen years of classroom climate projects, are resigned to a future of climate crisis and bored by the repeated warnings. We know. Watching the latest climate calamity and hearing the repeated politicians’ complacency, we’ll just have to put-up with whatever’s coming.
Adaptation is the latest language of denial. It’s going to get hotter and we face water shortages, disruption to harvests and food supplies, and fires. We’ll all need air conditioned homes and workplaces. Well, all, that is, of those of us who can afford the kit and electricity. All of only those who work for ethical employers who comply with a maximum level of heat allowed in the workplace and are prepared to invest in our safety and comfort.
Those of us without the wherewithal are going to suffer the worst of the early consequences of decades of inaction, and we are the majority – those in deprived communities, precarious employment, reliant on disability benefits (about to be slashed again if Reform UK get into government locally or nationally), and the majority of elderly people poorly resourced by the low state pension. The majority of the working class are expected to just get on with heat exhaustion, flooded homes and mouldy walls.
We need urgent action to slow the crisis, not just adapt to it. Yes, the government should be prioritising retro-fit of 14 million homes in Britain to be fit for heavy rains and scorching heatwaves. Yes, the roll-out of solar panels and heat pumps to end gas burning and reduce electricity demand is an absolute essential.
And yes, the one-in-every-five of our homes now sitting on flood plains have to be protected by massive investment in a scale of civil engineering the size of the idiotic HS2 white elephant. And yes, the fossil fuel corporations who have made their billions in private wealth out of destroying the Planet should be made to pay the price of adaptation, their profits taken into public ownership, not tax-exempted.
This heat is a killer. It’s only going to get hotter until we tip into a completely new geological epoch – coming soon. The political order of the day is “Transformation, not just Adaptation”. Human society has to be reformed before climate disaster destroys us. It is that serious whether we are prepared to confront it or not.
We need system change. All facets of the fossil-fuel infrastructure have to be replaced. Quickly.
Emissions that trap the heat in our atmosphere and oceans have to be stopped. 95% of Europe’s land area experienced above-average temperature in 2025. The geographical expanse of the continent of Europe, which includes Britain, experienced its largest wildfire season on record, with over a million hectares burned.
A “Super” El Niño is now the most likely outcome by this year’s end. The human cost could be staggering
Sea level rise is confirmed and accelerating, and is going to continue. Staggeringly high temperature anomalies of +15 to about +22 degrees C (+ 27 to + 40 degrees F) above average fare being recorded over large parts of the Arctic. What we call the “Gulf Stream” has a more than 50/50 likelihood of shutting-down this century. Anyone listening?
These figures do not capture the full costs borne by lower-income countries, uninsured communities, or the long-term setbacks to development that rarely appear in loss accounting. The people of the Global South are suffering the worst, right now, but the costs are not even recorded. India with its population of 1.48 billion, is being mass murdered by fossil fuel corporations and their political accomplices. This is at ‘just’ at 1.45°C. Most of the populated area of the globe is 6 or more degrees C above normal. That includes places where it is winter and places where it is summer.
Okay then, Capitalists, forget humanity, since you only care about your money and private property. Insurance companies record that in 2025, the Americas recorded the greatest economic losses from climate disasters of any region – US$110.6 billion, or 65.2% of the global total of US$169.7 billion lost to extreme weather last year. The Climate crisis is set to wreck your global economy.
We live in the Age of Extremes. A new Age of Catastrophe. We’re living on borrowed time. And the paid-for loyalty of politicians are tied to the oil companies, not the working class. We have to organise for climate action to save ourselves.
My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (19.5.26) keeping-up the assault of the Left against the far-Right, following the previous Saturday’s excellent Palestine Solidarity/Stand Up To Racism demonstration in London, overwhelming the much-reduced far-Right “Unite the Nation” march called by the Islamophobe, Tommy Robinson. Plymouth has a range of fascist and racist organisation competing against each other for pride of place, pretending to demand protecting of women and children from refugee men whilst, in practice, working alongside white men with convictions for abuse. The Left is also in their sights, our charge of racism having a serious effect upon their credibility and support. We must not be complacent and must increase and deepen our efforts until they are off our streets. The next counter demonstration is next Monday.
