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!

Trump must not be allowed to fulfil vision

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (12.11.24), just touching on the outcome of the Trump election victory. Of course, there’s more to say, but at least opposition is in print early, especially in a city where our Palestine stall is often challenged by Trump-supporters eager to shout at us about the most bizarre conspiracy theories as well as overt Islamaphobia and pro-genocidal slogans. But not everything fits inside 600 words, and anyway, words aren’t enough. We need to organise to Dump Trump!

Not my headline, but “Trump must not be allowed to fulfil vision”.

So what should we do about Trump?

According to the group he has around him and the people he’s carefully placing into office, Trump’s second term as President of the wealthiest and most militarily powerful empire the human world has ever known, is about to change everything.

Everything that is, except the maintenance of Capitalism: the economic, political and social system based upon private ownership of wealth. Trump will amplify the individual, corporate and national competition for power and control of the means of production and markets in pursuit of profit.

Trump, a billionaire in cahoots with billionaires, is not about to redistribute wealth and make everyone richer. He didn’t the last time round.

Between 2017 and 2020 the USA lost 2.6million jobs. Three million more people lost access to any health insurance to total of 28 million impoverished human beings. Profits rose by 68%, nearly doubling, whilst wages increased by 8%, bumped-up mostly by manager’s salary-hikes at the expense of the low minimum wage. Home ownership increased by 2% making the property-owning middle classes feel better off, house prices rising by 27%. Rents for the poor more than doubled. His was a government of the rich for the rich and will be so again.

Trump’s 2024 election manifesto represented him as the bringer of system change. Not the eradication of poverty and exploitation – instead there shall be yet more billionaires and wealth accumulated into the non-taxable bank accounts of the 1%.

Trump’s “right-wing populist nationalist movement” (as defined by himself) will protect and work for the domination of the American White Man. They will, indeed, benefit.

Trump’s America will be racist and misogynist, supported by an ideological cadre in government and on the streets. That means scapegoating, gaslighting and flagrant misinformation as government standards.

1.5million migrants forcibly deported inside his first year of office, families torn apart, hundreds of thousands in internment camps, will cause enormous economic turmoil. These are the people who reap the harvests, pack the goods, serve at table, and cook and clean in the homes of the middle classes. Irreplaceable.

Protectionism will wreak havoc. The big import tariffs on foreign goods will ensure a significant rise in inflation, job losses and a trade war

Trump’s promise to end all action on climate, withdrawing from international agreements and to “dig, dig, dig” for more oil and gas will condemn the world to climate catastrophe. Climate Change will accelerate, causing extremes of weather that his citizens will not escape and will suffer without the State taxes available to protect or re-home them.

Trump will support the complete eradication of the State of Palestine, whilst the promised end to the current war in Ukraine will only be a prelude to much larger wars to maintain global American supremacy.

In all, Trump represents civil war at home and war abroad. Trump’s far-Right Movement is heavily funded and reaching-out across Britain and Europe and beyond. It will be a totalitarian government, holding power over all houses and the judiciary, entrancing the people with false hope and mythology in the face of deepening global crisis.

Trump must not have it his own way. And he won’t. The USA is a federal system of local governments, the blue “sanctuary states” committed to upholding the quest for equal rights and eradication of poverty.

America is not a United State. A third of all those entitled to vote, did not vote at all, the Democrats offering little or nothing. In every State there is resistance, particularly at grass roots. The struggle for Women’s rights, Black Lives, workers rights and climate action will continue. And must do so here at home, lest we all fall for Trump’s lies.

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The UK is Effectively the USA’s 51st State

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As usual the Editor chose the title, somewhat misplaced, for my weekly Comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (29.10.24). The article should speak for itself in a period where we face not only escalation towards global warfare but the first use of nuclear weapons between nuclear-armed States. Trump may well be elected next week and has suggested the use of “battlefield nuclear weapons”. And Harris has shown herself tough enough to do the same. Netanyahu has been urged to threaten nuclear weapons at Iran by his fascist cabinet colleagues, and Putin keeps threatening the UK with the same. I would encourage everyone to join the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and to campaign vigorously straight away.

Of all the spats and counter-accusations over this week’s Budget, mainstream commentators will hardly mention let alone question the UK’s heightened military expenditure. This government spends the highest proportion of our Gross Domestic Product of any country in Europe, and is raising that level every further. 

The current “NATO-qualified defence expenditure” is £65billion per year, due to increase to almost £100bn by 2030. Across the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, only the USA spends more than the UK as a proportion of the country’s GDP.

Some £7billion each year is spent on nuclear weapons in the UK and the nuclear industry that supports them. The old myth that this is Britain’s independent defence system has long been debunked – it is the President of the United States that is required to sanction the firing of Britain’s Trident nuclear warheads, the weapons system itself leased from the United States and dependent upon US military infrastructure. 

Rather than being “independent”, in military terms the UK is effectively America’s 51st State and has been so ever since the Second World War. The “special relationship” that Prime Minister Starmer maintains will continue whoever wins the US presidential election next week and will ensure the UK puppets US imperialist intentions. 

Last week, without any debate in Parliament, the government effectively made the UK/USA Mutual Defence Agreement permanent, securing a secretive Treaty with the US that “allows” the UK to have nuclear weapons. 

As tensions multiply in both Europe and the Middle East, Starmer and his ministers appear keen to prove full support for escalation towards global war. The USA has spent $60billion on the war in Ukraine since February 2022, and is set to spend the same amount again, perpetuating that war. The UK has paid across £13billion in lethal weaponry and military assistance, with Starmer promising another £1billion a week ahead of the Budget.

Meanwhile the government supports the bombing of Gaza, Lebanon and Iran. The UK has suspended only 30 of 350 military export licences to Israel this year, ensuring the continued supply chain for the operation of F-35 aircraft that are illegally strafing and bombing civilians in Gaza and Lebanon right now – the UK complicit in serious violations of international law. 

A budget that shut down all arms exports to Israel would reap more than enough cash to maintain the Winter Fuel Allowance for everyone. 

As the spectre of world war becomes more ominous, rather than suing for peace, for ceasefires, for negotiations and compromise, the USA and UK are ramping-up the tax expenditure, the fire-power and propaganda towards conflagration. This is not “Defence Expenditure”, it is an offensive strategy economically, politically and morally indefensible.

Into the mix comes the USA plans to base hundreds of its nuclear weapons and bombers at Lakenheath in Suffolk. Placing the UK as a primary nuclear target, the first to be hit, Lakenheath, Faslane and of course, Plymouth’s Devonport nuclear dockyard, a centre for the Trident first-strike nuclear submarine infrastructure.

Once again, tens of thousands peacemakers will be protesting on Saturday – in London for a ceasefire in Palestine and Lebanon, and at Lakenheath to stop the US nuclear weapons deployment there. We want Welfare not Warfare, green jobs not bombs, 

Spending billions ramping up new weaponry that ensures the other military nations ramp-up their munitions is just an endless spiral of waste and destruction. If Britain were to represent the quest for peace, disarm our nuclear weapons and stop pursuing the wars of others, we would not only lose the label of “target” but have thousands of millions of pounds to spend on social infrastructure and welfare. 

The Banks are Funding the Fascists

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (22.10.24). The huge upsurge in organised racist protests have to be challenged on the streets, and in print, especially when this local newspaper prints so many letters from the far-Right. This was published before the national demonstration in London called by the fascist Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) who was imprisoned the day before it took place. The united front group, Stand Up To Racism correctly called a counter-protest, and two rallied at either end of Whitehall, London on 26th October: the racist anti-muslim march numbered over 25,000 brandishing giant Union Jacks and flags of Israel. The anti-racists saw 26 trade union banners, 13 General Secretaries and 3 MPs speak to upwards of 20,000. This is a warning from history. The fascists are well funded and better organised, and all those interested in democracy, freedom, multiculturalism, diversity and human rights had better step-up and take back our streets and workplaces. Or it will be, suddenly, too late. Fascists have called a regional South West demonstration on 30th November in Torquay and we are all required to mobilise to stop them.

There is almost universal agreement that the big banks and corporations wield too much power over humanity and are motivated by greed. The service or product they offer is secondary to the gross salaries of their owners and executives and the huge shareholder payouts. Theirs is the drive for a never-ending growth in profits, exploiting workers with productivity demands and low wages, exploiting the consumer with higher prices for low-quality goods, and evading their tax liabilities. 

The Forbes Rich List identifies around one-hundred large, transnational corporations that own just about everything, globally. The brand names we know are often subsidiaries or larger conglomerates with internal economies larger than entire countries. This reality is cited by economists as “monopoly capitalism”, consortia or cartels of individuals using inherited wealth to become wealthier and more powerful, scheming to beat all competition and corner markets, locally and globally.

The largest companies are headed by the world’s richest billionaires, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates being household names. There are 12 people who are worth more than £100,000,000,000, their fortunes growing by $220 billion in the past 6 months. 700 individuals are responsible for half the world’s wealth, their assets multiplying with nothing trickling down.

It is observable to all that the gap between rich and poor is obscene and unsustainable. And so the human world is descending into wars between the contending owners of wealth, and rising tensions inside each country between the classes competing for the right to life, liberty and social justice.

The United States of America holds the lease on the wealthiest and most powerful, the global economy remaining US-centric. Corporate power infects all of life, the natural world and the way we live. These corporations dominate not only our working lives but our media, our education systems, our environment, our diets, health and recreation. The actions of industry, why and how we produce things, is determined not by need but by profit margins. We see destruction everywhere as a direct consequence of this systemic dysfunction. If society were a family, we would require restraint of such predatory, gaslighting, sociopathic domination, the perpetrator judged to be breaking basic laws of acceptable behaviour. 

The deepening debate, nay, the conflict, is about how to overcome this tyranny.

Working people and our trade unions have long sought reforms for a greater share and more say – redistribution of wealth and power. It is becoming clear that no reforms are likely or even possible. The rich won’t have it.

To prevent us organising for a better society, they not only strengthen their laws against our protestations, but fund and encourage an ideology that says this state of affairs is natural and unchangeable. Theirs is the law of “survival of the fittest” by which is inferred the meanest, most violent, most self-centred should run the world.

Onto this stage has come the far-Right, rising once again across the western world and beyond, being organised into fascist parties and pretending to be in opposition to the billionaires but all the time working in their interests.

Fascism does not represent any sort of freedom or hope. Fascism is not anti-capitalist, just anti-democracy. It is the totalitarian domination of elite power, liquidating any inkling of human rights, equality or social justice. Fascism divides and scapegoats in order to destroy all sense of self-determination and personal freedom. Its main tools are hatred, spreading race-hate and misogyny and the promise of male-white-supremacy for the chosen few. Fascism is organising here, now.

