This article, edited, was the follow-up to my column on the War on Gaza that was stopped from being printed on 10th October on the grounds that some readers would find it objectionable. The daily Plymouth Herald printed this as my weekly column the following week, on the 17th, aware of my complaints about their censorship, and, I’m grateful to acknowledge, a number of letters to the paper complaining on my behalf. We really do have to keep challenging authority!

Have your say. We are now in a toxic country of lies, misinformation, and conspiracy-inventors. It is a land where individuals can be targeted by public media and the authorities, slandered and put-down to shut-up any and all challenge to unaccountable or undemocratic power and corruption. 

This is not the fault of the internet – the World Wide Web of electronic communications. People produce the propaganda. And whilst our dependency upon “smart” screens appears total, it is not the technology that is smart at all. The ideas behind all the images, text and talk, however enhanced by Artificial Intelligence, come from individuals and groups putting forward a political viewpoint.

The greater your control of mass communications, the greater your power. Just five individuals, each a billionaire, own more than eighty percent of all printed media, newspapers and magazines in the UK, each with online outlets. They not only headline a particular worldview, but as billionaires they tend to share a similar ideologies, blanking out and censoring all opposing or alternative ways of seeing.

By contrast, the vast majority of us have no real say at all – we are passified as acquiescent consumers of the ideas of others. Even our thoughts are censored. 

There are two definitions of censorship. The better known is “the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information.” Interestingly, the other is “the prevention of disturbing or painful thoughts or feelings from reaching consciousness except in a disguised form.”

In both cases, the legitimacy of preventing statements or the publication of information may be argued on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or “inconvenient”.

This raises many questions. Who has the power to decide what material is inconvenient? Inconvenient to whom? What information is not sensitive or objectionable to someone? 

Documenting the human world of eight billion individuals, each of us experiencing unique lives in a world of sensations and emotionality, cannot help but arouse disagreement, objection and debate. 

On hearing the term, censorship, everyone invokes a sense of the political. Primarily it is “The Authority” who censors. Yet, in truth, each of us censors ourself all the time. Self-censorship is usually managed with the intention of not offending others. We may not say what we really think about how a friend looks, or the choices a family member has made, or the instructions our boss has delivered to us.

We are now wary of speaking out. We censor ourselves in public, not only to be polite but because we’re wary of being challenged and targeted. It’s relatively OK to support a sports club and exchange friendly banter with rival team supporters, but allegiance to a particular political or religious worldview is now supposed to be kept to yourself.

The recognition that we have to be careful what we say, whether we are overheard, what we put into print, creates an inner tension. A push-me-pull-you between ensuring safety and speaking the truth as you see it. 

With the growing polarisation in society between rich and poor, fewer people find themselves entitled to have a voice. Workers in minimum wage employment are told to shut up or get out. Those on average wages must follow dress codes and spout the Corporate Line. Professionals in Education, Health and Social Care as well as private businesses must continually prove their allegiance to the mantra and vision of their Agency. 

This is not just a cultural shift, it is now recognised as Culture War, all thoughts becoming politically weaponised. It is as if we are being prepared for life in a war zone. Not least, the UK Police Force has now been given discretion and case-by-case judgement as to whether someone is causing upset or may be likely to do so. That matches the description of the Thought Police given by George Orwell in his prescient book, 1984.

We are expected to accept that governments can censor and even imprison you for your opinion, your attire or appearance in the name of security and protection. In the course of this current clampdown it has become illegitimate to ask the question, “whose security and whose protection?”

Allegiance to the Flag and Nation of the country where you currently preside is being weaponised to build hatred and even attack against anyone less enthusiastic. Trade unionists are internationalists, recognising the deep similarities of exploitation and hardship we share with workers across the world, whatever their faith or birthplace. Yet this is being delegitimised despite our movement being many millions strong. 

Rather than keep quiet, or allow ourselves to be silenced, we have to speak our truth, and challenge any attempt to silence us. Taking a stand against this drift into authoritarian rule cannot be left to a few – we must all call it out, challenge and combine together to assert our rights and our agency.

Where there is debate and disagreement, cherish it, speak your truth, challenge whatever you feel to be falsehoods, and be prepared to be challenged in return. Or else be prepared to live in far greater fear and distress based in a society organised for the survival of those individuals who are prepared to be the most violent. 

