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!

Challenge supermarket domination – transform food production!

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (28.10.25), beginning a few weeks of focus on elements of the climate catastrophe and how it effects working class people on a daily basis. It’s probably all been said before, but as fossil fuel corporate executives and their pet politicians gather in Brazil for the COP climate conference, it’s worth reflecting upon why we’re in this dire state. Of course, as usual, the Paper chooses the headline, sufficient but way off point:

Nutritional food is a Right for All

Food prices are going-up, supermarkets crying poverty. Ahead of next month’s government Budget, the powerful food industry is lobbying MP’s demanding protection from increases in taxes or workers’ rights. Supermarkets have the power and influence to bully and bribe government ministers to do their bidding.
Sixty-five percent of our food shopping takes place in the top five supermarkets. They dominate our choices, our diet and the price of food. Annual food price inflation was at over 20% only two years ago, prices continuing to rise at over 5%, with butter prices up by 19% and milk over 12%. Add-on the so-closed “shrinkflation” of paying more for smaller sized packs and there’s only one result.
High profits! Lidl has tripled its profits in the last year. Tescos is expecting the highest profits at over £3,000,000,000 (£3bn) this year! That’s three-thousand million pounds surplus over-and-above the costs of running the business!
Food prices are rising to increase their rate of profit and still they are crying poverty! They attempt to hide their greed and extortion by blaming the government. The big five set prices amongst themselves that bear little relation to the actual costs of production. £1 for an apple? You must be joking! They grow on trees!
Supermarkets are attacking increases in the minimum wage despite the fact that their employees cannot live on the minimum wage, have to apply for state help with welfare benefits to subsidise their wages (actually subsiding the employer paying low wages), and needing two or more jobs or massive overtime working to afford housing, heating and the very food they stack and serve.
The top directors and shareholders are making a killing. Tesco’s chairman’s “salary” doubled to more than £9.6 million last year. With pension rights and other dividends his personal income is way over £10m a year. Sainsbury’s boss got a 20% increase adding £1m a year to his £5+m annual salary. No-one deserve such income, especially when their private wealth comes from the artificially hiked prices we pay for the essentials we need.
The corporate bosses are attacking any potential higher taxation, saying they have to cut jobs to pay for increases in national insurance contributions, the increases which are needed to keep pace with the inflation that they are in part responsible for! They threaten us with job losses whilst arguing for Budget cuts to the State pensions, education and hospitals.
The supermarkets limit their tax liabilities to the minimum with off-shore arrangements and transnational corporate status, yet shout through TV-ad megaphones to build public support against increases to proper taxation of their high profits. The profits go into the pockets of wealthy shareholders themselves playing fast-and-loose with their private tax liabilities. They’re scamming us. Tax the Rich!
Supermarkets see the highest profit margins from the highly processed “cheap” foodstuffs, mass produced in low-wage factories. The production risks, transport costs and limited life of fresh food makes it far less profitable and are therefore discouraged by high pricing agreed between the supermarket cartel, ready meals encouraged in heavy advertising and clever “bargain” pricing. These industrially produced chemical “foodstuffs” barely contain any real nutrition.
Farmers, already plagued by extreme and unpredictable weather events caused by the deepening climate crisis are complaining of bullying and extortionate demands forced upon them by take-it-or-leave-it supermarket contractors. Migrant workers are subjected to horrific working practices and vulnerable to modern slavery to minimise the wholesale costs of fruit and vegetables and maximise the profits of this big corporations.
And the drive to minimise costs in order to maximise share prices is seeing agricultural land polluted by short-term chemical fixes, destroying the soil’s natural processes for replenishment, creating deserts in the regions we rely heavily upon for the import of food, and forcing human mass migration. We are facing global food shortages as a result.
Don’t cry for the supermarket bosses, and don’t believe their propaganda. Their entire system of food production and distribution is unsustainable, deeply destructive and highly exploitative of both the natural environment and of the working classes here and across the world. We have to organise for a fundamental transformation of food production.
We should revolt against their profiteering, challenge their shareholder’s demands for never-ending growth in profit margins, and not only tax them properly but cap the profits and dividends they are allowed to reap. Nutritional food should be human right for all, not a source of massive private wealth for a privileged few at our expense.

We Shouldn’t Fund Nuclear

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My weekly Comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (21.10.25), asking the obvious, stirring-up dissent in this city dominated by the Navy and the Trident Nuclear dockyard.
The point is to raise the issues for the environmental movement here ahead of COP30. There is an acquiescence to new nuclear power which has to be challenged. With 600 words its impossible to deal with the arguments against both nuclear power and nuclear weapons together, but a longer article does. That’s why the published version is below, followed by the longer version if you have the time and commitment! No to Nuclear Power! Teachers not Trident! Nurses not Nukes! Welfare not Warfare! ☮️

Watch the movie – House of Dynamite – Netflix from Friday!

