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 (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!
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!
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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
My two-page reflection on the General Strike 1926, published in the Plymouth Herald (30.4.26). The synopsis reflects the mood of the new book by socialist historians Judy Cox and Charlie Kimber, long term comrades, reminding the world that workers can and do fight, and workers in Britain have joined in mass dispute over and over again, including throughout my lifetime. The sell-out of the General Strike was used by Capitalist historians, including the reformist Labourites, the Webbs, to impose the cultural and political imposition against mass strike action, indeed, to undermine and criticise any and all strike action ever since. This top-down bureaucratic domination of the Labour Movement has plagued the working class ever since. I have always fought and organised for rank-and-file bottom-up collective action emanating from workplaces and working class communities. It will erupt again, the pay and job cuts and rate of gross exploitation too tense to be permanent or managed. The Workers, United, will never be Defeated!
One Hundred Years since the British General Strike
Plymouth Trades Union Council is hosting a Festival for International Workers Day in Plymouth on Saturday 2nd May at Sherwell Church, North Hill, with talks from socialist historians and a full length film on the 100th Anniversary of Britain’s General Strike 3-12th May 1926. Here, Tony Staunton, records the local events of the time.
On May 3rd 1926 four-and-a-half million workers went on strike across Britain for 9 consecutive days the longest period of a mass strike in Britain’s history. A real working class challenge to the UK government. In fact the strikes went on far longer.
The General Strike has been rewritten and dismissed by Capitalist historians. In fact it proved the real potential of working class collective power in the workplace, and the violence of the capitalist business owners ready to use their power to smash opposition.
General workers unions from the 1880’s had seen the match-girls strikes, 1910-14 huge explosion in general strikes in UK, continuing to a degree through the war, and then mass strikes at the end of the war across Europe. A new strike wave saw half of Britian on strike in 1919, including many police forces, pushing for better pay and conditions.
The British working class was the largest in the world, the First World War politicising workers, the British Empire declining and the British ruling class needing to break the growth of working class revolts. By the 1920’s, the bosses were desperate to take back control of industry from the war-time State. With coal fuelling all of industry, coal miners were at the frontline – mine owners supported by the government for privatisation and immediately imposing 50% wage cuts and longer working hours.
With one million miners in Britain, the threat of poverty wages and increased in hours was recognised as the focus for a general strike across the organised working class. Their first fight in 1921 published demands for 30% increase in wages, a 30-hour working week and nationalisation of the mines under workers’ control. It was defeated on Black Friday when the rest of the trade union movement failed to offer support.
The Labour Party was right-wing but offered a political voice to the organised working class in these circumstances. Unsurprisingly, in 1924 the first Labour Government was elected, but only just, as a minority administration which collapsed in November the same year. This had nevertheless rattled the ruling class recognising they had to break trade union and labour power and beat-back the working class especially on wages and hours
The Triple Alliance came in support of the Miners: Miners, Railways and Transport workers, pushing their own demands. The Tory government called a Royal Commission to investigate the Mining Industry, agreeing a 10% wage increase and a 8-hour working day, giving mine owners a 9-month subsidy to stop wage reductions.
This cut across class struggle and diffusing anger. It was a temporary victory, the government preparing whilst the TUC didn’t. The Miners won on Red Friday, the mine owners and government recognising they weren’t ready for the showdown to come.
The Royal Commission finally called for increased working hours and cuts to wages, ending the Government subsidies to the mine owners. On 30th June 1925 the Miners Owners announced pay cuts and increase in working hours. Tory Prime minister Stanley Baldwin announced in parliament that all workers, not just miners, would have to take wage cuts and work longer hours to put the economy back on its feet.
In 1926 the Mine owners gave a 2-week notice of 50% wage cuts. Workers knew that if the miners lost this time, the bosses would come for the rest of the working class. On 1st May 1926 a general vote of TUC special conference recorded 3.6m for a GS, 50,000 against. The TUC made no plans for action. It focussed upon respectability – “stay at home, don’t go to picket lines, tend the garden and pigeons, organise cricket matches with the police and opposition”. A non-threatening general strike! The TUC Congress voted unanimously to stand with the Miners but refused to organise defence against the policing and government.
In fact, the TUC called the strike only 2 days before with minimum preparation. It was pushed by an unofficial strike of printer workers at the Daily mail refusing to print a headline against the Miners and TUC headed “For King and Country!”. Baldwin demanded the strikes were called-off. The TUC repudiated the Daily Mail strike but the Government snubbed them.
The Government was fully prepared, with huge coal stocks and military preparations, and wanted the strike. It had imprisoned most of the leadership of the British Communist Party along with thousands of known militants, and shut down leftwing newspapers and political meetings.
The Tory Government invoked the Organisation of Maintenance and Supplies (OMS) a government-funded paramilitary strike-breaking organisation recruiting 100,000 mainly middle class volunteers – with contacts between the Tory Government, the British Union of fascists and the visible presence of the Armed Forces on the streets, not least the Navy deployed in ports visibly threatening port towns. Over 200,000 were recruited into special Police.
