Author: Tony Staunton

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

Climate Change is a Working Class Issue still

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (2.9.25), reflecting on the floods – of rain rather than flags! But the two are linked, the flag-waving ultra-nationalists and racists denying climate change to a person. There are polarised divisions, not to be undone by keeping quiet or being nice! We’re fighting for our children and their children … climate change is an existential threat.

Unedited below:

Those affected by floods in Plymouth through the last week have been shown sincere empathy by our entire community. Waking to leaking ceilings or sudden torrents of water pouring through our homes is a traumatic shock as well as a long-lasting costly clear-up and remedial project.
Most if not all of us seeing the media coverage have the immediate intellectual acknowledgement of climate change. We all know it now. Extremes of weather are routinely breaking records, whether temperature peaks or torrential downpours, the erratic conditions now responsible for more moorland fires, farmland droughts, basement floods, transport disruption, and uncertainty about the future.
The damage to our once-stable climate is accelerating, the various impacts of human-released carbon gases trapping heat in the atmosphere, feeding on itself and amplifying the power of nature’s dynamic forces. For more than 50 years the impact of carbon-emissions has been known and tracked and yet still the system of production adds more carbon dioxide to heat-up the world.
For those of us mopping-out our living spaces, the voice of Kemi Badenoch, leader of the beleaguered and discredited Tory Party, calling for the extraction of more, nay “all”, oil and gas from the North Sea has to feel like a direct snub to our plight, but also a call-to-arms. You see, the last Tory government accepted that there is a Climate Crisis and we have to cut emissions.
The sudden perverse rise of the conspiracy-touting far-Right in Britain has shifted the climate debate away from observable as well as scientific facts towards a fresh denial of any problem whatsoever. Not only Badenoch but Starmer is jumping to the tune of Farage and ending the drive to net-Zero by 2050 (or ever), a target of emissions reductions very attainable but wholly inadequate in itself.
It is an ideological offensive against any and all calls for curbs on unbridled, unfettered free-market corporate drive for profits. Badenoch is championing the oil and gas companies, even damning any of the false-hope new technologies like carbon-capture-and-storage currently being funded.
The claims are false – gas prices have caused the high energy prices in the UK, and more reliance on gas will not reduce our domestic bills – they’ll increase. More North Sea oil won’t help tax revenue either, oil is privatised and the corporations receive tax-breaks and subsidies and those companies export most of what they find.
Badenoch’s claims are characteristic of the corrupt lobbying for the interests of the big corporations at the expense of the beleaguered working class.
We campaigned with Insulate Britain, calling for government action on refurbishment of no less than 14 million homes in England and Wales needing urgent upgrades to protect us from the extreme weather. We were vilified in the Press, and the governments of both parties have refused to consider our evidence and experiences. Indeed, some of us were imprisoned for daring to call-out their intransigence.
Climate activists continue to be persecuted and criminalised for trying to expose the depth of the immediate and worsening catastrophe. Just look at the weakening of the so-called Gulf Stream and the very real impact on our entire ecosystem in the very near future. You want to protect our children? We have to stop emissions now! Just Stop Oil!
Climate change is a working class issue. Governments and Corporations are doing nothing to help or support the adaptations needed. Trade unions have always fought for workers rights and for the changes needed to make society better for us. We have solutions to the climate emergency. Trade unionists in the 1970’s designed and engineered the first wind turbines, heat pumps and electric public vehicles as part of the “Lucas Plan” never invested in by the Corporations finding profits much larger in the production of weapons of war.
Renewable energy production does not generate the massive size of short-term profits for the super-rich – and that’s the challenge! State investment with significant tax claw-backs from the fossil fuel industries must fund a National Climate Service that can create the millions of climate jobs needed to adapt our social infrastructure.
Plymouth Trades Union Council is working with the Plymouth Hub for Climate Justice to build the climate movement as a force to shift government and corporate policy back to Green. Climate Jobs in their millions, protection for homes and communities, integrated and accessible public transport.
The urgency is palpable. This Autumn we launch the trade union year of climate action, with a key moment of global solidarity in November when world leaders meet for the UN climate negotiations in Brazil – the COP 30. Join our protest and Climate Summit on November 25th at the Sherwell Centre.
The right-wing politicians, whether Labour, Tory and Reform UK speak only for the profits of the oil and gas industries. Only about their profits. Farage wants to scrap the already paltry regulations that protect workers and householders. Badenoch wants more emissions. Starmer has little in the way of plans for energy transition, and wants the end of green incentives for employment transition. This lot don’t listen to workers and aren’t going to help us.

We have an autumn programme of actions and events. Join us: https://plymouthhub4climate.org

The Union Jack is a Symbol of Imperialism

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (26.8.25) identifying the political polarisation represented by the flags being hoisted everywhere. Hatred or Hope? It’s time to choose sides and take action.

Unedited here:

Painting red crosses onto white mini-roundabouts reflects confusion. Not just for drivers. The Red Cross on White background is the national flag of England. This “Flag of St George”, also known as the White Ensign, is incorporated into the imperialist Union Jack which unified England, Scotland, Wales and the colonies becoming known across the world as the “Butcher’s Apron” because it was flown into every battle across every continent and subjugated a third of the world under the great British Empire of the 19th Century. The Union Jack is a symbol of power, of conquest, of imperialism even today.
All flags symbolise power, and a lot more besides. Flags rally people into a shared identity, a common cause, and a commitment. The flag of St George is now being flown from windows and balconies and lampposts signifying a new-found symbolism. Mixing myth with dogma, the English flag is now being flown as the call to arms against refugees and asylum seekers. Black refugees. And Muslims. Overwhelmingly the poorest and most helpless in society.
It could be explained that St George is a well documented historic figure, his mother a Palestinian and father Turkish. St George is celebrated in Palestine and many other peoples for helping those in need and opposing the persecution of others. True, the flag was used as a herald in at least one early plundering escapade of the Crusades targeting the riches of the Middle East under the cynical guise of Christianity defeating the devil of Islam.
Those utilising this symbol today may evoke the Protestant Christian adoption of the flag of St George in the 16th century, and use it as a statement against Islam as the primary enemy amongst all non-Protestant faiths, but the bigots outside the asylum hotels are not, in all honesty, particularly interested in any of that. Today’s Red Cross on a white background is a statement of hatred of Black people, of the call for supremacy of the White English Race.
The flag of England has been turned into a rallying cry for racism. When, during football tournaments it was flown to support the English Team, now it symbolises hatred of Black people in general and refugees landing here in boats (we are an island, after all). It has been irredeemably politicised, weaponised once again.
Other flags are available and being flown. Somewhat ironically, supreme amongst them right now, across Britain and most of the world, is the flag of Palestine. It represents the people of Palestine – colonised, brutalised and now experiencing not just ethnic cleaning through non-stop heavy artillery bombardment, enforced famine and genocide.
The Palestinian flag has become the symbol of internationalism, social justice and equality. In Britain it now a symbol of human rights, including the right to protest. Whilst pensioners are arrested for flying the flag of Palestine, those marching against refugees and even calling for them to be killed are protected by Police and escorted into battle.
Britain is in a state of polarised hostilities whipped-up by an economic crisis caused by corruption and ruling-class propaganda, scapegoating minorities to keep the spotlight away from their plundering of the Commoners’ wealth. It is difficult to get at the actual people who are pillaging our country and destroying our security – the corporate directors and their political puppets. It’s much easier to blame, target and attack local people who are Black and penniless.
Outside the ramshackle profiteering hotels, ultra-nationalists are flying the Union Jack, the flag of St George and the Zionist flag of Israel together in racist rage. They are politically led and driven by fascist cadre who know what they’re doing. The Israeli state has an apartheid constitution giving Jewish citizens more rights than those of any other heritage – it is a racist state. It’s what the far-Right protesters want here – superior rights for those born into White-skinned Protestant families. The flag of St George conjures-up anti-Muslim military crusades, the Union Jack represents a British Empire long gone and never returning. This is a crusade of despair and hopelessness.
Anyone, of any human decency will not rally to the flag of hatred, bigotry and racism. Instead, we must rally together to defend human rights and build hope through working class allegiance across communities, nations and cultures. Fight all exploitation and oppression! Stand Up To Racism!

Proscribe State Terrorism!

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (12.8.25), adding to the widespread outrage at the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. It’s important to get this into print on the day the newspaper carries an article quoting Labour government ministers as saying PA is violent and has “caused significant injury, although cannot give soecific details at this stage”. Liars!

The unedited version below:

Starmer’s government has re-written the definitions of both terrorism and hypocrisy. At the same time as he announces UK readiness to formally recognise the people of Palestine he is arresting UK citizens protesting against the genocide and eradication of Palestinian people.
Starmer and his apparatchiks have achieved a ground-breaking conjuring trick. Even the greatest circus acts have never managed to ride two horses going in opposite directions at the same time. A completely fresh take on two-faced forked-tongued politics.
Last Saturday, 466 people were arrested in London under Section 13 of the Terrorism Act for silently displaying the following words on white card: “I Oppose Genocide, I support Palestine Action”. The numbers arrested as “terrorists” were predominantly older people, ready to risk their liberty and life opportunities to challenge not only genocide abroad but the affront to democracy at home in the proscription of protest group.
Terrorism has long been understood as the intentional use of violence against non-combatants to achieve political or ideological aims. The term emphasises the aim to instill fear to pursue political goals, and using fear as a strategic tool to influence decision makers.
Non-Violent Direct Action cannot be interpreted thus. Spraying paint on machines of war or factories producing such machines highlights the deadly capacity of the objects whilst not threatening or producing fear in any rational human being. Sitting cross-legged with a hand written paper sheet is not an act of terror. Pointing-out a complete sea-change in State law away from democracy and towards authoritarianism is never illegitimate. This is thoroughly peaceful protest.
Government ministers here and across the world are using the term “genocide” to describe what the Israeli State is doing to over two-million people across the Gaza Strip, and increasingly inside the West Bank – the two regions that comprise Palestine.
Having already killed at least 60,000 Gazans, Israel is inflicting purposeful malnutrition resulting in hundreds of child-deaths, preventing access to potable water, and now about to force the evacuation of one million from central Gaza to crowd together with another 1 million in the South – an open air crowded prison without food, sanitation, much shelter or any utilities.
This is what terrorism actually looks like but on a mass scale. Israel is instilling fear in an entire population in order to pursue political goals – in this case the illegal invasion and colonisation of another land, a people recognised by the United Nations.
The UK, with a history of driving establishment of Israel by force, from the point of the Balfour Treaty in 1919 through to the terrorist establishment of the first Israeli government in 1949, is complicit in today’s terrorism. The UK produces the suicide drones that kill Gazans indiscriminately each day, and supplies the parts that keep the incessant FA32 jet flights across the Gaza Strip to identify targets. These actions produce mass terror in the pursuit of political ends: Greater Israel and the eradication of an entire people.
The overwhelming majority of the countries of the world have condemned Israel’s actions. The millions across Britain who have protested non-stop throughout the past 21 months have forced MPs to question Britain’s actions and demand we “Stop Arming Israel!” But Starmer offers lip-service only to the potential of challenging the far-right Apartheid racist-colonialist Israeli government, whilst arresting those who act on his words. Hypocrite!
We have two priorities, to defend the right to protest at home and demand freedom for Palestine!
Trade unions need to step-up to defend the right to protest in this country. Arrest and proscription of Direct Action places our right to strike for workers rights in serious jeopardy – after all, picket lines and protests outside workplaces are forms of Non-Violent Direct Action! If they come for Peace protesters in the morning, they’ll be calling union activists “terrorist” by nightfall.

