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!

The far-Right and Fascism are the most immediate threats

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (7.1.25), raging against the far-Right. Once again, not my chosen headline. We have to call out Farage and Reform UK and stop the growth of fascism. I could go on. Build Stand Up To Racism and challenge racism in our workplaces and communities while fighting for our rights.

The unedited version below.

The fact that the repulsive Nigel Farage and his toxic Reform UK are central stage has little to do with any mass popular support. It is testimony to the fast development of support for the far-Right by the world’s powerful billionaires who have control of the mass online media, printed and TV news, and right-wing control of the British Broadcasting Corporation.

The worlds richest man, Elon Musk, is insisting that statements of white supremacy and racism are hallmarks of free speech, and he’s ready to fund politicians across the world who want to spout ultra-nationalism. Farage, pictured recently with arch-misogynist and Islamaphobe, Andrew Tate, is publicising Musk’s bile as his own, operating merely as a parrot of the Trump doctrine.

Musk’s support for the fascists’ pin-up boy, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon aka “Tommy Robinson” leaves little doubt that Musk wants Reform UK transformed into an openly fascist party akin to the AfD in Germany. Despite calling-out the UK Prime Minister as “complicit in the rape of Britain”, the self-proclaimed English nationalist Farage offers support for Musk in the hope of funding. Farage’s political gamble backfired. But in this polarised country operating in a polarised world now descending ever-deeper into strife and open conflict, there is oxygen for extreme views.

The question must be asked, where is the opposition? Starmer is going out of his way to appease Trump and court Farage. Labour Party grandees salute him rather than challenge. When Farage says “forcibly deport more refugees”, Starmer boasts he is and will do even more.

Any decent person should damn the implicit racism and shout from the rooftops that the UK depends upon migrant labour and we uphold the human rights of asylum seekers to sanctuary here. Starmer’s spineless ministers assert precisely the opposite.

Where is the challenge to the Islamaphobic bile spewing from Musk and Farage about Muslim sex-abusers? Numerous well-funded reports have repeatedly offered evidence that over 90% of child sexual exploitation is at the hands of white men, with Asian abusers proportionately lower than across the white population. Where is the Reform UK outrage about the sexual abuse inside the white Christian churches, the Royals and the “play-boy” super-rich?

Reform UK is whipping-up a racist lynch-mob mentality, when the cost of asylum-seekers reaching here in boats is a fraction of the costs to the exchequer in unpaid taxes of those who can more than afford to pay them.

We require active, vocal, constant and collective challenge to such discrimination and prejudice. Anything other than direct challenge to Farage’s racist bigotry represents acquiescence to far-Right rule in Britain and across the world.

Despite the Reform UK’s insistence on challenging the Establishment, this is an organisation in league with the Capitalist ruling class and doing their bidding, diverting attention away from the huge increases in private profit and accumulation of private wealth at the expense of mass of working people.

Farage has ten times the air-time of the Prime Minister on prime-time TV. Despite his various political organisations never having more than five elected MPs, the BBC has invited Farage onto the weekly Question Time politics show more than any other politician, his groups represented on around 24% of all the show’s broadcasts. You’d think it was Reform UK who won the landslide!

The multi-millionaire Farage is not planning to make life better for the working class. His purpose is to divide us to rule us on behalf of the super-rich, and thereby become one of them. His appeal is not to average-wage-earning workers but to the wealthier amongst the middle classes who, sensing the vulnerabilities of the Age, are reacting to all shifts away from the crumbling status quo that has benefitted them.

The far-right Reform UK is for the protecting of the well-off as the buffer for the super-rich to end joy the tax-cuts and freedoms that Farage and Trump and Musk promise. Workers, young and old, white and of colour, of any ethnicity and anyone condemned as “woke” will not receive any joy from a Farage government.

This far-right Reform UK is seeking to ignite the understandable anger of the disaffected into more street violence aimed at scapegoating minorities. The real aim is to atomise working class organisation by setting us each against the other in pursuit of unchallengeable exploitation, stabilising and engorging the landlords and business grandees through low taxes at the cost of unaffordable health services, low wages, extortionate rents and mass poverty.

This is the class base of Reform UK and the multi-millionaire Farage. We saw their like grow and take charge across Europe one hundred years ago and now they’re back.

The trade union movement back then was key to exposing their lies and breaking their popularity, challenging racism and scapegoating in the streets and in the workplaces. We have to rise-up against bigotry and division as a matter of extreme urgency.