The Government ensured a broad propaganda campaign against the strike, setting-up the daily “British Gazette” edited by Winston Churchill to organise a “scab army” of strike-breakers, facilitated but the Daily Mail and Daily Express. The editorial was that the strike is a threat to country, the monarchy, the Empire, to law and order, the family and the Christian religion.
The BBC ensured repeated appeals for scab recruitment, fake reports of mass defections from the strike. The head of the Catholic Church came out to declare that the strike was a sin against God!
In response, the “British Worker” newspaper was set up by the TUC emphasising that the strike was simply an industrial dispute, no threat to the Constitution, and arguing for restraint. TUC leadership organised against any and all semblance of rank and file organisation, and used the local trades councils to prevent or reign-in the Councils of Action (local Strike Committees for agitation and propaganda, demanding all power to the TUC General Council “for the preservation of peace and order”.
At midnight on 3rd May the country stopped. The industrial heartlands, railways and public services brought to a halt, industry came to a complete standstill. In London al 4,000 buses stood still, 9 of 2,000 trams and 15 out of 15,000 tube trains moved. Docks shut down, the volunteer strike-breaking force ineffectual, the students crashing trains and buses.
Dockers, Iron and Steel, metal and chemical workers, woodworkers, printers, building workers on strike. Shipping and shipbuilders, power workers, the Post office and telephone engineers, didn’t strike although many came out during the 9 days. Large numbers of unorganised workers joined the strike – nobody wanted to be that person seen to be on the side of the bosses.
The General Strike was heavily supported, mass pickets on 4th May stopping scabs, fierce street battles including deaths, trucks and cars and busses set alight, railway stations invaded to stop transport. Women laid babies on the road to stop scab vehicles and allow the drivers to be evicted and engines to be broken.
The General Strike unleashed working class anger at their exploitation with a popular wave of physical confrontation against the power of the State. Women’s organisations ensured infrastructure for the strike, including financial levies for universal welfare and organised groups to challenge strike-breakers.
At Millbay Docks in Plymouth there was open conflict, the Dockers struck in sympathy with miners, leading to the docks becoming a major flashpoint for clashes with police. As the strike developed, it was important to stop all business as usual. On Saturday, 8 May, Police used batons to disperse crowds near Drake Circus and Old Town Street after a No 6 tram was attacked, with several protesters arrested. A procession of around 4,000 strikers attempted to block the operation of trams by “volunteers”. This resulted in violent confrontations, with trams having windows smashed and destination boards torn off by protesters.
Battle ships were moored off Plymouth and on the Mersey, the Clyde, and other cities. Hyde Park in London was turned into a military camp. For the Tory Government, the workers had to crawl back to work humiliated. The working class must not get any idea that strikes can win.
The TUC sought talks, the government disinterested, even when the TUC leadership agreed to prevent the Miners from being part of negotiations because they were pledged not to back down. Meanwhile, Councils of Action spread across the country from the 2nd Day coordinating strike action, picketing, permits for transport and workers defence forces.
Just as the momentum was rising and more workers were joining, on 12th May the General Council of the TUC called-off the strike, without any agreement with the government or employers. They felt the situation was getting out of their control. In short, the union leaders shrank from confrontation because it imperilled their carefully built organisations. But the impact was to leave workers to the punishments meted out by the employers.
The Daily Mail headline “surrender of the revolutionaries!” Trades Councils, strike committees and all were outraged and incensed at the call back to work. It represented nothing on the ground. There were more people on strike the day after the strike was called-off, with more people who were non-unionised too! It took time to quell the fight.
The Miners carried-on the strike and were beaten. It was a defeat for the Mineworkers Federation and a major defeat for the general working class, the government and employers weeding-out all the militants and activists across industries.
Printers unions stayed on strike demanding the reinstatement of all workers. Even the strike-breakers said the end of the strike shouldn’t be a rout and a punishment. Big wage cuts and job mass sackings followed. The Bosses stated “you’ve got nothing” and forced 25-40% wage cuts – a bitter defeat of the entire working class. The rail owners sacked 45,000 workers after the GS defeat, giving the jobs to the scabs.
The betrayal of 1926 opened the way for the brutal repression of the Unemployed Movement, the 1932 Great Hunger March assaulted by Police, all leaders jailed in the 1930s and State assaults on the anti-fascist mobilisations before and after the second world war.
The Labour leaders declared general strikes should never happen again. It has pervaded debates across the labour movement ever since. The reformist historians, the Webb’s recorded that British workers aren’t revolutionary and British bosses aren’t fascist: “British culture is immunised against the continental virus of open class antagonism and political extremism”. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.
The true legacy of the General Strike is that workers can and do fight back against exploitation and repression. The worker’s history shows that we can and do stand together, and most importantly have power. There is always the question of leadership in any conflict. People do not break from forms of democracy and coordination that are handed down to them without the realistic prospect of something different. For 9 days the prospect of real change, of something better had become a reality. Those with a self-interest in the maintenance of the status quo disallowed such aspiration. Such is the lesson of the General Strike of 1926 for today.