Say it Loud – Refugees are Welcome Here!

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald, challenging the racists in this city. In the wake of the huge anti-racist demonstration against fascist-led racist gatherings in Glasgow and Epping, the call has to be to confront the racist mobs everywhere – Whose streets? Our Streets! Thanks to Julie for timely research on the facts. Keep on protesting – join Stand Up To Racism! https://standuptoracism.org.uk/

My unedited version below:

Say it Loud – Refugees are Welcome Here!

There is something worse than despicable about people who want to assault and abuse refugees. Yet there they are, forming-up to rage in protest outside squalid buildings, some of them trying to burn them down with the people trapped inside.
These buildings, hardly passing as “hotels” – never improved, never refurbished, never invested in – now being used as cheap accommodation and a fast-buck for the tax-cash grabbing owners, cramming-in people who have foot-slogged across continents to risk their lives in flimsy rubber boats to get here.
These people are refugees – between 60 and 80% of people in those small boats are granted asylum -they are refugees as a class. They don’t get given jobs here – they cannot work for ages until their applications are processed and successful. They don’t come here to hang around shopping centres, they come here to contribute to the economy, have a life and pay taxes.
Asylum is a human need and a human right. When you’re being attacked by military or armed gangs, your family raped and killed, your homes and lands destroyed either by war or extreme weather, you should be helped.
And we should be incredibly proud of helping. Thankfully, most people in every city, every town, from student through to pensioners, are ready to help those in need. But now, with violent racist thugs seeking to take-over our streets, anti-racists need to come out and challenge them, to Stand Up To Racism!
The fascist-led thugs attacking the hotels across the country, throwing bricks and attacking Police this Summer are more than ready to be treated in hospital by the migrant workforce on which the NHS and many other public services depend. Immigrant doctors are saving lives, immigrant teachers are teaching our children, immigrant workers are cleaning our buildings and driving our public transport.
But rampaging racists don’t care about facts. Not least, asylum-seekers in the UK get no privileges. Asylum seekers cannot choose where they live. People seeking asylum receive little financial support and are not allowed to work, usually getting £49.18 a week to pay for things like food, clothing and toiletries, but if the accommodation provides meals this is reduced to £9.95 a week. The UK is not overrun with asylum seekers. In a country of 66,000,000 people, 32,345 refugees were living in so-called “hotels” last year.
The UK is home to just 1% of the world’s refugees. As of 2024, the number of refugees in the world stands at 27.1 million. Last year, 108,000 applied for asylum in the UK, which is 1/3 the number in Germany and only 1/10 of the total applications in the EU.
Net migration to the UK last year was about 450,000, with small boat migrants a tiny proportion of that. Here, 1 in 6 (or 16%) of the population were born outside the UK. The idea that Black people are taking over the UK is an impossible racist lie. More than 90% of land across the UK has no buildings on it – hardly overcrowded! Britain is comprised of at least 55million white-skinned humans out of a population of 66 million – hardly “taken-over” – as if that should matter! Do you really think that a human born with darker skin pigmentation is inferior to “white” or lighter skin – are you stupid or just ignorant or lazy-minded or just fooling yourself that you’re more important than other people?
And those who say Black men are sexual abusers need to look at the list of paedophile celebs, politicians and royals who are White, including many of the racists’ own heroes. In fact, the vast majority of child sexual abuse happens inside the family, and the vast majority of families in Britain are White – you don’t see the racists protesting against white gangs organising child sexual exploitation. The racists don’t really care about children, they just use them to exploit racist ideology.
So who is raping and pillaging our country, exactly? The top 50 richest families (that’s just 2,000 people) in the UK now hold more wealth than the poorest half of the population (33 million of us). The greed and avarice of the super-rich, their exploitation and maltreatment of the UK’s working class dwarfs any misbehaviour of any migrant.
It is the super-rich who are funding the fascist-led far-right racist demonstrations and their vile racist propaganda, and given the oxygen of publicity by the politicians and media led by those who are actually responsible for our housing crisis, our crumbling NHS and schools – the big landlords and corporate executives who deserve all our bile.
Stand up and clear our streets of the racists. Say it loud and proud – Refugees are Welcome Here!

For a Party of the Working Class

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (22.7.25). I found myself in the interesting position of not being able to write this as part of any official mainstream organisation. It is the rule of the Trade Union Congress that representatives can only support the Labour Party. And it is the general policy of lobby and campaign groups not to be directly associated with any political party. There’s a dilemma. A new party of the working class will need affiliates from the broad progressive movements. Campaigns will have to pin their political colours to their masts and produce a confederation tied to a set of principles not unlike organisations of the working class across Europe and beyond. It demands an ideological and constitutional change away from the cosy neutrality of post-war reformism. All that is over and gone. The need for a new working class party is the result of the end of the old order and norms.

The working class needs a new Party. The level of representation of working class interests in the UK Parliament is as low as that if the 1910’s. Multi-millionaire career politicians preside on all sides.

The working class – those of us wholly reliant on wages and/or top-up welfare benefits – number 2/3rds if the population – at least 40 million people in England & Wales. Parliamentary decisions, over spending policies and laws governing our behaviour and beliefs, are made in the interests of the super-wealthy and their corrupt capitalist system.

We, the majority, have little voice. Our political representatives have a basic salary of at least twice the average wage, and can take additional jobs kowtowing to the corporate lobbyists. They oppose the regulation of working conditions, wages, housing conditions and rents, health standards and utility costs. Their talk of freedom is of the individual right to take liberties on charges and levels of exploitation to maximise profits, not the freedom from poverty and oppression. And now, the support for Israel amidst genocide, and rearmament towards a third world war is linked with widespread funding of individual MPS by Israeli lobby groups.

These self-interested politicians hold the Houses. 

Starmer’s Labour (and Blair’s before that) place growth in profitability way above the eradication of deprivation. The highest utility costs in the western world and poorest State pension, attacks on the paltry incomes of people with disabilities, blaming migrant labour despite their gross levels of cheap labour and servitude for the middle classes – that’s not a party for workers.

The Tories, from Thatcher to Cameron, Johnson to Sunak, mercilessly plundered the British Exchequor to enrich and engorge the billionaire class at the expense of every public service and all the essential needs of workers, whilst cutting their own tax liabilities to a minimum. 

The Liberals, yellow Tories now useless, devoid of that one chance at coalition given the lessons of when they threw working class students into decades of severe debt, capped redundancy pay, privatised Royal Mail (look how that worked-out for jobs and public services) and forced through cuts to health and welfare to expedite the new Age of Austerity. Not on our side.

And Reform UK, another Party of and for the Establishment, lead and funded by multi-millionaires and supported by rabid right wing billionaires based in the USA and Russia. For Farage’s patriotism read representation of the ultra wealthy, tax cuts for the rich, full privatisation of the NHS with further cuts to the new dilapidated public services, and spend tax money on war instead whilst destroying democracy and dividing working class communities through rampant racism.

As for the Greens, their broad church approach suggests workers and socialists are included yet, in practice, when running a Council in Britain or part of a coalition in Europe, they act purely on behalf of capitalism and attack workers on strike, reneging even on environmental promises.

None of these Parties represent or even care about working people. In our fragmented and polarised society, those with money are looking after themselves and their own at the expense of the many.

A Party of and for the working class would ensure class principles of collective organisation and solidarity, challenging the vast inequalities so apparent across the UK today. Taking hold of the resources of the world’s 6th richest economy, a government placing need above profit could redistribute our wealth to benefit the vast majority. 

In this world of plenty there should be no poverty, and therefore no billionaires. The super-rich can be legally bound to pay their taxes, to cap their prices, and to produce for the common good. The principles of working class solidarity would end Austerity, fight racism and welcome refugees, oppose oppression of minorities, fund welfare instead of warfare and militarisation of society, and take urgent action on climate change.

This is no dream world. The proposal for a new working class Party is on the table, and across the country, enthusiasm for these policies has already found electoral support at or above voting preferences identifying Labour, the current party of Government.

Everywhere, workers are demanding change – real change. In the absence of a progressive left-wing party, workers are turning to Reform UK as a protest vote despite its obvious contradictions. But this acceptance of racism and division is the greatest threat to our future safety and security.

The unity of the working class has to be created by the working class, organised and combined. 

Whilst Corbyn and Sultana have broadcast the call for a new Party it is up to ordinary workers of all communities and occupations to make it happen and decide its purpose and policies. 

A working class party, interpreting and realising the socialist call in the 21st Century, is now an urgent necessity: a society formed from the efforts each person according to their abilities and providing to each according to their needs. It’s time!