The threat of nuclear war doesn’t seem to hit hit the top ten on anyone’s worry-list these days. Nuclear radiation is all around us, from Radon gas to reactor-emissions. The new, overpriced and polluting nuclear power plants are supposed to save us from climate disaster. Why should we worry?
Understand one thing. The nuclear industry is a single corporate industry uniting the technologies and infrastructure for producing both nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Weapons manufacture utilises the staff and resources required for nuclear power. Indeed, because nuclear power is so expensive and unprofitable, requiring massive tax-subsidies and ridiculously overpriced electricity charges, it wouldn’t exist without the nuclear weapons industry.
If you oppose nuclear weapons you’re bound to also oppose nuclear power. You can’t have the one without the other.
Why is the UK producing nuclear weapons? Shouldn’t we decommission them all, now? They are illegal weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction, condemned under international law and banned by 150 countries. They don’t stop nuclear war, they encourage it – when the US and UK produce new generations of nuclear warheads and carrier missiles, they require Russia and China to do the same, and more. In response to the bombings from USA and Israel, Iran has now withdrawn from any nuclear agreements. In response to the threat of deploying US Tomahawk nuclear-armed missiles to Ukraine, Russia is deploying intermediate-range nuclear-armed missiles. The stage is set.
Trump is pushing NATO to be nuclear-war-ready – the nuclear exchanges will fly first into Europe, not the USA. There has been a “bonfire of nuclear treaties”, destroying the old nuclear order. We are in new and uncharted nuclear territory. Last month, Plymouth MP and “Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry”, Luke Pollard told us, “you all know that we are not at war, but nor are we at peace any longer.”
Britain is one of 191 countries signed-up to the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) agreeing not to expand the nuclear arsenals, yet is building a complete new nuclear weapons system at the cost to the tax-payer of £13bn a year, breaking all Treaties that have sought to limit and disarm.
To rearm, the UK will shift from £62bn now to £74bn by 2027, working towards 5% of GDP to be spent on military with a heavy reliance in nuclear weaponry. The total nuclear bill of £210bn should instead be spent on our deteriorating social infrastructure, schools, hospitals and welfare benefits.
We have entered a new arms race as part of European rearmament, with much reliance upon nuclear weapons. We remain under the ever-darkening shadow of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).
The latest book by Annie Jacobsen, “Nuclear War, a Scenario”, half novel, half scientific manual, offers an in-depth account of modern nuclear weaponry, its proliferation and risks. It’s a “must read”, not only for peaceniks and environmentalists, but for everyone. It proves how much at risk we are of nuclear war by accident if not design, triggered by unregulated, poorly-programmed and hackable Artificial Intelligence.
Now it has been adapted into a film – “House of Dynamite” available on Netflix from Friday 24th October, which exposes the issues and vulnerabilities of the current deployment of nuclear weapons. Please watch it, and then join us to stop Trump placing US nuclear weapons on UK soil at Lakenheath, stop Starmer buying Trump’s air-launched B61-12 tactical nuclear missiles for use with F35A fighters stationed at Marham, and stop spending £205bn on new Trident nuclear weapons launched from the Vanguard and Dreadnought submarines destined to be serviced in Devonport, Plymouth. Join the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and say No to Nukes! http://www.CNDUK.org

_——————-
The threat of nuclear radiation doesn’t hit the top twenty on anyone’s worry-list these days. We’re mostly surviving despite it. Indeed, X-Rays of our lungs and organs are routine, despite releasing the ionising radiation and radioactive particles can cause cancer by damaging DNA. We want the medical diagnosis. How many tumours are caused by radiation damage is not known. The fact of the damage is well proven, not least from the aftermath of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the meltdowns at Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear power stations. Radiation makes people sick.
More locally, the naturally occurring radon gas, formed by decaying uranium found in rocks, is now the subject of controversy at Dartmoor prison – closed-down simply because of radioactive contamination. Radon is a leading cause of cancer in the UK and jail staff supported by their trade union, alongside up to 300 prisoners and former inmates, are seeking a legal challenge over their potential exposure to the gas. Uranium is the hard-to-refine ore essential to the production of nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons.
Plymouth is built upon the same radioactive rock and radon is a recognised threat inside our buildings. That may have been one of the criteria for Plymouth being the chosen centre for nuclear vessels and the Trident nuclear weapons-carrying submarines. Just add some more nuclear radiation to the already-present radioactive cluster, who would notice? In hindsight that wasn’t so clever. It costs the Ministry of Defence more than £30million each year to keep the 13 rotting hulks of nuclear subs from emitting the deadly pollution into our City. In any case, how would we know what radiation levels are attributable to the Devonport nuclear dockyard?
We know that radiation is dangerous and causes sickness and death. However you look at it, nuclear energy is not “clean energy” as currently described by Starmer’s government. And nuclear power is not a renewable. It produces radioactive waste. In every plan for new nuclear power plants, large or small, there is no costing for the “clean-up” and storage of radioactive waste some of which takes hundreds and even thousands of years to decay to a safe level.
We’ll have to just live with it, you say, and anyway “they” will solve the waste problem (whoever they are), eventually. Campaigners against the Sellafield new nuclear build are demanding that the Chancellor of Exchequer adds the cost of radioactive waste storage to the already astronomical cost of the nuclear power plant – the technology now completely outdated and redundant because of the rise of real renewables – energy production from solar, wind and wave power. The private corporations profiting from nuclear will never accept liability – the multi-billion cost of clean-up forever a liability for the tax-payer.
Understand one thing. The nuclear industry is a single corporate industry uniting the technologies and infrastructure for producing both nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Weapons manufacture needs the staff and resources in place because of the much larger scale of resources required for nuclear power. Indeed, because nuclear power is so expensive and unprofitable without massive tax-subsidies and the overpriced charges to the consumer, it wouldn’t exist without the nuclear weapons industry. If you oppose nuclear weapons you’re bound to oppose nuclear power. You can’t have the one without the other.
So why nuclear weapons? Surely we should decommission them all, now? They are illegal weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction, the subject of international law and banned by 148 countries. They don’t stop nuclear war, they encourage it – when the US and UK produce new generations of nuclear warheads and carrier missiles, they require Russia and China to do the same, and more. In response to the bombings from USA and Israel, Iran has now withdrawn from any nuclear agreements. In response to the potential use of US Tomahawk missiles, Russia has once again said it will deploy intermediate-range nuclear-armed missiles.
Trump is pushing NATO to nuclear-readiness – the nuclear exchanges will fly first into Europe, not the USA. There has been a “bonfire of nuclear treaties”, destroying the old nuclear order. We are in new and uncharted nuclear territory. Last month, Plymouth MP and “Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry”, Luke Pollard told us, “you all know that we are not at war, but nor are we at peace any longer.”
Britain is a signatory to the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty agreeing not to expand the nuclear arsenals, yet is building a complete new nuclear weapons system at the cost to the tax-payer of £13bn a year, breaking all Treaties that have sought to limit and disarm. To rearm, the UK will shift from £62bn now to £74bn by 2027, working towards 5% of GDP to be spent on military with a heavy reliance in nuclear weaponry. All this at a huge cost to our deteriorating social infrastructure, schools, hospitals and welfare benefits.
We have entered a new arms race as part of the European rearmament drive, with much focus being on nuclear weapons. We remain under the ever-darkening shadow of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).
The latest book by Annie Jacobsen, “Nuclear War, a Scenario”, half novel, half scientific manual, offers an in-depth account of modern nuclear weaponry, its proliferation and risks. It’s a “must read”, not only for peaceniks and environmentalists, but for everyone. It proves how much at risk we are of nuclear war by accident if not design, aided and abetted by unregulated, poorly-programmed and unmanageable Artificial Intelligence.
Now it has been adapted into a film – “House of Dynamite” a “must see”! Opening on Netflix this Friday evening, 24th October, it exposes the issues and vulnerabilities of the current development and placement of nuclear weapons. Please watch it, and then pledge to join us to stop Trump placing US nuclear weapons on UK soil at Lakenheath, and stop Starmer buying Trump’s air-launched B61-12 tactical nuclear missiles for use with F35A fighters stationed at Marham, and from spending £205bn on new Trident nuclear weapons launched from the Vanguard and Dreadnought subs destined to be serviced in Devonport, Plymouth. Join the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and say No to Nukes!

