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.

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!

My weekly Comment in the daily Plymouth Herald (11.6.24). I want nuclear-everything (bombs, propulsion, energy, power) discussed during the General Election campaign but can clearly see it is a non-starter in any list of priorities. As, it would appear, is the same for war. Only the protests for Gaza have shaped any election manifesto, the rest being bland re-hashes of out-of-date and incoherent false promises.

The article was edited for publication, the original below.

There are no winners in a nuclear war

Not one Party leader has stated that they shall under no circumstances order the launch of a nuclear weapon. So it can hardly be against the rules of election purdah to argue for unilateral nuclear disarmament when we face such a ghastly future.

We are facing the real possibility of the use of nuclear weapons in the lifetime of the next UK Parliament.

Buried under the sincere emotional weight of commemoration of D-Day 1944, the American President, the de-facto leader of NATO, last week gave approval for US and UK weapons to be fired into and exploded inside Russia. US troops are standing alongside Ukrainians, assisting the launch of high explosives into Russian towns.

Not long before, President Biden had stated on screen that this would never happen, the engagement of NATO forces inside Russia would amount to the start of the Third World War. Yet it’s happening. Have we missed something here? Is everyone in a state of denial?

The more honest of the official military advisers tell us that the present risk of nuclear war is as grave as in 1962 and the early eighties. Some of us remember both periods as a time of breath-holding and anti-nuclear protests.

But not today. It is considered as “woke” to be against the readiness to unleash the Trident-system’s multiple nuclear warheads launched from the UK’s Vanguard nuclear submarines. Indeed, the Plymouth Herald rejoiced at the support of multiple Party-heads to pledge to bring the next generation of nuclear weaponry to Plymouth after the election.

The distraction of nuclear – weapons and power generation – taking much needed cash and skills from the enormous emergencies of both climate and social infrastructure – should be intolerable and exposed as lies.

Instead, “more jobs and more money!” was the parochial proclamation, devoid of any consideration of the impact on jobs and wealth should nuclear weapons ever be used.

And they may well be used, sooner than you think.

The military elite speak of the current escalating nuclear threat and counter-threat pattern, not as an opinion but as fact. There are preparations for resurrecting live nuclear weapon testing by Russia, China and the US. We witness the collapse of arms control measures, the modernisation of weapon systems and the emergence of political leaders fighting over access to the nuclear arsenals and boasting of their readiness to make the “first strike”.

There should be no doubt about the catastrophic reality of nuclear conflict.

The United States’ nuclear arsenal, to which the UK’s bombs are wholly subordinated, contain an Artificial Intelligence programme to deploy a launch-on-warning situation, making the Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (huge nuclear bomb-carrying ICBNs) capable of being launched in as little as one minute—15 minutes for the submarines. There are enough weapons in those positions right now to bring on a nuclear winter that would kill at least 5 billion people. In a nuclear exchange, most people don’t die instantly – most die over a period of weeks or months in extreme agony, dissolved from within by the radioactive fallout.

The talk of “targeted” battlefield weapons is a nonsense of hawkish propaganda. There’s nothing targeted about them – these are weapons of mass destruction deemed illegal in international law. The cynically presented “low-yield” nuclear bombs, with smaller explosive and radioactive fallout footprints than those carried on the ICBNs, are nevertheless the size of that dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. For politicians to speak of their use in Ukraine or Gaza (and yes, active politicians in power have voiced those demands recently) is despicable.

There is only a single target for nuclear weapons – humanity itself. The first use of one nuclear weapon will, most likely, set-off a global chain reaction ordered by automation, not a Prime Minister or President. Britain’s nuclear weapons make us a primary target, as the offensive military commander, President Putin has pointed out.

Existential threats to the very future of the human race need to be understood and addressed in democratic debate. Nuclear war is right up there with climate and bio-diversity collapse. These horrors should be high on the election agenda.

Immediate unilateral disarmament is the only answer. Instead, raising the proportion of military spending, including at least £210billion of tax-payers money for the new nuclear weapons Trident system controlled by the United States, is written in stone in the Party manifestos and boasted for as a vote winner. Why would you vote for nuclear war? It is a war no-one can win.