Build Climate Action!

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (15.7.25) calling for a fight for climate action, alongside everything else! If anyone hasn’t read the Met Office report, conservative in the extreme yet painfully dire in its predictions and concerns, then do so. In any case, out of existential self-interest or global climate justice, rebuild the climate movement, now!

Unexpurgated below (not my chosen headline!)

We need a Heat Strike! So say the majority of trade unions across Britain and beyond. Employers are failing to recognise the threat from high temperatures to its workforce, politicians have refused to identify a top temperature with stated conditions in which it should be illegal to be forced to work.
The national campaign, Heat Strike, has won huge support from workers everywhere following the third heatwave of the year.
Drivers sat in poor quality commercial cabs have recorded 42 degrees centigrade whilst stuck in traffic. Bus drivers required to manage 9-hour shifts in 32-35C. Cafe kitchens and warehouses, and many small offices and shops, are recording temperatures impossible to function within, employers uncaring and unready to supply any remedial equipment, workers fainting from dehydration.
The UK is not an air-conditioned country. Unlike most of the Western world, our housing and buildings are not built or equipped to ensure comfort or safety during extremes of hot, cold or flash-flooding caused by Climate Change. Our natural environment is in crisis, seasonal dissonance e killing plants and insects.
According to the EU Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), 12 countries and some 790 million people around the world experienced their hottest June ever, Baghdad’s 49C feeling like 65C.. Temperatures were particularly extreme in Europe, 45C in places with two ‘exceptional’ heatwaves. Wildfires are raging, destroying urban areas as well as wildlife, a water-shortage in Hamburg, Germany and Spain’s hottest day ever recorded hitting 46C.
Humans cannot survive for more than a few hours in temperatures over the body temp of 37C at 90% humidity, making it essential for access to cool spaces and liquids.
The Met Office says this is the new normal. Globally, June 2025 was the third-warmest on record, continuing a heat streak in recent years as the planet warms as a result of humanity’s emissions of greenhouse gases. It’s not over, and next year will be hotter still. Europe is warming several times faster than the global average, the sea levels rising around the UK faster than anywhere else, storms and coastal erosion destroying homes. Last winter was the UK’s wettest, with sudden deluges – 2-4 times the average rainfall last September, the cost of water ingress very high.
Heat-related deaths in England and Wales are predicted to rise 50-fold over the next half century if adaptations are minimal. Fatalities will climb six-fold as the planet warms and an ageing population becomes more vulnerable. Add to that the food shortages caused by harvest failures and transport disruption, alongside country-wide water shortages – the result of inadequate investment by profit-hungry private companies – and we cannot continue as we are.
Even the most crazed conspiracy theorists have stopped arguing that Climate Change is a hoax, now saying we have to roll with it or blaming some deep-State contrivance. Climate change is not about belief – t’s a fact. It used to be that only the far-Right and the ignorant argued against tax-investment in climate damage reduction
Yet now, the UK’s Labour government stands alongside USA in cutting investment in adaptations and emissions-reductions to a minimum, investing in more fossil-fuel extraction and use compared with plans laid only a few years ago. We need shaded streets not concrete boulevards, retrofits to millions of homes, increased water storage and energy conservation. We need a National Climate Service to coordinate adaptations, as a matter of extreme urgency.
Whilst all the scientific predictions broadcast by Greta Thunberg’s Youth Strike for Climate have come true, and worse, the campaign clamour for action that peaked back in 2019 has now died down despite evidence of the climate emergency being plain to see. Climate appears not to be an electoral priority.
But the people swept away in flash floods in Texas, USA, last week are a minuscule fraction of the havoc being wreaked right now by the heating of the atmosphere and oceans across the world. Contrary to Trump’s repeated one-in-a hundred-years false propaganda, the Americas are suffering repeated crisis costing their economies trillions of dollars a year. Transnational Finance Corporations, including the world’s biggest bank, JP Morgan Chase, are publishing reports to affiliates identifying huge and immediate threats to “business as usual”.
But businesses are looking for opportunities to make more money rather than invest in safety and slowing-down the chaos: pharmaceuticals can make big money out of malaria spreading through the northern hemisphere; insurance companies can limit liabilities by ending cover for homes on floodplains.
It should be no surprise that bosses don’t care about what happens to us. Corporate government won’t invest in our social infrastructure. The only solution for the working class is to down tools, take strike action to force employers to put in the adaptations we need to survive. Climate is a working class issue. Climate activism must rise again and trade unions have a key role to play! We are launching a Year for Climate Action from September 2025. Join us!

Tony Staunton
President, Plymouth Trades Union Council

It Is OK to Support the People of Palestine!

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (8.7.25), written to evade censorship and to a deadline 12 hours before the Netanyahu/Trump talks. There, they finalised a plan to transport 600,000 of the 2 million Palestinians in Gaza to the destroyed city of Rafah in the far South, as the first trenche of clearing North and Central Gaza completely.
They are looking to create a beach-side Mediterranean holiday resort for the super-Rich, Trump part of the billionaire property-speculating investments. Partying on the bodies of tens-of-thousands of Palestinians. This is Capitalism/Imperialism on steroids. Quite beyond words, really.
This is a catalogue of multiple war crimes, crimes against all humanity, undertaken in broad daylight, recorded and broadcast globally. We can and will hold these bastards to account.
Trump has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Netanyahu, not so surprising when you think of the previous warmongers who have won. But their sheer audacity and narcissism, their sociopathy, is a statement of absolute Power that exposes their real weakness. Our protests, our boycott, our worldwide outcry can build such a movement as to mobilise billions and overturn their entire system.
Keep protesting. Build the Campaign. Free Free Palestine (and all of us)! We are all Palestinians!

The article (for what its worth):

It is OK to Protest for Palestine (Fly the Flag!)

Amidst all the confusion it is important to note that it is not illegal to offer support for the civilian population of Palestine, themselves subject to an illegal invasion and occupation. It’s OK to fly the flag!
Palestine is recognised as a sovereign State by 147 countries of the United Nations, including Spain, Ireland, Norway, and the huge nations of Venezuela, Brazil, China, Russia and India. Palestine is recognised and politically supported by most countries of the Global South, and UK trade unions. Palestine sits at the UN General Assembly.
Palestine is seemingly only not supported by the countries of the North West, especially the UK and USA. These two countries, more than the rest of the world put together, are arming Israel from their citizens tax-money, exporting munitions, military equipment and military advisers, training to facilitate the ongoing genocide (illegal under international law) in Gaza and settler colonialism in the West Bank.
Palestine’s two non-contiguous territories have been separated by illegal military invasion, land clearances and military occupation over the past 77 years. Israel has constantly waged military and political warfare against its Palestinian neighbours before and since its inauguration.
The current catastrophe of disproportionate death and destruction of Gaza by Israel – possibly 1500 Israelis killed and at least 60,000 Palestinians including 20,000 children (the bodies are there to be counted) since October 2023 means this is not a war of two sides, it is the drive towards the continuous extermination of just one people and an entire nation.
Supporters of such Israeli action justify the ethnic clearance (illegal under international law) on the grounds of Israel’s right to exist, whilst critics of this genocide are labelled as “Islamist sympathisers” and even “terrorists” by some, for demanding an immediate ceasefire, help and reparations for the people of Palestine and security for the Palestinians’ homeland.
Ironically, the fascist descendants of Hitler and Mussolini who systematically rounded-up and killed over 6-million Jews in the horrific Holocaust during the Second World War are now supporting Israel alongside far-right white supremacists and racists here and across the West. Why?
Because Israel is a racist colonial Apartheid State with a constitution which render Israeli citizens much higher rights and powers than any non-Israeli citizen.
The country’s laws are very similar to those of Apartheid South Africa which was supported by fascists everywhere as representing the separation of so-called human “races” and the domination of the superior “Whites”. In the Israeli context, the term “White” represents a political allegiance to Zionism rather than skin-colour.
White-supremacists in the UK, including the notorious Stephen Yaxley-Lennon aka Tommy Robinson, would like Britain to develop an Apartheid system, Whites over Blacks, from a belief in racial superiority and genetic ethnic purity. They whip-up anti-Muslim hatred and blame refugees and migrants for the crisis of housing and health services that, in truth, have been sucked dry by privatisation and corporate greed.
At this time, the overwhelming majority of the British people do not share such beliefs or sympathies, our friends and relations ethnically diverse and multicultural.
The active support for Palestine by ordinary people includes Jews not affiliated to the political creed of Zionism – a world view distinct from Judaism. It is not anti-semitic to oppose Zionism.
Across the West we have seen huge political protests for Palestinian rights. These must continue and grow. It is therefore of extreme concern that Starmer’s Government is clamping down on support for Palestine, targeting those of the progressive Left seeking Peace with Social Justice. It appears the government would prefer us proscribed rather than the far-Right. Democracy ensures the right to protest for Palestine. We are not illegal!

These Changes are not What Labour Promised

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (1.7.25) opposing the Welfare Bill currently in debate. It’s mean, it’s punitive to those most in need – especially the young – and it’s a policy of capitalist privilege and entitlement benefiting the wealthiest in society. Fight it. Fight Austerity. Tax the Rich…in fact, ban them!