This article, much edited, was printed as my weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald on 25th October 2023. Of course the title and tone were changed, but given previous censorship I’m please and surprised it was printed at all.

Plymouth people still recall the mass bombing of civilians in our city, Plymouth, 80 years on. Children are taught our history generation after generation, the photos and testimonies are on permanent display in our museum and municipal buildings. This collective memory of horror, human suffering and destruction is highly valued and maintained as a lesson never to be repeated.

Our huge cohort of amateur local historians recall as often as is allowed the siege of Plymouth by royalist forces during the first English Civil War. Our town was the isolated bastion of progressive Parliamentary forces in a sea of a royalist army seeking to maintain the feudal power of landlords, dukes and princes, and the King.

For three years the blockade bombarded the city and sought to prevent food and water getting to the residents until finally liberated by the New Model Army. With the restoration of the monarchy, Charles II built the Royal Citadel including guns pointing inwards ready to shoot the civilian population should we rise against totalitarian power once again.

We have our own lessons in siege and civilian deaths in war that should inform current events.

Truth be told, civilians are always targets of war. Feudal wars saw the landlord – he who had plundered and stolen the land in the first place – conscript his subjects as and when necessary to defend his region or expand his territory. 

Conscripts are civilians in uniform, not soldiers out of choice. Plymouth has its history of the King’s naval press gangs taking civilians hostage and forcing them onto the ships to fight at sea. 

Overall in war, the majority of deaths have been civilians, not soldiers, generally a 2:1 ratio and civilians suffering far higher numbers injured.

The bombing of one-third of Plymouth during the Second World War won the hearts and minds of inhabitants for the vengeful fire-bombing of entire cities of civilians in Germany, and probably even the atomic bombs on civilian cities in Japan in 1945. 

The entire history of warfare has included the systematic killing of civilians under the offensive premise that citizens of enemy states are complicit in the actions of their rulers.

Following the Second World War, where more than 70 million people died – the majority civilians – a new morality has been attempted. 

The United Nations comprising 193 sovereign states has long declared the targeting of civilians illegal under international law, the killing and ill-treatment of civilians being prohibited by the Geneva Convention. “Grave breaches”, such as “wilful killing”, are considered as war crimes. 

Similarly, siege tactics are war crimes where civilians are first trapped inside a city and then targeted and bombed, or blocked from access to food, water or essential supplies.

Such international laws have precious little impact. Just over one fortnight ago, the State of Israel declared itself to be in a state of war with Hamas, the government of Gaza, part of the State of Palestine recognised by 138 counties of the United Nations. Of over 6,000 people killed in this war, some 1,200 are military personnel from both sides as defined by articles of war, and the overwhelming majority -now over 5,000 civilians killed – are Palestinian civilians, including 1,700 children. Hundreds of thousands more are sick and injured, the Siege of the Gaza Strip imprisoning and targeting 2.3 million human beings.

The asymmetry here, the difference of power between Israel, the most militarised State in the entire Middle East and the impoverished people of Palestine – calls into question the definition of war. For war there has to be two State armies, each with a scale of military infrastructure that certainly does not exist in Palestine. We are watching genocide and ethnic cleansing taking place.

Now we see the deployment of two aircraft carrier convoys from the United States with additional ground forces, to be complemented by Plymouth 42 Commandos in alliance. Plymouth is once again involved in war. 

This time Plymouth’s forces are part of an overwhelming show of force from a global imperial power against a besieged people suffering indescribable pain and death. Will the current horror spread across the region as the next imperialist war? 

Humanity is a very long way away from a world where the killing of civilians is disallowed. Quite the opposite. One sides’ war crime is another’s justifiable defence. 

The current debate centre’s upon justice. Social justice. The the struggle for the right of all people to the freedom that comes from human agency – a voice in your community, the ability to make decisions over your own life, freedom of movement, the right to remain in your birthplace and home, and sufficient access to the basic needs of life: water, nutrition, shelter, access to health care and education. 

The conditions that create war have remained fundamental throughout the history of the human race. There can be no peace without social justice – for everyone.

Writing a column for the local newspaper, the daily Plymouth Herald being part of the Daily Mirror group nationally, has been a valuable opportunity for left wing commentary in an otherwise Establishment tabloid. I’ve attempted to be forthright whist recognising there are boundaries. and in any case, the Editor has been clinical with his knife, sure to cut out anything “too political” whatever that means. This week my article was refused. in discussion, it was considered unbalanced and too upsetting for some readers to access. I had no column this week.