Gaza Deal is a Lie

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This Week’s column in the daily Plymouth Herald (14.10.25), stating the obvious about Trump’s Plan for Gaza – no plan at all for Palestinian sovereignty. It is not just that our protests against genocide need to continue, but they must grow and combine anti-imperialism and opposition to rearmament before we’re all treated like Gazans. Written on Monday morning whilst watching the Trump Show, by publication on Tuesday morning the spectacle had already been exposed as an empty fraud to be condemned. The Big Lie! Keep protesting!

Here’s the original unedited version (900 words) with the printed version (max 600) beneath.

So President Trump has proclaimed Peace in the Middle East and the end of the violence against the people of Gaza! Why, then, did 600,000 people march through London last weekend calling for Freedom for Palestine? They’ve won, haven’t they?
No! This ceasefire is a respite, the third ceasefire in the two-years of assault upon Gaza. It does not represent peace or justice. It is not a Peace Agreement. Despite all living hostages being released, Israel has not agreed that this is a permanent ceasefire. Medical workers, doctors and nurses arrested without charge during the destruction of the hospitals of Gaza are not being released from detention. Gaza has no electricity, neither water nor sanitation, almost no food, medical supplies or any basic infrastructure whatsoever. No economy. At least 180,000 Palestinians dead including 20,000 children, 5 times that injured, the entire Gazan population of two-million traumatised.
The seige conditions that may be be lifted were always illegitimate, inhuman and illegal under international law. Netanyahu’s Israeli Defence Force has violated one international law after another and is not withdrawing from Gaza. Netanyahu is a war criminal yet applauded by the most powerful rulers of the world. The Israeli State refuses to recognise Palestine and cannot be trusted.
The first phase of the Peace Plan has no timetables and has no plan for self-determination or even representative government for the Palestinian people. The Board of Peace chaired by the President of the United States of America is now unlikely to be administered by Tony Blair, an architect of the illegal invasion of Iraq, and equally unlikely to replace the Israeli occupation with an international military force. In any case, Israel will maintain a security perimeter to Gaza’s borders, ensuring a militarised open-air impoverished prison.
Any Palestinian civil authority will be fragmented and disempowered. The plan does not include any plan for reparations for the wholesale destruction of Gaza by Israel, and no accountability for Netanyahu’s war crimes. There will be no dismantling of all the Israeli settlements in and around Palestine’s West Bank – the larger part of Palestine not even recognised by the Trump Deal – gained by force and ethnic cleaning and declared illegal over decades by the United Nations Council. There’s no right-of-return for any of the 8 million Palestinian diaspora – those already forced from their own land and living in exile.
Previous agreements surrounding Gaza, for example at Camp David or the Oslo accords, have been signed and then discarded by Israel. Earlier this year, the Real-Estate billionaire Steve Witkoff organised a deal accepted by not only by Hamas but a wide range of different regional liberation groups representing a much broader cross-section of Palestinian society. They all signed the Witkoff Deal on August 18th, only to have the entire negotiating team of Hamas targeted by Israeli air strikes hours later, bombing buildings in Doha, Qatar but failing to kill Hamas leaders. Israel can’t be trusted.
Trump’s Plan is neo-colonialist. The racist apartheid military state of Israel wants the entire surrender and subjugation of the people of Gaza. Israel is creating open-air concentration camps of the most intense poverty, heavily restricting water and food aid as well as maintaining a visible and palpable atmosphere of disempowerment and fear. For the Zionist ultra-right nationalists, the Palestinian people are still the target for complete extermination, Palestine to be erased from the map and from history.
This short pause is better than nothing. A respite. But it’s not over. No people can agree and sign-up for the end of their very existence. Israel remains wholly entrenched in Gaza. The people are traumatised and immiserised but have not surrendered. The potential for a viable Palestinian State, as already recognised by the UK and 148 other nations, is further away than the serious opportunity for “a land for all” – a secular and multicultural democratic state from the river to the sea.
The Israeli people may not like Netanyahu but show no wish for a Palestinian State. The loss of support for Israel by the majority of people across the West and further afield is extensive and irreparable. Our protests have made Israel a pariah State.
Gaza represents the most barbarous peak of the logic of the system we are all subjected to. The brutality of Capitalism. Why does no-one ask for Israel to disarm? Why is Israel allowed to produce, site, arm and aim nuclear weapons, threatening their imminent use, whilst all others in the region are banned? Why is the single-ethnicity state of Israel allowed to maintain an Apartheid constitution when the world previously damned and deposed the Apartheid State of South Africa?
The answers are two-fold: the ideological commitment of western politicians to the racist elitist tenets of Zionism, and the capitalist economics clawing at the wealth of the region through imperialist militarism. So the genocide in Gaza has awoken peoples across the world to the nature of Israel and imperialism. There is a movement of millions across five continents that is focussed upon challenging Israel.