Unedited version below, or expand the pic for the published version.
Women’s liberation would benefit men. Working class men, at least. The ability of the Bosses to pay women less than men for doing the same work, having the same or even more skills but being denigrated, denied recognition and prevented from rising-up the management hierarchy, harms everyone…except the bosses. Unequal pay holds down the general pay-rate. Any excuse is used to hold down wages in order to increase profits, including ideas that women are not worth as much as men.
Women’s oppression, the consideration of women as less than men – weaker, more emotional and therefore fickle and untrustworthy – is increasing again in Britain. After a few decades of winning better women’s rights at work and at home, there’s now a push back. And misogyny is the hard end of this – male hatred of women – a political campaign for male supremacy overwhelming the online Manosphere and poisoning young men’s minds.
Sexism doesn’t make sense. If women had the same rights as men, men would be freed from the results of women’s oppression. If we broke the stereotypes assigned to gender roles we could be honest about our emotions, we could share responsibilities, mix our teams and, oh yes, increase the rate of pay for all, setting the bar at the highest common denominator, not the lowest.
Women in the UK still get paid on average of 18% below men’s pay rates for work of the same value. Trade unions still shout about this. The essential priority for campaigners for women’s rights is correctly focussed upon male coercion, sexual abuse and rape. It is estimated that up to 900,000 people across the country experience sexual assault each year, including attempted rape and penetration. Much has been done to strengthen laws against sexual violence and yet it is widespread, less than 3% of reported rapes ending up in a successful prosecution and punishment.
Predatory abusive men have little to fear. One-in-three women in the UK experience an average of 7-years of domestic abuse at the hands of their partners, statistics that hasn’t changed for the past 50 years. Around 90% of rapes are committed by people known to the victim, often by someone who the survivor previously trusted or even loved. Rapists are usually friends, colleagues, clients, neighbours, family, partners or exes.
Sexual abuse happens in every community. In England, where more than four out of five of the population are white-skinned, this means that the vast majority of sexual abusers are white men abusing white women.
Yet a new campaign group, publicised by the Plymouth Herald, is calling for action against Black men. “Women Reclaim The Streets Plymouth” (WRTSP) is claiming that our streets have been made unsafe by immigrants seeking to abuse women.
WRTSP states “We will feel safer on the Right than the Left always, with rising amounts of illegal undocumented men coming here on boats and the amounts of rapes and murders by these men We Stand (sic) together for closed borders and the illegal undocumented men send (sic) straight back.”
They have no evidence, and as such this is hate speech, a hate crime, promoting fear and racial hostility through the false claim that asylum seekers are responsible for a rising number of rapes.
They wrongly raise the threat of “stranger danger” when women and children are most likely to be abused by someone known to them. Their propaganda is placing women and children at more risk, intentionally or not, implying that family and friends are always safe.
This outcry against asylum seekers and young refugee men as rapists is being fomented by organised fascists. The misogynists who hate women also hate Black people. The ultra-nationalists framing patriotism as white-supremacy are waving flags to intimidate ethnic minorities. The men in high-viz jackets waving Union jacks with the Reclaim the Streets group outside Theatre Royal last week have amongst them thugs convicted for violence against women.
These racist groups are planning a series of local protests against refugees, starting next Monday. They threaten to hold more demonstrations outside our primary schools, claiming to “protect our children” and targeting local Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMO) as if they all house illegal refugees. Their sheer ignorance is jaw-dropping.
Far-right organisations are springing-up across the city, competing with each other for pole position as the most racist, the most patriotic. They plan to protest outside the Plymouth Courts at a hearing of Black men of a sexual attack. Yet all six cases of serious rape and abuse of women heard in Plymouth last year had no such protests outside in the cause of keeping women and children safe – all six were white men – no protests to keep us safe from them, was there?
Women’s safety must not be a tool for racism. Women and children are at risk from low wages, insecure housing, inadequate access to support and benefits as well as sexual abuse. Women are at risk from the sexism and misogyny in our general culture. Women’s sexist oppression and abuse cannot be defeated through the racist oppression and abuse of Black men. We must counter these racist demonstrations and honestly campaign for women’s liberation.