The horror unfolding in Gaza has to be sanitised before publication, it would appear. Given the outrageous lies being printed on front pages everywhere, for example the accusation that Palestinian fighters chopped off the heads of Israeli babies (much as was accused of the Germans in the first world war – eating babies, or of Saddam Hussein’s army in Kuwait turning off babies incubators), now being backtracked from in the absence of there being no evidence whatsoever.

I have no control over what is published. But I shall protest in public. I doubt that any normal news service will be resumed anytime soon. The photo below is of this week’s headlines, without apology or refusal to print by Editors devoid of morals or journalistic standards.

The Trades Union Congress met in September this year and voted, by the democratic tradition of representatives with hands up in proportion to the number of members of their organisation, to support the Boycott of, Disinvestment from, and Sanction against the Israeli State. The acronym of which is BDS – an international call for the human rights of Palestinians.

The trade union position is the latest in a long history of support for the Palestinians, not from any antisemitic stance – we abhor and challenge all antisemitism as we do all facets of racism. 

Trade unions have an ancient history of fighting for freedom, justice, human rights and internationalism. We are based upon values of fairness and exist to protect and expand the wellbeing of the exploited and oppressed, the world’s working classes, those not born into wealth and privilege.

This has to include the understanding that political power is concentrated in the hands of a class of humanity that furthers its own aims at the expense of all others. When we discuss democracy it has to be in that context – what checks and balances are in place to allow challenge and defeat of oppressive governments and totalitarian control?

For Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and West Bank there are none. Part of their nation, not an empty desert but a society with towns and houses and cars and infrastructure, was taken away from them in 1948 and declared as the Israeli State. Since then, in 1967 further military incursions ensured Israel grew to four times its original size by seizing more land, and in 1973 that was expanded further.

To a point where, whilst 400,000 Palestinians were expelled from their birth homes and expunged of their birthrights in the beginning, today some there are 6 million Palestinians displaced from their homes with no right of return.

The Gaza Strip, home to over two million Palestinians, is surrounded by soldiers and artillery, controlled in all matters of life and livelihood, identified by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty international and others as an open prison. 

The United Nations has, since its first decision by Resolution 242 in 1973, called repeatedly and overwhelmingly for the Palestinian Territories occupied by Israel since then to be returned to Palestinian control. Instead, the Israeli State has expanded further through force, taking land, water and resources to settle its supporters and push Palestinians into enclaves without rights or hope.

In any debate about humanity, this has to be unacceptable.

The scenes of death and destruction are both horrific and familiar. Just this year the daily death toll from Israeli forces into Palestinian towns has been recorded as at least one per day – that’s almost 260 so far this year, mostly civilian. With more than half the Palestinian population under 18 years of age, due in part to the harsh living conditions and lack of resources – some 50% living in absolute poverty, the Palestinians overwhelmingly reliant on international aid – a high proportion of deaths are children.

Israeli forces have the right, enshrined in law, to enter any Palestinian household and remove people into detention, without stating the reason, for an initial period of 6 months and with power to detain indefinitely. That is total military control.

Israel’s far-right government, by their own words the most racist, fundamentalist and fanatic ever, has been ruthlessly escalating its ethnic cleansing, siege, killings, incarceration, and daily humiliation of millions of Indigenous Palestinians.

Last weekend we saw home made paragliders fly into Israeli-occupied land (still recognised as Palestinian land by the United nations and international law) carrying a man with a machine gun in a statement of defiance. This, in sharp contrast to the usual sight of fighter planes over Gaza, bombing sites identified by military drones, an omnipresent top-down occurrence above this open prison.

The world has made so many statements in support of Palestine yet is doing nothing to stop the violence. Not just this week’s violence but the violence perpetrated against the Palestinian people for 75 years. 

Gaza, a heavily populated area smaller than London, is now besieged, already without electricity, water or adequate health facilities, and being bombed by the most advanced weaponry on the Planet. A ground force of trained soldiers is about to enter and occupy some of the most poor civilian streets and homes in the world.

What can be done? Demand a ceasefire, now. But also demand the end to the oppression and violence from a very wealthy military state against a people devoid of any control of their own livelihoods and lives.