This week’s meetings of the most powerful politicans and Corporate directors in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, will include business talks to carve-up the beach-front property rights and the gas and oil extraction off the coast. Trump wants this deal because he wants-in on the Gaza Riviera property developments, and his negotiators are in on the scam.
We can’t easily access these facts of what’s happening. Trump’s friends, centibillionaire Larry Ellison and his son David, own Paramount and are buying media institutions including CNN and TicToc. The billionaire owners of global mass media control the narrative. They buy mass media to ensure it will report what they want said. And censor what they don’t want said.
Trump’s Plan was represented by Trump’s son-in-law-law, the billionaire financier Jared Kushner, his US speculative land acquisitions once bankrolled by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and with major shares in Israel’s finance firm Phoenix known as “the JPMorgan” of Israel. Yet he is portrayed as a neutral player negotiating for human rights.
If the media and politicans can lie straight-faced and contiunously, if the big corporations are granted ever more power and control without challenge, and if the military is allowed to infiltrate public spaces to protect the rich and powerful, then we will all become Gaza – subjugated to the inhuman drive for wealth and power by the billionaire class, and terrorised if we resist.
The Palestine protests will continue. We will apply boycotts, divestments, sanctions (BDS) against Israel to end the genocide and colonisation. We will expose the lies and slights-of-hand of the media spin and political machinations on behalf of the imperialists and colonialists. Freedom for Palestine, self-determination for the people, is the test for freedom for us all.

In print:

President Trump has proclaimed Peace in the Middle East and the end of the violence against the people of Gaza! Why, then, did 600,000 people march through London last weekend calling for Freedom for Palestine? We’ve won, haven’t we?
No! This ceasefire is a respite, the third ceasefire in the two-years of the current assault upon Gaza. It does not represent peace or justice. Despite all living hostages being released, Israel has not agreed that this is a permanent ceasefire. Gaza has no electricity, neither water nor sanitation, almost no food, medical supplies or any basic infrastructure whatsoever. At least 180,000 Palestinians dead, 5 times more injured, the entire Gazan population of two-million traumatised.
The siege conditions are illegitimate, inhuman and illegal under international law. Netanyahu’s Israeli Defence Force has violated one international law after another and is not withdrawing from Gaza. The Israeli State refuses to recognise Palestine and cannot be trusted.
The first phase of the Peace Plan has no timetables and has no plan for self-determination or any representative government for the Palestinian people. Any Palestinian civil authority will be fragmented and disempowered.
A Board of Peace chaired by the President of the United States of America is yet to be organised, unlikely to include the hated Tony Blair or to replace the Israeli occupation with an international military force, the tensions high across the Region. However contrived, Gaza will remain a militarised open-air impoverished prison, the IDF securing its perimeter.
The Plan does not include any details of reparations for the wholesale destruction of Gaza by Israel, and no accountability for Netanyahu’s war crimes. There will be no dismantling of all the Israeli settlements in and around Palestine’s West Bank, gained by force and ethnic cleaning and declared illegal over decades by the United Nations Council. There’s no right-of-return for any of the 8 million Palestinian diaspora – those already forced from their own land and living in exile.
This short pause is better than nothing. A respite. But it’s not over. No people can agree and sign-up for the end of their very existence. The people are traumatised and immiserised but have not surrendered. The potential for a viable Palestinian State, as already recognised by the UK and 148 other nations, is further away than the serious opportunity for “a land for all” – a secular and multicultural democratic state from the river to the sea.
Gaza represents the most barbarous peak of the logic of the system we are all subjected to: the ideological commitment of western politicians to the racist elitist tenets of Zionism, and the capitalist economics clawing at the wealth of the region through imperialist militarism.
Today’s meeting of the most powerful politicians and Corporate directors in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, includes business talks to carve-up the beach-front property rights and the gas and oil extraction off the coast. Trump wants this deal because he wants-in on the “Gaza Riviera” property developments.
The media and politicians obscure the facts. We are all at risk of becoming Gazans – subjugated to the inhuman drive for wealth and power by the billionaire class, and terrorised if we resist. The big corporations are granted ever more power and control without challenge, and the military is allowed to infiltrate public spaces to protect the rich and powerful.
The Palestine protests will continue. We will apply boycotts, divestments, sanctions (BDS) to end the genocide and colonisation. We will expose the lies and slights-of-hand of the media spin and political machinations. Freedom for Palestine! Self-determination for the people! Gaza is the test for freedom for us all.

