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!

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!

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.