We call for the boycotting of Israeli goods, the divestment of funds of banks and pension funds from Israeli businesses, and the impositions of sanctions of all governments against Israel, including withdrawing all military aid, until the basic human rights of Palestinians are restored. 

This week’s Comment article, my weekly rant in the local daily Plymouth Herald (3.10.23), has a hidden personal element having been outraged by the treatment of my teenage granddaughter at her secondary school. The Editor chose his own headline, cut much of the argument and disclosed my qualifications without my permission! My enquiries found levels of absurd rule-making and punishments reminiscent of Victorian England and exposing the enforced passivity of our new generation – a generation who will need to fight for their futures as climate change collapses the status quo. Why do teachers want to pacify them? and why don’t more teachers fight for their own liberty?

All individual power corrupts. We know this to be true. For a person’s authority to be accepted by others, they need to consider themselves accountable to those they instruct and those they make decisions on behalf of. At its core, democratic power vested in individuals is the humble power of responsibility, not an autocratic power over people.

And so we currently see groups of parents in Plymouth and across the South West challenging the apparent unaccountable power of teachers in schools. Reports of humiliation and degradation of our children by teaching staff behaving with unchallengeable power have grown in this new term, undoubtedly encouraged if not actively required by central government. 

Examples include locking the school gates in advance of the daily deadline for student attendance, despite it being a safeguarding issue and illegal for a child to be locked-in anywhere, anytime, unless convicted of a heinous crime. A one-pass-per-class policy that means only one child in a class of over thirty teenagers can go to the loo at a time, despite the challenges of being a girl on her period or a boy with a medical condition, and the sheer longevity of a timetabled double-session. 

Then there are the punishments. If you’re late to a class expect to be sent to isolation, meaning you altogether miss the class -and the learning – that, for a myriad of possibly justifiable reasons, you were a little late for. How is that a lesson in justice, proportionality or fair play? 

Or try being a child with attention deficit, expected to sit upright and silent for an hour. Slouching is punishable with a period of enforced “Reflection”, again separated from your classroom and curriculum. Speak out-of-turn and expect an enforced “Reset”, alone in a cubicle for a day or two at a time. Receive supermarket-style points for good behaviour (as defined by the Authorities) and receive negative points, deductions towards Detention, whenever not compliant.

It appears that teachers have the right to remove children from learning for extended periods, whilst parents are being threatened with prison sentences should their child not attend these regimented barracks.

This is military-style authoritarianism. Our children are expected to work to a one-size-fits-all standard defined by the Department for Education and imposed by the local Academy – not any elected governing board but a business-style consortium headed by highly-paid bosses wielding total control.

Education Secretary, Gillian Keegan, waxed lyrical at this week’s Tory Conference about more discipline, including the banning of mobile phones from schools. This simply betrays a lack of any knowledge of contemporary schooling, where students manage their learning, homework and timetable online through the school online application, downloaded onto their mobile phones! If you can’t have your phone you can’t access your timetable (schools generally don’t have enough computers to go round). And why would parents want to lose track of their children who are forced to leave their expensive phones at home and so wander the streets unable to call home or be called?

Scrabbling for sound bites to prove the Government’s authority, Tory Ministers are inventing spectres of threats to social cohesion that don’t even exist. The “our children are out of control” slogan was used by the elite class in the Victorian Age, the 1920’s and the 1960’s, and every time it was working class parents who fought back for the rights of their children: care and investment, not punishment and put-downs.

Human beings are all different. Raise two twins and you’ll know that much. Teach a class of thirty youths and their individuality, both in terms of personality and ability, will astound you. 

So how does any teacher, learned and trained in child development as well as the psychology of education, justify the deepening level of unquestionable power-and-control they are required to exert over school students? Individual power-and-control is the essence of coercive behaviour and abuse.

What’s their motive? The attendance and behaviour crack down is creating more school refusers, the opposite of the role of the teacher, the true pedagog. There has been a huge increase in Home Education, falsely blamed upon the COVID-19 pandemic but more accurately laid at the door of the sheer discomfort of school life. 

In reality, our secondary school regime is all about the targets and school performance indicators. The most callous know that to suspend and expel the non-achievers raises the Ofsted-determined school rating to “outstanding”.

Wait a minute. Even if preparation for employment is the only honest goal of teaching today, doesn’t that mean the development of initiative and empowerment, not standardised automatons? 