We have seen fascism rise and be overthrown by mass mobilisations and at huge human cost through the twentieth century. We must learn the lessons of history, rise again and demonstrate our determination, in our millions – Never Again!

Incinerators Should All be Shut Down!

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An occasional letter from me to the Plymouth Herald (17.10.24) after an appaling account in the paper detailing how incineration is the dirtiest form of energy production now in the UK. Like we hadn’t told them!

Plymouth’s controversial incinerator has been labelled a ‘disaster for the environment’ as new figures show the amount of waste being brought in from across the county to be burned in the city.

New figures show the Energy from Waste facility in Barne Barton incinerates rubbish trucked in from all over the county, with Devon County Council, Plymouth City Council and Torbay Council all using its furnaces. 

A reliance on the incinerator – and others at several other facilities in Devon – mean councils across the county are recycling less of the rubbish they collect, and burning far more.

Research carried out by the BBC’s Shared Data Unit says councils around the country are bound into decades worth of contracts with companies to burn black bag waste – even though some experts now say incineration is a “disaster” for the environment Plymouth and Torbay are among four councils that went from incinerating nothing at all 10 years ago to burning the majority of their waste.

Recycling in Plymouth has decreased around four percentage points to 34 per cent. Back in 2015 Plymouth City Council recycled 38 per cent of its waste, landfilled 62 per cent, and incinerated nothing. By 2023 it was burning 66 per cent of its waste.

Devon, Plymouth and Torbay are all members of the South West Devon Waste Partnership, which has a £436 million contract with MVV Environment, the company that runs the Barne Barton plant.

Devon’s contract with MVV still has 15 years to run, while Plymouth and Torbay are contracted until 2052. The contracts include sharing the income created by selling electricity from the plant, which opened in 2015, to the National Grid.

However, details of that contract are deemed commercially sensitive and are not publicly available. Energy-from-waste companies argue that their methods are far better for the environment than landfill.

The MVV website page on the Barne Barton facility boasts it is a ‘good solution for Plymouth, Devon and Torbay’ and that it is ‘saving resources and reducing the carbon footprint of Plymouth’. But despite stopping waste from going to landfill, the investigation suggests it may not be the green solution it has been sold as.

Instead, they burn millions of tonnes more than a decade ago in large energy from waste facilities – most often situated in the poorest parts of the UK. The incinerators generate electricity for the National Grid, but researchers say they are pumping out greenhouse gases at a rising rate.

They claim the amount of harmful greenhouse gases pumped out of England’s network of 52 major incinerators has increased by 40 per cent in just five years – currently four times the amount predicted by the government. Tonne-for-tonne, the pollution from those sites is on a par with coal in terms of emissions produced.

Bristol-based environment campaigner Dr Dominic Hogg said: “It looks like a disaster because we’ve looked at it too much as though it’s a power generating facility. The reality is this is a way of disposing of waste, and we should treat it as such.

“We should stop considering these things as power stations, because they’re not good examples of power stations. Their principal objective is to get rid and to reduce the volume of waste.”

The Department for the Environment says energy from waste has played an essential role in moving England away from landfill, and emission limits are set well below the level above which harm to the environment or human health could occur. A spokesman for MVV said greenhouse gas emissions from energy-from-waste plants compared favourably to those from landfill.

The spokesman said: “Since 2015, MVV has been treating waste that previously went to landfill – that is waste left over after all efforts have been made to reduce, reuse and/or recycle it. Our activities are regulated by the Environment Agency, including emissions. Maximum emission limits have been reduced in the last year and we operate within them.

“The primary purpose of an energy-from-waste facility is to treat non-recyclable waste. The greenhouse gas emissions should therefore be compared with those from landfill, which are significantly higher and longer-lasting.”

SSSSSHHHHHH!!!

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My weekly Comment in the daily Plymouth Herald, reflecting on the Hurricane season in the USA. Since writing it, that is yesterday a new report says that in 2023, the hottest year ever recorded, preliminary findings by an international team of researchers show the amount of carbon absorbed by land has temporarily collapsed. The final result was that forest, plants and soil – as a net category – absorbed almost no carbon. That’s a crisis alright.

The full version of my article here:

Ssshhh! We should talk about anything else but Climate Chaos. The two record hurricanes that killed hundreds, cost hundreds of billions of dollars, destroying entire towns across the Carolinas and Florida in the USA last week. This was passing news, fleetingly displayed and speedily dismissed.

Hurricanes Helene and Milton broke all records, Helene being one third more powerful than any previously recorded, including Hurricane Katrina.

The weather, once the few subjects that Brits have been allowed to talk about endlessly without any controversy, has now been weaponised. In our tense and polarised society, debate about the future is fraught with anxiety. It is as if we don’t want to face the facts, even when they flood our senses.

Climate Change is a case in point. For the far-Right, anyone calling for climate action is a “woke” enemy of freedom, seeking to end all personal liberties and regulate all personal choice. For those on the other side, concerned for the future of humanity and the planet, any public demonstration is to be ridiculed and any direct action quashed by unjust prison terms.

Before and after Helene there was a news blackout of the phrase, “climate change” across US media. Meteorologists and weather reporters received abuse and threats to their lives for mentioning the causes. Online, swathes of propaganda infected the internet with conspiracy theories that “the elite powers” had seeded clouds to produce the hurricanes. Scientists, it was claimed, had intentionally created the chaos to prove their unfounded theory of climate change, empowering despotic politicians to pass new laws banning cars and coal.

Conspiracy theorists had a field day. The thermometers that showed the increasing heat of the seas – the heat that generates the hurricanes – was not to be believed. Evangelists across the States proclaimed the floods as God’s wrath, warning us against alcohol and promiscuity, abortion and homosexuality. Prepare for the End of Times. As if they desire it!

The science that has charted the rapid concentration of global heating gases in the atmosphere over the past 150 years, all caused by the burning of fossil fuels as documented by the oil and gas corporations themselves, was instantly rebuked, rebuffed or downright denied.

And the list of extreme weather events, beating all records just as 2024 matches the hottest global average temperatures in millenia, was not to be advertised. In the last two weeks there have been devastating floods in Nepal, Oman, Spain, Tunisia, Thailand, Mumbai, India; Mexico; Ecuador, Oklahoma, Florida, Tennessee and the Carolina’s. And it’s not nearly winter.

We even experienced mild flooding in Plymouth caused by Hurricane Kirk as a record three hurricanes whooshed across the Atlantic at once. Those preaching individual freedom had better beware – they are not immune. As global warming gas emissions continue to rise, the world is set for worse extremes and greater destruction. And, because the corporations and governments refuse to take the actions required by lowering emissions and ending reliance on fossil fuels, it will be the working class and poor who will pay the price.

Those of us on low incomes and in poor housing have the least protection from extreme weather. One-in-five homes in the UK are built on flood plains, the insurance companies protecting their profits by refusing support or quadrupling their premiums. Floods and droughts abroad are creating food shortages that will soon hit our supermarkets.

And, if the USA is to go by, the employers who have done little or nothing to plan for climate change will force workers to stay at work amidst the havoc, or lose pay if they don’t clock-in on time and remain producing whilst the waters rise.

“We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster”, according to the latest science report from Oxford University. “This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.”

We need a revolution in the way energy is produced and organised. Decentralised renewable energy, insulated homes to reduce use, and widespread free public transport. This transformation would create millions more jobs than those in the fossil fuel industry, and offer a beacon to the rest of the world for the action required to stop climate collapse.

The Trades Union Congress has proposed support for a National Climate Service to coordinate and fund emissions reduction. Instead, Starmer’s government has copied the Tory funding for a £23bn carbon-capture-and-storage (CCS) project, unproven as a technology and a simple foil to allow fossil fuel companies to continue operating.

This denial of the Climate crisis must be challenged by all means necessary, if we are not to reap the whirlwind.

Just Stop Arming Israel!

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald newspaper (8.10.24), the day after the one-year commemoration of the current occupation and destruction of Gaza. For the record, the mainstream media led by the BBC focussed upon the threat from Iran and it’s allies, detailed the plight of Israeli families suffering the loss of their relatives, and persued unashamedly a narrative of the threat from Islam and all Muslims.

By contrast, my Comment may appear mild to those activists in the know, but was something of an antidote to all the lies and misinformation, the Zionist flag-waving and warmongering rallies. The point was “Stop Arming Israel”, their headline shying away from my original. But at least our side got something into print.

Stop Arming Israel!

Three-hundred-and-thirty thousand people marched in Britain’s capital cities last Saturday calling for a ceasefire in Palestine and Lebanon. We marched in Plymouth and held a vigil for the dead.

Placards warned of genocide, war crimes and the potential for nuclear war. Speakers at the rostrums identified the human toll and threats to the entire world from escalation and the impacts of regime change.

We who call for Peace are no tiny minority. Nor are we the terrorist extremists painted by far-right politicians. We are speaking Truth to Power.

Since Palestinian fighters broke-out from their decades-old open-prison a year ago, the resulting deaths of a thousand Israeli settlers have been met with military destruction of the entire infrastructure of the Palestinian State of Gaza, 60% of buildings completely destroyed.

The statistics should not depersonalise the human tragedy. 2 million Gazans homeless, 43,000 including 17,000 children killed by weaponry, 200,000 Gazan civilians dead as a result of the year of Israeli assault, disease and starvation, 12,000 Gazans seized and imprisoned in Israel without trial.

This is no proportionate two-sided war. Guerilla fighters snipe at Israel and fire small explosives to be intercepted by sophisticated weaponry. The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) have the most technologically advanced and trained battalions systematically wielding weapons of mass destruction.

Israel’s military action in Lebanon has not been restricted to defending its border. The bombs pounding the North as well as its Capital city, Beirut, destroy far inside a sovereign nation. It is an invasion with over 2,000 Lebanese civilians killed in the past year.

The villages and towns of rural southern Lebanon have been strafed by white phosphorous shells and bombed with uranium-tipped rockets, polluting the lands with a toxicity that will prevent agriculture and any return for the displaced refugees for generations to come.

None of this destruction could have happened without the extraordinary level of financial and military support from the United States of America and the United Kingdom. Israel does not have an economy of the size and scale to fund such warfare. It has been the military base for USA in the Middle East since its violent establishment in 1948, borne of terrorist attacks upon British protective forces in Palestine, forcing 700,000 Palestinians into exile in the first catastrophe.