Protest to Survive!

Tony Staunton1 Comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (7.10.25), challenging the Police powers in relation to protest. In particular, whilst there is no universally agreed definition of discretion given to Police as agents of the Capitalist State machine places democracy and all of us individually in danger. We must oppose, we must protest for the right to protest.

As printed:

Protest is political. Obviously. Politics, especially the decisions governing the distribution of power and resources, is always contentious. Democracy demands we debate and argue, vigorously!
Any power seeking to curb or prevent protest is seeking to impose their preferred political position and belief. When protest is banned the cry of injustice rings loudest. Telling people they have no right to believe what they believe is symbolic of absolute power and control.
It gets more complicated. Some political beliefs and actions are seriously threatening, harmful or perilous to other groups or individuals. Lines are drawn as to the acceptable levels of risk and threat, always prioritising openness and freedom over any upset to sensibilities. Prohibition has to be the last act set against only the most devastating threat to democracy.
Current protests against the prohibition of the Palestine Action group are supported by the Quakers, a contemplative religious group encouraging peace, truth, justice, equality and simplicity. When their values are threatened they must act. Faith enters the political realm.
Successive UK governments have changed the legal definition of terrorism in order to curb opposition, now proscribing Palestine Action as a terror group despite any published evidence of fact. The current Labour government attached Palestine Action, a protest group seeking to expose genocide in Gaza, to two tiny fascist organisations in order to compel Labour MPs to vote to proscribe all three together. A dirty trick.
Those of us observing the complicity of the UK military and arms manufacturers in the genocide of Palestinian people of Gaza could only be outraged at such injustice. Many started to sit down, in silent and passive protest at the proscription, hand-writing cards stating “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action”. Thousands have been arrested for this “thought crime” of support for actions exposing a crime against humanity.
The wider context, of openly fascist organisations now being allowed to parade on our streets with mass chants of racial and religious hatred without police action offers us evidence of a level of political bias both within the Home Office and the Police Force.
It’s all too easy to expose the racist and misogynist culture ever-present in police stations and the plethora of private security firms. Every generation has seen scandals of organised fascist groups inside police and military services.
The result is political bias in policing. Look at the racist bile spewed-out by tens-of-thousands at the London protest addressed by Elon Musk and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon on 11th September, inciting hatred and violence. Police hospitalised by the violent mobs throwing bricks and bottles resulted in only 27 arrests for common assault. Conversely, aged Christians sat silently protesting an injustice are roughly man-handled, thousands arrested under terrorism legislation for exposing mass murder.
This week the Labour Government will further limit and ban the right to protest. In practice they are specifically targeting protests that are “left-wing” – protesters for equality, peace, universal human suffrage and social justice.
Meanwhile, the ultra-nationalist flag-wavers terrorising asylum seekers in dilapidated hotels are given free reign to incite and threaten. The recent burning of mosques, street rape of Muslim women by white thugs, the racist gang murder of a Muslim man are not designated as terrorist.
However more prescriptive and authoritarian Starmer’s government goes, the reactionary Tories and Reform UK will demand more restrictions and harsher punishments. Britain’s ruling class is letting the anti-democratic far-Right and fascist organisations off-the-leash here, copying the rampaging race-hate mobs on the streets across the USA.
The trade unions better mobilise quickly, because we’re the next to be targeted and broken.
There’s no time to lose. Protest to Survive.

There is nothing benign or liberating about digital ID

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (30.9.25) opposing digital ID. Its all about the direction of travel, the vision and goals of those promoting it. Placed in the current political context – the complete absence of workers control or democratic accountability of the tech providers – its a non-starter. Trade unions have to act now to stop the momentum.

The unedited version below:

Never having lived-under an authoritarian Police State it’s hard, perhaps, to recognise why we wouldn’t want to. A reading of history can help: Stalin’s Gulags; the overnight disappearances of millions across South American countries during various fascist or military regimes; Hitler’s mass killings of trades unionists, the disabled, gypsies, gays, Trans-people, socialists and finally Jews… why would anyone willingly accede to totalitarianism?
Of course, military governance rules many lands and people today. It’s one reason for clinging-on to some semblance of democracy, of individual agency. However weak and corrupted, bourgeoise parliamentary democracy is better than rule by force of arms.
Signals of authoritarian control should raise our hackles. The loss of all personal agency, subjection to discrimination and torture without any right to appeal, mass incarceration – these are all potentialities we must collectively guard against.
Little wonder that in the first 3 days after its launch, the petition to Parliament opposing Starmer’s compulsory “Digital Identity App” raised over two million signatures last weekend. There have been street protests since, and the proposal has yet to be published never-mind placed for formal debate. Unprecedented!
In our rapidly polarised society, the political centre decomposing – the old parties of Tory and Labour smelling of rot – both “Left” and “Right” appear to be opposing ID cards. The “Middle”, those who afford European holidays and enjoy privileges to be preserved at all costs, quite like the idea.
For the Left, digital ID systems will ensure centralisation of all personal details, to be utilised not for empowerment but for surveillance, censorship and political control.
At its inception, Starmer has targeted and scapegoated migrants working illegally as the rationale for “Digital ID for All”. That, of itself, is a racist act. Refugees are forced into the informal economy by laws which stop them working legally and make them survive on a pittance, exploited by unscrupulous employers. Starmer’s immediate “rationale” is obviously bullshit, pandering to racists whilst the real intention is social control in a period of mass unrest.
Starmer’s dramatic announcement is actually part of an international initiative and trend for the incorporation of transnational tech companies with each national State. Big Tech is behind the “ID2020 Alliance” lobbying for “Digital Identity for All”. The ubiquitous cameras linked to your digital ID will inform the official observer of everything about you (including your individual key-strokes), big business knowing your every desire and the State compiling your every dissent.
There are obvious links with both the drive to the domination of Artificial Intelligence over our economic and social infrastructure and the fast-tracking of militarisation of our society.
There is a UN-backed public–private initiative advocating biometric, traceable identity systems prioritising “global interoperability and integration with state services and online platforms”, run by the likes of Microsoft and Google. This is twenty-first century authoritarian control with a spin-off for corporate profits paid from our taxes!
The far-Right are in some disarray, those who oppose any State interference into personal Liberty are protesting whilst those for whom power and white supremacy is paramount are confused by the potential. Whilst he’s formally opposing digital ID its unlikely that Farage would repeal Starmer’s ID scheme were he to become Prime Minister, the opportunities to deport people-of-colour being made all too easy through 24-hour surveillance with biometric facial and iris recognition.
The comfortable middle classes console themselves that “if you do nothing wrong you have nothing to fear”. Huh! That all depends upon who’s making the laws that define illegal activities. Laws can be changed overnight by whoever comes to power. An authoritarian state will curb both your financial and personal pursuits, including your recreational peccadillos. You can easily fall foul of a fascist regime.
Total control is the true direction of travel: state surveillance which will be used primarily against ethnic minorities and radical groups, including trade unionists challenging exploitative managers. The digitally excluded, disabled people and elderly people risk being locked out from accessing essential services, whilst welfare benefits claimants and patients will have their entitlements cut-off at the press of a remote discriminatory button. There is nothing benign or liberating about digital ID. We must protest to prevent it before it starts.

Palestine Recognition is Merely Posturing

Tony Staunton1 Comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (23.9.25), reflecting upon the cardboard cut-out commitment to a Palestinian State by Starmer, the kid-starver. There has to come a point where we openly discuss the fact that there is no possibility of a two-state solution to the plight of Palestinians. Apartheid Israel, of whatever colour of political governance, will not and cannot allow for it. Racial supremacy is an anti-human scourge upon humanity and must be deposed.

The unedited version below:

It has to be a definition of hypocrisy to make a pledge you know can never happen. It is just a ploy to maintain the status quo. In this case, recognising Palestine whilst not condemning the genocide of the Palestinian people is the pinnacle of forked-tongue posturing.
It’s nothing new. In 1917 the Balfour Declaration declared its commitment to the Palestinian homeland at the same time as supporting Zionism, the European-contrived political creed of Israeli supremacy, racism and settler colonialism. Why would anyone choose to believe the pledges of the British State?
The resulting Arab revolt of 1936 against British control was violently put down by the British, Zionist militants then using terrorist force to kill Britain’s soldiers, finally taking control of a small patch of land in 1948. Ever since, Israel has forcefully expanded to occupy the land that had been independent Palestine.
The recognition of Palestine by the UK government was a promise made to the Palestinian people more than 100 years ago and repeated, recognising two countries in the region – Israel and Palestine. Under the international accord signed by Israel in 1995 all of Palestinian land occupied by Israel in 1967 was to be handed-back to Palestinian control. Instead, new settlements have been created across Palestine’s West Bank ever since, including hundreds in the last two years alone.
Israel is taking over large parts of the West Bank through military violence and murderous gangs of settlers. These actions, threatening any chance of a sovereign Palestinian State, are politically intentional and supported by the UK.
How can we believe that Starmer supports Palestinians when he refuses to act against the genocide in Gaza? Evidence published in the medical Lancet magazine last week proved that 186,000 Gazans have died since October 7th 2023, largely women and children. 90% of buildings have been destroyed. The indiscriminate blanket bombing is killing the hostages.
We see the serious expansion of settler violence in the West Bank, with the intention of the E1 construction proposal. In Gaza, the murderous clearance of Gaza City is part of the published intention to create a new Mediterranean seaside resort for the super-rich, Trump’s “Middle East Riviera”, quietly supported by the capitalists of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt and Russia all investing in “Mar-Gaza-Lago”.
Gaza is a property-speculators dream built on the crushed bones of hundreds of thousands of poor civilians, administered by a “Palestinian Authority” controlled by Israel and financed by BlackRock, J P Morgan Chase, Bank of America, not to mention finance companies across the City of London. The plan is in much the same vein as the US private contractors running the evocatively named dystopian “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” food aid sites, not to mention America’s own privatised Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “mission”.
Israel is using the methods of destruction waged upon Gaza now in the West Bank, destroying buildings and infrastructure to ethnically cleanse area E1 and close down any link between Palestine and Jerusalem, the Palestinian capital.
The annexing of the West Bank is intended to create Greater Israel, eradicating any vestige of Palestinian land and heritage. Last week, Israel’s Prime Minister, Netanyahu, repeated the claims of his self-identified fascist cabinet ministers: “The West Bank is our heritage, our land and our security”. The Israeli government says the very idea of Palestine should not be considered, and that there will never be a Palestinian state.
There is no possibility of a two-state solution. It is a foil. Israel remains a military Apartheid State with a racist constitution ensuring Israelis enjoy high levels of human and legal rights, social provision and suffrage above and over any and all other ethnic groups and nationalities inside that country.
Starmer must recognise this is illegal invasion and genocide and act accordingly. Stop selling arms to Israel. Start to prosecute and sanction Israeli ministers. Demand the end of settlements and occupation in tune with the hundreds of resolutions voted upon by the United Nations.
There is a solution – a single secular democratic state in the region where Jews and Arabs and anyone can live together. Coexistence with shared rights irrespective of religion and heritage is the only possibility. For that to happen the current Apartheid State of Israel has to be deconstituted. Impossible?
Internationally, tens of millions of people have protested on the streets in defence of Gazans and against Israel, forcing at the very least mealy-mouthed pledges from governments. Such enormous political mobilisation across nations is unprecedented.
Despite their massive propaganda machine weaponising claims of Antisemitism and funding organised race-hatred based upon Islamaphobia, Israel’s actions have made that State a pariah across the world. More than 153 out 194 nation States have condemned Israel’s actions, the United Nations identifying multiple elements of genocide, ethnic-cleansing, use of illegal weapons, assassinations, incarceration and torture. Countries are sanctioning Israel and its leaders listed as war criminals identified by international courts. Trade unionists are boycotting Israeli goods and blocking trade routes.
Palestine is the flag and campaign of all those demanding human rights, equality and decency. We know, deep down, that if international imperialism get away with mass slaughter in pursuit of corporate profits there, they can and will do it anywhere and everywhere. The political concept of “disposable people” is very real whether considering war, climate justice or fascism. Gaza tells us we are all at risk.
The anti-human Israeli government can be deposed. Palestinians don’t need the empty pledges of cynical politicians, they will survive and prosper through the accelerating actions of millions of ordinary people across the world. Plymouth is sending coachloads of us to the national demonstration in London on 11th October. Free Palestine!