U-turns are sometimes used to ensure you carry on in the direction you intended. They don’t always represent back-tracking or a change of mind.
Changing the criteria for claims for Personal Independence Allowance (PIP) and Health element of Universal Credit appears at first glance to restore welfare rights. Many politicians who were prepared to rebel against their Party Leadership and the anger of their parliamentary Whips now claim victory, whilst those MPs who stood by Starmer, including Plymouth’s two Labour MP’s, are now shamed by their obvious lack of concern for people with disabilities.
In reality, the changes are superficial. Under the guise of getting people back to work, should someone with disabilities actually find an employer willing to hire them – a rare event in itself – the claimant risks everything. If the job doesn’t work out you become a “new claimant”, and hey presto, where a month ago you would receive assistance with the essential tasks that you find impossible, the new eligibility criteria says you’re not worthy. You are condemned to severe poverty.
People with disabilities confined to limited lives with close horizons feel unfulfilled, the problem being all the barriers to being able to work: the employers who won’t make flexible adjustments to meet their needs; the poor transport facilities and costs; the cost of specialist apparatus. These are social barriers that effectively create or exacerbate the physical or mental characteristics of a person’s individual abilities.
Generally, it is society that determines disability by facilitating every person, or not. Legal changes to require employers to provide facilities would develop social inclusion, not the sharp stick of requiring crude employment that risks individual failure.
The current benefit system does write people off, it’s true. But changing the arithmetic of benefit costs is an inhuman method of dealing with the vast spectrum of human conditions. Start from the view of human need, not the departmental budget.
The cuts to PIP were originally proposed by the Chancellor in order to balance the State’s War Budget. The original announcement of £5billion cuts to disability benefits came in April, 2 days after the government announced a £5billion increase in military spending on nuclear weapons. To pay for rearmament, Starmer targeted those at home least able to fight back.
Now, because of a public outcry threatening so many seats of Labour MPs, amendments to the original Bill protect over a million existing PIP claimants and two-and-a-quarter million current UC recipients. But the amendments leave-out 58% of new PIP claimants, 730,000 future UC recipients, 440,000 JSA/ESA claimants on time-limited awards, every disabled person under the age of 22 and every person who becomes disabled in the future.
This is not the “Change” that was promised by Labour at last year’s general election. From November 2026 the safety-net for people with disabilities will be weakened and holed. The new points-system will raise the bar, the criteria to receive help (of up to £110 a week – no King’s ransom) dramatically tightened. The changes are divisive and sinister.
This bastardised two-tier system will find many claimants £5,700 a year worse-off. Why? Because the government is too weak and complicit to chase the super-wealthy individuals and corporations – including the heavily tax-subsidised arms companies – who avoid paying billions in taxes, year after year. It’s the poor who pay the price.
Able people have to fight for the rights of people with disabilities, not least because we never know when we’ll be in need ourselves. The government should scrap its entire welfare bill and start again from principles of social justice, human rights and Welfare not Warfare!

Protesting Can Never Be Called Terrorism!

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (24.6.25), lambasting the government for proposing to ban the Palestine Action group as terrorists, and thereby make Non-Violent Direct Action illegal. This is a threat to us all, activists and citizens alike. It was written the day before publication, hours before the Minister announced in Parliament that the ban will go ahead, a complete travesty of the definition of terrorism, more literally applicable to Israel and the United States and their actions against Palestinians and Iran. Protests were held across the country last night against the ban, and must continue. Amnesty International, CND, StW and PSC have all lodged formal challenge, and that must continue. The fight for Freedom for Palestine and against imperialist war is one-and-the-same, and must be built louder and stronger.

Protesting can never be called Terrorism!

The right to self-defence is a rule of law. To be attacked without provocation is simply unjust, and we accept the use of reasonable force to defend ourselves in any explanation of violent or destructive behaviour, whether person-on-person or country-on-country.
Another rule involves the recognition of complicity. To be a by-stander to an injustice and do nothing is, in effect, to accept the injustice and thereby be complicit with it. To not intervene to stop a crime when you know it’s happening can identify you as a party to the offence.
These fundamental rules are now under threat.
Humanity and civilisation is being tested to breaking-point by climate change: extreme weather conditions destroying entire regions, seasonal dissonance destroying agriculture, mass extinction of insect and wildlife; and social strife in the clamour for depleted resources.
The fossil fuel companies and their friends are engaged in violent acts against the ecology, destroying entire communities. We are complicit if we knowingly watch and do not act. That has been the successful defence of many climate activists discharged by juries clear about our right to expose greater crimes.
Unprincipled politicians and corrupt corporations have roared, red-faced at being challenged by direct action. They have lobbied weak judges to declare unjustly long prison sentences. The UK Government wants to end our defence, including banning the use of Non-Violent Direct Action in pursuit of the protection of life itself.
As great a test today is the legitimacy of warfare. Aren’t we, at Law, all complicit with illegal mass murder if we do not try to intervene, expose and stop the slaughter?
The USA bombed a sovereign country last weekend, a State that had made no threat against America and was actively engaged in negotiations at the time. The violent action of Trump is illegal. It follows on from the illegal destruction of Gaza by Israel, its key protagonists wanted to stand trial by the International Criminal Court. Their offensive and illegitimate violence continues.
To stand aside and say or do nothing is to be complicit. Last week’s spraying of red dye on RAF bombers by the Palestine Action protest group not only exposed the poor security at the Base but also symbolised the prevention of a far greater crime, stopping the bombers from taking part in acts of genocide in Gaza and-or an illegal invasion of the State of Iran.
To hide such a legal and political debate, the UK Labour government is trying to determine that Palestine Action is a terrorist organisation and must be banned, its members and supporters tried as terrorists. The Irish music group, Kneecap, are artists who write and sing songs of rebellion against injustice, now likewise condemned as terrorists.
This authoritarian paranoia is as bizarre as it is unacceptable – undemocratic attempts to shift the entire nation away from our basic human rights, including the right to protest.
Trade unionists, above all, should be outraged at any attempt to repress collective political campaigning. Trade union organisation – the right to combination for mutual-protection from exploitation – has been hard-won.
Not all laws are Just. Unjust laws and State activities must be challenged. Mass campaigns of defiance and opposition to unjust laws represent the entire history of our successful transition towards democracy and universal suffrage. We must not treat this lightly.
We are facing war and climate collapse – the multi-faceted existential crisis of humanity. Non-Violent Direct Action is valid protest against illegitimate acts of violence and destruction against people and planet. Defend the campaigners of Palestine Action! They are not terrorists. They are attempting to stop State terrorism.

has Third World War Already Begun?

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (17.6.25), written the day before and hardly keeping pace. Trump has convened the US national security council to prepare for war with Iran.
Think on it. The US president has told Tehran’s population to immediately evacuate the city. Israel has nuclear weapons. The imperialists want regime change in Iran and to break Iran’s ties with Russia, and more importantly, China. They want to break Iran the way they have Iraq, Libya etc.
And the UK is fully engaged.
Stop Arming Israel!

(Unedited below)

Has World War Three already Begun?

Does it matter that Britain is training soldiers from the Israeli Defence forces here in order for them to conduct an illegal war? Is it of no consequence that Prime Minister Starmer is sending typhoon jets and refuelling planes to support Israel’s bombing of Iran? How does this represent “de-escalation”? Millions of us are outraged and protest that these are acts of warfare, not even voted upon by our elected representatives in Parliament.
In the context of international law, and to be confirmed by the hindsight of written history, the UK is “at War”. Our political leaders, including the Armed Forces Minister Luke Pollard, are complicit with genocide in Gaza and illegal bombing of the citizens of Tehran, the capital city of Iran. Neither of these joint military actions are happening in self-defence.
Israel’s invasion and occupation of Gaza, destroying 80% of buildings, all infrastructure, killing 60,000 unarmed civilians with 200,000 seriously injured is not proportionate to the stated 1,000 Israelis killed by Hamas fighters 19 months ago.
The current enforced and intentional starvation of the 2 million people still inside Gaza, trapped in an open air prison without food or clean water, are acts of barbarity, immorality and despotism.
Cabinet members of the Israeli parliament, self-identified as Fascists representing a fascist party – so extreme that even the British government has sanctioned them – call for the use of nuclear weapons in Gaza and upon Iran.
Iran had not attacked Israel first. Israel cannot prove self-defence, not least because there is no evidence a) that Iran was planning to attack Israel, and b) there is no evidence that Iran had nuclear weapons nor that they have the means or intention to build any. Prove otherwise.
The rationale for bombing Iran is a repeat of the false claims of Blair and Bush for their illegal invasion of Iraq. As stated back then, nuclear weapons are illegitimate and should be immediately dismantled. So why is it OK for the UK or Israel to have them?
Over decades, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has consistently received the practical support of the USA. President Trump shipped about 300 AGM-114 Hellfire air-to-ground missiles to Israel on Tuesday in full knowledge of the “surprise” attack on Iran last Friday.
Trump has continued the call for regime change in Iran, tearing-up agreements during his first term of office and now threatening Iran with the “full-strength” of US military force. Trump and Netanyahu state they want to see regime change, the economic, imperialist and ideological reasons for which are obvious. Israel is continuing to do the work for US imperialism just as it always has.
All talks are off, intentionally sabotaged by the West. Iran and Israel have stated that all targets are now legitimate, each hitting oil and economic facilities, killing civilians and pushing oil prices sky high internationally. Fires are burning at fuel facilities and military installations, Israel bombing nuclear sites – illegal as we hear all the time from the war in Ukraine, Russia rightfully condemned for shelling nuclear power plants. Why is it OK for Israel to do far worse?
Trump has provided Israel’s armaments, backed-up by the UK. They know that Iran is supported by both Russia and China, the momentum towards war in the South China Seas most obvious. The risk of global, never-ending war is very real, at huge cost to our welfare and security. So why is the British tax-payer spending billions upon billions of pounds killing civilians on behalf of Israel?
Will Starmer break away from UK complicity in war crimes and genocide?
So many questions. So little time.
Stop Arming Israel!
Tony Staunton, vice-Chair, CND

Greta’s Action Lies at the Heart of Humanity

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My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (10.6.25), written the previous morning (to meet print deadlines), just as the independent aid ship was assaulted in international waters in the Mediterranean and the protesters kidnapped. Right now the international justice campaigner, Greta Thunberg is said to have been deported from Israel to France, but we continue to harass our State and politicians to ensure the safety and the freedom of all of them. It was a brave initiative to highlight the starvation of Gazans, and has served to increase the public consciousness and rising opposition to the genocide being perpetrated by the Israeli State. With millions protesting across the world, the whole world watching, we can win Freedom for Palestine!

[the ship was assaulted, border and Greta and the crew kidnapped, forced to watch Israeli videos of October 7th before being deported, banned from Israel for life. It is said that the aid they carried was taken to the refugee food centres in Gaza – a privatised food distribution “service” run by a US Company, and where at least 20 starving people are being shot each day for not complying with the rules of the queue. This is dystopia.]