The UK’s special relationship with the USA means Britain is arming and funding Israel to support western corporate and strategic ambitions across the Arab World. It is as if the Big White West consider their right to control the people and resources of another continent unquestionable and unchallengeable. Ownership and control of oil and precious resources in lands far away from your own economy and birthplace is to be seized and maintained by military force – such is the definition of Imperialism. Arabian countries have been carved-up by imperial powers of France, Britain and US over the past hundred-plus years, by military and economic force including two world wars.

And so we now face a war with Iran, an advanced Capitalist nation, oil and technology rich, with a nuclear industry. Israel has nuclear arms. For the first time in human history we face a war between countries with illegal weapons of mass destruction.

The majority of British people oppose this escalation to wider war let alone the third-world war, and consider that Israel has already gone too far. Our movement to stop the war, including unequivocal condemnation of the escalation by our Trades Union Congress, has forced some restraint by the allies of Israel.

Right now, our focus must be to demand the UK government and military corporations stop arming Israel completely and immediately.

I’ll Accept No Lectures from Tory Grandees

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald, coinciding with the Tory Conference to address the majority readership of the paper, damning them all! The horror of Palestine and Lebanon has pushed the Tory Conference into the background somewhat but in doing so, allowed the faithful to orate their racist xenophobia bile almost unheard by the populous. It’s worth venting against them, even if only to remind ourselves.

The unexpurgated version below:

The sheer audacity of the disgraced and deposed Tory Party in Conference to condemn Labour is a political abuse beyond hypocrisy. Not least because Starmer’s Labour is continuing most of Sunak’s plans, so what are you moaning about?

The Tory leadership have been proven and condemned for far greater crimes than anything thrown at the current Labour cabinet. Yes, crimes, because Johnson, as the British Prime Minister, alongside his amoral cohort, received fines for breaching the COVID laws he initiated! Johnson had dinner delivered to his own home during the lockdown when he told us we couldn’t. There were more offences committed at the addresses of 10 and 11 Downing Street than at any other address in the United Kingdom during that period. They were filmed at drunken parties at a time when the rest of us couldn’t attend the funerals of loved ones.

This is nothing compared with the corruption during COVID, swathes of multi-million pound contracts dished-out by politicians to the corporations they moonlighted at and their friends who hastily set-up “businesses” to take the contracts, without proper scrutiny and outside of legal procedures.

The British tax-payer “lost” billions. It is all coming-out, belatedly, in the COVID Enquiry. Were we all to be deemed equal in front of the Law, many Tory cabinet ministers should by now be in prison. The recent descriptions of “scenes from hell” across hospitals in the early pandemic record more deaths of medical staff than in any other western country.

How? Look back. The less than decent New Labour government, despite itself (remember their 2009 expenses scandal?) at least established a PPE stockpiling system in 2009. But the Tories left it to rot. In June 2019, the government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group warned that stockpiles needed replenishing. The warnings were ignored and the Tory government downgraded guidance on flu vaccine administration, hospital gowns and masks instead of comprehensively dealing with shortages.

Then came COVID, causing the UK to spend more on PPE than any other European country, yet with the highest death-toll, both overall and one of the highest per capita. Officially more than 240,000 dead and a couple of million suffering debilitating long-term organ damage (euphemistically named long-COVID) out of 26 million of us suffering the infection.

Test-and-trace app contracts were awarded to companies connected to PM Johnson’s adviser Dominic Cummings, under a programme run by the Tory peer, Baroness Dido Harding. Lives were put in danger and the virus spread further because the apps didn’t work, didn’t work properly, or were not ready in time.

Many deaths were preventable. The corruption undermined public protection. Breaking their own rules, over 70% of PPE contracts were awarded to companies without bidding (untendered), the public and professionals instructed to use the wrong masks leaving us unprotected to the infected aerosols, and tens of millions of masks unused and destroyed. The list is too long to print here, but ministers and government workers became multi-millionaires overnight. The truth will out.

In all more than £38billion of our money remains unaccounted for in expenditure during the Lockdown.

And that’s paltry compared with the consultancies scandal of HS2. According to the Stripe Property Group, spokespeople for the construction industry, the Tories wasted and lost a staggering £92,000,000,000 on the collapsed HS2 rail project.

The Tory imposed “Age of Austerity” was inflicted upon the working class because of such official gangster-capitalism. One after another we’ve been fleeced by corporate businesses protected by politicians: the LIBOR scandal of banks gambling on lending rates to the detriment of mortgage, rental and loan rates (2012); the Panama Papers exposing illegal tax-evasion and offshore tax-havens losing the exchequor trillions (2016); the lost billions from the false-promises of the Tory far-Right after Brexit; the FinCen money-laundering scandals involving over 70 UK banks (2020); the COVID scandals still ongoing. Why are we so desensitised?

The tripling of interest rates causing unaffordable rent and mortgage hikes at the hands of Prime Minister Truss, and the further deregulation under Sunak causing the trippling of fossil fuel company profits and doubling of numbers of UK-based billionaires, represent the mechanisms from which now one-in-three of our working class children live in poverty.

We are told to blame workers claiming sickness benefits (£50billion per year) and even more so, asylum seekers costing £7billion a year, whilst the corruption and tax evasion costs the tax-payers hundreds of billions each year. The legalised gangsters are above being called to account, the poorest to take the blame.

This is not to excuse the huge donations and free gifts being accepted by Starmer and other Labour government ministers. It is a lesson in the need to revolt against any more of the same. But we shall accept no lecture or pretence of truth and honesty from these corrupt and contemptible Tory grandees. The entire swamp must be drained.

Speak Out Against Racism and Fascism

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With the far-Right Farage ramping-up white-British supremacy at the ReformUK Conference, and the fascist “Tommy Robinson” calling for street demonstrations across Britain this weekend, including in Torquay, Devon, my weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (24.9.24) had to call for mass opposition to fascism and the rise of authoritarian governance. Strangely, it was edited to leave-out my call to get to get to London for the national demonstration on 26th October to Stand Up To Racism, but at least it was printed!

The full Comment below:

It’s Time for Mass Action Against Racism and Fascism

Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist and racist political ideology. The fascist movement organises for a centralised autocracy: militarism; forcible suppression of opposition; and a dictatorial leader of a militarised Party machine.

The fascist believes in strict social hierarchy, often portrayed in mystical terms of genetic and ancestral birthright, concocting the superiority of the land and so-called “Race” you are born into. Fascism demands a strong regimentation of society and the economy with no democratic say.

The most important ingredient of fascism is the mass movement. Fascism depends upon the building and mobilisation of street gangs and mobs ready to physically attack any and all opposition, and embed fear into the general culture and daily experience of working class communities, destroying trade unions.

Any political litmus test would show Britain to be at risk from fascist organisation, having become more deeply polarised over decades, the gap between rich and poor stretched to an extreme, the fear of “the other”, and the targeting of the non-compliant purposefully ramped-up by politicians seeking power.

The fear shuts working class people into our homes and shuts down open debate in workplaces and families.

This is why it is so vital that we do not shut up, that we do speak out, and that we show our collective opposition to racism, misogyny and authoritarianism on the streets. Right now, active anti-racism requires constant challenge to Islamaphobia and anti-semitism as well as championing the equal rights of people of colour alongside the politically identified “White” population.

We must be highly sensitised to the signs and symptoms of authoritarian governance and fascist organisation. Targeting all Muslims as “Islamist extremists” is a piece of propaganda nonsense easily exposed – the vast majority of adherents to any religion do not support the extreme-fundamentalist wing of their church. Scapegoating a tiny number of asylum-seekers as the enemy supposedly “invading” a nation of sixty-seven million people is a toxic distraction from the real causes of poverty.

The twentieth-century experiences of fascism proves the rule. Those organising for fascism first seek legitimacy and wear a mask of reason and justice, engaging with democracy in order to later smash it. They voice the growing anger against poverty and inequality in a pretence of challenge to the rich and powerful.

In fact, they only grow with the active funding and encouragement of sections of the super-rich ruling class, using the mob to smash any collective working class fight against exploitation and oppression.

And history shows that when faced with fascists on the one hand and working class socialists on the other, the property-owning comfortable middle classes will invariably side with fascism.

This is happening right now across Europe and the United States, and here in Britain.

Starmer’s meeting with Italy’s Premier Meloni last week is a signal of our political class courting the far-right. Macron’s imposition of a government of the far-right despite the Left winning the majority vote in the recent French election is another warning of the lurch of the ruling class towards fascism. The 30% vote for the fascist AfD across Eastern Germany a further example.

The drive to war, with the nationalism and militarism it transmits into civil society, is perhaps the greatest warning.

All this means we have to challenge the forces of fascism directly, nationally and internationally. Against war and racism, ultranationalism and oppression.

Trade unionists will be supporting the national demonstration in London to Stand Up To Racism and Fascism on Saturday 26th October. We will travel together from Plymouth and across the country to push back against fascism and the authoritarian powers that promote it.

Trade unionists will be supporting the national demonstration in London to Stand Up To Racism and Fascism on Saturday 26th October. We will travel together from Plymouth and across the country to push back against fascism and the authoritarian powers that promote it.

Labour Voters Getting More of the Same

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald newspaper (19.9.24), in the week that the new Labour prime Minister, Keir Starmer, was exposed for taking personal gifts for himself and his wife, including tens of thousands of pounds in clothes, accommodation, holidays and an executive at the Arsenal football ground. At the same time, Starmer has withdrawn winter fuel allowances of £300 from over 10million elderly people, is spending tax-payers money on arming the Israeli genocide, more than 100 fossil fuel extraction licences whilst reneging on funds for renewable energy, and enforcing more pay cuts and Austerity measures. This is not a Government for the working class or indeed the progressive future of humanity. It is more of the same, a Tory government in red clothing (gifted by ruling class Tories), and they have to be deposed. But replaced by what?

News Flash! Our public services are in crisis. As if we didn’t know. 

Last week, Lord Darzi’s quick review of the National Health Service conveniently allowed the new Labour government to announce that the “NHS is broken”. Alongside all the other Government claims that “there is no money”, the NHS is the latest public service to be told it won’t be bailed out.

There is little surprise amongst our working class population, more than half of whom did not vote in the July General Election. ‘They’re all the same” was a common theme in every pollster report. Labour won a landslide despite their share of the vote hardly rising. People voted against the Tories, that is, for no more Austerity.

After 14 years of Tory rule our pay has been cut to a point where it is now at the ratio of spending power of 2008, 16 years ago. On average fully-time workers are over £4,000 a year worse off, given the rate of inflation. To achieve minimum subsistence levels, 5 million of us get top-ups to our wages from Universal Credit – itself a benefit designed to subsidise the rogue employers plying starvation wages.