Far-Right call to Arms is a Chilling Sentiment

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (16.9.25), listing a few of the policies of President Trump, representing a clear and present danger to the working class of USA, and indeed, everywhere. The speed of change must be disorientating for most of us but we have to catch-up. Fascism is off-the-leash and has to be challenged.

Trump falsely blamed the “radical left” last week, following the political assassination of his ally, Charlie Kirk. Trump’s was a far-Right call to arms by the holder of the most powerful position in the world, reverberating everywhere. He will no longer tolerate the protests against genocide in Gaza, for action on Climate and for Peace not War.

In fact the assassination of Kirk had nothing to do with the Left but did create a martyr to rally behind. History is littered with such acts. The Left tends not to have skilled marksmen nor to advocate individual acts of terrorism. We know that assassinations produce exactly this reaction of state clampdowns and reprisals. 

Socialists and trade unionists organise for a collective response to exploitation and oppression, knowing that individuals cannot wield the level of power needed to live with agency and free choice. We know that a society based upon powerful hierarchies ensures the tyranny of a ruling class controlling the lower ranks, profiting from all our toil.

The “radical Left”, as Trump describes us, organises against exploitation and oppression. In very real terms, we want the end of poverty through redistribution of the product of our working lives – working for each others needs not the avarice and hoarding of multi-millionaires and billionaires. That’s obviously why the rich hate us so much that they call us dangerous subversives, we are challenging the system that they create and run for their own advantage. We deny their right to exploit us.

Trump’s State visit to the UK today will see parliamentary democrats celebrate the global leader of the far-Right , a Labour Prime Minister dancing to the tunes of a billionaire organising for totalitarian power and control. 

Trump’s defence of the far-Right racist misogynist, Charlie Kirk illustrates his true intent very well. Kirk’s speeches were racist and hate-filled, the 31-year-old evangelical firebrand of the far-Right publicly arguing that Black pilots were incompetent compared with white-skinned pilots, Gays should be stoned. He opposed all gun control, abortion, denied trans-rights, denied the climate emergency, condemned Martin Luther King Jnr and the Civil Rights Movements, Black Lives Matter and the Me Too women’s movements. The misogynist Kirk promoted Christian nationalism, advanced COVID-19 misinformation and was a proponent of the white-supremacist’s Great Replacement conspiracy theory. 

Trump’s represents the drive to dictatorship, seeking domination at home as well as abroad. Democracy will not be allowed to get in the way of his global protection racket, his tariffed numbers game. Trump is threatening to jail judges who rule against him, ending the separation of legislators from the judiciary, a key safeguard for checks and balances.

US military spending is at an all time high under Trump: $1trillion a year announced in April, ten times that of any other country, for new nuclear weapons systems as well as expansion of “homeland security”, despite increasingly severe poverty of tens of millions of Americans and a faltering economy. 

Trump as Commander in Chief has ordered the US Army to swear-in four executives from the technology industries as Lieutenant Colonels, politicising the chain-of-command: Shayam Sankar, the CTO of Palantir (Peter Thiel’s company), Andrew Bosworth, the CTO of Meta (Mark Zuckerberg’s company) and OpenAI’s chief product officer Kevin Weil and former chief research officer Bob McGrew, (the company belonging to Sam Altman.) 

The definition of fascism includes the maintenance of capitalism but through the melding  together of the big corporations and the State. It’s happening, the billionaires taking charge, employing street gangs to exert terror.

Consider the conditions now engulfing America. Armed and masked men in plain clothing are beating and arresting people of colour in most American cities now, sub-contractors of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency deporting record numbers of migrants in a multicultural country built upon immigration and colonisation. This is a fundamental change to the Constitution.