The Left must Stand Up To Racism and campaign for the super-rich to be taxed accordingly (the loopholes, tax-evasion and subsidies plugged), the bloated Corporations forced to pay-up to fund our NHS and welfare services, for a mass-build of affordable housing with rent controls, and a proper living wage that prevents the 7million of us currently living with food insecurity and 14 million in poor housing.

The chancers and deceivers of Reform UK are offering none of that and will deliver none of this, and sadly neither will Starmer’s Labour government. It is down to us to organise for workers rights.

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A Harsher 2025

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Wishing everyone a Happy New Year, and hoping for some mass revolt in 2025, here’s my last weekly comment column of 2024, in the daily Plymouth Herald (31.12.24). This has been a ghastly year, both in terms of personal health and global suffering, Gaza needing to remain at the forefront of our minds. And the local issues, the degradation of our services and of any accountable democratic framework, have to be challenged. I remain focussed on the greatest twin perils of climate catastrophe and nuclear warfare, but the cause of all remains the Capitalsit System, which has to be overthrown.

The unedited version here:

On the eve of a new year, hope lies with those campaigning for Peace with Social Justice. That is not the manifesto of any of our main political parties, hellbent on war and racial hatred.

Starmer’s Labour is organising for a 5% reduction in spending in all government departments, cheered-on by the Tories and only Trumped by Reform UK demanding more cuts, their propaganda financed by billionaires. The lesser parties can say what they wish, but they have no clout.

Only the people, assembled, en masse on the streets and in collective action across workplaces have the power to improve our collective future.

We are facing a harsher year ahead, Austerity Mark Two now declared. It’s not what the People voted for, but democracy and civil infrastructure are now in deficit if not bankrupted. The National Health Service in hoc to private US-based corporations, our education system scavenged by hedge-fund consortia, our housing ravaged by short-term profiteers investing in squalid tenements and over-inflated market rates.

One-in-three of our children are living in poverty, going to bed each night without having access to at least one of the essential components of healthy development. At least one-in-three of our older people live impoverished lives of isolation and loneliness. One-in-four women are suffering domestic violence, the pressures of this alienated existence creating the conditions for us to turn against each other in the quest for some power and control over the inner sense of powerlessness.

The working class is the majority. Those of us who, should we suddenly spend a year or more without employment income, suddenly dependent upon £80 a week welfare benefits, the mortgage or expensive rent no longer paid, would face homelessness or insecure dank accommodation, subsistence diets and a depressed monotone reality. We are at least three-quarters of the UK population, living with serious vulnerability.

There is more that unites us than divides. We may enjoy different recreational pursuits, cultural preferences and dietary habits, but we go to work to earn the crust and pursue our dreams. We experience the treadmill of the workplace, the middle-managers forced from above to demand ever more, the workforce driven into a self-defensive regime to protect ourselves from bullying. overwork and hopelessness.

The UK is the 7th largest economy out of 196 countries. Our gross domestic product is 4 times the size of the 1970s. We should all be on 3 day weeks with an income twice it’s current size, or more. Where’s all the money gone?

The world has 7 times the wealth compared with 1970. The average person is only 8% wealthier, the richest 0.01% are 4000% richer: Elon Musk was worth $2billion in 2012 (much of it inherited), in 2024 that had increased to $447bn; Jeff Bezos $18bn 2012 to $249bn in 2024; Zuckerberg $44bn in 2012, $224bn in 2024. The world’s wealth has poured upwards, not trickled down at all.

Our taxes have been sucked into corporations through the process of privatisation, producing big holes in our health, welfare and education funding. And more taxes have gone to the now-endless wars being pursued by the military-industrial complex of private arms companies making obscene profits alongside the transnational oil and gas corporations.

Starmer wants UK tax expenditure on the military to go up to 5% of GDP, hence the 5% cuts to everything else. Our welfare is being sucked dry by war and private greed. And now, no-one is predicting that life will get any better – the changes to climate are observably accelerating at such a rate that it is undeniable, only the causes and solutions argued about. We face local and global food shortages in the near future.

We need a radical transformation to survive. From any social analysis it is clear that the rich are too rich and the distribution of wealth in society too extreme. No-one needs or deserves a billion pounds or dollars. In fact, anything more than £5million must be an inexcusable amount of surplus personal wealth, spent only on a life of wasteful privileges and extreme extravagance at the expense of tens of thousands if not millions of others. We have to put human need before private profit, a cap on wealth and a profound level of redistribution to meet human needs in this new harsher world.

It will take a revolution.