The reduction in inflation to 3% doesn’t mean prices are going down – food prices are 30% higher than 4 years ago. Pay hasn’t gone-up that far.

So the Tory and far-right shouts that Labour has paid-off unions with “above inflation pay increases” is just their latest big lie. A 5% pay rise doesn’t touch the pay cuts of the past 15 years. One-in-five of us are living below the official (Tory) poverty line – that’s over 14million people in Britain, 2.2million of whom are pensioners.

The UK has one of the highest retirement ages in the world, the lowest State pension in Europe, some of the longest working hours for one of the lowest minimum wages, the highest energy costs, the biggest profits and the lowest taxes for the rich.

Sir Starmer offered very little and already is delivering even less. The Autumn Budget will only deliver cuts. And for the NHS this will be an acceleration of the privatisations planned by the Sunak government. Tory cries of Labour betraying the poor hang thread bare given their destruction of welfare state over the past 14 years.

Last week’s Trades Union Congress, the annual conference of Britain’s trade unions, saw elected delegates pulled by these tensions. On the one hand, a Labour government, supposedly the Party of the working class, was cause for celebration. On the other, the condition of the working class has worsened, except for a small strata of skilled workers able to improve their pay and conditions due to skills shortages.

Clearly, we’re not all in it together. The UK ranks the 9th most unequal society out of 38 richest countries. The richest 10% own half of all earth, the poorest 50% just 9%. 

The argument goes that 14 years of Tory cuts cannot be turned around overnight, or even in the 5-year span of a single Parliament. But that should not mean the continuation of Tory plans. Indeed, immediately raising taxes for the most wealthy, those who currently pay proportionally less of their income in tax than the poorest in society, would fill the alleged £22billion black hole and more.

Instead, Starmer goes further than Sunak ever dared, deleting the Winter Fuel Allowance. Universal benefits ensures that everyone is covered, helped and safe whatever their conditions. Means-testing creates a poverty trap for those who don’t quite meet the criteria, in this case, numbering into millions of elderly who will face a very challenging winter.

Trade unions are demanding a U-Turn. Indeed, we want a shift in economic power in favour of the majority. The influence of big business and the billionaires on government policy have to be swept away. But Labour is in the pockets of the lobbyists.

According to the parliamentary register of interests, Wes Sreeting, the Secretary of State for Health & Social Care, accepted donations amounting to around £175,000 from two donors with links to private healthcare firms. He has pledged to “fight the middle-class lefties who oppose expanding the use of private health providers.” 

Actually, Streeting, it’s the working class trades unions who collectively oppose private health services. The NHS is in crisis caused by the task-over by private firms making profit from our taxes, from healthcare, pharmaceuticals, health insurance companies, administration and estate management, a huge proportion being companies based in the United States of America. The hundreds of billions in private profit could be saved or spent on patients if the NHS was still a state run public Labour is set to privatise more.

The questions are begged, can we end the corporate plunder of our public services? Will trade unions fight a Labour government? Would the threat of “winter of discontent” result in the return of a Tory government, and if it did, what difference is there between the policies of these two parties fighting to serve the interests of those already privileged few? 

The Trade Unions must be prepared to act independently of any government hostile to the needs and rights of the working class. Labour is not withdrawing from the Tory anti-union laws, nor their new restrictions on the right to protest. This government will fight any collective trade union challenge, imprison strike leaders and workers on picket lines.

We must campaign now for redistribution of wealth to eradicate poverty, increasing benefits and pensions, not cutting and taxing them. A 2% tax increase on citizens whose private assets are worth over £10million, surely enough for anyone, would pull-in £24billion a year to the Exchequer. More than enough to fill that questionable black hole. 

If Labour is no longer the party for the working class then it’s time to build new socialist organisation in the workplaces and communities. Or suffer worse to come.

We Must Never Forget the Grenfell Disaster

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Too ghastly to fully contemplate. My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (10.9.24) arguing against the general media commentary, most powerfully articulated by “left-wing” barrister and human rights campaigner, Michael Mansfield, that society no longer cares. I would observe, with triangulated evidence, that ordinary working class people do care – a lot. It is the Rich and those driven to be rich, who do not.

The unexpurgated version below:

The Word has a power. The moment the Word is printed here, a proportion of potential readers of this column will read no further. Some will drop it because of sheer prejudice. The Word conjures-up racial tensions, the Word makes those who are comfortably-off uncomfortable, the Word reminds us of the unfathomable span and depth of wealth distribution and social class status.

The Word exposes the very nature of the Capitalist system we live within. The Word is Grenfell. By this point many have logged-off, not needing to know more nor wanting to accept some truths that go to the very heart of their own situation. But the Grenfell fire must not become last week’s news and forgotten. Yet already, the mention of the word Grenfell is losing newsworthiness.

The burnt-out tower stands as the international icon of societal failure. The names of the 72 dead identify the poverty of the vast majority of Black and Asian people in Britain, condemned to living in the poorest housing conditions, unheard. The total and unchallengeable power of private corporations proves the absence of any concern for social justice in Britain, or any readiness of politicians to intervene.

A survivor, Natasha Elcock from the Grenfell United survivors’ group said the Inquiry report speaks to a lack of competence, understanding and fundamental failure to perform the most basic duties of care…“We paid the price of systematic dishonesty, institutional indifference and neglect.”

The Inquiry concluded that every single loss of life as Grenfell Tower burnt on the night of 14th June 2017 was avoidable. People did not die in an accident, they were killed. Human life was never a priority, and still isn’t. The Dagenham highrise fire two weeks ago was a copycat cladding incident, lives saved by getting them out quick, but proved that the risk remains. There will be more.

For trade unionists, workers collectively organised for our own protection, the conclusions come as no surprise. But we do balk at the assertion that no-one cares anymore. Millions of us do.

We have fought, campaigned and challenged the dangerous hazards at work and in our communities, championing calls for Health & Safety against a growing cacophony of right-wing put-downs of “nanny-Statism” and “wokism”. Sponsored by the private corporations and neoliberal think-tanks, successive governments have been lobbied and bribed to cut back on safety regulations and cut-corners at work in order to maximise shareholders dividends. 

Most workers want to end their week feeling they we’ve done a good job. But the culture of fast and big profits and shareholders dividends minimise quality and care in the pursuit of cost-cutting and maximising productivity. The greed of the already wealthy has overwhelmed all industries to the point of mass demoralisation and constant danger.

It has been said that we are no longer a caring society – people don’t care anymore. That’s not true. Ordinary working class people care a great deal for people around us. Those at the top don’t care a jot, and those who want to climb that ladder learn fast that they must show they don’t care and are prepared to break the rules on behalf of the business. 

There has been a growth in micro-management and quasi-military supervision across all industries, telling workers “you are not here to think, just do what you’re told.” Compassion and empathy are frowned upon. We are instructed at work not to care, not to listen, and disciplined or sacked when we question or whistleblow. The culture of carelessness has been forced from the top, promoting a lack of concern for working class communities and the pain of poverty.

The cuts to public funding of social infrastructure and welfare since the mid-1970’s has ensured that vital emergency services are threadbare in all aspects, from training through to staffing levels. Those in positions of responsibility have outsourced the risks to ensue they cannot be blamed for the consequences of their cuts.

The privatisation and deregulation of housing has ensured landlords can charge extortionate rents for squalid rooms and evict at will anyone who complains. Governments have purposefully cut the jobs that used to monitor safety and enforce the law in the name of profit and “wealth-creation”. 

Grenfell is the proof: cladding companies lied and operated illegally, residents and trade unions repeatedly rang the alarm, elected councillors refused to act. 

Governments ignored warnings about dangerous cladding as early as 1991 and have ever since. As with so many other disasters we can expect little or no serious resolution to this. This Inquiry is a condemnation of our political system, and the COVID Inquiry is likely to evidence an even deeper proof of corruption. 

Grenfell highlights that all our public services are at a point of collapse. And we cannot rely on Starmer to deliver justice and change after Grenfell, when three of the top five landlords in Parliament are Labour MPs. Theirs is a party courting big business and private developers, desperate to show it’s a responsible manager of the corporate profit system.

And that’s the point. This was one of an endless list of tragedies caused by the system of Capitalism that always places profit as a far higher priority than the needs of the People. We should confiscate the assets of the businesses who profited from flammable cladding, and jail their owners for corporate manslaughter if not murder. All those responsible should pay for the removal of the cladding and the safe renovation all buildings affected. And as a wider project, to end these tragedies we have to organise for redistribution of wealth and system change.

This Scale of Injustice Should Fill Us All With Fear

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (3.9.24), seeking to expose the media bias amidst the horror of the genocide in Palestine. I didn’t choose the heading nor the edit, but the published version did it’s job. With insight, the march on the following Saturday, defying and beating police restrictions intended to undermine the organisation and provoke violence, saw 120,000 once again parade through London’s thoroughfares to the Israeli Embassy. The heat, the anger and outrage, is not dying down, particularly whilst over 400 more Gaza’s have been murdered this week.

The unexpurgated version below:

The general strike in Israel yesterday showed the power of organised workers. The Histradut, Israel’s trade union organisation, perhaps similar in form to Britain’s Trades Union Congress, called a mass strike to put pressure on the government to change its course. Production stopped, and with it, the economy.

It’s a lesson in where our potential power lies. If workers stop working, the power of government and rulers may be undermined.

But not all trade unions are the same. In some countries, including Israel, unions are directly allied with and controlled by their State. In other words, they are not independent of the employer class nor democratically controlled by their members. In the most perverse of circumstances, combative sections of the ruling class can call upon workers to strike in order for themselves to seize power from their opponents.

Currently, the warmonger Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is pursuing a strategy of genocide against the Palestinians, in part to protect his own skin from charges of corruption once he steps down from office. He is relying upon the support of far-Right politicians, some self-professed fascists, in order to remain in power.

Opposition politicians, and many sections of Israeli corporate businesses increasingly concerned with international boycotts and economic instability, would prefer a negotiated pause in fighting to regain some international credibility.

In this context, the general strike in Israel is not a call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza or any opposition to the illegal occupation and colonisation of Palestine. It is only a call for negotiated let-up in hostilities while the remaining hostages are released alive. Most of those on strike have no care for or affinity with the people of Gaza or the West Bank, and support the country’s current constitution that represents the separate and privileged development of Israeli citizens over all other peoples.

Conversely, in the United Kingdom, the trade union movement recognises Palestine and the Palestinian people. We demand not only an immediate end to the bombardment of Gaza but reparations for Israel’s illegal occupation, a demand that condemns the illegitimate military occupation of Palestinian territory since 1947, the blockade of Gaza and the militarisation with pass laws over the people of the West Bank.