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (28.4.26) challenging the motives of all candidates in the current Council elections. What are they doing about poverty, deprivation and the gross inequalities we live with each day.
Notable that the Editor would not print the swearword “sod”, replacing it with “Forget”, despite f and c words on our telly every evening. Apparently being angry is unacceptable.
Sod potholes, why don’t candidates address poverty in Plymouth!
Around two-thirds of Plymouth residents eligible to vote are likely not to do so in the local council election on May 7th. There is no single reason, but any class analysis will prove that the wealthy don’t bother to vote – they don’t use public services and find taxation an unjust burden they seek to evade – whilst the poor wisely recognise that politicians don’t do anything for them.
So democracy, flimsy at is, is for the middle classes. And local election campaigns tend to focus on the day-to-day niggles affecting middle-earners and the otherwise comfortably-off: pot holes, business rates and regulations affecting small businesses.
Some national issues invade local democracy, especially when racists and warmongers seek to divert issues of municipal welfare into white-nationalist xenophobia – from rearmament to fight foreigners and the damning of all people of colour through to ultra-parochial slogans demanding “Plymouth People First!”
The one thing not to be spoken of, politely or otherwise, is poverty. Much of the growing anxiety and discontent is borne of the fact that millions of us do not have sufficient income to cover essential expenses. All our politics has moved towards the extremes as we’ve become more divided and more unequal. Voting for a new bunch of multi-millionaires seeking to out-do the established lot is not going to bring any real difference to working class lives. The Status Quo is no good for most people.
Candidates should offer real and substantial change. Britain has the highest increase in child poverty in the whole of Europe, the richest 10% live an average of 20 years longer than the poorest, and in much better health. This record level of income inequality and class polarisation is visible on our streets and in our neighbourhoods. Never mind the potholes, what about the homeless?
So saying we’re going to carry on as we are shouldn’t be a political message that gains votes. It represents only a 15% strata of the comfortably-off. Meanwhile the super-rich are continuing to change society away from mutual aid and collective care in their struggle to accumulate more and more of society’s wealth.
In Plymouth, one in three of our children live in poverty, defined as being deprived of one-or-more of essential human need – nutritious food, heath care including teeth and emotional support, secure and safe housing, self-actualising education, and a loving environment promoting positive self-esteem.
Pot holes aren’t on the list. They affect car owners and cyclists. Owning a car requires expenditure of at least £50 a week for an old banger, hundreds for a new vehicle, placing them outside the affordability for at least 20% of us. Public transport is the real issue and requires massive investment if we are to have any equality of mobility.
Spending around £40million on refurbishing Armada Way is of benefit to local businesses seeking higher footfall, and property speculators wanting to make a fortune out of new city centre accommodation, but for families in Honicknowle or Southway the bus costs of getting into the city to play amongst the water features are wholly unaffordable.
What we need is £40 million spent on breakfast clubs, play parks and youth centres on our estates.
More so, we need refurbishment of our housing stock which is now, notably, the worst in all of Europe. Housing conditions are so poor that 14 million homes in England and Wales require extensive repair and retrofitting to stop water ingress and provide the insulation required to end fuel poverty. Plymouth has one of the highest rates of household damp and mould in the UK, with studies showing 36% of homes are damp, 14% with serious mould, and 25% of Plymouth households living in unhealthily cold homes.
The private landlords, a large proportion amongst our elected Councillors, certainly don’t want the housing crisis as a campaign issue. Caring for their tenants will eat into their private profits.
Trade unions have always campaigned against poverty, but the sectional self-interest of workers in specific industries often overwhelms our founding socialist principles. Jobs at the Dockyard and through the Freeport are emphasised as the growth Plymouth needs, whilst in all accounting for only 10% of our economy and doing nothing to alleviate poverty. Plymouth Devonport is one of the very poorest electoral wards in England.
Low pay is endemic, workers on the Minimum Wage often needing top-ups from Universal Credit in order pay the rent – effectively a tax-incentive for landlords to charge inflated rents.
Pay in the health service, schools and all public services has lost at least 15% real spending power since the 2008 crash. Our public services need substantial investment, not further privatisation pumping the offshore corporations’ profits.
Council spending power per person will be at least 15% lower in real terms in 2028/29 than in 2010/11. That’s more cuts and austerity policies to come this year and next. Central government must give back the money it has stolen from local authorities. Any candidate that isn’t ranting about this isn’t worth the time of day!
Now we are heading for another crash, probably the worst yet. A quarter of a million people will likely lose their jobs by the middle of next year as Britain experiences price-hikes, food inflation at 5%pa+ right now, and a recession because of nil investment and the chaos caused by the illegal war in Iran.