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Religion is Political

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (24.12.24) getting over-philosophical (it’s the time of year) and challenging all orthodoxies. No more Business as Usual (if we want to survive). Seasons Greetings, the unexpurgated version below:

We are constantly warned of extremism. Not only the terrorism of car-driving, gun-toting or axe-wielding fanatics but the social orators of various fundamentalisms, political as well as religious.

We are taught to see those who haven’t been raised to our orthodoxies as potential threats.

We are told to be cautious of those who wear the symbols and emblems of a religious group or engage in mass rituals. A society with a regime that requires specific behaviours of all citizens, stopping all they would normally do in order to respect a specific religious date, is to be frowned upon as an example of anything from forced indoctrination through to mass hysteria. Oops, there goes Christmas!

All religion stems from the primordial human need to understand why we are here as well as why we die. The apparent impossibility of answering those questions opens the door to an all-but infinite number of explanations. Events and situations that are unconscionable are explained by the wisdom of god or gods who do know that which we cannot know.

Religion offers hope amidst the pains of living, and a heart in a heartless world. Faith allows acceptance of fallibility, the inhuman actions of human beings, the unreasoned and unreasonable.

Because Faith seeks to define acceptable behaviour, it is deeply political. Politics is, after all, about how people live together and behave towards each other. And so, as religions develop and grow they become organised and led, by leaders, enrobed and ordained with the word of god, to tell people how to behave.

The histories written into religious scripts convey the lessons of humanity over time, but are nevertheless written down by human beings. Ancient scriptures are reinterpreted time and again, and subjected to the censorship or acceptance of those with the power to have them published or burnt. The stories and the rules are changed over time. Crude tenets are nuanced into everyday rules of social relations. The scribes and their editors possess immense personal power. And all personal power corrupts.

There are some material reasons for religious rules. In a world without fridges it was a good rule of thumb to not eat red meat riddled with disease. Should you be starving you may still be tempted to eat a pig or a cow, even if the King threatened you with punishment. But if it is god’s word, punishable with an after-life of eternal pain and damnation, you may rather starve to death in pursuit of life in the hereafter.

The rules laid down by god are not to be broken so lightly as the laws decreed by men. And so the church has power, political power. Most organised religion tells us we are born into a place in the social structure as ordained by god, and we should accept rather than challenge our rank in the class system. But the decrees laid down by the church change over time, determined by the prevailing social conditions. The religious edicts of a feudal society have to be turned-over as a new ruling class develops – the Capitalist mercantilists taking over political power from the landlords.

The ruling class power, its wealth and standing army, determines the rules of the church, not the other way round. Monasteries are burnt to the ground, bloody wars are waged between rival sects.

Catholic versus Protestant, Sunnis versus Shia, Hindu versus Buddhist…and within each there are challengers from the Left and the Right, doubters and zealots.

All religions involve battles for power. The power of ideas, accepted or rejected by those with the wealth and armies to enforce them. To a point where all ruling ideas are the chosen ideas of the ruling class.

It’s all about power and control on Earth, not Heaven.

People learn how to think within the confines of the society and natural world we are born into. The teaching we experience in school reflects the ruling ideology, the curriculum determined by the ruling class, the behaviours enshrined in the prevailing religious order. We try to behave and accept even when those ideas make little or no sense – do we starve or break the laws in order to survive?

It is the contradictions between what we’re told to believe and what we actually experience as the world around us that foment revolutions.

Those of us who dare to challenge the ruling class also challenge the ruling ideas, and are heavily damned should that include defying the ruling religious norms. We can be proclaimed as “ungodly”, a charge far worse than being “illegal”. Yet all beliefs change with the times.

And so there are times when the enforced religious rules no longer make sense and place the people in grave danger. They have to be defied, as does the ruling class who proclaims them. With an elite of billionaires ruling over mass poverty and requiring authoritarian compliance to the money-god, we are living in such times.

In this era of escalating warfare and climate catastrophe our priority must be to organise for human welfare not religious or political dogma. That means opposing both imperialist and religious wars threatening nuclear annihilation. It also requires we challenge the consumerism producing the climate-heating toxic emissions and throwaway plastics that are killing the Planet. These are not matters of belief but observable facts.

Christmas needs a rethink.

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We have to Think for Ourselves!

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (17.12.24), musing on memes. It is said that young people are now living in a 15-second information-age, although my current experience talking with students suggests quite the opposite. But to what extent the headlines are read and consumed instead of the analysis is up for debate. As ever, the unexpurgated version is below (minus the grammatical errors in the printed article…and, as ever, it’s not my headline…):

We’re Living in a Land of Social Media Memes

Every day we are assaulted, jolted, confounded or simply amused by the memes appearing across our social media.