So we must protest too, but independent of the campaign of the Histradut. We do not support settler-colonialism. The right to self-determination of the Palestinian people will not be conferred on them by the Israeli State.

The plight of Palestinians is a blight upon all humanity. Aid agencies have identified the bodies of more than 43,000 civilians, including 23,000 children, in the last 11 months of Israeli invasion. The extreme horror of enforced starvation and famine of more than three-quarters of a million human beings in Gaza is an international outrage, only deepened by the propaganda horror of a polio vaccination programme while the military bombing continues.

Polio is spread by faeces, the entire sewage networks of Gaza having been destroyed. The vaccinations represent not so much any humanitarian intervention but are clearly aimed at preventing the return of polio to neighbouring states should the Palestinians escape their open air prison.

Air strikes have left more than 42 million tonnes of debris in Gaza, toxic chemical and human remains spread under the rubble. This has been the most intense bombing campaign in history, the Israeli air force dropping more than 20 times more bombs per kilometre than the US did during the Vietnam War, and far greater amount of explosive power than during the entire Second World War.

For every direct death in the bombing, another 3 people have died indirectly due to disease or starvation. The credible Lancet medical journal in London estimates the deaths of some 186,000 Gazans since last October. Eighty percent of the population have been displaced with no shelter, fresh water or food, or anywhere to go.

Yet our Labour government continues to unconditionally support and arm Israel in these atrocities. The pathetic cancellation of a few of the more than 300 export licences granted for arms to Israel proves our government acceptance of genocide including starvation as a tool of war and subjugation.

Our media name and mourn the Israeli hostages taken on 7th October and killed in the fighting since, yet the Palestinian dead remain anonymous in their tens of thousands.

This scale of injustice should put fear into us all for the current state of human relations and the inhuman politics of war. Mass collective action on the streets and in the workplaces can force politicians to act. We will be on the streets of London in an another national demonstration this Saturday, marching to the Israeli embassy with trade union banners demanding Freedom for Palestine, now!

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What a Cynical Political Game They’re Playing!

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (27.8.24). Spurred into foaming wrath by the cut of the pensioners’ Winter Fuel Allowance I have to vent my wrath. Tax the Rich. ‘Nuff said. It was too much for a well-known local far-Right UKIP letter-writer, who denounced me as a Marxist. Yawn.

The unedited version here:

Stop the Riots of the Rich!

The most fundamental tension in society is between social classes. Yes, the oppressions affect us all too, but class is overarching as the basis of either the power available to oppress or the powerlessness that renders us oppressed.

The degree of exploitation we each experience is the deciding factor as to how oppressed we will be. Sexism is far less of an inhibitor if you’re Margaret Thatcher, Racism not nearly so painful if you’re a billionaire person of colour. The physically disabled are more mobile if they can afford a motorised wheelchair and an adapted home, and so on.

The inequality between rich and poor is not only about wealth, it is about agency – the degree of self-determination available. Most of us have choices so limited as to constrain both our dreams and our abilities. We scream out, periodically, at the sensed injustice of our social condition.

Historically, riot is the cry of the oppressed, revolt is a festival of the powerless, uniting to find some semblance of social agency. Inhibitions are lost in the outburst of violent relief from the shackles. But as order is restored we pay a harsh price.

Strange then, that the most recent riots in the UK have been led by the rich and the middle class, hardly the most oppressed. They’re complaining that their privileges and entitlements as white men are being eroded by the poorest in society. It’s Black people and trade unionists who are destroying our country, they whine.

In fact, it is The Order that is criminal, the structures that they benefit from. It is their System that allows the rich to steal, plunder, abuse and destroy in degrees of magnitude.

Let’s just look. For a start, the rich don’t pay their share of taxes to the degree and proportion the working class do. We pay far more, whilst they dodge it. Rishi Sunak paid 22% on his earnings, via Capital Gains Tax. Workers on the higher grades pay 40% whilst earning a fraction of his income. When does not paying your liabilities become a crime?

Sunak cried “Stop the Boats” to cut the small percentage of tax money spent on immigration, raising calls of patriotism and nationalism, whilst his family bank abroad. His friends too. Fellow patriot, Lord Cameron keeps his money in Panama, Nationalist zenophobe Rees-Mogg keeps his in the Cayman Island, Nadhim Zahawi, Gibraltar. Reform UK Deputy Leader, public-schoolboy millionaire Richard Tice MP also banks in the tax-haven of Jersey.

The far-Right pretend to be anti-elite but are the elite. They do whatever they can to avoid paying into the public purse for our public services. Not so patriotic, right?

Powerful influencer and multi-millionaire, Lord Rothermere of the Mail newspaper group is registered as a non-dom whilst his newspapers are registered in Bermuda and do not pay the full rate of tax they would have to pay if they were registered in the UK.

Now, Starmer has ruled-out raising Capital Gains Tax and instead cuts the income of pensioners, some of the poorest elderly people in Europe. Yet he wants us to blame immigration for the budget deficit.

Governments of all parties demonise the broken and impoverished “boat people” coming to the UK for taking “our” money whilst all the time leaching off UK workers and giving us nothing in return – what a bunch of racist liars!

Farage earns more than £1million a year but paid his taxes to Belgium, his True Allegiance clearly not to Britain but the EU. His biggest donors are Non-Doms. He’s having to rethink now because the EU is considering bringing in financial transparency laws that will destroy the tax havens of the rich and powerful. Maybe he’ll move to the USA!

If HMRC went after creeps like this there would be no need to rob struggling pensioners of their Winter Fuel Payment. Our schools would be reflated to afford to teach, our hospitals would have doctors again, our crumbling roads tarmac’d.

In the period where food prices increased by 25% or more TESCO made £2.5bn profit, an increase of £1.6bn. This was not inflation but extortion.

Big business & the Super-rich don’t have a country. They move their wealth from one tax haven to another, exploiting workers and chasing profit all over the globe. They only want a country when they need armed state intervention to protect their interests. And even then they don’t want to pay towards it.

We pay for much of the arms being sent to Ukraine and Israel. The leading 15 defence contractors are forecast to log free cash flow of $52bn in 2026 — almost double their combined cash flow at the end of 2021 – subsidised by the UK tax-payer.

Oil and gas firms are allowed to write-off outgoings again tax, to a point where BP and Shell have paid almost no tax in recent years, receiving more subsidies from the tax payer to represent a negative amount of tax – 2015 to 2021 UK tax total to -£685m. Tax-payers subsidise the firms that tripled our energy prices to triple their own profits – BP £27bn in 2023 boosted by the war in Ukraine, Shell £28bn. It’s our money, stolen from us!

The six largest oil firms made £76billion profit in the first 6 months of 2024 whilst being subsidised by tax-payers. Why aren’t we outraged by this instead of blaming people seeking refuge in boats?

Coca-Cola has been found to have hidden “astronomical levels” of profit in tax havens. They’ve been ordered to pay back $16billion tax in the US. Who knows what the other multi-nationals owe, especially the oil companies.

And even when they are caught and fined, they don’t pay. Rather than paying the £250m fine for breaking their business licence, Thames Water has negotiated a “turn-around plan” to keep the money whilst still paying out huge dividends to shareholders.

This is Gangster Capitalism, managed through threat, backstabbing, robbery, numbers games and protection rackets by confidence tricksters. London is known as one of the most corrupt financial centres in the world today, a gigantic laundry for dirty money.

And now they want the UK turned into one big Freeport cesspit, so they dont have to have the hassle of paying to park their cash away overseas. They want to run tax-free havens where their companies can operate free of legal responsibilities including the workers rights of those employed inside. And that’s here, in the wide district of Plymouth, now.

No wonder we’re angry. The super-rich have raped us and left us naked in a polluted land. Our power lies in unity, joining together in such numbers that can cut off their power – not the self-destructive riot but trade union organisation towards general strike action.

The top 1% in the UK own more than 70% of the population combined. Stop cutting our services and tax the rich instead!

We should All Check our own Behaviours

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (20.8.24), focussing on sexual abuse at a time of deepening institutional misogyny. A pending court judgement in Plymouth this week will raise the heat and debate once again. We need to be ready with context and pushback against racist agitation and misogyny. Most interestingly, a few days later, a right-wing pro-Life (the coordinator of SPUC) activist in Plymouth wrote a condemnatory letter back, advancing a women’s place as in the home (with all that implies).

The unexpurgated version below:

The government is currently reviewing laws addressing misogyny – the male-supremacist hatred of women. There is an obvious and observable rise in abuse of women in our country. The imagery of women’s bodies as sexual objects, as opposed to human subjects and thinking, feeling empowered citizens, is everywhere. This is a backlash against the women’s liberation movement of the 1970’s and 1980’s that challenged women’s oppression and won a few new rights for women in the workplace and community.

The backlash against women’s rights began in the 1990’s, but that was nothing compared with the online abuse of women and girls accessible to all today. Women as second class citizens, to be viewed and controlled for male gratification is back in fashion.

The webstreams of Andrew Tate, self-professed misogynist and male-supremacist, are viewed by millions of our male children every week. He says women belong “in the home” and men have the right to have sex with women, both mainstays of fascist ideology. Tate has nine million followers on X (formerly Twitter) and his You Tube videos encourage male domination. He is currently wanted by Police in the UK, and facing trial in Romania charged with rape, human trafficking and forming an organised crime group to sexually exploit women.

Unsurprisingly our schools report an accelerating rise in sexual harassment and boy-on-girl abuse, a three-fold increase over the last ten years. Over 90% of reports of sexual abuse of young people aged 15-25 were women and girls. And we have seen young men engage in random killings as a rebellion to being “incel”, claiming women should be forced to have sex with them.

Self-identifying as “sexist” and “misogynist” is becoming acceptable as part of the “culture Wars” sweeping the USA and Britain. And it is being encouraged and represented across mainstream media.

The result is that more than one-in-four women have been raped or sexually assaulted as an adult p some six-and-a-half million women. Two million women experience notifiable domestic abuse each year in Britain today, according to government statistics. Most domestic abuse is male on female, a high proportion involving routine sexual abuse. At least two women are murdered each week in England & Wales, usually by their male partner or ex-partner.

One-in-five of our children experience abuse inside their family, and about one-in-six children experience sexual abuse each year. That works out at around 600,000 children subject to sexual abuse inside their families right now.

68,000 rapes were recorded by Police last year with charges brought against just 2.6% of them – an institutional “Get Out of Jail Free” card for male supremacists. Over 10,000 sexual offence cases are waiting to go to court, the violently abused women waiting at least 2 years for any justice. Where is the hue and cry?