The article:

Once a government declares it is in a pre-War situation, planning to shift the country’s economy towards rearmament and civil preparations for conflict, the machismo sets in. The men pump themselves up. In today’s terms, it becomes “woke” to speak of Peace, by which is implied “unmanly”, cowardly, “without balls”. The papers are full of it.
This unseemly reversion to the bullish male-supremacist politics of the 1930’s is everywhere today, but nowhere more so than in the debates over Palestine. The UK Prime Minister, Starmer, stood in battle fatigues in a British base in Cyprus telling the service personnel they are doing a vital job for our Nation, but one we we should not speak of. Man up!
The Cyprus base is involved in bombing, drone-facilitated targeting, fighter jet flights and the missiles firing upon more than 2 million Gazan civilians, defenceless, homeless, dehydrated and starving, living in an open air concentration camp repeatedly bombed to rubble, constantly attacked by the world’s most sophisticated military machines.
Plymouth Labour MP Luke Pollard, the Armed Forces Minister, calls for a ceasefire and withdrawal of troops yet maintains the export licences allowing UK-made parts for the UK fighters flying missions over Gaza. The UK is complicit in Israel’s war crimes, second only to the USA in supplying the technology, training, military personnel and equipment that ensures the genocide of the people of Gaza continues.
Last Wednesday, Jeremy Corbyn placed before Parliament a Bill which passed it’s first reading whilst tens of thousands of protesters wrapped a red shawl around the entire building of Westminster, in protest at the unconscionable horror taking place in Palestine.
Corbyn’s Bill demands a public inquiry into Britain’s role in Israel’s invasion and illegal occupation of Gaza and the actions that have so far seen 61,000 killed, over 110,000 severely injured, and the entire population terrorised. Our political representatives must be held accountable.
The previous weekend half-a-million people marched on Parliament demanding that the UK “Stop Arming Israel!”. Such protests continue across the world.
It is not weak or woke to challenge Genocide! Unaccountable military force threatens us all. The people of Britain should know the scale of complicity in such atrocities, and our politicians must be held to account.
Film of starving civilians being bombed, shot and killed in Gaza is now broadcast 24/7 on our news. The Israeli government is shooting desperate people running towards food aid. We are supposed to keep quiet and accept this dystopian reality. We refuse to do so, not only for the Palestinians but for our own future, our standards of decency and the required treatment of our children and future generations.
This week the Madleen, the second independent ship carrying food aid and medicines to Gaza, has been impounded in international borders, the passengers taken to Israel as political prisoners. A previous attempt resulted in an aid ship being blown apart by the Israeli Defence Force, 9 passengers killed. This time, internationally renown human rights campaigners including Greta Thunberg were on board, the world’s media spotlighting her humanitarian cause.
Corbyn’s Parliamentary Bill, Thunberg’s Freedom Flotilla and all our protests represent the international conscience of the World against the complicity of our parliamentary representatives. Bringing food to the starving, breaking the silence, challenging racist totalitarian military power is no sign of weakness. These actions lie at the very heart of humanity.
History shall write the Truth and condemnation of this genocide to no less an extent than our damnation of the history of Slavery and Fascism. The names of those responsible will be remembered as anti-human monsters unless they act to Stop Arming Israel. Now!

Cash for Nuclear War but not Welfare!

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My weekly Comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (3.6.25), responding to Starmer’s outrageous and dangerous Strategic Defence Review, representing a drive towards nuclear war. The Idiot! A colossal waste of money in pursuit of personal aggrandisement and ultra-nationalist status at the expense of all emotional security and economic progress. The scale of my anger cannot be printed. Join me on Saturday 7th to protest, shout and scream, rage at the injustice. Welfare not Warfare! Nurses not Nukes! Books not Bombs! 12 noon at the Guildhall Square, Armada Way, Plymouth.

[in the event some 100 dedicated anti-nuclear activists joined the protests despite torrential rain. It was a start, a reconvening of those most alert to the risk of nuclear proliferation and war. Thank you each and every one].

Cash found for War instead of Welfare

What will you feel, say and do on the morning you wake-up to hear that a nuclear bomb has been exploded upon a population? You see, the idea that it’s the end of everything is not quite correct. In the ensuing nuclear war, the majority of the human race will die over prolonged periods of time in pain, homelessness and famine. Nuclear war bears no comparison to conventional warfare, the radioactive fallout keeps on killing, the destruction of infrastructure total.
The UK Government’s Strategic Defence Review has committed an additional £15 billion to nuclear weapons. The British tax-payer is buying F-32A jets to carry air-launched missiles carrying nuclear warheads, and adding a new fleet of nine nuclear “attack” submarines to the four new Dreadnought super-Subs armed with first-use Trident nuclear warheads.
We are in a “pre-War situation”, exclaimed Defence Minister Healey.
Britain will build 6 new munitions factories costing an extra £6billion over the next 5 years. 7,000 long-range weapons are to be built in the UK – a massive arsenal. Clearly the next war will be a nuclear war.
UK troops are part of a wider European military strategy and the entire nuclear weapons system based here will be reliant upon the provisions and infrastructure of the United States of America.
The Trident nuclear weapons system is not independent, always having been reliant upon and governed by the USA. Now it is announced that British-based US fighter jets will carry nuclear bombs, the “air delivery system” carrying “tactical nuclear weapons”. The proposition is that nuclear weapons can be used without mutually assured destruction. It is a nonsense.
The wars in Ukraine, Sudan and Palestine have proved that the classic “Rules of Engagement”, even if they used to be adhered to, don’t apply anymore. Military leaders are clear that they will do whatever they want to civilian targets and use weapons of mass destruction despite any international laws, rules of warfare or moral considerations. Genocide is normalised. Attack-first is the order of the day on all sides.
Public attitudes are being reset. Recruitment and retention in the armed forces is crucial, especially when most young people don’t want to fight and die. The proposed volunteer “Dad’s Army” is designed to demand allegiance. A new ideological offensive of militarisation coupled with patriotism (defined more by hate-filled xenophobia than love of country) is being wheeled-out.
Tax money is plentiful for military rearmament but not hospitals and schools. We are seeing tens-of-thousands of jobs being lost in health, education and social care, far more jobs lost than will be created by the arms industry.
Governments always find tax cash for weapons but not for welfare. It would cost £1.5 bn to reverse the Winter Fuel Allowance to pay £300a year to 10million pensioners, £3.5 billion to reverse the 2-child benefit cap safeguarding a third child with £66 per week, and £5 billion to reverse the draconian cuts to benefits for people with disabilities.
That money would be available now if they scrapped the £13 billion per year being spent on Trident nuclear weapons of mass destruction.
The NATO summit next month will recommend 3.5% of GDP to be spent on military resources and another 1.5% on civil protection and security. That 5% of GDP represents even more Austerity, cuts to welfare services and social infrastructure – the opposite of a safe and secure population.
We must protest against this drive to war – a waste of money, humanity and the environment. Demand the end of nuclear weapons – Welfare not Warfare! Saturday 7th June, 12 noon at Plymouth’s Guildhall Square. Join us! CNDUK.org

We must call out racists as racists!

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (28.5.25), prompted by the racist protest of 200 in Plymouth City Centre the previous Saturday, organised on a national platform by confirmed fascists, and screaming-out “Stop the Boats, Save Our Children”, meaning let asylum seekers drown, and all sexual abuse happens at the hands of Black people. Not only is the opposite the truth – 87% of sexual abuse in the UK is perpetrated by white British – but the violence implicit in their chants represents their intention to take-over our streets and communities through fear. That fear is primarily for Black people to experience, instantly recognisable and to be targeted. 

We witnessed this in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and we fought it and fascism back in the 1980’s to the point that people felt unable to make racist comments in workplaces and social events because they would always be challenged.

It would appear that the confidence of anti-racists to expose and challenge racism has gone, replaced by some ideologically nieve quest for consensus. It’s easy for white people to argue that the two sides – racists and anti-racists – have common ground and should talk instead of contest, but the question is begged – on what basis should the White protesters on each side debate with each other the terms of acceptance and treatment of Black people looking-on? Isn’t this a white-racist process of itself?

We have to listen to and ensure the involvement of people of colour in challenging racism. How can we best stand with you, and how can we best help ensure safety and respect? Why are white anti-racists prioritising talking with racist protesters over-and-above talking with Black and Muslim communities facing this rise of racist groups and protests?

Last Saturday, of the 200 in Plymouth City Centre there was no challenge to the racism from within their own ranks, meaning everyone on that far-Right protest were racist and had taken the trouble to come into the town centre in order to express their racism. These “Great British Protests”, with more planned, represent more violent gang attacks on lone people of colour in the streets, at home and at places of worship. We’ve seen it before and it’s happening again, this time worse. Never mind dialogue with the violent racists, get them off our streets!

My article in print, a pale shadow of the above:

Democracy requires a vibrant and engaged population with sufficient agency to affect society. Citizens have to act to ensure we’re heard. Passivity and silence give space for tyrants.

So, for those of us who want real democracy, we may feel pleased that Prime Minister Starmer is considering a U-turn of Winter Fuel Payments. Has he listened to the clamour of opposition? 

Scrape the surface and his back-track appears to be a sleight-of-hand. What trade unionists have labelled “Austerity Mk II” is still in place by a government voted-in on the basis of real change from the Tory years of welfare cuts and price hikes. 

Starmer’s attack on people with disabilities, some £5billion in cuts to support payments for those unable to work, remain in place. We’ll see what he has to say about the two-child cut-off for support, but overall the attack on the working class is continuing.

The public sector pay offers to teachers, health workers and civil servants are below inflation, once again. We are reminded that governments changed the measure of inflation from RPI to CPI to remove housing costs from the equation. The government’s current 3.5% CPI inflation-rate equals well-over 4% RPI, eating all of next years pay rise despite workers having already suffered years of pay cuts. No wonder there’s talk of strike action!

Schools get a below-inflation 3% budget increase needing to make yet more cuts to crumbling classrooms and jobs, and have to find that extra 1% for the pay deal. Hospitals are in an even worse position, massively underfunded and under-staffed, now facing the loss of migrant workers due to absurd and counter-productive new immigration rules.