A phrase, often printed in front of a provocative picture, is posted online to capture, sum-up and sloganise, seeking to impregnate our minds with a dominant thought of the day. No reason to read the contents, just scan a headline and move on.

We are being bombarded with what we are supposed to think, and consequently become hyper-critical of others in order to hide our own insecurities. The Blame Game, Trolling, Gaslighting, anti-bullying-Bullying and the nonsense non sequitur have become common discourse.

The best memes evoke an emotional reaction by which they’re judged and then shared towards the much-prized accolade of “viral”. Indeed, their creation has inspired a cottage industry, thousands of times larger than that initiated by the Spinning Jenny, producing home-spun phrases or sayings.

What used to be jokes have now been weaponised into ideologically-charged phrases to be liked or to cause anger.

On TikTok and Instagram memes are politicised to win hearts and minds, celebrities of the Right and the Left vying for the punchline quip or deathly allegation that will be shared ten million times. The picture propaganda lasts longer on X and Facebook, and now Bluesky, and tend to come round again, for months or sometimes years, thoroughly out of context from their original intention.

Categories follow news themes. Recent memes include “Care homes charging £5,000 a week – you could get a room at the Ritz for that! Nationalise social care!” Not funny really. A similar one with a picture of Bugs Bunny in a dress suit reads “I wish all CEOs a very healthy fear of the working class.” Yep!

Another, “Health Care should not be cheap and accessible. It should be free and universal”, ran across all apps. A favourite, mocking a TV advert of an elderly man on the phone searching for a specific book reads, “I’m looking for a copy of “How to Avoid Paying Tax by Buying a Farm” by J R Clarkson.”

There are left-wing memes and far-right memes and feminist memes and misogynist memes. There are also a growing percentage of memes created by artificial intelligence and shared by bots at a rate devised to swamp the internet.

Elon Musk, US-based multi-billionaire owner of X, is posting memes calling for a UK General Election, calling our society a Stalinist regime and authoritarian police state, and offering support for the jailed fascist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson. The aim is to pull the elected UK Government rightwards into ultra-nationalist and racist policies to appease the opposition. It appears to be working.

When Musk bought X he “unbanned” far-right misogynistic and racist groups, allowing the posts and memes that labelled all asylum seekers as child abusers and sparked the anti-immigrant riots last summer. He bears some responsibility for all those provoked into violence and later jailed for exemplary prison terms.

It’s not just the Billionaire media-owners seeking political influence online. Apparently all States across the world are applying meme tools in order to cajole and confuse enemies both within and outside their national borders. Similar strategies, tho’ on a much smaller scale, were adopted during wars where planes distributed thousands of flyers saying “surrender now or die!”.

Conversely, some of us attempt to stay with facts and truths. For example, the dictionary definition of “genocide” has been shared in thousands of different memes, many with harrowing pictures of dead children and civilians, as a counter to much of the mainstream news coverage of Gaza. As fast as the online moderator can delete them as “contrary to our community standards’, another appears, illustrating the tens of thousands dead in Palestine and Lebanon.

The question is begged. Who is best placed to censor these ten-second messages, and in whose interests? Surely not the billionaire social media moguls least representative of the majority of working people. State censorship is a reaction to widespread opposition. Free the Meme!

The best this morning, given the very clear and present danger of climate chaos facing us all, is the picture of thousands of people labelled as “scientists”, being challenged by a single man saying “you are all wrong”. His label? “A man who saw a You Tube Video”.

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Collective Freedoms Must be Fought For

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (10.12.24), keeping-up with the fast moving historic situation. Linking the global and local is a challenge, but we are all affected by international events, and should learn from them.

Collective Freedoms Must be Fought For

It is good to see so many are thinking about human rights, political agency and personal integrity. There is much debate about the future of democracy. The driving force for this anxiety is the accelerating instability at home and across the world.

The fall of the dictatorship of Assad in Syria has encouraged talk of universal rights, women’s suffrage and protections of minorities. With at least nine military forces vying for power in Syria, including the country’s working class who started the revolution in 2011, collective freedoms are going to have to be fought for.

Amnesty International’s decision, however late, that Israel’s destruction of Gaza represents genocide is another demand for protection of human rights. The bombing of schools and hospitals and entire civilian populations is against international law and has to be challenged for any of us to feel safe. Mass extermination is beyond all concepts of political balance and social justice.