Should anyone knock at your door, ask them about the gross inequalities and deprivation in Plymouth and what they’re going to do about it
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (21.4.26) challenging the albeit minority support for the illegal war against Iran. Trump is under huge pressure at home and globally, more threatened by oil prices than any moral upset at human death and environmental destruction. But Starmer’s hypocritical role is possibly the most astounding of all – stating that the UK does not support Trump’s war but ensuring Britain as the launchpad for the weapons of mass destruction. We have to protest!
A B-1 Bomber is filmed high in the sky over Plymouth. Its rumblings, distinct from rolling thunder, cause us to look up, to question and to assess. It is not normal, not a usual sound. Some marvel at the power represented by the technology. But the black silhouette causes many to fleetingly reflect on the distant wars that are being rehearsed overhead.
Britain is an aircraft carrier for the United States. Only those who are comfortable with this “special relationship” applaud the US bases strewn across our island and the use of the Royal Air Force for Trump’s illegal war in Iran.
At least 23 US strategic bombers are now operating from RAF Fairford, Gloucestershire, US military personnel flying missions from England in support of ongoing strikes against Iranian targets. They’re practising and refuelling over our homes, but dropping huge payloads – 2,000lb “bunker buster” bombs – on everything from schools and hospitals to ancient historical monuments and, oh yes, civilians, women and children.
Just as Blair and Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 was formally recorded as illegal under international law, so will the bombing of Iran in 2026. There are no weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear weapons in Iran. Only Israel has nuclear missiles in an otherwise nuclear-free Middle East.
Wars are deadly. And costly. Thousands dead, hundreds of thousands injured, millions homeless inside of one month’s assault. This illegal invasion is costing the US $891million each day and the global economy hundreds of billions in disruption, transport and agriculture descending into chaos. Blocks to oil supplies is already the equivalent of the daily consumption of Europe’s five largest economies combined. Petrol and gas prices are a superficial inconvenience when compared with the real and lasting costs to us all.
By the end of this week, roughly 60,000 American service members will be in or around the Middle East, the largest concentration since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Trump is calling the current pause in fighting with Iran a fragile two-week ceasefire, set to expire on Thursday April 22 after talks in Pakistan fell apart almost as soon as they began. Then what?
Only last week, Trump’s threat to destroy a civilisation, with its implied threat of nuclear war, sent a chill around the world. Trump and Netanyahu’s war has been a brutal and illegal onslaught on the people of Iran and Lebanon. It has created a humanitarian disaster and caused the destruction of infrastructure, environmental damage, and economic crisis. And the British Government is wholly implicated.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been complicit in this illegal war, allowing US planes to use British bases. The British government must break with Trump and his warmongering policies, including disallowing the stationing of US nuclear weapons at the Lakenheath USAF base in Suffolk.
British “patriots” are cheerleading the US bombers as if they’re “our own”! Their allegiance is to Trump’s Stars-and-Stripes far-Right White-supremacy, not the Union Jack, and to western capitalism, the only beneficiaries of mass slaughter being the western oil companies who have made an extra $100billion more than their usual profits in the last month, and the arms companies scurrying to increase production.
Which brings us back to Plymouth. The B-1 stratospheric rumblings are in part a propaganda exercise to pull the population behind support for rearmament and the diversion of much-needed tax funding for health and education into arms spending. The real power of that jet bomber is in tying us to the politics and economics of warfare, not welfare. Nothing at all to cheer about in a country ravaged by austerity politics and corrupt profiteering.
On Saturday we will be protesting at RAF Fairford to demand the UK stops the bombers! Kick US nuclear weapons off British soil! Fund doctors and nurses, not Nukes! Vote for Welfare not Warfare!
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (14.4.26), repeating the very obvious about the undermining of basic political rights and democracy in Britain. We are closely surveilled, micro-managed at work and in our personal lives, and bombarded with nationalist and militarised propaganda. And amidst their engagement with genocide and illegal military invasions, the Government is rearming, preparing for War with huge increases in military spending at the expense of welfare and adaptations to prevent climate collapse.
We Must Protest for the Right to Protest!
The Police arrested 523 people on Saturday during a silent and static protest in London. They unlawfully arrested hundreds of peaceful protesters for holding placards which say “I oppose genocide – I support Palestine Action”.
The government says Palestine Action is a terrorist group, calling supporters “terrorists”. In July last year anti-terrorism legislation was used to make support for the group illegal. Then, three High Court judges overturned that parliamentary decision identifying it violates the Home Secretary’s existing policies, the Human Rights Act and the people’s democratic rights. The legal appeal by the government will take many months.
The Police are bound by the Human Rights Act – the right to freedom of expression and the right to freedom of assembly. The law can only interfere in a protest where there is clear evidence of the incitement of violence or hatred against others. The subject of these protests is the opposite – the call to an end to violence alongside the demand that the UK government is not engaged with illegal wars. So the designation of “terrorist” is being used to protect the arms manufacturers from exposure of their illegal and deadly trade.
The Decision of the Metropolitan Police to mount mass arrests is evidence that our Police forces are making their own political interpretations of the Law. Far worse is planned.