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (12.5.26), tangentially addressing last week’s extreme meltdown of the political centre of politics in Britain. More than 1400 Councillors were elected for the Reform UK last Thursday, including openly racist and fascist representatives, an historic shift to the far-Right in British politics. Or at least, a shift towards the extremes, the centre ground emptied. As part of the essential campaign of opposition to the far-Right I felt it important to state what fascism represents here and now.
Below is the unedited longer version, and the pic of the much reduced published article:
Are you now, or have you ever been, a Leftie? If so, those who have usurped the national flags to impose a culture of racism and misogyny, those who want to see a million migrant workers forcibly expelled from Britain, those who protest with their children outside schools, intimidating staff and pupils alike, want you to shut up and be shut down.
The far-Right in Plymouth have broadened their focus to not only include scapegoating people of colour but also openly threatening “Lefties” and, in particular, socialists. This is not a tussle between two clubs or rival gangs – it is the current condition of general politics in our society – divided towards the poles.
The far-Right, individuals and organisations of right wing ultra-nationalists, racists and fascists, is currently stoking anti-refugee and anti-Muslim racism, throwing-in classic accusations that black men are a threat to children. They seek white male supremacy, lauding Western colonialism and campaigning to Restore Britain with the return of the military British Empire.
The Left, meanwhile, is a broad spectrum of individuals and organisations that recognise and value all of life on Earth, of diversity, democracy and human rights.
So there is a real and present divide, a gulf, between Left and Right. The Left recognise the danger of the climate crisis, oppose imperialist war, demand full rights for women and Trans people, expose and challenge genocide and ethnic cleansing, stand for the rights of the disabled and demand social welfare paid from the common wealth of taxes and corporate profits.
The Right seek self-advancement at the expense of others. Beyond their own clan they hate humanity. And humanism. The far-Right add attributes to their desired dog-eat-dog world including white-skinned, male, heterosexual cultural domination. Their end result is the defence and protection of unbridled capitalism through an autocratic totalitarian and militarised state – see fascist Italy, Spain, Germany and the Axis powers of the twentieth century. A reactionary conservative creed.
Being “on the Left”, for the Right, does not require a commitment to socialism. Anything “progressive” is deemed “woke”, a term of abuse used by the far-Right.
Not all of the Left are socialist. Many seek reforms to the harshest and sharpest edges of the global and local system of Capitalism, accepting that Capitalism is here and probably inevitable, but can be tamed and controlled. Many reforms have elements of socialism: a universal health service paid for through taxation to be free at the point of need. Subsidised public transport. Fee State education paid for from the public purse. Welfare Benefits to those who cannot fully manage on their own. Social Security ”Council” Housing, the stock owned and maintained by the local council tax payer ensuring decent and affordable housing for all (a thing of the past thanks to previous and current right-wing governments).
Capitalism can have a mixed economy containing elements of socialism just enough to sustain the working class. The Right hate the Welfare State and cannot understand why anyone should pay taxes towards anyone else’s needs. Until, it seems, they become homeless or sick or infirm and complain that the services are not there, because of immigration rather than spending cuts and privatisation.
Socialists are a left section of the Left. In essence we want a different construction of socialist society. Socialism is a society based on meeting the needs of people and the environment, not maximising the profits of the rich. It would be a radically democratic society, with ordinary people collectively running things for ourselves.
A socialist society would be one where items are produced because they are needed, rather than because they are profitable. It would mean an end to a system where millions of people struggle to make ends meet while the rich sit on piles of money. In a socialist society, the working class would collectively own big industries and services, democratically deciding what to produce and how to use the Earth’s resources.
Socialism is therefore international, recognising we each impact upon everyone else, migration and global trade being ancient human attributes that benefit and bind us together as one human race.
Fascism asserts national identity and geographic boundaries in order to accentuate individual competition and bind the people to an internal collective fear and hostility of “the outsider”, “the Alien”, “the Other”.