The same bombing of Ukrainian towns by Russia is damned across our news media, but the hypocrisy of condemning Putin and not Netanyahu completely outrageous. If some groups of people are expendable then we are all at risk.

When the Prime Minister of South Korea declared martial law last week, placing the entire country under curfew policed by armed soldiers, workers amassed on the streets to reinstate democracy.

When the President of France imposed a Prime Minister from a minority party, ignoring the majority vote of the people, mass protest and industrial strikes defied the imposition and kicked out the usurper.

There is a class war for workers rights and agency happening parallel to the wars between nations. Economically, global Capitalism is in crisis, the poor immersed in debt.

In this accelerating war of competition for resources, there are battles between ideologies as well as armies.

We now see a fast-growing and organised global far-Right movement, winning elections across the globe from Argentina to Poland. The threat in the UK is real, the ultra-nationalists organised politically with promises of millions in funding from American billionaire Elon Musk. This year we have seen white power pogroms in which acts of attempted murder were committed against refugees, racist riots in town centres, meetings attacked and mosques firebombed.

Our government is pandering to the far-Right, Labour courting Reform UK, toughening Tory laws against protest and manipulating the Courts into the levels of sentencing they condemn when seen in Russia or China. Authoritarianism at home is another manifestation of deepening war abroad.

Behind all are the same forces operating on many fronts. Billionaires are funding propaganda aimed at scapegoating migrants and minorities, weaponising racism in order to hide their hideous wealth derived from our exploitation and oppression.

The level of disinformation paid for by wealthy elites mirrors their new investment in arms manufacturing and artificial intelligence, all aimed at distracting and confusing us into acquiescence. Wars make money for the few.

The Trade Unions have a key role in challenging the drive towards fascism and war. We need a strong anti-racist movement to defend the rights of minorities in order to advance the rights of the entire working class. And that means offering refuge to those scorched by war or climate change, alongside challenging the profiteers making billions from death and environmental destruction.

Bringing the human race together is the historic role of ordinary people, we, the majority working class. Our history proves that nothing is given to us without collective demands and organised challenge to those in power. Blame the billionaires not the refugees. We who want peace with social justice are going to have to fight for it.

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Step Back from the Brink – Join CND!

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (3.12.24) after week of military escalation almost everywhere. The published headline is not chosen by me, and I did sign it as a national vice-Chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, not the Trades Union role. Once an artcile is submitted it is out of your control. The limited space and editing cut my original in half, so below is the full and unexpurgated text. Please do join me in Plymouth City Centre on Saturday.

Step Back from the Brink

We’re not wrong. The sense of living on the brink of historic change is shared by most. Not only can the current status quo not be sustained, it mustn’t be. Tension mounts as a consequence.

There is no debate that climate change is happening, only what should be done about it. There is no debate that our social infrastructure is dilapidated, at least for the majority of the working class, but no consensus about rebuilding it.

There is general agreement that war is spreading – and a new kind of war at that – the mass killing of civilians by huge armaments often launched by computers and targeted by drones. This is neither fantasy nor science fiction. It is the living reality threatening to engulf us all.

The nihilists muse to themselves that global conflagration is inevitable and call out to “bring it on”, as if all life, not just theirs, is worthless. The pragmatists meanwhile, sensitive to their own plight, make preparations as best they can, hoarding durable essentials before the power cuts and alarm calls. We, those seeking peace with social justice, are greeted with distain or completely overlooked when marching in our hundreds of thousands.

What do we want? Immediate de-escalation!

The escalation in Ukraine is very serious. The Biden/Starmer agreement to use missiles into Russia has escalated the tension, Russia ratifying a change in policy, deciding to use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state if that state is backed by a nuclear force (ie NATO) should it feel directly threatened.

Reports show Ukraine has lost 40% of the territorial gains it made in the Kursk region through the Summer. The Group of Five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, each nuclear armed – China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, and United States – recommitted to arming Ukraine and, last Tuesday, NATO concurred.

Britain’s defence secretary said last week that “if Britain’s military were asked to fight it would fight”. Britain is in no way ready for war, nor should we be. A majority of the Ukrainian population want an end to the war through peace talks, as do very large majorities of populations across Europe. The escalation is being determined by politicians in their own interests. Is Biden just looking to stop Ukrainian defeat whilst he is in office, and to what lengths will he take this?

Trump’s election is having a big impact already, with ultra-hawks in his cabinet implying that military conflict is more likely, withdrawing from nuclear agreements and focussing on Iran and China. They promise more sanctions around Iran and more economic challenges to China. Most of the real trade wars throughout history have resulted in military warfare.