More broadly, is schooling expected to break children’s dreams and hopes? Are our children now becoming groomed and penned into an authoritarian society and the dissolution of democracy? It was not long ago that elected local councillors oversaw the education of our children and could be held to account, whilst schools had elected parent representatives on Governing Boards, together ensuring a level (never enough it can be argued) of transparency of school life. Public scrutiny and challenge. 

No more. Our children are experiencing the hard-end of a social transformation towards dictatorship devoid of debate or reason. This is the continued pursuit of neoliberal free-market competition even while the global economy is in crisis because of its failure. Our children are expected to grow-up in contrived and inhuman competition with each other, striving ever harder to achieve ill-conceived standards, jumping hurdles ratcheted ever higher, towards ever more precarious employment in conditions absent of any degree o1f autonomy, self-expression or voice in the workplace.

Today’s working class children face a future so much more challenging than their parents, despite how hard it’s been to date. The obvious challenges of climate adaptation, global economic crisis (the so-called “Age of Austerity”), protectionist border controls inhibiting movement, and destabilising wars, will require strength and resilience.

The future demands independent decision-making and self-determination – the opposite of unquestioning obedience. 

Teachers should be open to question and debate at the hands of both students and their parents. They should lead by example, abide by the rules they set, encouraging open and wide enquiry, empathy and understanding. Routinely walk in the child’s shoes to stay in touch with the world through their eyes. Ask what the circumstances are which leads the child to be late to school, and recognise the depth of emotional distress that is now observable in one-in-six teenagers, the majority young women. 

Teachers should be asking why, not donning uniforms and high-airs to exert individual power over those not yet adult enough to stand up for themselves. Stop the blame-and-shame culture pushed down by The Management on High and now enveloping pupils and staff alike. A good starting point would be to ask why one-in-three school children in England are eligible for free school meals, and, instead of consolidating the pecking-order, challenge the gross social inequality in front of all our eyes. 

Thankfully, indeed bravely, trade unions in education have been taking action against this deteriorating of our education system, the enforced “managerialism”, rote-learning and faceless herding of young humans towards a dystopian world of artificial intelligence. In truth, knowledge is Power – those in control are trying to ration knowledge in order to maintain theirs. Our children must rebel.

My weekly column in the daily newspaper, the Plymouth Herald (published 26.9.23), strangely omitted my very mild criticism of Starmer’s Labour Party stance on the Climate Emergency – policies that will ensure chaos just as much as the Tories. Ho hum, so much for parliamentary democracy.

The cuts to climate action announced by PM Sunak last week are catastrophic. Doing even less to reduce global warming emissions locks-down the UK, hiding indoors from a global epidemic of new green industries and the fresh-air of climate jobs.

Sunak is not responding to science or fact. He is simply attempting to prop-up the core vote of his climate-denying and self-delusional Tory base-support, and echoing the ideological bigotry of his far-Right backbenchers – those political immigrants who entered the Conservative Party from ultra-nationalist organisations such as UKIP and even fascist sects just a few years ago.

He openly states that politicians may take into account scientific reports from their own consultants, including the Climate Change Committee, but politicians don’t have to follow the research. Tories know best. After all, look how well they’re doing on NHS waiting lists, the housing crisis, child poverty and mental ill-health.

Such political manoeuvring away from emissions-reductions will do nothing to protect us from the immediate threats:  extreme weather events that are flooding our homes, polluting our rivers and seas. The unprecedented sudden extreme heatwaves, droughts, hurricane force winds, harvest failures and food shortages, and the transport disruptions that create job lay-offs.

The climate movements’ drive towards zero-emissions is a drive for a marvellous level of new investment in millions of climate jobs and new social infrastructure to meet the new conditions of disruptive, inclement weather conditions. The government opposes all this. But to cut that essential ambition is to damn those less able to afford costly adaptations, to hell.

The working class is being left to fester as extremes of weather accelerate. The commitment to fossil fuels only benefits the big shareholders in the industries with the highest short-term profits at the expense of any long-term stability.

The faster we move the less damage will be done. For renewable electricity alone, there are 95 new bids for green energy generation to produce 3.7GW of power, at a cost almost half that of fossil-fuelled electricity generation. Thousands of decent new jobs. Now all that is in question, withdrawn or stalled due to new financial uncertainty caused by policy change. It is as if the Government wants to see climate catastrophe and economic collapse.