Fascism is the absolute power of the capitalist. Presumably, that’s why it is considered to be of the “Hard-Left” to seek an end to Capitalism. Although, the redistribution of wealth downwards away from billionaires and multi-millionaires to eradicate child poverty and unemployment should appear perfectly reasonable.
Not least, it’s increasingly obvious that the Capitalist dream of becoming super-rich is sheer mythology – a propaganda tool to tie us to the yolk of wage-slavery. The super-rich are a class apart, managing the State, the laws and social culture to maintain their power and keep all the wealth inside their families and Corporations, preventing social mobility.
Fascism gives this Capitalist ruling class absolute power inside a totalitarian State. An autocratic corporate dictatorship. The fascists pander to the super-rich in the hope of receiving crumbs from their table. In reply, the World’s billionaires, especially the techno-billionaires, are currently funding the rising fascist media and organisations here and across the world.
But why would working class people want an even harsher administration of capitalism in which we are even further atomised away from any mutual aid and self-organisation? Fascists destroy trade unions.
Why would we want to live in a hostile neighbourhood of State-snitches dobbing each other in on false accusations of proscribed relationships, unpatriotic activities or subversive thoughts? How could we condone paramilitary snatch-squads funded by the state and private corporations, smashing-in the door of our family members, friends or neighbours and stealing people away to be disappeared as “enemies of the State”?
Humans have experienced long periods of fascist society all across the world. Fascism adapts to its local conditions, but we all know what fascism looks like. So let’s be clear. That’s the end game of the fascist “Tommy Robinson” and the far-right parliamentary-wing represented by Farage’s Reform UK. Fascists lie and deceive and threaten in order to achieve absolute power. Fascism is not what anyone voted for last week. But fascism is here, now, and must be actively confronted and opposed. We will oppose Tommy Robinson in London next Saturday, and local fascists day-and-night from now on.
The UK threat level has been raised to severe. Fear levels have been raised as a consequence. The leader of the Conservative Party say we are in “a national emergency” after the horrific stabbing of two jewish men in Golders Green, London, last week. Thankfully, they are both now out of hospital.
The BBC and mainstream media have repeated for days that antisemitism is endemic in British society. It is reported that Jews are now living in fear of their lives, although the BBC’s Broadcasting House interviewed a number of Jewish teenagers last Sunday only to find they hadn’t experienced antisemitism, were shocked by the attack but were not worried for their own safety. “I love living in London, probably the best city in the world”, said one.
The UK’s entire Jewish population is not under terrorist attack. Appallingly last Wednesday, the British citizen, 34-year old Essa Suleiman knifed two Jewish men in Golders Green. It is not widely publicised that he is also charged with having stabbed a Somali Muslim man, Ishmail Hussein, less than an hour earlier.
This changes the narrative, doesn’t it? Stabbing friends and strangers alike. Suleman has a history of violence connected with mental illness, and was discharged from the Prevent programme aimed at identifying terrorists. That he stabbed a Muslim seriously undermines the assumed antisemitic motive. He’s ill. A single man in an individual act creating terror is not the same level of threat as an organised terrorist group. He should not evoke the same response. Is the declaration of a terror threat to Jews actually a propaganda exercise to counter the widespread criticism of Israel?
The big media companies all report that Jewish people living in Britain are looking to leave and emigrate to Israel due to the rise in antisemitism here. The statistics to not bear this out. Britain is one of the safest countries in the world for Jews and indeed, because of our secular and multicultural policies, for all ethnic groups and religious faiths.
By contrast many Israeli citizens are leaving Israel, and many more protesting inside Israel in protest at the illegal war on Iran, the corruption of Netanyahu and the self-declared fascists inside the Israeli leadership. The Israeli Government has introduced a law that renders all residents of Israel who are not Israeli citizens subject to the death penalty for serious offences.
The hanging law is one piece of evidence that proves Israel has a racist legal system of Apartheid that affords Jewish Israelis much greater civil rights than non-jewish residents. Israel is a racist State, borne of a Zionist political doctrine of a separate country for Jews, or are we not allowed to say that?