Meanwhile there are more millionaires and billionaires lauded each week. The 2025 Rich List identifies just 50 families in the UK owning more wealth and resources than the bottom 50% of our citizens – that’s 1,000 versus 34 million people. The increased wealth of the rich comes directly from keeping wages low, evading paying taxes to the tune of £130billion each year, and raising housing, fuel and food prices over market value because governments let them do so. 

The super-rich live off our backs but tell us to blame migrants and the disabled for all our discomforts.

Last weekend in Plymouth and around the country, two poles of political organisation rallied on the streets, neither side satisfied with Starmer. But we have nothing in common. 

For the far-Right, Starmer is a socialist establishment stooge, soft on immigration and child-sex gangs, putting the two together to proclaim that Black people, and particularly Muslims, are all paedophiles. Their racism is rabid, hiding behind Union Jacks to represent the goal of Apartheid white-supremacy in Britain, and shouting for convicted fascist, Tommy Robinson.

For the counter-demonstrators demanding human rights and social justice for all, Starmer is a stooge of the billionaires, using racism to hide the rip-off ruling class and destroying the Welfare State to increase the private profits of the big corporations. His funding of war abroad, bombing of civilians in Gaza, and his anti-migrant racism has allowed fascist organisers to whip-up racist attacks, antisemitism and Islamophobia. 

The only possible common experience is of a harsh and unjust economic environment where the working class is being screwed. But the answers are polar opposites. 

We know from history that fascists use discontent to take violent control of the streets and demolish democracy. We know that trade unions encourage collective action to defend democracy and win better pay and conditions in organised workplaces. We Demand Change!

Blame the Billionaires not the migrants and asylum seekers! Fight for social justice for all!

Fascists are the threat, not Migrants!

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (20.5.25), warning of the fascist group coming to Plymouth on Saturday 24th May, under the banner “Great British Strike”, emulating the National Socialism of the Nazis, and conning the working class. Please join the counter-demo at the Sundial, Armada Way Plymouth City Centre, 11am.

The full article:

The fascists are coming! On Saturday, Nazi-sympathisers are returning to Plymouth to parade in the city centre that their forebears flattened with blanket bombing 84 years ago. They’re not welcome here!
We say Never Again! Never will we allow Hitlerites to foment violence, scapegoating sections of the working class or minorities identified by our skin colour or gender. Never again will we be conned by talk of white power and male supremacy preached and funded by super-rich multi-millionaires and their billionaire masters.
Fascism took-over in Germany and across Europe one hundred years ago resulting in social terror and genocide and world war in which more than 70 million people died. We should be historically informed and ideologically clear enough by now to recognise and oppose fascism when it speaks.
Fascism allows no free-speech or opposition, especially not organisation of the working classes such as trade unions. All individual interests must be subordinated to the good of the nation’s rulers, defined by those with wealth and power.
Fascism promotes extreme nationalism and militarism breeding contempt for electoral democracy and cultural diversity. Fascism is a political belief in there being a natural social hierarchy, white men at the top, and the rule of an elite as an autocracy with absolute power. Fascism is favoured by sections of the Capitalist ruling class when rumblings of discontent sound loud amongst workers.
Fascist ultra-nationalism was first fomented across Europe by isolating and demonising Jewish people, dividing the working class and ending with at least 6 million murdered in industrial death camps. Today it is Muslims similarly scapegoated across Europe, and now targeted in Britain as encompassing all Black and Brown-skinned “migrants” wherever born.
Racial hatred is being whipped-up again to divide us and rule us. Onto this stage comes Keir Starmer, echoing the nonsense that migrants are a threat to Britain’s economy, culture and identity. He claims that migration is making us a “country of strangers” when it is the extreme class divisions between rich and poor which segregate and alienate.
We’ve heard it all before. In the 1960’s Enoch Powell said white people were “strangers in their own country”, Nigel Farage marched with the British National Party in the 1980’s and praised Powell as his political hero, now Starmer echoed Powell with his “island of strangers” immigration speech. The fact is, this country’s working class has never tolerated a fascist party and isn’t about to now.
Migration isn’t a threat to the security and wellbeing of the working class. Migrants are not responsible for the housing crisis – rent hikes by landlords, interest rate hikes by banks, construction material price-hikes by monopoly corporations have together caused a crisis totally out of any power or influence of Black migrants.
Migrants are not responsible for the crisis of our Health Services – in fact migrants keep it going amidst decades of underinvestment. Without so-called “foreign-labour” the NHS and care homes for the elderly would not exist. You are far more likely to be helped by a migrant worker in a hospital than be in the queue alongside them.
Migrants are not responsible for the high prices of electricity and gas – they suffer the same charges whilst watching the record profits of Corporations like Shell and BP enrich the shareholding class.
We, the working class, are being fleeced by the super-rich, and fleeced by the same people telling us to blame the poorest and most powerless of the world on the basis of the colour of their skin. We’re not that stupid!
When we see Muslims being butchered in Palestine we protest – 600,000 on the streets of London last weekend. Britain’s multiculturalism is a hallmark of our post-colonial culture and identity.
Last weekend, leading fascist organisers in Britain called on Nazis to join Reform UK. They want to fast-track racism and male-supremacy, on a roll after the Prime Minister’s inflamatory speech.
Starmer is fuelling far-Right scapegoating out of fear of the rising tide of protest against his Austerity Mark 2 programme of social welfare cuts across the UK. We want to see real change for He could raise taxes on the Rich, but he’s on their side. He could restore the Winter Fuel Allowance and gain the support of the majority of of our cash-strapped elderly. He could u-turn on the £5billion cuts to welfare for people with disabilities. He could ensure a living wage for care workers and invest in the NHS and schools rather than military rearmament.
But Starmer is not on the side of the working class. History is littered with failed politicians who sought to appease fascists rather than expose their lies. Starmer is courting the same fate. Trade unionists must stand together and demand redistribution of wealth from the super-rich to the working class.

Oppose the Drive to War!

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (13.5.25), once again rattling-on about the drive to war. We need to rise-up against warmongering, costly rearmament at the expense of health and education, militarism and the authoritarianism it promotes. Nationalism and racism – the fear of “the Other” is a prerequisite to winning the population to war and death “in the national interest’. But whose interest? Not the working class – ever.

PS. I laughed at the editor’s placement of a picture of Putin alongside my name. I have always lived by the adage, “Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism”.

All this wondrous talk of Peace is actually the opposite – it’s War Talk! The government’s Strategic Defence Review is proof enough of that. Why would we need to declare an emergency uplift in military spending, at a direct and crippling cost to welfare benefits for people with disabilities, unless we were preparing for war?
The second question is two-fold. Who is about to attack us and who are we about to attack? Talk of Russia taking-over Europe is beyond nonsense. On the one hand the western military strategists say the Russian economy is in tatters and at the same time they argue that Putin wants to invade Britain. Both arguments cannot be correct.
The hypocrisy gets worse. Our leaders and those across the West are wringing their hands at the enforced famine and mass starvation of two million Palestinians, whilst actively providing the arms and hardware with which to pound and systematically murder people across Gaza.
The stated desire for ceasefire is not what it seems. They are reconfiguring towards fresh battle lines in Europe, the Middle East and the far-East.
Labour’s so-called ‘defence’, by which they mean the promotion of war and militarism, represents an offensive ideology competing with the right-wing of the Tories and chasing the ultra-nationalism of Reform UK. Not only a ‘triple lock’ on Trident replacement, producing a new generation of outrageously expensive but illegal weapons of mass destruction, but also prioritising rearmament tied into the US ideological and military framework.
The global tensions are being ramped-up by the West. The West is worried by the fact of a multi-polar world where newly industrialised countries are strengthening and new values are being asserted, such as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, led by the states of the global South.
The West does not accept this new world and is willing to go to war to prevent it, apparently even to nuclear war.
There is no Peace in Palestine, because the UK’s F-35 exports are more important than stopping genocide. The UK placing its bombers in Diego Garcia and firing on Yemen represent preparations for war against Iran, a country whose people and economy cannot afford war.
The fragile ceasefire between India and Pakistan represents a ramping-up of more proxy hostilities, the West seeking India’s allegiance in preparation for an offensive upon China.
These battles represent new spheres of influence, changing the old certainties of Western imperialist domination. Ultimately these wars are about the assertion of power by force by competing regional elites to extract enormous personal wealth. They should be exposed and opposed.
Meanwhile the transfer of workers’ tax-money from education, health and social welfare to increase arms spending to 2.5% and then 3%+ of our Gross Domestic Product sets us on a war-footing. It provides a big boost to the British arms industry under the Big Lie of re-industrialisation.
We’re not conned by this false impression that military production can generate economic growth. The decline of manufacturing industries is separate from the arms industry, tax investment in weapons systems diverting all possible investment from the civil production and climate adaptations urgently required.
War batters the international working class, destroying our security, welfare and wellbeing. The continuation of enforced Austerity – the destruction of our social infrastructure – intensifies working class vulnerability.
The destruction of hundreds-of-thousands of jobs in education and health in order to pay for a rise of a few tens-of-thousands of jobs associated with the military should not be condoned by trade unions.
Next Saturday’s huge national demonstration will shout for Peace with Social Justice, in Palestine and everywhere. Welfare not Warfare!

Oppose Rearmament and Militarism

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This week’s comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (6.5.25), uncharacteristically offering a personal memory in pursuit of a wider general point. Being against imperialist war is not a pacifist stance necessarily – it is a recognition of class society. Workers are sent to die for the ambitions and profits of the ruling class. And the Second World War was, above all, an imperialist war. We need to build working class resistance to oppose the drive towards the third world war, urgently.