Media coverage is scant and biased. Despite the inspirational rise of the Me Too protest movement following the rape and murder of a young woman by a serving police officer, the lack of justice for women has only worsened.

And there is a racial bias, the cases of child sexual exploitation involving members of minority ethnic groups are usually front page news where the day-to-day cases of white men go unreported. Ever since the rise of the British Empire we have been encouraged to believe that people from cultures other than white Christian are more depraved, sexualised and bestial than we, the White British.

Sexism is allied to nationalism, xenophobia and racism.

The overwhelming majority of sexual abusers are white men. Britain has a long list of historic revelations of sexual exploitation gangs, white men from the middle and ruling-class use their institutions, wealth and privilege to hide in plain sight.

The prevailing idea that there’s a unique problem with ‘migrant sex gangs’ plays into a broader context of widespread deprivation and frustration about multiculturalism, migration and the out-of-touch professional and political elite.

Sexual abuse is abhorrent in every and any context. Its prevalence in Britain, the statistics let alone the experiences, suggests that there is a large minority of men who believe that women exist to serve and service them, and indeed are inferior human beings.

There is no greater proportion of abuse against women in our minority ethnic groups than white British. Fair to say, we should check our own behaviours before throwing stones. Respect is at a premium.

Sexism is on the increase in workplaces, reports suggesting we’re back in the 1960’s Mad Men days. Trade unions need to reboot and champion women’s equality all over again. In fact, we need to challenge all bigotry and oppression, before they overwhelm us.

We must Unite Against the Spectre of Fascism.

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I must admit I wouldn’t have used the term “spectre” in my headline, but then, I don’t determine the headline, the Editor does. This is my weekly column printed in the daily Plymouth Herald (13.8.24) following-on from the week of racist violence and the superb anti-racist demonstrations across Britain. for the record, the misogynist extremist Andrew Tate, and Yaxley-Lennon were amongst many who published lies about the ghastly killings in Southport of three young children at a day care centre. They quickly blamed Muslims despite the accused being born in Wales of Rwandan parents, and called their followers onto the streets. The point here is that “Tommy Robinson, Farage and their ilk have organisation. They can call people out. They cynically used the killing of children to promote their political ideology, having previously whipped-up fever against paedophiles and Asian gangs grooming white girls. it is orchestrated, and is a long-term project. So we’re organising, but not simply against racism. Fascism is insurgent across Europe and the USA. It is no spectre. It is very real. and growing fast.

This is a call for your readiness to come onto the streets to prevent fascism. It comes at the end of an historic week that will last long in the memory. The anti-racist demonstrations in Plymouth were followed by larger and wider rallies from local people nationally, gathered together to Stand Up To Racism.

Those racists throwing missiles were in the main, older men, confirmed in their political dogma and flying the Union Jack to represent white male supremacy. Their fascism must be challenged.

Fascist cadre from elsewhere came to Plymouth to whip-up hate and violence. Leaders of the far-Right in Britain had travelled to Plymouth, including the head of the UKIP party, Nick Tenconi, a self-publicised racist and misogynist, who travelled from London and spoke via megaphone of the immediate threat from communists and Islamists – an obvious reference to the trade union banners and Palestinian flags across the road.

This was not mindless violence but an orchestrated fascist incursion. Most importantly, they are well-resourced and not about to go away. 

The younger people screaming hate had been groomed, over years, by racists in their communities and racism across social media, to hate those even poorer and more destitute than themselves.

Beneath their anger was organised political challenge, firing the first salvo against the new Labour government. It is easy to remember the rise of the fascist National Front in the 1970’s, during a Labour Government that enforced welfare cuts and wage-restraint deeper than anything Margaret Thatcher cuts were demanding by the International Monetary Fund and represented the start of the era of neo-liberalism, now in a state of collapse.

Today, the vast majority of Muslims in Britain are part of the working class poor. The refugees arriving in boats are not responsible for the price hikes and record profits, or the crisis in housing, health and education. Britain has been plundered by the most powerful and dominant corporations for record profits, who are now blaming the most powerless and destitute in society, setting us against each other in order to protect their riches. 

And the failure of any collective fightback to force distribution of wealth back, away from the super-rich and into wages and social welfare, has opened the doors to the politics of hatred and scapegoating Almost unrecognised, the super-rich have ensured their continued plunder of the public purse by inundating all media with racist tropes. 

Just five individuals of the ruling elite own eighty-percent of our news media, and have, for years, systematically ramped-up race hatred and fear with endless front-pages condemning refugees and asylum seekers for every social problem. 

The multi-millionaires like stock-exchange trader Nigel Farage and Irish passport-holder Stephen Laxley-Lennon (“Tommy Robinson” amongst his many aliases) whip-up racism and “English Nationalism” (!) for personal wealth and power on the backs of the discontent of the “squeezed middle” as well as the poor. 

The multi-billionaire, Elon Musk, purposefully and provocatively speaks of a civil war in Britain. It is impossible to become a multi-billionaire without exploiting huge masses of ordinary working class people. No wonder he wants the blame for our poverty focussed elsewhere.

The far-Right and open fascist parties have grown in the last few years across Europe and the USA. They feed on the hopelessness and despair caused by The Age of Austerity begun in 2008 with the crash of banks, the super-rich bailed out by our taxes resulting in the impoverishment of millions of working class people. 

We are living a period of repeat of the 1930’s, in slow motion but accelerating. Sections of the Capitalist ruling class are now so worried by our righteous anger and discontent that they are turning to fascism – a totalitarian version of Capitalism – to protect their riches. They echo the fascist broadcasts of the 1930’s, pretending to be anti-Establishment and all the time seeking to control the existing system of vast inequality, offering to smash all opposition in return for personal wealth and power.

Hitler gained power in Germany with the backing of sections of the Ruling Class (including in Britain) but managed the working class through the use of gangs of street thugs, scapegoating individuals and groups and systematically maiming and killing all opposition. Trade unions were his first target, even before the gypsies and Jews that would become his vehicle for absolute power. 

Hitler stated that his opponents should have fought and killed his gangs of killers on the streets, while we could still do so. The trade union tradition , in search of workers democracy, was always for swamping the streets with such a mass of anti-fascists as to remove their oxygen. It should have been done then, it must be done now.

The Capitalists use the poverty that they have caused and profited from in order to focus the blame away from them. Theirs’ is the Great Lie of modern times. The wholesale corruption of politicians tied to protecting financiers and corporations by stealing our taxes and public services has demolished most people’s faith in Government. 

Fascism can only be stopped by our numbers – our opposition on the streets and in the workplaces. We need millions of working class people here to oppose racism and directly expose the fascists seeking the total destruction of working class organisation and workers’ rights. 

We must mobilise for the largest national demonstration against fascism. Trade Unions – Ready!

We Stood Up To Stop Fascists from Destroying Plymouth

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Fascist cadre came to Plymouth on Monday 5th August 2024 to whip-up violence against migrants and people of colour, with phrases like “Stop the Boats”, a one time slogan of the Tory Prime Minister, Richi Sunak. The reporting of the violence suggested two tribes, two sides fighting each other as if in turf warfare. I had to complain. We had called a protest with the Stand Up To Racism organisation to stop the fascists. 700 of us faced 500 of them. They threw bricks and bottles and fireworks. We shouted “Refugees Are Welcome here!” and “Fascists off Our Streets!”. My letter was challenged by the Editor of the Plymouth Herald, but published in full. I stand by the challenge against poor journalism and biased reporting.

Dear Editor

The reporting of Monday night’s violence in Plymouth represented an extraordinary level of ignorance of the facts. Your narrative was of a clash between two protest groups. It was portrayed as a clash between two tribes, both violent and in the wrong.y

In fact, the Unity Rally at the Guildhall Square, called by the Stand Up To Racism group in the City and supported by the Plymouth Trade Unions, was a statement of city pride in multiculturalism and peace. 

When told that fascist organisers were travelling to Plymouth to whip-up race hate and misogyny, we rallied to defend our rights. We stopped their intended destruction of our city centre.

Yet we are presented as two-sides of the same coin. Let’s be clear, there is no currency between social harmony and fascism. 

Militarised fascist cadre, ideologically tied to far-right groups in the USA and funded by millionaires organising a fast rise in fascist organisation across Europe and America, came into Plymouth to test our resolve. They are seeking fertile ground for fascist organisation. They include those who emulate the Nazis of the Second World War who bombed Plymouth. They present Nazi salutes and symbols in public.

The most horrific and violent aspect of their organisation is the intention to find the most righteously angry of the dispossessed youth in the poorer cities and towns, to pull together into street fighting gangs to target minority groups – essentially tho’ not only Muslims, refugees and asylum seekers.

The local young people on the Racist demonstration came from the most deprived areas of our city are easy prey for political manipulators seeking personal power and control.

Race-hate is not their only tool. The powerful millionaire actors on social media whip-up misogyny, homophobia and trans-hate, ridiculing actions to manage the very obvious climate change we are experiencing, and whipping-up nationalist fever towards world war. These are the proponents of male white nationalist supremacy. Why would the media not expose this?

And more importantly, why is the propaganda from local politicians not only saying we should not challenge the fast rise of organised racism and fascism, but actually defend our cities? It was exactly this position of politics as in the 1930’s that allowed Hitler’s Nazis come to power in Germany. Know your history.

Our politicians should be out, working tirelessly to build the social infrastructure so desperately needed to end poverty and division. 

Fortunately, more than 700 anti-racists defied political demands to “stay at home” and ensured the insurgent fascists could not smash our city centre. We should be applauded, not damned. Plymouth must not be seen as fertile ground for fascist organisation.

There is an urgent need for action against racism in our City. And to prevent the adoption of race hate by our forgotten and disposed youth we need urgent funding for housing and education, welfare and security. We need politics of hope not hate. And we must stand up to racism, as a mass and in action, or our streets will quickly become unsafe, firstly for any person of colour and then for the entire working class.

Trade unions have a proud history of fighting racism and fascism, because fascism destroys all working class organisation to ensure totalitarian control from above. We stepped-up to the plate on Monday, against violence, intimidation, racism and fascism. We will continue to do so.

Tony Staunton

President, Plymouth Trades Union

Plymouth Stand Up To Racism held a meeting on Thursday 8th August at 7pm at the Quaker House, 74 Mutley Plain, Plymouth, with 70 people attending, organising a Unity Rally the following Saturday that was attended by 200. Altogether a good start, but nearly enough activists to combat this growing threat.