Britain should be investing in new factories to produce the transmission cables needed for the green energy grid in a world crying-out for cables! New factories to mass produce the heat-pumps needed to replace gas boilers would bolster the economy. A renaissance of industrial production of wind generators, an industry moved overseas by this governments policies, would employ thousands and could resurrect steel-making with fresh investment in green-steel production. 

The social investment government should make in insulating our fourteen million homes, currently lousy with damp, toxic mould and chilling draughts, the priority. That would create more than 2 million jobs, the transition of workers currently in low-paid casualised and precarious service jobs to decent and secure employment rebuilding our social infrastructure and security.

But no. Instead our government, unlike most in the world, wants to invest in new oil and gas fields in the North Sea, offering billions in tax-subsidies to private overseas corporations, and mechanised coal fields employing tiny numbers, the produce of which is for exports by owners from overseas, with no benefit to our economy. 

Only the super-rich will benefit financially, but even they won’t be able to stop the impact of ever-increasing climate chaos. Those who point to China and India as worse cases are blind to the fact these are the nations developing renewable energy the fastest, out-competing our paltry industries and soon to cross the tipping point towards cleaner and cheaper energy production than ours. 

The question is begged: “how is it that Sunak is getting away with this?” On the one hand, the leader of the Conservative Party is simply speaking to those loyal to the Party, either because they don’t believe climate change is a threat, or they don’t want to pay anything towards the costs (let the working class pay). On the other, his official opposition, the Labour Party, is not even prepared to champion the weak climate actions contained in Corbyn’s manifesto. There is no authority ready to legislate to force fossil-corporations pay for the damage they’ve caused and continue to cause.

Britain is heading in entirely the wrong direction. Some misguided and frankly laughable (if it wasn’t so desperately tragic) notion of going our own way, being our own people, returning to the glory days of past empire leading the world by example (all a mix of myth and colonial barbarity) has fed a total denial of reality.

We are at great risk. Either we get in front of the changes or we will be drowned in the torrents already coursing through our streets. If governments refuse to listen to science or even look out of their windows, then the people have to rise-up to force the changes needed. The only power available to challenge and stop oil is the mass of the working class, stopping production. If that means breaking inhuman economic policies and environmentally destructive laws, so be it. System Change not Climate Change!

This article, much edited to the point of no reference to the Climate catastrophe, was published in the Plymouth Herald on 19th September 2023. The attack on pensions leaks into debate about our entire future. Will there be pensions in the future? With the predictions of global economic collapse under the weight of extreme weather disruption, how do we best campaign for climate justice? The obvious issue includes divestment of pension funds from fossil fuels, but what kind of future are we fighting for, and won’t the catastrophe make all this meddling with Capitalism rather than ending it, quite pointless?

Britain is being manipulated into a political quagmire of anger and hatred. Whilst tax-payers cash is bleeding-out to subsidise record profits of oil companies and the big landlords, the working class is descending into fuel poverty, hospital waiting lists and homelessness.

But don’t blame the Billionaire Prime Minister, the multi-millionaire MPs sitting Parliament or the corporate executives sucking from the funds in advance of their companies going into liquidation, sacking thousands of worker at a time. No, no, don’t blame the bosses. 

The bosses, their newspapers (5 rich individuals own more than 80% of our media) and the politicians they pay for are all telling us to blame each other. If we can’t manage our low pay there must be something wrong with us as individuals. If we can’t afford the rent or mortgage we should lower our expectations about where and how we live. If we’re limited to life on welfare benefits we don’t deserve a voice.

The most recent target of the attacks on the working class is the new row about pensions. The most obvious purpose of the variety of allegations is to split old from young, workers from claimants, and especially to build the anger of young workers against retired people who they say, get paid for doing nothing. It is rarely explained that the retired have, throughout their working life, paid handsomely for the pensions of their contemporary elderly in the expectation that the future generation will do the same. Such an arrangement is far more cost-effective and secure than private pensions based-upon accruing a stash of cash vulnerable to the ups-and-downs of gambling on the stock exchange. State pensions are a preserve of the Commons – that part of society owned and valued by all.

Clearly speaking for the far-Right individualist dog-eat-dog wing of the political spectrum, one senior Conservative MP last week warned Prime Minister Sunak against giving inflation-linked rises to benefits and pensions as this would “leave the working population worse off and taking the brunt of the pain”. With inflation still high and rising, state pensioners are due to get an 8% increase next April.