The full text:

“Those who celebrate war have never seen it”. The words of my father, who fought through the entire 6 years of the Second World War. A skilled sailor, a gunner on the convoys, steering a landing craft on D-Day, he never spoke of his experiences until in his late seventies, and then seemed unable to stop recounting the horror.
My mother lost her first husband in ‘41. He was a bomber pilot. She, a young widow, then served as a fire warden, spotting the bombs to warn the emergency services. My parents married on VE Day +1, a date later to become their granddaughter’s birthday. The wedding was brief and a celebratory act, Dad about to finish his training at Turnchapel to captain an assault craft for the ground invasion of Japan.
Victory in Europe didn’t mean the war had finished. Their hasty marriage reflected fear as well as happiness, and the war experience infected the rest of their long but haunted lives.
There has been more war ever since, the competition between imperialist powers continuing to today, with a war in Europe and clamour for more war in the Middle East and against China.
Eighty Years on there are few who remember the impacts of war at home as well as abroad, even if the emotions are handed down the generations. I’ll never forget my old man’s eyes, glaring through his memories as he described the killing, his friends on fire as the ship began listing from the explosions, enemy planes strafing the deck, him seeing the face of his foe in the cockpit as he shot him down.
The trauma doesn’t go away when the fighting stops. War doesn’t ever stop once it’s in your head.
And yet this week, service men and women will be in school classrooms exalting military service. Infant and Primary School teachers, and even nursery staff will be encouraging the glorification of wearing uniform and dying for your country.
Teachers’ trade unions are warning against the militarisation of the curriculum. Whole classrooms will empty to learn the rudiments of marching on Plymouth Hoe, waving union jacks and singing the national anthem. Are pupils being brainwashed into this generation’s cannon fodder? Tax money for armaments has been taken from education budgets – mistaken priorities, surely?
Don’t tell me we’re not being prepared for war. Don’t pretend this week is a commemoration of a horror never to be repeated. The horror is continuing today in the Middle East, Europe and Africa and the messaging is towards the glorification of War, not a celebration of Peace.
Prime Minister Starmer, joining at Plymouth, slept a night onboard aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales a fortnight ago, addressing the deployment of young sailors from HMS Drake and elsewhere in battle fatigues reminiscent of Thatcher’s photos as a tank commander. Hurried rearmament was his message.
Starmer’s sending forces to the South China Seas via the Mediterranean, targeting Gaza, threatening Iran, bombing Yemen, and trying to deploy “troops on the ground” in war zones. Prime Ministers all want to command a war as their legacy. Remembering Blair he’d be advised to be careful what to wish for.
The week Starmer’s government announced an additional £5bn for the armed forces he also announced £5bn in cuts to disabilities allowances and PiP. War costs. He’s now spending £10bn a year on Trident nuclear weaponry that can never be used. Basic rate tax is bound to rise.
My MP, the Armed Forces Minister Luke Pollard, has developed a keenness for war preparations, raising spending to 2.5% of GDP and not stopping there, despite 1 in 4 of our children living in poverty amidst crumbling infrastructure and Austerity Mark II.
Plymouth’s former Royal Marines officer, Fred Thomas MP, might regret the rising rate of homelessness of veterans but his government is cutting public services for all. At the same time, the far-Right scream for the return of National Service if not conscription.
Raising military spending to 3% or even the 5% wished-for by President Trump is a target in the Government’s eye, a preparation for war. Deterring war requires detente and diplomacy, not militarism. Let our children study Peace.
We are being prepared. Wall-to-wall glorification of war, promotion of illegal weapons of mass-destruction both chemical and nuclear, plastic-doll cuddling of soldiers in uniform, ultra-nationalism being required as standard, the identification of all “others” as threats and potential enemies. Hatred of the “sub-humans”. Call of Duty 1-6. Militarism is a tool for authoritarian control, jingoism and subjugation.
I shall commemorate the dead and campaign for Peace in their memory. Welfare not Warfare!

May Day is International Workers Day

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This week’s Comment column for the daily Plymouth Herald newspaper (29.4.25), needing to use the space to advertise our May Day march and rally, 12 midday at the Plymouth Guildhall Square, Armada Way, and trade union Rally at the Athenaeum Theatre, Derry’s Cross, in the city centre. We will march! Please bring banners. Workshops from 2.15 at the Athenaeum Theatre, on trade union struggle; standing up to racism and fascism; and opposing militarism – Welfare not Warfare! Afternoon free cinema showing the vital film documentary, “Censoring Palestine” at 3.15pm. Light refreshments available.

Please join us.

It might feel like it, but this is not the start of Summer. Meteorologically, Summer will be welcomed-in on Saturday 21st June. Nevertheless, we’ve always celebrated May Day as a turning point, the days expanding and the trees in leaf again. Phew!

Workers celebrate May 1st for a very different reason. May Day is a celebration of the collective and organised power of the working class. 

For most of us, on every continent since the very start of the system of Capitalism, workers have had little to celebrate, condemned to precarious employment, wage-slavery and gross exploitation.

From the fourteenth century, the rise of a new Capitalist class, mercantilists competing with and largely replacing the ruling Feudal Landlord class, cleared the lands of peasants and herded them, with enforced ethnic-cleansing, into their hurriedly constructed slums and their 14-hour day factories producing the global Industrial Revolution which continues today.

Workers were combined into the Proletariat, the label an acknowledgment of the cruelly stratified system of the ancient Roman Empire within which the proletarii owned little or no property. Proletarian struggle could overthrow imperial governments. That’s why workers’ organisations are continually challenged and forcefully put down by the Capitalist Class who know the history and recognise that we are the many and they are the few. 

The Capitalist class organises, by any means possible, to ensure that workers cannot gain economic, social or political control. Should workers win, the exploitation of Capitalism will be ended, the social conditions of individual competition for private gain at the expense of others finally ended.

On 1st May 1886, workers in the United States of America called a strike for the 8-hour day. Workers across the continent heeded the call, downing tools, refusing to work. The bosses put-down the disputes with great violence, imprisoning and even executing activists. This only produced more opposition and demands for a legislated maximum working day.

By 1890 the international organisation of workers proclaimed May Day as International Workers Day, adopting the workers’ anthem written by French member of the Paris commune, Eugene Pottier: The Internationale, sung every year since across five continents, beginning “Arise Ye Workers from Your Slumber, Arise Ye Prisoners of Want!”

We commemorate the struggles and gains made by the labour movement, with marches and rallies. Trade Unionists will be marching for May Day in London this Thursday, celebrating our proud heritage. On Saturday we will March in Plymouth and enjoy an afternoon of festival and campaigning at the Athenaeum Theatre, Derry’s Cross.

It is worth remembering our heritage, and all the struggles that have been fought at great cost for regulated working hours, health & safety, and decent pay rates. Today, the celebrations across the UK are muted by the effect of decades of direct attack by successive government on worker’s rights, the right to strike and more recent restrictions on the right to protest. 

Much of the gains made by collective trade union actions through the post-war period have been reversed, young people facing precarious employment, a low-wage economy, housing crisis and the return of long working hours and the prospect of never reaching pension-age. 

Most importantly, we support action today against vicious employers. We support the Birmingham “bin workers” striking against pay cuts of £8k a year. We support delivery workers organising for income security.

This week’s celebrations across the UK are muted by the direct attack of successive governments on worker’s rights, the right to strike, and more recent restrictions on the right to protest by Starmer’s Labour government.

Trade unions have been bureaucratised and the notion of collective struggle demonised as if now irrelevant or counter-productive. Yet the central dynamic of Capitalism requires the extraction of surplus value from our labours, into the pockets of employers. That exploitation will always produce fights for workers’ rights. As individuals we are rendered powerless in the workplace, and forced together to support each other’s common need for decent pay and conditions.

Today the global proletariat number more than half of the entire human population. Strikes are happening every day across the world, and often winning. On an international scale, that’s a powerful force if ever brought together. Here in the UK, it’s time to build such collective resistance once again. 

Transphobia is a Threat to all who Seek Equality

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My weekly Comment article in the daily Plymouth Herald (22.4.25), opposing the Supreme Court (little new there) but feeling quite inadequate in expressing the pain and fear the Court cast over the Trans+ community, with shades of 51st State and an escalation of the ideological far-Right “anti-Woke” propaganda permeating everything and everywhere. How any socialist can condone any oppression of any minority is unfathomable. The contorted argument that oppressing Trans-women strengthens the rights of cis women is unconscionable. That socialists have to be Tribunes of the Oppressed at all times is unquestionable. Trans+ Rights Now!

The published article:

Women are still oppressed. On a global level, women suffer systemic abuse as second-to-fifth-class citizens or slaves, their burden of service denying choice, autonomy or agency. In Britain one-in-four women will experience an average of six-years of domestic abuse, with 2 women being killed by their partners or close relatives each week, sexual abuse overwhelmingly residing inside the family.
In the workplace, women are still not assured of equal pay and the low-pay across all care jobs is excused by the absurd caricature of the female sex as delicate and gentle, unfit for managerial roles and decision-making.
Women’s oppression is systemic, society maintaining values that demand men are outward, active and physical whilst women should be domesticated, passive and emotional. These absurd stereotypes damage us all and have long been challenged by feminists and disproved by our social experiences. Non-binary and Trans-people have always existed across all societies through all the ages.
The Supreme Court decision to decree that we are all defined by our birth genitalia is a serious set-back to women’s liberation from oppression. To limit sex-based protection to only those born “female” is an absolutist statement that denies the variance of biological characteristics in our species. It defies science. It is a ratcheting-up of State oppression not only of a small minority of humanity but all of us.
Any and all oppression limits workers’ rights and divide us one-against-the-other. Trade unionists in well-organised workplaces have long challenged sexism, opposing all oppression and demanding human rights for all. We oppose this legal change which empowers the most bigoted and reactionary beliefs and sentiments, all of which encompass misogyny.
Little wonder that it is the far-Right who have most loudly applauded the judgement, with a sudden outpouring of anti-Trans hatred.
It is a reactionary political judgement, no doubt pushed for by Starmer’s government and unworthy of any independent judiciary, but loudly applauded by right-wing politicians including Farage and Badenock. They stand with Hungary’s far-Right Prime Minister Viktor Orban who enshrined anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ constitution alongside Putin’s homophobic laws. They mirror the vicious bigotry of the fascist AfD Party in Germany. They emulate the politics of President Trump seeking to outlaw medical sex-change alongside his crusade against abortion rights.
In essence, the imposition of binary gender identity places women back into the repressive primary status as baby-makers and feeds the power of the male-supremacists. It restricts what control each of us has over our own bodies, not just in how we appear but which of our feelings are legitimate.
Human biology is non-binary. As any biologist will admit, humans have a variety of chromosome classifications: XX, XY, XXY XXYY and all manner of variation which is why, in science, sex isn’t classified as binary. Genitalia at birth can be ambiguous. You can’t have a binary classification system when there are more than two configurations! That’s why Trans-women are women!
Transphobia is a threat to all of us seeking equality and the end to oppression. Look back at the laws and social attitudes against homosexuality in the 1960’s, now recognisable as extreme prejudice. The damning of those of us with gender dysphoria will once again be condemned in time.
In the meantime, this Supreme Court ruling has reduced Trans+ rights in the UK, Trans people now unable to make equal pay claims and excluded from single-sex spaces that confirm their true identity.
Luckily, Trans+ people, trade unionists and most of the socialist left have risen to immediate protest against the ruling with tens of thousands on the streets last Saturday. This debate isn’t over, the fight for universal human rights continues.