Remembering Hiroshima

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My weekly comment printed in the Plymouth Herald (6.8.24) simply commemorating the dropping of nuclear bombs on human populations. It was heavily edited before publication. There was much else happening in this tense and volatile world as I wrote, but this issue must not be put to one side.

On the day of annual commemoration of the dropping of a nuclear bomb on Japan’s city of Hiroshima in 1945, the President of the United States warns of great peril today. Western countries are pulling their citizens out of the Middle East whilst sending more troops and military equipment into the Mediterranean. There are preparations for nuclear war.

Today’s remembrance of Hiroshima’s destruction by a single bomb, we remember the slow deaths of hundreds of thousands caused by nuclear radiation contaminating generations ever since and still to come. Nuclear war is not sudden death. For most it produces lingering suffering.

In 1961 the public news was full of imminent threat of nuclear war. Russia and the United States of America (USA) tensed for a nuclear stand-off, and ordinary working class families, East and West, were openly educated on the potential of nuclear war, with schools rehearsing duck & cover drills on the sound of an air raid siren. 

As USA missile bases were established ever-closer to the border of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the Soviet Union decided to put their less long-distance nuclear missiles on Cuban soil, 90 miles off the Florida coast. For 13 days in October 1962 we came ever closer to nuclear war, the brinkmanship between Kennedy and Khrushchev ramping-up the tension to an agreement minutes before midnight. The US agreed to take their nuclear missiles out of sites in Turkey, on Russia’s border, and Russia agreed to dismantle nuclear sites in Cuba, some 14 miles off the coast of the United States. 

Protests were worldwide during that period, the Labour Party amongst many mainstream political organisations leaping to adopt a “unilateral disarmament” policy, meaning each nation should disarm all nuclear weapons whatever other nations are doing. Unilateralism was the obvious political “deterrent” against nuclear use, since, if you ain’t got nukes, no-one can be so threatened by obliteration that they fire at you first. But which nuclear power would be the first to give them up?

Unilateralism did not sit well with the cold warmongers who continually organised for the chance to defeat all opposition and rule the entire world. The first period of imminent nuclear war gave way to a Cold War of continuous and immense military build-up between enemy states, the cost of such rearmament ensuring cuts to education health and welfare. But the threat of immediate nuclear war diminished enough to be sat only at the back of our minds as a distinct but distant possibility.

Between 1974 and 1980 the UK government produced TV and newspaper adverts, radio broadcasts and public information films on how to protect ourselves during a nuclear attack. The very famous pamphlet, “Protect and Survive” went through every home’s letterbox. The BBC made films of the aftermath of a nuclear exchange, the 2-part mini-series Threads still spinechilling today in its depiction of multiple mushroom clouds demolishing Birmingham, and the years of mass suffering amidst social collapse in the decades that followed.

CND produced “Protest & Survive” as a pamphlet detailing how human society collapses in nuclear war, and 250,000 of us marched in London in 1981 to stop the US siting their nuclear missiles in Britain. The historic women’s camp at Aldermaston went on to ensure US nuclear warheads left our island. 

Now, the USA is putting new nuclear warheads at US Airforce base at Lakenheath, Suffolk, with barely any notice other than a few of us CND activists. Putin has twice threatened nuclear attack on Britain as one of the foremost nuclear armed states supplying weaponry to Ukraine, including missiles that can fire deep into Russian cities. Germany is raising its army again, with words of war in Europe. 

No-one seems to be blinking an eye at all this, let alone running public education programmes on how to survive nuclear war. Will there even be a siren offering the famous “four-minute warning”. 

Russia is a brazen Capitalist, nay Gangster economy with a far-Right nationalist President wielding huge powers of repression inside the country and engaging in imperialist wars abroad. There is no “Red Menace” of the 1960’s. 

There is now global Capitalist competition for natural and Human Resources at a time of greater tension and multi-causational crisis than in the 1930’s. In many ways this is far more dangerous and volatile than the Cold War between conflicting ideologies of the post-war era. This is open global imperialist rivalry in the age of climate collapse and mass poverty.

We are now said to be in an imperialist pre-war era, although the hundreds of millions of humans currently caught-up in regional wars worldwide would disagree it is “pre” to anything other than world war that will engulf all humanity. 

To suggest that, at least by having a so-called “British Bomb” we can be mutually assured of the enemy’s destruction even if we also all die in the process, is the most bizarre and ignorant of all nationalistic nonsense. There has never been a more urgent point in history for unilateral nuclear disarmament now, before it’s too late.

Is Military Might the Final Solution?

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It is probably routine for the Congress of the United States of America to offer a platform to war criminals and colonialists. After all, the history of US imperialism has been a constant military assault on countries across the world, deposing non-compliant governments and installing their own, whether in the form of fascist generals in Chilé or totalitarian Royal families in the Middle East.

But offering Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu a State address last week has to rank towards the top  of the list. A statement to the world by the waning super power that overt military might is the final solution to any and all challenges to global US supremacy.

Listen to Netanyahu himself, addressing the leaders of most powerful military nation in human history: “We help keep Americans’ boots off the ground while protecting our shared interests in the Middle East.’

Netanyahu is stating the truth – that Israel/Zionism is an extension of American imperialism. That’s why the US supports Israel like no other country does.. The main US interest in the Middle East is oil.  Getting out of fossil fuels would not just address climate change, it would break the link between energy security and the Middle East, especially as part of the current Israeli illegal invasion of Palestinian territory is for ownership of oil and gas on the land of Gaza and off the Gazan coast.

Israel is a militarised society with conscription for all Israelis into military service when young, trained and ready for active service until they’re old. The constitution they fight for and preserve is based upon Zionist political laws  assuring racial supremacy and privileges for Israeli citizens and open oppression and exploitation of Palestinians and all Arabs, at the centre of the Arab world.

Netanyahu was appealing to the US for continued support for his assault on Gaza, where now more than 185,000 Palestinian civilians are reported to have been killed since October 2023, the majority women and children, in the overwhelming military bombardment of a territory 24 miles by 7 miles across. 

Right now, one-and-a-half million civilians are experiencing homelessness and extreme food insecurity without fresh water or sanitation, and half-a-million are experiencing famine whilst being daily bombed by high-grade munitions. 

Yet Netanyahu received 58 standing ovations by US elected senators and congressmen and now holds the record for the applause of a foreign leader invited to address Congress.

Sure, around half of Congress’ Democrats skip Netanyahu speech, with many lawmakers, particularly progressive Israel critics, explicitly boycotting the event in protest of Netanyahu’s prosecution of the war in Gaza.

And outside, hundreds of thousands rallied to protest against him, jeered and provoked by Netanyahu from the rostrum, blasting the protestors against his foul reception as “Iran’s useful idiots…” as they were pepper sprayed and beaten with batons. He was cheered to the rafters in the House.

This grotesque celebration of horror and genocide will correctly mark the US state and its allies, in the eyes of billions of people throughout the world, as a hostile state. The  International Court of Justice has ruled that its occupation of Palestinian land is ‘unlawful’ and breaches laws concerning apartheid. Netanyahu, despite an International Criminal Court arrest warrant pending for the Gaza genocide, can travel under the protection of the US.

And the Western governments haven’t stopped supporting or arming Israel. Parts of combat aircraft and guided missiles, used by Israel to murder Palestinians, are made in Britain. And the new Labour Government aren’t stopping weapons sales to Israel.

Nevertheless, Netanyahu and his far-Right Zionist ministers in Israel remain on the back foot. He was forced to go to Washington as a propaganda initiative. Why? Because millions have actively protested against the assault on Gaza non-stop across the world through the past 9 months and continue to do so. Our protests have forced over 600 major corporations to disinvest from Israeli assets and business collaborations, and has won more than 145 of the World’s 196 countries to openly oppose and condemn Israel’s military colonisation of Palestine. 

We must continue to organise and protest to stop the killing and win Freedom for Palestine. Boycott, Divest and Sanction Israeli goods and trade. The next national demonstration will be in London on Saturday 3rd August. Be there!

Migrant Workers Give More than they Take

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It becomes tiring and repetitive, but the point has to be continuously repeated – migrants and refugees are not the cause of the Age of Austerity – greedy bosses, their exploitation and oppression of the working class certainly is. And they’re organising to ensure it stays that way. My weekly Comment published in the daily Plymouth Herald (23.7.24) tried to explain at least some of the reasoning why we must say “Refugees are Welcome Here!”.

Keep them out! Last Thursday’s international summit, held at Winston Churchill’s ancestral home of Blenheim Palace, focussed upon the “threat” to Europe of from the East and the Global South. In short, the leaders of 14 countries determined they should collaborate to keep refugees out of Europe.

Of course, unlike the same policies in the USA, Europe cannot simply build a long, high and militarised wall to “keep’em out!”. The geography doesn’t allow for barricades. Instead, those seeking refuge will need to be turfed out, turned around, sent back, or imprisoned in regimes so inhuman as to act as a “deterrent” to peoples whose conditions are already inhuman. 

The leaders stood together to rightfully denounced the human traffickers, but focussed upon those arriving at Europe’s borders and Britain’s shores as “illegals”. Little or nothing was said about the reasons for this mass migration, or consideration of the causes rather than the effects upon their security, wealth and power.

The vast majority of people travelling northwards, in death-defying journeys of pain and fear, are escaping one of two never-ending horrors being experienced by those born in Africa and the Middle East. The first is the wars funded and armed by countries of the North, encouraged and applauded by the leaders dining at Blenheim Palace, producing extremes of wealth for the arms manufacturers and allied trades who pay the lobbying fees for their jamboree.

The second is the climate collapse engulfing entire regions of sub-Saharan Africa – some 46 countries – with tens of millions of humans marching away from their homelands, lands forever starved of water and arable land as a result of the fossil-fuelled emissions from the global North, heating the Planet towards mass extinction.

In these circumstances, humanity should be uniting to protect all. The opposite is the case. As if labelling human beings “illegal” isn’t inhuman enough, plotting to ensure they die “abroad” is despicable, outside of all the legal and moral tenets that are paraded at such grand political events.

Those of the far-Right reading this will be enraged. The white-supremacists and Capitalist entrepreneurs, driven by their quest for individual power and wealth, will be screaming at the page, arguing for a national pride that blames all Britain’s obvious social decline on Black people.

Refusing to consider the record profits and exemptions from paying tax that have seen wealth go from the poor to the rich at an accelerating rate through the past decade, they blame immigration for any and every social problem. 

The fuel bills that have tripled in 4 years have seen the oil and gas companies triple their profits into tens of thousands of millions of pounds paid for by us. The water & sewage bills that used to be covered by taxes as part of public services are now being raised whilst the owners harvest tens of billions of pounds from us, in profits. 