But we were all surprised then to hear Angela Rayner confirming that Labour is refusing to say it will keep the inflation-safe triple-lock on pensions. In this carefully stage-managed and choreographed political Conference Season, they all seem determined to out-Right each other. 

Britain has the all-but lowest and very paltry level of State pensions of any country across Europe. The full State Pension is £156.20 per week, or £692 per month. Additional income is taxed. The Minimum Wage is £385.54pw, £1700pm for a 37-hour working week –  more than twice the State Pension yet understood by most of us as impossible to live on these days. Fuel, rent and mortgage hikes, colossal food inflation and the general cost-of-living far higher with those of us with the least spending power.

It now appears that all major political parties are looking to cut the pensions rates and blame the elderly, whilst ruling-out collecting the unpaid tax from the richest in society, amounting to at least £35,000,000,000 that the wealthy should pay every year yet is never collected by His Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC). And the tax-payer doles out over £12billion a year to fossil fuel companies in subsidies despite them making record profits (that’s surplus cash for shareholders) of £65billion in 2022.

The money for pensions should be there. A further £67billion remains unpaid as tax-bills sent to the UK-based Banks. The banks profits are heavily increased by the market trading of the private pension funds themselves, creaming-off a large slice of the cash paid in by workers in the hope of getting it back in old age.

Those who believe in Capitalism believe in the inalienable right of individuals to exploit and defraud to become billionaires by whatever means necessary. They are the first to blame benefit claimants and pensioners as a drain on society’s resources. 

Indeed, Capitalists hate all aspects of socialism – the simple notion that we pay into the common tax purse in order to provide basic living standards for all (access to housing, health care, education and nutrition) irrespective of whatever circumstances life’s lottery determined we should be born and raised into.

But what we’re actually seeing is upside-down socialism – policies of small-State market-driven privatisation are there to ensure a tiny minority takes all the tax-cash from the poor, out of the collective purse and into their fat private pockets, offering nothing in return. The current Additional State Pension imposed upon all workers just as they raised the age of retirement to 68 is predicted to add some £150-a-month extra in addition to the decreasing State pension provision, after paying-in for forty years. This is a recipe for mass subsistence and poverty on a scale larger than the sprawling ghettos of the United States of America.

Nevertheless it should be of little surprise that some young workers are taking the bait. After all, with a crumbling Britain falling into authoritarian control in preparation for economic collapse under the weight of climate chaos and war, what have they to look forward to? And who else can they blame but those who came before? 

Of course, they have a point – the elderly haven’t fought hard enough for the future they won’t see – but neither have the Millenials. Everything must change, whatever investments have been made. The same pensions system cannot possibly exist in twenty or thirty years time when the Millenials reach pension age. It is not simply a question of what shade of government will be around to determine the quality of old age (although that is an issue as fascism resurrects itself across the globe – fascists don’t have welfare principles) but the overall condition of the global economy. And that will be decided, above all else, by Climate Change.

The rising sea levels and hot-house environment causing chaos to food production, city living, transportation and thereby all aspects of the current way of doing things will change everything. Above all, the extreme weather events, already chaotic, will devastate global financial systems and see the current mountains of private pension cash evaporate. Those wishing to tweak our finances for a secure old age need to be advised by the science of climate collapse. 

In this context, attacking the investments made by pension funds on the basis of their links with fossil fuels is morally superior but is, at best, a piece of concrete propaganda to raise climate consciousness. The campaign misses a crucial point: the entire monetary system is wedded to and reliant upon fossil-fuelled production. The call has to be for the end of all fossil-fuel extraction and use – a revolutionary demand because it is beyond the capabilities of the Capitalist system. 

Depleting the pension funds in isolation whilst leaving the other finance systems intact will only strengthen the position of the privateers and anti-Welfare far-right whilst reaping the wrath of those left with too little. It’s happening already. The finance system itself has to be changed from commodity trading for profit to production for adaptation and survival. In that context, the market trading and speculation inherent to pension funds is already defunct, whether investing in oil fields or solar farms. 

If we can organise for a socialist society based upon a system where everyone offers what they can manage and gets back what they need, the concept of retirement will itself be retired. Every one of us will be a valuable contributor to society in whatever way we see fit throughout our entire lifetime. Wouldn’t that be better.