The historic and illegal occupation of Palestinian land, the catastrophe or “Nakba” for Palestinians, is another example of illegal “ethnic cleansing”, currently best exemplified by the continued violent expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank by Israeli Settlers facilitated by the Israeli Defence Forces, and, undeniably, the continuing genocide in Gaza and the truce-breaking destruction of Southern Lebanon.
Western States culpable in the continuation of this current mass horror perpetrated against an entire People are keen to emphasise the threat to Israel and the world’s Jewish peoples by external, and specifically Muslim groups and nations. It is now alleged that the fear is being exaggerated and promoted by Prime Minister and the entire Establishment for their own ends. A charge worth investigating.
Antisemitism undoubtedly led to the Holocaust at the hands of Hitler’s fascist Nazi Party, at least 6 million jews industrially murdered in an attempt to eradicate their ethnicity, an activity supported by fascist regimes everywhere, then and now. The supreme lesson for humanity never to allow racism, ultra-nationalism and xenophobia to take hold of any society ever again.
The neo-fascists and Nazi-sympathisers today are flying Israeli flags alongside the Union Jack in probably the greatest hypocrisy of recent times. They do so in the certain knowledge that Zionism represents the same separation of humanity into “races” with an order of supremacy (based upon skin colour as well as religious belief) that is the creed of the fascist.
Opposing Zionism is not the same as opposing jewish people or Judaism. We cannot blame jews anywhere in the world for what the Israeli government is doing. Every anti-racist, every person demanding equality and human rights must challenge all levels of anti-semitism and hatred of Jews, including all narratives suggesting a “global Jewish conspiracy”.Antisemitism exists, to be opposed and stopped.
Anti-zionism is not antisemitic. Zionism is a political creed, not a religion or Faith. But there are attempts at Establishment level, to join antisemitism and anti-zionism together and call us racist for opposing racism!
This all comes before the Nakba Day on 16th May. London’s Metropolitan Police and the Starmer Government want to ban marches in support of Palestine. In fact, the march happens each year in commemoration of the forced expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians from their homes in order for the establishment of a new country and state of Israel as a home specifically for Jews. Nakba is the Arabic word for “catastrophe”, and represents all that has happened there since, including the recent expulsion of over 450,000 more Palestinians during the destruction of their homes in Gaza.
London’s Metropolitan Police together with Starmer wish to ban the Nakba march, despite it being a family occasion without any arrests or incidents over the past decades.
But when far-right groups rampaged through Epsom last week, whipping-up anti-Muslim hatred across the country without any evidence, there’s no suggestion that fascist-organised violence represents terrorism. The controversy is deepened by the fact that the same Met Police seeking to ban marches for justice for Palestine have allowed and prioritised the march and demonstration by “Unite the Nation, called and hosted by the outspoken Islamphobe Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, for the same day.
This self-identified white-supremacist has invited well known far-right extremists to address his crowd in Parliament Square on the 16th, the same day and time of the Nakba commemoration, in a political statement of ultra-nationalist defiance. One of the far-Right speakers has already been denied permission to enter Britain because they represent a threat to public safety. This protest is led and funded by fascists. What’s not to understand?
These questions are of fundamental importance. Why is the Government supporting fascist organisation over democracy. Why is the entire media so unquestioning of the political assertions of the Met Police that there is a generalised terrorist threat to Jewish people? On what grounds is the government considering the banning of protest for the first time in post-war history? Why is the stabbing of a Muslim man not stated alongside the stabbing of two jewish men? Why are the three Golders Green stabbings by the mentally distressed Suleiman considered sufficient evidence of a generalised terrorist threat to raise the level of militarised policing and introduce even more restrictions to civil liberties and freedom of speech?
And finally, does the British State value and unquestionably support the Zionist political creed? We must protest! Join the Plymouth transport to London on Saturday 16th May – https://may16coach.eventbrite.co.uk
Coach from Plymouth via Buckfastleigh to London (and back) to attend the national demonstration against the genocide in Gaza. 6am: Leaving Plymouth from Home Park / Milehouse 6.25: Pickup at Buckfastleigh – Furzeleigh Mill Inn Get into London for about 12.30pm Leave London at about 5pm Get back to Buckfastleigh for 10.40 and Plymouth for about 11pm
Emotional Climate 