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Workers’ control of production will require a revolution

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My weekly Comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (15.4.25), looking at one aspect of the current crisis of British Steel. Of course we want all utilities and public services nationalised, but under what governance exactly? There’s no reason for workers to trust State Capitalism – it simply maintains the competition and exploitation at the very heart of the System. Workers’ control of production will require a revolution.

The full unedited article here:

To eliminate poverty every essential product should be managed not for profit but for human need. Those needs are determined by the daily requirements for survival.
Every human being needs nutritious food, warm and dry shelter, protective clothing, love and nurturing, and education that ensures we learn how to look after ourselves and others. Socialism is the idea of a society that meets those needs for everyone – collective ownership of the means of production.
In a society of 67million human beings our needs have to be produced at scale. So we need mass production of food and housing and wherewithal, which in turn means we need large quantities of nutrients and bricks and materials, including steel for transport and buildings.
It becomes clear that these materials should be regarded as essential, not luxury items that we may also want but not need.

It stands to reason that all essential production should be considered as part of public services, socially organised. Private businesses do not operate according to social need, but rather for short-term private profit.
The fact that British Steel plc was privatised by Thatcher in 1988 and fleeced for shareholder profits ever since is a case in point. Steel is an essential social resource. If the Steel industry was publicly owned and controlled, the steel would be produced at cost, environmental concerns regulated and climate damage addressed, jobs valued, and the products – from building construction to railway lines – locally supplied.
As it is, British Steel has been a cash cow for private investors – shareholders seeking a maximum return on their money – for decades. Along the way they’ve sucked dry the blast-furnaces in Port Talbot and Llanwern, steel making in Teesside and the electric arc furnace in Rotherham.
The current crisis of the Scunthorpe steel plant is the latest example. The Dutch Corus Group bought BS in 1999, sold to Indian-registered company Tata Steel in 2010 who sold it in 2016 to Greybull Capital LLP for £1 in 2016, sucking-out its cash equity before going into insolvency in 2019.
Greybull is one of those predatory capitalist cowboy-firms buying vulnerable companies cheap and sucking them dry at the cost of thousands of jobs and livelihoods, including the Monarch Airline company.
The Chinese capitalist conglomerate Jingye bought British Steel from Greybull in 2020 promising huge investments, wanting a Made-in-Britain badge in the steel it supplies at market rates. The UK Governments pledged £3.2billion to support the UK’s steel industry, with more to come in the next few months.
Surely, throwing billions of tax-payers money at private companies makes no sense. Why couldn’t we just buy it for £1 and own and control it as an essential asset? Indeed, why did the State ever sell it off?
The answer is not economic but ideological. Successive governments, Tory, Tory/LibDem and Labour have all fully committed to the political philosophy of neoliberalism: free-market Capitalism – the opposite of socialism. First sponsored by President Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the belief is that the neoliberal State should not own anything that can make a profit for a private business.
Under this ideology, only when essential businesses go to the wall should the State intervene to bail out and protect shareholders for as limited time as possible. Hence the creeping privatisation of the NHS, and absurd ups-and-downs of the rail and bus industries, their profits wholly underwritten by our taxes. Socialism always and only for the super-rich, profits guarantee from the common wealth.
Now, as a Labour Government takes over the management of British Steel wielding statutory powers over the still privatised business, there are calls for renationalisation.
There are many forms and purposes of nationalisation. Capitalism required it for the reconstruction of industry after the Second World War. Indeed, Hitler’s fascist government, and Mussolini’s Italian fascist State utilised nationalisation as a tool of totalitarian control. It is not, of itself, a cure for poverty, unemployment, exploitation or oppression.
Trade unions like nationalisation of a certain kind. Democratic public ownership and control, with workers full engagement allows security of production and jobs despite market turbulence, able to deliver the goods for need not profit. Socialists demand workers’ control of industry.
In successive polls, at least 65% of the electorate like the idea of returning our services to public ownership – including water, energy, transport, the NHS and Royal Mail. Nationalism is seen as better than corporate ownership.
Starmer’s Labour government, like Blair’s before him, hates nationalisation, only ever doing so to protect the business owners for as short a time as possible. The Tories, now all-but defunct, agree. The millionaire Nigel Farage, executive director of Reform 2025 Ltd, the business behind the political party, Reform UK, bizarrely demands full nationalisation without compensation to the Chinese owners – at face-value a full-on socialist demand.
Bizarre because Reform UK is a thoroughly neoliberal organisation on the side of big business, seeking the smallest State possible with policies for privatisation of the NHS and against workers’ rights and State regulation. The arch-Nationalist Farage may pretend to be a friend of the working class ahead of the May elections, but there is nothing socialist about Reform UK.
The end of steel production here should not be an opportunity for false promises. The long-term failure of businesses to invest at all amongst the general industrial decline across the UK is a vindication of all of us who have warned against and opposed neo-liberalism from the start. This decaying corpse of a failed political creed represents a serious crisis for jobs and cost-of-living that demands we take control, in the collective interests of the working class not the careless greedy bosses.

Trump’s Tariffs will not Help the Working Class

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My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (8.4.25), following a weekend campaign stall which heard many local people saying they “like Trump”. In general, nationalist sentiments and comments were the majority. Socialists really do need to heed this shift to the right, and argue back. I can’t offer any deep economic analysis and would never predict the global impact of Trump’s tariffs, but one thing’s for sure. The working class is going to pay a heavy price, everywhere.

What have tariffs to do with us?

In Truth there is no such thing as the “National Interest”. We are not one nation, not because of any differences in skin colour or ethnicity, but because of social class. The richest 20% of British citizens live totally separate and different lives from the poorest 20%. In general their bonuses come from our losses.
Tax cuts for the rich do not benefit the poor in any way. Surplus personal wealth tends to be spent on luxuries, the larger amounts squirrelled away in off-shore tax-free bank accounts. In Britain the luxuries mostly come from overseas, the luxury holidays generally happen overseas, the upper-middle and super-rich upper class investing in cheap labour overseas. The working class hardly ever see the real wealth of our Nation.
Trump’s tariffs are portrayed as his attempt to pull production back to the United States of America in order to revitalise their endebted economy and improve the condition of the poorest. He has no such intention, and in any case, tariffs don’t do that. Trump’s taxes on imports to the USA will fuel price rises, maintaining or even increasing inflation at home and abroad.
The tariffs will damage any capitalist’s confidence in investing, anywhere. Last week’s sudden record losses on stock markets worldwide are evidence of this. The retaliation of other countries with large economies, imposing tariffs on US goods will replicate the inflationary pressures worldwide.
The UK’s economy is stagnant already. Before Trump, for the poorest 50% of people in the UK, prices kept going up and our spending power decline. The tariffs will ensure this continues. The outlook is stagflation.
We are already suffering disgusting inequality and poverty levels. Low wages, precarious work, 6 million households in fuel poverty, 4 million children in poverty. To judge where you sit in the hierarchy of rich v poor, just consider that Britain’s median hourly wage is around £37,000 per year before tax, roughly the same as in 2006. Most wage-rates have been pulled down by wage-compression resulting in the top 10% of salaries averaging £73k, the poorest 10% less than £23k. Standard Universal Credit per adult £5kpa. State pensioner a maximum of 12kpa. Of course the super-rich aren’t in these stats – they’re the directors and executives and property owners – not the workers – averaging £200kpa before bonuses and dividends. Where do you sit?
The top 10% of households hold 43% of the country’s wealth while the bottom 50% of us (33 million citizens) share just 9%. The 170 UK multi-billionaires own £700billion between them, their collective income rising over £30bn in the last year. We never see their money.
America’s gap between rich and poor is even more extreme. Trump’s primary motive in enforcing tariffs is to get more dollars into the USA’s federal budget to be able to further cut the rate of tax for the wealthiest in America. Damn the poor, the social infrastructure and welfare services. Why any working class person would still wish to support Trump beggars belief.
We have lived the fact that the rich having more cash doesn’t trickle down to the poor, quite the opposite. The poor pay substantially more of our disposable income on essentials with little or nothing for luxuries, the prices of which will now skyrocket.
Trump’s tariffs will make the price of essentials increase. Here in the UK. The world’s smallest countries are being hit so hard they will be plunged into even more abject poverty (the current jokes about penguins are not really funny). The big economies responding with tariffs of their own will cost their working class a double-whammy.
Trump’s administration isn’t benign. His people know the history of trade wars. They’re not stupid. Tariffs deepen economic competition and lead to military competition. Trade wars lead to world wars. The USA has a military budget that dwarfs the rest of the world’s combined. And wars make huge money for the arms manufacturers at the expense of everyone else.
Little wonder Starmer’s government and those across the world are now preaching rearmament and militarism. Nationalism is being drummed into our working class mindset as a prelude to war. And wars always make the working classes much poorer, economically, socially and emotionally. Surely, war is not in our interest. And neither is Trump.
More than one million people protested across the USA last weekend, against Trump’s offensive. The working class here must challenge Trump’s poverty policies here, too. Welfare not Warfare!