Far from being a peacemaker, Trump is ready to magnify tensions in the Asian Pacific, with Starmer adding tax cash to the AUKUS nuclear pact funding nuclear capabilities in Australia, ready for war.

The ruling class of the United States of America maintain full support for Israel’s regional ambitions, the devastation of Palestine continuing, Biden continuing to arm, Trump ready to escalate the tension with Iran. The ceasefire in Lebanon is only temporary. The wars in Syria and Sudan funded as proxies for outside military powers.

Trump has favoured restarting of nuclear testing having not ratified the nuclear test treaty when last in office. The USA is looking to undertake underground nuclear testing of a new technological generation of advanced nuclear weapons, destroying any taboo against the use of nuclear weapons.

Both the USA and Russia have tested and deployed hyper-sonic rockets that can carry nuclear warheads that rise and fall too fast to be stopped. Russia used one last week, albeit without any explosives, just to show its power. These are all “first-strike” weapons, their strategic use only valuable in hitting before being hit. They are a threat, not a deterrent, demanding escalation on all sides.

Trump is not going to pull out of NATO in Europe but wants Europe to take a far greater degree of the burden of the costs and, no doubt, the impacts.

So the UK’s military spending reaches a record high outside of wartime and is planned to increase further. America’s B52 bombers are here, and their nuclear weapons will be coming to Lakenheath, Suffolk, not least because Turkey has become an unreliable ally having bought fighters from Russia. Starmer has made commitment to NATO and nuclear as a key commitment with £3bn increase in defence spending, the current £6b per year cost of the Trident nuclear weapons upgrade being a sinkhole in Britain’s military funding. No-one dare challenge the tax bill for Nuclear, however outrageous.

The proposed United Nations international study into the global impact of any nuclear exchange has now been agreed between most countries, and only voted against by the UK, Germany and Russia, saying they already know what the effects of a nuclear war would be – the countries to the fore of preparations for wider war.

The study is important. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) has commissioned enough studies to know that any nuclear exchange will kill millions and lethally contaminate entire regions with radioactivity. But the hidden fact is that millions more will survive for lengthy periods, in agony as burn casualties and sickened by cancers, struggling to find any nutritious food or potable water. Radioactive contamination is not a quick death.

The slow deaths of starvation and disease will be more common than the sudden flash of vaporisation of those caught beneath the bombs. The impact on all life, the ecology and climate, will only expedite the course of climate chaos we are already experiencing.

Another well-evidenced conclusion is that the mechanics of nuclear weaponry provides for their likely launch by accident rather than intention, especially in this era of “Artificial Intelligence” programming machines for an instant and automatic response.

Starmer’s shift to closer relationship with the nuclear-enthusiast Trump will increase his unpopularity at home. Most don’t want war, death and destruction. It is neither Namby-Pamby nor “woke” to call for Peace. Protests against war represent our collective self-interest for survival.

The safer countries in the world are those without nuclear weapons – the vast majority. Britain’s Trident Nuclear arsenal makes us the prime target.

On Saturday we will rally for a day of action for de-escalation, permanent ceasefire and Peace. Most of all, for the decommissioning of all nuclear weapons, unilaterally and internationally, before it’s too late.

We must step back from the nuclear brink.

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Small Farmers are Being Exploited by the Rich

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (26.11.24) wanting to rage against Jeremy Clarkson’s racist anti-working class smug privileges, but having to stay publishable. The reality is the propaganda emanating from the billionaire media corporations and their lackeys overwhelmed all reason and any honesty about the situation facing farmers. And much of the Left sided with the far-right landowners. A knee-jerk political illiteracy. Just because Starmer put a tax on the Rich but we don’t like Starmer, doesn’t mean we support the Rich. Starmer should and could have gone a lot further, and the nature of the inheritance tax means most of the wealthiest in society will not have to cough-up any more into the public purse for the next four year, according to Rachel Reeves in her toadying address to the CBI yesterday.

Anyway, that wouldn’t get into print. And the following was further edited-down to get in:

Farming has workers too!

Trade unionists know a lot about farming. The false divide between “city folk” and “rural communities” has been promoted ceaselessly in the media as if one of the great divides amongst the British people. It is nonsense.

The great divide is social class. The farming community is not not one homogenous mass. Far from it. The difference in lifestyle and life-chances of the agricultural worker (the majority who work on the land) and the landowners (a tiny minority) could not be more different and polarised.

Unite the Union organises inside the farming community, with tens of thousands of members who work the land. They are some of the most poorly paid and badly treated of our entire working class, subject to the most hazardous working conditions and the very highest level of industrial accidents and workplace deaths.