Today, MP’s will vote in Parliament for a new Law to give Police unprecedented powers to ban recurring protests, turning a fundamental freedom into a privilege granted by the political Police. Authoritarian control. The government is now saying that your right to protest will be judged against what others have done before you – if there have been previous protests on a subject, you cannot protest again, whether the issue has been resolved or not.
It’s not just about limiting any inconvenience or disruption a demonstration may cause – after all, how can protests be of any value if they must be without impact? This is deeply political, immediately shutting down all comment on the Gaza genocide and Palestinian rights.
These legal changes are also pandering to the far-Right and actual fascist organisers in Britain in an absurd bid to buy their votes! Trade union leaders, lawyers and legal experts have condemned the police for blocking the international Nakba Day march on 16th May in favour of the fascist-led “Tommy Robinson” racist demonstration called for the same day in London’s Whitehall. Metropolitan police have favoured the far-Right over a Palestine commemoration of the illegal killings and expulsion of millions.
Imagine how these blanket laws will be used should a far-Right government get into power in 2029: against trade unions (they already are); against human rights (they’ll be disavowed); against all demands for social justice – housing rights, welfare rights, defence of the NHS. Protests banned.
Most shockingly, Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary, Lammy, is now taking away our basic right to trial by Jury. This is a political response to the success of climate protests highlighting the deepening crisis. Climate protesters have suffered effective internment – being held illegally and without trial for 18-20 months, some resorting to hunger strikes in desperation.
When up in court, given the depth of concern about the impact of climate change, many jurors have recognised the defence of climate activists, finding them not guilty, accepting that citizens have a duty in law to raise the alarm about imminent threats to the People’s welfare. So the law is being changed to protect the fossil fuel polluters and deny all opposition.
We should all be up in arms! Protest for the Right to Protest!
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (7.4.26), where I write a piece, edit it down to the maximum of 600 words, and then it’s edited again to meet the so-called “standards” of the corporate media. Little surprises me these days, but to see my phrase “Distracted from paedophile Presidents and Princes…” have the term “paedophile” edited out did raise my eyebrows. I thought, at least, that Trump has had a court case rule him as such, and that Randy Andy had been stripped of all titles and wealth because his alliance with Epstein. Oh well, there we go, the article is about the Climate crisis anyway!
The unedited version below, or read the published article by expanding the picture.
The latest HD pictures of the Earth from space are undeniably moving. An expressed emotional response often includes something about vulnerability.
So it should. One look at the globe and its obvious that everything is connected. The question is, what should we focus upon? Is there a first priority if we are to protect and sustain life on Earth?
Where should we start? Right now, moonshots are distracting from illegal wars and genocide distracting from the rise of fascist organisations distracting from paedophile Presidents and Princes distracting from corrupt exploitative billionaires and all distracting from the climate crisis.
And there it is. One look at our world and it should be clear that climate and environment are top and centre.
“Planet Earth is being pushed beyond its limits”, announced United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres reporting on the 2025 State of the Global Climate Report, completely eclipsed in its urgency and warnings by the war in the Middle East. The Earth’s energy imbalance – the gap between heat absorbed and heat released – is the highest on record. The vast majority of the heat, 91%, is absorbed by the ocean, harming marine life, fuelling storms and causing ice melt. Arctic and Antarctic ice loss together with melting glaciers are driving sea-level rise. Our weather has become more extreme. In 2025, heatwaves, wildfires, drought, tropical cyclones, storms and flooding impacted hundreds of millions of people and caused billions in economic losses.
In February this year, the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee, on which heads of MI5 and MI6 sit, released a heavily edited version of its national security assessment of the climate crisis. It came with a stark warning: “some ecosystems will start to collapse by 2030 or sooner”, suggesting an immediate threat to national security, prosperity, food systems and public health.
Government intelligence agencies have compiled full scientific reports on the imminent national security implications of climate breakdown, biodiversity loss and global ecosystem collapse.There’s talk across the Establishment of adaptation to a world at an average temperature 3C higher than 150 years ago. We are locked-in to a return to Pliocene conditions, 3C hotter and, eventually, a 20m sea-level rise.
You may expect the government to share this knowledge with everyone so we can all make important life decisions. But the UK’s Defra has refused a Freedom of Information request to see the full, uncensored report prepared by the Joint Intelligence Chiefs in connection with national security threats associated with climate and ecological breakdown.
The question remains unanswered: what do we need to do to be able live in these conditions? Perhaps die in our billions? Those who have significant resources to build away from floods and fires, insulate our homes against severe temperatures, access nutritious foods that are grown despite soil-depletion and chemical pollution, will live. But that’s not the most of us.
It is no coincidence that the far-Right is being sponsored to call-out climate science as false conspiracy, and oppose net-zero targets at the ballot box. “Drill, Drill, Drill!” Is the cry of the oil industry lobbyists, echoed by far-Right idiots hoping for crumbs of cash and power from the Billionaires’ tables. The barbaric decadence at the top of global capitalist society has never been more obvious, now funding climate denial to a greater extent than their previous campaigns denying cancer from smoking or asbestosis from unsafe chemical production. Starmer complies with support for new drilling at the Rosebank field in the North Sea.