Of course there is organised opposition and resistance to Trump’s continent-wide militarisation of American society. But not nearly enough, the fear palpable on the streets and in workplaces, trade unions weakened and disorganised in response. 

Why is Starmer courting this far-Right autocrat? Why is Starmer enacting the same policies here? And why are so-called “English Patriots” supporting the domination of Britain by a foreign military power? 

The lessons for the UK should be obvious. In defence of democracy Trump should have no place here, let alone the accolades of a State Visit. In defence of worker’s rights British trade unions should protest his appearance. In defence of equality, human rights and social justice we should take to the streets and expose Trump’s racism, violence and corruption. Only fools want the UK to become the 51st State of Trump’s Amerikkka.

Tony Staunton

President, Plymouth Trades Union Council

Defend Workers Rights and Defeat Fascism

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (9.9.25) challenging the media censorship of the words “fascism” and identification of active fascists in the UK. In the course of a broadcast BBC interview with me, editors clumsily cut my sentences to ensure the word fascist” wasn’t included. That is a sophisticated editorial decision, and probably institutionally dictated. This was published before the violent protest by the fascist Tommy Robinson supporters on Saturday 13th September 2025, an historic turning point with upwards of 250,000 supporters racist Islamaphobe surrounded and kettled 15,000 anti-racists, boot-boys looking to assault us all. We were kettled for over three hours, the Police having allowed the mobs to encircle us in Whitehall, the seat of UK Governance. The Nazi-saluting Elon Musk addressed the huge gathering, having donated towards the costs of coaches from across the countries and thousands of nationalist flags, to state that the current British government must be dissolved, and the gathering should prepare to fight to defend themselves. My article had not anticipated the grotesque scale of the rise of organised racism in Britain, but the point is made in print, in time. We need to call out fascism, everywhere, all the time.

The unedited version below:

There are fascists in Britain. Organised fascists. And they are organising. But we don’t talk about them.
Across Europe there have been fascists ever since Mussolini first adopted the political concept of a mass movement for authoritarian rule. Political descendants of Hitler’s National Socialist “Nazis” in Germany and Franco’s authoritarian Falange militarist party in Spain still hold positions of power and privilege today, their street supporters numbering millions locally identified and opposed.
In the United States various fascist organisations parade with their guns demanding male white supremacy, allied with or spawned from the Ku Klux Klan and their vigilante lynch mobs.
In Britain, with the historical echo of us fighting and beating the fascists in the Second World War, tolerance of fascist speech and fascist organisation has been understandably very low by comparison. Low until now. British fascists are on the streets once again, funded by those in Europe and the USA.
Post-war Britain saw working class mobilisations destroying the fascist organisation of Moseley’s Blackshirts – his street thugs finally routed in the Battle of Cable Street. In the 1970’s we organised a mass movement against the fascist National Front through the Anti-Nazi League, in the ‘80’s and 90’s we beat-back the BNP through Unite Against Fascism. This century we mobilised against the English Defence League organised amongst the violence-obsessed ultra-nationalists on the football terraces.
But now we have a new breed who have studied and analysed their previous defeats and built a militarised cadre of organisers across Britain. Some fascist groups are proscribed, but new forces imported from the USA are permeating local housing estates and community organisations.
The largest fascist group, the Homeland Party has emerged from the neo-nazi “Patriotic Alternative” as a front-runner here, preaching white-supremacism and “white nationalism”. The “National Rebirth Party” and the previously defunct UKIP group led by the fascist Nic Tenconi are also competing for leadership. With links to American groups they’re helping fund the “Fly the Flag” ultra-nationalist protests across the UK, in competition with the “Britain First” fascist group, their leaders identified at the “Flag” demonstrations in Plymouth last week. They brandish Nazi salutes of Seig Heil and lead the chants of “let them drown”, whipping-up racist division.
Fascists are peddlers of myths and superstitions, lies and conspiracies. Fascists feed on fear and guilt and powerlessness. Fascists use individual force and violence to remove all opposition, weaponising individual traits to victimise entire minorities, creating division inside the working class. They currently lead the “anti-woke” brigades, opposing multiculturalism, gay and trans-rights, action on the climate emergency, and women’s rights. Fascists are misogynists and antisemites to the core.
Today, as in the past, the fascist organisations are funded by the super-rich and billionaires internationally, tolerated if not fed by mainstream politicians. Why? Because democracy can get in the way of unregulated profiteering and exploitation. Fascists may propagandise against “The Establishment” but theirs’ is no anti-capitalist revolution – on the contrary it is a promotion of dog-eat-dog exploitation and a reaction against any call for equality and human rights.
Today, Capitalism is in crisis and the billionaires are taking control. We are heading for war and climate collapse.
The definition of Fascism is the melding together of the big business corporations and the State. Trump is militarising American cities, placing corporate executives in charge of the military, and encouraging racist scapegoating of migrants. Elon Musk is funding the UK far-Right. Italy’s Meloni is drowning refugees. The fascist Le Pen is set to be France’s next President, fascist street gangs are killing migrants in Spain, and the fascist AfD now controls half of the German republic.
The Centre will not hold. Democracy is in peril.
The international working class is beleaguered and demanding change. The fascists are seizing the opportunity. Trade unions oppose racism and fascism for obvious reasons. The aim of fascism is the atomisation of the working class and liquidation of the Left as a progressive social force. The Capitalist ruling class have let the fascists off the leash for their own self-defence. It’s our job to defend workers rights and defeat fascism once again.
Trade unions will be mobilising for the national counter-protest against the fascist “Tommy Robinson” demonstration in London next Saturday. Standuptoracism.org.uk

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