So when 20,000 so-called “farmers” march on parliament against paying inheritance tax, the protest raises more questions than demands.

Small farmers are living on a knife-edge. The endless rains of last winter and spring collapsed much of the early crops, reducing income to a bare minimum or even increasing crippling debt, leading many to leave and some to commit suicide.

None of this has anything to do with inheritance tax. Small farmers are pressured by falling livestock prices, or are tenant farmers who own no land and are affected by increasing land prices. Since Brexit, farmers have faced reduced subsidies, increased tariffs and falling prices for products and livestock. The savagery of the huge supermarket chains squeezing wholesale prices to maximise their record profits to the impoverishment of the small farms is immoral and detestable.

But last week the millionaire land owners and big business drew upon the plight of poorer farmers to organise against the plans for the big agro-businesses to pay the same inheritance tax as the rest of the wealthy do.

One third of land in the UK is owned by the aristocracy, with separate tax rules and regimes that charge high rents for farming and homesteads, and little or no support in return. Church and State own less than 2% between them.

Second-up are the large corporations investing in land for its tax-saving opportunities. Then come the individual multi-millionaires and billionaires. 12% of land is in the hands of 50 owners.

James Dyson is a big landowner, as is billionaire John Whittaker, chairman of the Peel Group property corporation, owning ports, huge swathes of commercial and industrial land and companies such as the Holiday Inns.

Half of the top ten are oversees holders of UK land including the ruler of Dubai, Denmark’s richest man and Italian billionaire aristocrat Count Luca Padulli, freehold owner of hundreds of thousand so properties here including apartment buildings beset with cladding risks.

The root cause of the pain of small farmers is an agricultural system dominated by big business interests, the market and profit. Small farmers are being squeezed out by a process of gentrification on an industrial scale, orchestrated not only by local avaricious landlords but by global financial giants.

Yet poorer farmers are being pushed to the front of the protests by farming organisations run in the interests of the big estates, precisely because city people can relate to the real hardship of squeezed locals in a way that we wouldn’t care about the super-rich. In fact, we would like the corporations and multi-millionaires to pay more tax.

The protest against Labour’s inheritance tax rise doesn’t hit most farmers. It’s a tax on the very rich and millionaire land owners and big businesses. They would have to pay 20 percent inheritance tax on any estate worth more than £1 million—and even then, only what exceeds one million.

Inheritance tax is not levied on the value of property up to £325,000, bringing the untaxed total to £1.325 million. And, if a farmer is married and owns the farm jointly, their spouse can pass on an additional £1.325 million tax free. Furthermore, there is a £175,000 tax-free allowance on a main residence when it’s being passed to children or grandchildren.

This amounts to just half the main rate of inheritance tax everyone else is charged. As a result, some 500 farmers – the owners not the agricultural workers and tenants – will e tax demands each year.

The demonstration was headlines and praised across our media in a way that most protests at Parliament are ridiculed or unreported. Why? Perhaps because 80% of our news media is owned by just 5 billionaire families. Bur journalists should be expected to offer a more factual account.

One fifth of the working class are self-employed, hard-pressed, working all hours subject to the dictats of their corporate suppliers and free-market forces to scrape a living. The small farmers are in the same situation. The class divide in agriculture is all-but feudal in its despotism.

It was the big landowners and agro-businesses who financed this, the first major protest against the new Labour Government, cheered-on by the anti-working class far-right organisations of Reform UK and GB News.

But it is the trade union movement who should be organising opposition to Labour over the two-child benefit cap, winter fuel cuts and worsening austerity, to tax the super-rich to pay for the help and services desperately needed by ordinary workers, including those in agriculture. The problem in all employment sectors is the system of capitalism.

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Demand Action on Fossil Fuels

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (19.11.24) seeking to highlight the criminal hypocrisy of the COP29 Climate Conference. Climate is the overarching issue of this human era, bringing together all other issues and campaigns into a Big Picture far too overwhelming for the emotional intelligence of many. The resulting “it’s too late”, “grow your own” or hair-shirts responses are understandable but hopeless. And maybe that’s what is wanted. Just do nothing.

The projections of climate collapse in the very near future are illustrated by this year’s weather events as well climate movements. At least they published the mention of the of Saturday’s events, but the Press Release was never published.

Full text below:

Let’s have a look.

In the United States, super-hurricane Milton battered Florida followed by Helen, the strongest tropical storm ever recorded, which poured more than a year’s average rainfall onto North Carolina in less than eight-hours, destroying whole towns, houses and cars swept away. Seven weeks later local people have no fresh water to drink and the regional food production has been devastated. More than 200 people died.