The global North is being lulled into believing we’re safe from the climate crisis. Those in the tropics and Earth’s southern regions are already suffering climate chaos. As Jane Fonda said last week, “There’d be no climate crisis without racism!” This is probably the main reason behind Trump and Farage opposing net zero goals away from fossil fuel dependency: in the first instance, stopping climate chaos will be of primary benefit to the countries of the global south, non-white populations! To hell with that, let them die first! Racist it is, but also very short sighted – the worse chaos global heating causes the tropics, the more likely the temperate zones will suffer seasonal dissonance, extreme weather and food shortages. The climate does not recognise national boundaries or human cultural differences.
The climate crisis is not a matter of opinion. The real conspiracy is the opposite of that spouted by The Deniers – governments have compiled the information on the Climate Crisis already – they’re just not letting us see it, preferring to distract us with photos from space. We should each make the links and act now.
We are each at liberty, for now, to submit a Freedom of Information request to government to release the full report produced by the Joint Intelligence Committee on the national security implications of climate breakdown, biodiversity loss and global ecosystem collapse. Email your Freedom of Information (FoI) to informationrequests@defra.gov.uk
In the meantime, stop war to stop the murder, massive environmental destruction, pollution and global heating carbon emissions, and campaign against the opening of any and all oil and gas fields, most urgently, Stop Rosebank!
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (31.3.26) advertising next weekend’s mass blockade of US Air Force base at Lakenheath, Suffolk where US Bombers, fully armed, are taking-off to drop pay-loads on Iranian civilians in an illegal war. You’d think Starmer’s Government and our local MP Luke Pollard would be more embarrassed. Instead, they promote the drive towards nuclear war. Sickening. Inhuman. Detestable. Pandering to their rich imperialist paymasters.
Unedited below:
The illegal war on Iran is in its 4th week, upwards of two thousand Iranian civilians are confirmed dead so far, 24,000 injured and over three million displaced. 13 US military personnel killed and 300 injured. Iran has bombed Israel and Arab States in retaliation. In the West the care and concern is for prices at the petrol pumps and for home heating, the wider implications obscured by immediate self-interest.
This latest war is not going to end any time soon. Indeed, the media chatter is focussed upon the question of whether the Third World War has already begun. In associated reports the people of Ukraine generally accept it already has.
Following the nuclear bombs dropped upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 it was always assumed that WW3 would be a nuclear war.
Throughout March 2026 the two nuclear-armed states of USA and Israel have been pounding nuclear energy installations holding deadly radioactive materials in Iran. There are growing threats to nuclear facilities as has been the case in Ukraine where nuclear power plants have been damaged. In Iran, Israel has targeted the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant, the country’s only operational civilian nuclear power plant, and Iran threatening the nuclear site in Dimona, Southern Israel. Nuclear installations are frontline targets in war, posing the greatest mass threat to civilians downwind of radioactive fallout.
Targeting nuclear installations is act an of defiance of the UN Charter detailing rules of war. Indeed, nuclear weapons themselves are illegal under international law as weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction. But in 2026, the Old World Order is well and truly dead. The new situation has been being developed for decades, international agreements on nuclear arms reduction being eroded, disregarded or broken. Trump finally ended the New START Treaty last year despite the second major nuclear power, Russia, proposing its extension.
As a result we are seeing global nuclear proliferation, including by Britain. China is expanding its arsenal, Pakistan and India make routine threats against each other, US and UK building new “useable” so-called low-yield warheads with explosive power still larger than the Hiroshima bomb. They are designed for “first use”.
Local Plymouth MP and minister for military procurement, Luke Pollard, has waxed lyrically recently extolling the virtues of huge new investments in the US Trident nuclear system, the nuclear weapons system leased to the UK. At least one quarter of the entire UK military budget is now dedicated to nukes. He suggests nuclear weapons are a deterrent never to be used. He argues that nuclear weapons represent jobs and prosperity and a power too horrific to be unleashed, protecting the Peace. What’s not to like?
Such nonsense is belied by the list of hundreds of millions subjected to wars since 1945. What Peace has been protected? The international Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has offered evidence this year that the imminent potential for use of a nuclear weapon has never been greater. Only fools believe nuclear war cannot happen or that it can be contained once the first bomb is dropped.
Thankfully, despite Pollard, the majority of political leaders across the world understand this threat. Trump is not getting support from allies, governments like Spain actively defying Trump’s unbridled aggression. But Britain has fudged its direct involvement in Iran as “defensive support”, an increasingly untenable position. UK and US bases in Britain are launching attacks on Iran. At RAF Fairford there are 21 bombers running bombing raids twice a day, dropping the same 20-30k bombs that Israel has been dropping on residential areas in Iran, Palestine and Lebanon.