The low pay and long working hours culture that ensures at least 5 million of we, the working class, are reliant on top-ups from Universal Credit. 14 million of us live in subsistence poverty, including 4 million of our children, with 17 million homes requiring refurbishment. 

These numbers alone dwarf any cost to us attached to caring for refugees and asylum seekers. In fact, the tax money we pay towards subsiding the arms manufacturers and fossil fuel companies amounts to tens of billions pounds more than the costs of immigration. 

The skills shortages that are hiking costs in the service and construction industries could be solved by immigrant labour, but that solution is denied by the racist fanatics. Migrants allowed to work pay taxes, unlike the super-rich. It’s simple, working migrants produce taxes and fund commerce to a degree far higher than the initial costs of welcoming them here.

Stopping immigration will do nothing to stop the gross exploitation of working people here, will not reflate the Exchequer nor will it lower the bills. The politicians have let the racists off-the-leash and flagged migration as the key problem in order to create the cover for their continued profiteering and plundering of the public purse.

On Saturday, fascists and their racist allies are holding an anti-immigrant, white-supremacist march in London. Anti-fascists from across Britain will be joining forces to challenge their lies and hatred, supported by the national Trades Union Congress and dozens of trade unions. The rise of racism and fascism must be nipped in the bud before it swamps Britain and destroys the human rights we all require. 

Surplus Humans are Not the Real Problem

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There is an incredible depth and breadth of vitriol being published against migrants and asylum seekers right now, and a torrent of images on screen of mass human suffering. We are becoming desensitised and “used” to apocalyptic “Hollywood” movie images of people being torn apart, tortured and/or left to rot. Hence my weekly Comment in the daily Plymouth Herald (16.7.24) condemning any and all attempts to devalue even one human life.

We must not stop talking about it. Day after day we see horror on our screens. Everything from the apparent attempted assassination of a past-President to the blanket bombing of refugee camps.

We watch dramatic, high definition, cinematically enhanced moving pictures of bombs exploding into mushroom clouds and sound waves, collapsing buildings. 

There are close-ups of human carcasses with dissembled body parts, their relatives’ faces offered in close-up, blooded and wide-eyed, some screaming and others offering traumatised stares. The images can be paused, rewound, captured, recreated, saved and shared. Like a Hollywood movie.

In essence, we are being daily desensitised to the suffering of humanity.

Last week’s NATO conference in Washington heard world leaders ramping-up military plans for more war, more expenditure on war, and thereby, more images of death and destruction on TV. More frightening still was the latest language, intimated on stage and spoken more precisely on the fringes. The concept and identification of “surplus humans”. The term itself has been spoken in the Israeli Cabinet recently by a self-proclaimed fascist and racist war minister, referring directly to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

Let’s think on that. Surplus humans. Surplus to what, to whom and by what criteria? When politicians demand to “send them back”, the presumption is they’re surplus to requirements. When walls are built to keep “them” out, permissions given to shoot to kill, they’re “surplus”. Militarised camps are built to warehouse and store hundreds of thousands at a time, of these surplus peoples. 

A couple of hundred years ago, in 1798, Thomas Malthus published a book still referenced by the more bigoted of politicians, and poorly paraphrased to suggest “overpopulation creates poverty and misery”. Malthusianism is back in fashion. Let the forces of war and climate reduce populations “naturally”, to give the smaller human race space to live. Malthus’s arguments were thoroughly disproved on the basis that as more people exist, so more resources can be produced to alleviate poverty. Today, it is largely only the elitists who still adhere to his tracts, although, in the face of climate collapse, a range of liberal minds are now starting to repeat his nonsense, amongst them the near-god of the environment, David Attenborough. 

To disprove this nonsense, is to recognise that humans have modified less than 15% of the global land surface, and settled to create homes on 10%. In the UK, 9% of the land is built-upon. There is space.   

A better example still: there more food produced in the world today than there are mouths to feed. The much-overstated argument that the current human population would require 2.5 Earth’s worth of resources in order for everyone to live to the standards of USA and Europe is full of holes – firstly, Capitalism’s overproduction of Stuff, including industrial food, is not a desirable nor sustainable way forward for humanity, and secondly Capitalisms exploitation and destruction of natural resources is not a stated goal of the vast majority of humanity. 

The issue, is resource (wealth) distribution. One-third of all food produced in the world is wasted. The reason is intentional – if the transport of the food to the people who need it is not profitable (often termed “economically viable”), and if the hungry people cannot pay the market price (including the surplus value known as profit), then they must exist in a condition of malnutrition and slowly starve – in their millions.

With a complete negation of any reason or rationality it is argued that the surplus food is a natural part of the System, it is the surplus mouths that are the problem. Capitalist society values only those who work to produce surplus for those who accumulate and hoard wealth. Those who do not or cannot are deemed a drain on society, an impediment to growth, surplus to requirements. 

Obviously it is not people who are the problem. After all, we’re all people. As a matter of fact, the System that commodifies and puts a price on every aspect of life is the problem. 

Were we to live in a system based upon human need not profit, resources could be prioritised to ensure every human has the basics of life ensured: nutrition, shelter, health care, education and community – love. And there is more than enough to go round.

Instead, adherents of the system of Capitalism are knowingly destroying the planet, descending into war, genocide and barbarism. And these acts don’t go away simply by turning off our TV. They continue to come towards us and engulf us. 

We are witnessing the rapidly developing situation towards one billion climate refugees by 2035, forced to leave their homelands due to extremes of weather impossible to live under. Crop failures, permanent drought, or fires or floods that destroy arable land create both war for the diminishing resources and mass migration for survival. 

These conditions, now recognised by the warrior class of NATO and every imperial power, are likely to be answered by rapid the development of more vast refugees camps, the people guarded and impoverished, incarcerating the millions forced to stay and die where they were born, surplus to requirements of the global system of Capitalism whilst the world leaders spend more than $2trillion each year on armaments.

To believe there are surplus humans is to have lost all humanity. If a society says some lives don’t matter, then one day that life is likely to be yours. Not watching the latest news will only bring this ever closer to our doors. The real news is that we’d best change the System, fast.

Housing Crisis Demands Drastic Solutions

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As three tents appeared in our local park, signifying the development of homelessness and poverty here, I wanted to consider some of the political issues affecting any solution. This is my weekly column, published 9th July 2024, demanding the return to council housing at the start of the new Starmer Government, apparently already to the right of Thatcher.

There are tents in our parks and green spaces across Plymouth. The reason has little to do with the weather. We are witnessing the deepening problem of homelessness.

Britain has been experiencing a housing crisis for decades, the seemingly endless Era of Austerity pushing down income and pushing-up prices to create a huge deficit in affordable homes.

Surely, a roof over your head represents the most basic level of security, if not comfort. In a wealthy country it should be deemed as a right. 

Instead we see tens of thousands of people experiencing forced evictions amidst skyrocketing rent increases or mortgage demands. 

The laws have long been changed to give landlords and home owners tax-perks and almost absolute rights to act as they wish. The notorious Section 21 no-fault eviction law means landlords can evict tenants at 2 months notice without any explanation. Without reason. 

During the pandemic, house builders – for whom house building is about investment and profit, not homes – were given tax relief and development incentives. Such private developments included almost no affordable housing or rentable accommodation, and have driven-up prices.

When general inflation went well over 20%, building materials doubled in price alongside energy, the building firms cutting costs and quality and many going bust.

Working class people face a crisis of not being able to afford rent, bills and food, whilst small landlords moan they are in a “cost of doing” crisis, unable to maintain the buildings. The Office for National Statistics reported that 43% of renters declared difficulties with paying the rent last year, with 14% unable to afford food after paying the bills, almost 4 million of us having to use charitable food banks, in 2024 an additional three-quarters of a million people using food banks in for the first time.

Building houses isn’t the problem – the question is who are they being built for? The homes that are being built are for the already wealthy, the large building cartels forcing-up prices in a market that is based upon investment to sell-on at a profit, or buy-to-rent to ensure someone also pays their mortgage and into their pension pot. 

Almost 3 million council-owned homes have been sold-off across Britain since Margaret Thatcher introduced the “right-to-buy” in 1980, with 40% of these formerly affordable homes now rented out by private landlords, some councils having to rent-back the same properties at exorbitant prices in order to house homeless families.

The racists are quick to suggest these are refugees families taking the homes from white people, quick to dismiss the facts about refugees homelessness and exploitation, prison barges like the Bibby Stockholm or the asylum prisons in rotting disused army camps. 

Refugees are not the cause of homelessness. The crisis has been caused by the free-market unregulated capitalist accumulation of wealth and property in the hands of a few. When rents go up and salaries stay stagnant there is a systematic transfer of wealth from those who work for a living to those who own things for a living. 

The numbers can’t lie, the three-quarters of a million empty houses, mostly second-homes, the buy-up of homes for Air BnB to make a fast buck for the already wealthy, together pushing out people born in the area, and producing a generation of working class young people unable ever to afford to buy. Add to that the overpriced, poorly built apartment blocks owned by speculator hedge-funds gambling on the value in five years time irrespective of occupation all prove that Britain’s housing crisis is systemic, corrupt and immoral.

We are left too few new homes, and inappropriate house building organised to maximise profit, not meet to need. 

One in five of private homes lying on flood plains and now finding insurance against water ingress either too expensive or unavailable. More are being built on vulnerable land because the land is cheap for the builders to buy.

But climate change is creating a double-crisis, not only the lack of housing but the poor housing stock here, very vulnerable to extreme weather conditions. Too hot during our increasingly short summers, far too damp in the miserably long wet spells, and too expensive to renovate without State help. An estimated 13 million homes now need to be climate-proofed in England alone.

So long as housing is seen as an investment to be capitalised upon, so prices will rise, rents will double, and tents on the streets will turn into encampments of destitution. Locals get pushed out, home ownership becomes more exclusive, banks double their profits.

Last week, the Supreme Court of the USA voted 6:3 along ideological lines to allow States to declare homelessness illegal – that is, people who are homeless will be deemed illegal and will be imprisoned, into work camps as slaves. Are we to see this here?

Homes and homelessness is the new political frontline.

What is needed is local rent controls and house price caps – in other words regulation! 

A return to council housing with emergency funding of local councils. Government has to give the money it has stolen back to local councils, councils have to renown their old estates as well as build new ones. The neoliberal doctrine of private home ownership has to end, with the reintroduction of public ownership paid for by higher taxes for the wealthy landlords and corporations. 

We deserve protection, but it looks like we’ll have to protect ourselves with rent strikes and mass campaigns against evictions. Homes for All!