In Spain, more than a month’s rain fell in less than one hour last week, flooding the the cities of Malaga and Valencia for second time in a month. Thousands were evacuated, more than 200 killed, many still missing, homes, shopping malls and bridges wrecked and 100,000 cars destroyed.

The farmlands that supply not only Spain but supermarkets here in the uk were decimated. Greenhouses, machinery and packaging plants were smashed, with crops destroyed and significant damage to fruit and vegetable production into the future. The floods destroyed more than 60% of Spain’s production of oranges, alongside thousands of hectares of tomatoes, peppers, salad and vines.

Emergency and relief authorities took days to appear and could offer little, the people left to fend for themselves and protest at the lack of care. Timely warnings were not broadcast and cash-relief only offered long after the immediate devastation. And in the USA, the most wealthy nation in the history of humanity, only the wealthy who could pay received help.

Such calamity is nothing compared with the Global South. Record rainfall is happening across the world, in regions with far less economic resilience and social infrastructure than Europe and the USA. And at the same time, fires and droughts across Africa.

Extreme weather is leaving tens of millions millions displaced, millions starving and thousands dead in Nepal and Vietnam, Tibet, Peru, India, China, and Indonesia. It snowed in the Sahara desert, an event never before recorded. Glaciers are melting in the Himalayas causing uncontrollable floods in Pakistan.

Parts of the Arctic are enduring exceptionally high temperatures — up 30 to 40 degrees above normal — because of multiple intense heat domes. 2024 will be the hottest year on record, the past decade recording the hottest global temperatures too.

Everywhere there is profound changes in the weather, swinging between extremes of wet and dry, hot and cold. In Britain one-in-six people live at risk of flooding.

But the United Nations Climate Conference held last week in the oil-dependent-economy of Azerbaijan has ensured no funding for concerted action on the climate emergency, and protected the fossil industries.

The emissions of global heating gases from the burning of fossil fuels is the cause. Emissions have to be reduced, as an emergency action by all nations across the world. And many countries will need help with that, or face complete disaster. That’s why we call for climate justice.

The poor and working classes of every country should not be left to pay the severe price of climate change, caused undoubtedly from the impact burning of fossil fuels since before 1850. Yet we are targeted by climate deniers telling us to keep quiet and carry on – a strategy that hasn’t worked anywhere else.

For every climate sceptic, there are hundreds of climate scientists who studied to get to university, then specialised in aspects of natural science and finally produced report after report of the extraordinary and unprecedented changes that are destabilising our land, oceans, atmosphere and wildlife. Tens of thousands of peer-reviewed and triple-tested scientific reports on all aspects of the climate collapse and sixth Great Extinction of life on Earth – happening now.

Yet those with power are denying these facts and encouraging baseless opinions formed from mythology, superstition and dogmatism. To say these are “conspiracy theories” is not sufficient. This is far-Right wing ideological claptrap, linking climate denial alongside anti-vaccines, anti-woke ultra-nationalism, supporting climate colonialism and racist denigration of the people of colour across the global south – lives that are less valuable than white humans of the industrialised North.

Whilst the super-rich buy-up land in New Zealand, projected to be the least and last to be affected by climate collapse, they tell us there is nothing to worry about. The climate deniers are leading humanity into a deep and accelerating mass disaster.

It is as if the far-Right ideologues want to see mass environmental destruction and human carnage in order to feed off the hopelessness, despair and conditions of dog-eat-dog survival, best suited for their political ambitions. President Trump demands “drill, drill’ drill” for oil during his second term, appointing climate denier Chris Wright as energy secretary.

Prime Minster Starmer is more covert, booting tax handouts for carbon capture and storage, biofuels and nuclear power, none of which represent carbon-zero energy suppliers and altogether taking tens of billions of pounds away from investment in renewables of solar, wind and wave power.

The COP29 United Nations Climate Conference proved that the fossil-fuel companies are in control, selling more oil and gas rights in the face of disaster, chasing short-term profits at the expense of human carnage and societal collapse.

The science of climate change is not based upon opinion. It is fact. The climate deniers, funded by the oil corporations, are leading humanity into a deep and accelerating mass disaster.

We protest! Plymouth’s trades unions are supporting the Climate Summit in Plymouth this Saturday, and marching to demand action now: cut emissions by 50% by 2030, and plan for the fastest possible transition away from fossil fuels! Join us!

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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!!!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

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!