Bombers are also flying from USAF Lakenheath nuclear-weapons base in Suffolk, with the agreement of the UK government.
In all, the Iran war is being used as a nationalist propaganda tool promoting UK’s massive rearmament programme and militarised culture, in preparation for wider war. Yet there is strong public opposition to both US bases and US nuclear weapons here. 65% of UK citizens oppose nuclear weapons and over 70% oppose the war in Iran.
Defying public opinion, the political establishment and government are demanding we reorient towards European military coordination and nuclear expansion. The NATO nuclear alliance is being pulled-apart over continued US military alliance.
The joint committee on the National Security Strategy published last Friday, says Britain must delink from the US Trident weapons system and have an independent nuclear weapons system. In other words, build more nuclear weapons. And the government still hasn’t published its National Investment Plan due last year because of a £200billion shortfall – where are they going to get the money from? Higher taxes and cuts to welfare services, of course.
Meanwhile, we are building alliances and coalitions calling on a rethink of the nuclear expansion. Anti-nuclear campaigners are protesting. Our Peace Camp at USAF Lakenheath this week will demand the removal of all US nuclear weapons from Britain. We will blockade the base this weekend, demanding Welfare not Warfare! No Nukes! US Bases off British Soil! Join us at CNDuk.org
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (24.3.26), obviously advertising the mass demonstration against the far-Right taking place at the weekend. The back-room complexities of fund-raising and organising coaches, and filling them with activists, remains unseen. Commercial hire is absurdly overpriced. We are in debt and need donations, if you can. But more, we need to fill the coaches and build the mass movement against fascism.
Join us in Challenging the Rise of the Far Right
Hundreds of people will be travelling from Plymouth to London on Saturday to join the national demonstration against the far-Right. The protest by the Together Alliance and accompanying festival of diversity in Trafalgar Square will be the largest assembly against race-hate and fascism in British history. The threat of fascism is very real and present. The numbers of fascist organisations in Britain have grown, and their ranks expanded, greater than the National Front in the 1970’s or the British National Party in the 1990’s. At the same time, the level of public awareness has decreased as we have been separated and isolated into private social bubbles by financial Austerity, the Covid Pandemic and the sense of vulnerability caused by wars and climate crisis. We are emotionally jostled by conspiracy theorists seeking power through spreading fear and threat. We are lied to by far-Right politicians blaming and scapegoating minorities for all society’s ills. We are confused by politicians broadcasting conflicting fake facts in the name of Truth, just to further their own influence. Our children are subjected to all this in a concentrated form of professionally produced propaganda on-line, the Incel “Manosphere” telling boys they must be ready to fight, and girls they must submit to men’s needs. The saturating levels of You Tube generated sexism and misogyny is alive in the playground and classrooms, daily observed and documented by teachers themselves, taking a collective toll on the mental health and wellbeing of all concerned. Racism, the learnt prejudgment and assumptions of people of colour or minority ethnic group, is being encouraged and organised by antisemites, white supremacists and Christian fundamentalists, the targeting of Muslims most prevalent. Powerful political forces and social dynamics are being forged to develop fascist organisation here and across the world. In the United States of America, President Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) armed street thugs are terrorising minority communities, a style of para-military State organisation that Nigel Farage of Reform UK and all to his Right are pledging to bring here the moment they achieve power, targeting a million or more people of colour for forced deportation. Yet we know it’s not migrants that have created the cost of living crisis, food and fuel poverty, our austerity has been caused by the blatant profiteering of the richest multi-millionaires on the planet. Across Europe, openly racist and Islamophobic parties including the AfD in German, with whom Britain’s Tory Party are allied, is building street organisation to assert white privilege and forcibly smash all resistance. In France the same is happening with the leadership of the ultra-nationalist and openly racist National Rally set to win the Presidency within the next year. It is not an extreme view to be concerned about these developments. It is not politically extreme to oppose racism and fascism. Opposing the far-Right is essential to personal preservation as a member of the working class. It is now essential that we counter the rise of fascism on our streets and in our workplaces. We remember the history of the twentieth century, the death and devastation caused by the fascist parties that took power in Spain, Italy and Germany. We know that the totalitarian dog-eat-dog militarised organisation of society in the interests of a small super-rich all powerful elite produces a life of fear and subjugation, threat and violence for the majority. For example, after Hitler’s fascists, the Nazis, seized power in 1933 they banned political parties, trade unions and civil society organisations. They were “razing to their foundations” the institutions of any and all working class democracy. No semblance of resistance was tolerated. Key to this was the funding and organisation by the wealthy of violent street gangs recruited from the dispossessed, to “take the streets” and destroy all opposition. This is the blueprint and the goal of the fascist organisations in Britain today. Funded and informed by USA groups including the Homeland Party, the successors to the BNP including Patriotic Alternative and Britain First are joined by the reformed UKIP group led by the self-styled fascist Nic Tenconi, and others. The Flag Force groups encouraged by the White-supremacist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) are raising the English flag and Union Jack as symbols of neighbourhood domination in order to intimidate minorities. They are mirroring the 1930’s fascist strategies in a new era of capitalist crisis, nationalism and expanding warfare. In Britain there are currently many more anti-racists than racists. We must not allow ourselves to be out-organised. When we show our strength in numbers, the bullies and dominators disappear back into the shadows. Now is the time to stop the far-Right. Challenge far-right propaganda. Counter fascist-led demonstrations. It will only get harder, the longer they are left alone to breed hate and division. Join the demonstration in London, coaches from Plymouth and across the South West: go to togetheralliance.org.uk/getting-there
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (17.3.26), where in lighthearted mode I would have liked to wax lyrical about St Patrick’s Day but, in all sincerity, have to stay concentrated on War & Peace. Crucially, our anti-war protests in Plymouth have been attacked and assaulted by self-identified fascist cadre who themselves are supporting the Iranian royalists shouting in favour of Trump and Netanyahu’s illegal mass murder. The racists are supporting the immigrants, you ask? Well yes, only for so long as they support the Zionist racists in Tel Aviv and Trump’s regime. The moment Tehran falls will be the point when the Britain First fascists demand all the Iranian diaspora are sent “home”, alongside the rest of the 4million muslim Brits. Ultra-nationalism kills. Who benefits from such inhumanity?
War Benefits Nobody but the Billionaires!
Why would anyone support War? Mass murder of innocent civilians. Prices going up again. The question is begged. Why does the working class have to pay for each and every crisis?
As a secondary consequence amidst the mass murder and destruction, Trump & Israel’s illegal war against Iran has bombed refineries and blocked shipping of fuel getting to the West. Those who own the big piles and shares in the fossil fuel companies have raised the price of oil and gas.
It is always the rich who benefit. War always offers a profits bonanza for somebody. The corporations who supply the fuels and sell to us increase their charges overnight and sometimes thrice in a day.
In other words, the consumers, we at the bottom of the pile, take the hit. We pay more because those who own production and supply expect their profits to stay the same or even increase, whatever is happening in the world.
There are many reports of companies putting-up prices even before any rise in their costs, profiteers exploiting crisis if not actively creating them. To add insult to injury then, the government (of whatever hue) releases publicly owned fuel reserves paid for by the tax-payer to keep supply prices from going through the roof.
Yes, our taxes and national resources are used to subsidise the super-profits of the corporations. We fund the war through our taxes but the working class are not the beneficiaries. Our services are cut, fuel bills increase, taxes diverted from social welfare. Right now we are supposed to be placated by the understanding that prices would be even higher without the tax-subsidies to the oil corporations.
British-based BP and Shell reported combined annual profits of approximately £26.2 billion in 2024. Globally the big oil corps collectively made roughly £467 billion in profits last year. That’s a surplus over and above any business costs.
To hell with them! Let them take the hit for a change! OECD data shows that the UK government provides an estimated £20 billion per year in financial support for fossil fuel companies which includes tax relief for producers and VAT reductions. That is tax income for our common wealth taken away from health, education, benefits and the essential climate adaptation required because of their destructive emissions!
Now we’re propping-up their war-profits by more support from taxes, just for the oil tycoons to get ever richer at our expense! You who shout-out against migrants in boats costing the tax-payer say nothing about the big corporate scroungers who are actually sucking the money out from our welfare state. Why?
The Financial Times, the Bosses own newspaper, reports that US oil groups are set to make $63bn extra profits from the war on Iran! Why do you think that’s OK? Trump, the President you choose to support to the hilt, boasts that the US is the greatest oil producer by far so, “when there’s war we make money”, adding that “bombing Iran is fun”. He’s a monster!
It’s not asylum seekers bleeding our economy dry, it’s overseas oil magnets. And in Britain, the 50 wealthiest families own half our nation’s resources, paying little or nothing into our system. Yet you blame the poorest and most desperate for all societies ills. Are you sick in the head?
Some governments have acted against this profiteering. The French have limited price rises to every-other-day, the Greek government has capped the amount the Corporations can increase prices by. Not so in Britain, because Britain was one of the first to adopt free-market neoliberal economics and, over decades has become allergic to any state intervention for price controls, rent-caps and profit restrictions.
That’s why the number of billionaires in the UK has risen from 15 in 1990 to 156 today. We keep them rich, paying our taxes to them in incentives and exclusions: Universal Credit to subsidise their high rental charges, UC again to subsidise their minimum wages paid at rates too low to survive on, and our taxes subsiding the filthy water companies to the tune of £76bn.
Don’t blame your neighbour for a crisis created by the top 1%. While our communities of every culture and skin colour struggle to keep the heating on, the super-rich have increased their wealth tenfold. Finance cuts and privatisation of our assets to make a profit from our essential needs only deepen our problems.
So why on earth are you supporting the war? There’s nothing in it for the ordinary person in the street. Demand Welfare not Warfare! Fund Peace! Tax the Rich! Stop Bombing Iran!
Emotional Climate 