In the here-and-now, the self-righteous, climate-sceptic far-Right who are currently loud-hailing calls to cut State pensions and forcing full privatisation need to be challenged. To find the Labour Shadow-Cabinet refusing to commit to the protection of state pensions whilst also refusing to raise taxes on the super-rich leaves trade unionists stunned and socialists angry. 

To cut the triple-lock will mean even more elderly people suffering ill-health, isolation, loneliness and despair inside the current system. 

Added to which, the young workers being called-upon to jealously challenge the mythical luxury of being a pensioner in today’s Britain are being conned into acceptance of a future where they will experience an even more painful ageing, forced to pay more for less. Work ’til you drop. Such reactionary divide-and-rule politics of blame will not further any movement for social progress or protection. We must stand together, workers young and old, to demand decent pay and conditions working in climate jobs towards an enjoyable fourth age in a fossil-free economy! 

My weekly comment article in the daily Plymouth Herald newspaper, 13th September 2023, originally timed to advertise a Climate Rally in Plymouth the following Saturday. I had entitled it, “Stop Authorities Administering Armageddon”, that probably offered too emotive if not political headline. The constant issue of keeping a statement to 550 words when the issue is so vast and all-encompassing still befuddles and defeats me and I find these articles become repetitive from the need to state the core issues over-and-over. My original 750 words are below:

After the hottest summer of the hottest year ever experienced by Homo Sapiens – humans – climate change cannot be denied. Detractors will argue whether it’s human made or not, but the graphs of rise in C02 and Methane emissions match the rise in global temperatures. Follow the science.

The floods in Greece and China, the enormous hurricanes across the southern USA, the fires across southern Europe and throughout central Africa, and the drought destroying all potential for life in the arid regions of Africa are this year’s evidence of the real extremes of weather produced by the warming of our air, land and seas.

The wet and humid UK experience is different from the norm, but nothing like as bad as elsewhere, tho’ worse is bound to follow.

The majority of the UK population expresses worry and concern about the climate projections even while feeling powerless to do much about it.

The world remains headed for a temperature rise of up to 2.6C and must take urgent action, says a new UN report. Their “global stock take” informed last weekend’s G20 Summit in India, which offered no new actions to prevent climate collapse.

The richest and most powerful economies with all the power and wealth available did nothing. The G20 leaders’ declaration failed to include any reference to the phase out of oil and gas, despite the burning of fossil fuels being the biggest contributor to human induced global warming.

They are effectively happy to sit back and administer Armageddon. As, it would seem, are our national government departments and local Councils. Having declared a climate emergency, they tamper with cosmetic calls for “the people” (by which is meant the working class) to do more to walk and cycle, recycle, reuse and repair. 

With fuel prices set to rise yet again, food prices still soaring and a housing crisis all threatening misery this winter, we are given little option.

But the issue is emissions, emissions, emissions. 

The human world has to drastically reduce emissions from greenhouse gases to avoid mass extinction, a condition already happening across the rest of Nature. 

That means system change – how energy is produced and used, indeed how everything is produced and used. Jobs need to be transferred from fossil fuel industries into climate jobs: the restructuring of farming away from pollutants and towards home grown veg; the end of gas fuelled heating systems; the building of new electricity transmission grids to ensure constant supply of green energy; the construction of more wind and solar farms and the siting of solar for fuel and water heating on every building, alongside the insulation of at least 18 million of our homes. And much more, some 4 million climate jobs already identified.

This requires societal change. Society’s real decision-makers – the Capitalist owners of production, want business as usual in order to protect their disgusting and indefensible levels of private wealth and personal power. And they tell the politicians of all hues what to do or else be damned.

Next weekend the United Nations meets in New York for a weekend of talks to set new “Climate Ambitions” plans. 

Millions of climate activists across the world will be protesting to demand real action, taking to the streets to show concern and indeed our anger at our rulers’ intransigence.

Trade unions in Plymouth will be supporting the Climate Rally in Plymouth’s Guildhall Square at midday on Saturday 16th September. Workers – we who love, live and care for our children and grandchildren – have to organise for root-and-branch adaptation away from dependency on fossil fuels. This is a collective endeavour.

It is estimated that $4tn annual global investment in clean energy technology is needed to limit temperature rises to 2C. That’s 1/20th of world wealth. In terms of human survival, it seems more than affordable. But the system of Capitalist competition and imperial ambition won’t allow anything like that level of investment. The investment cuts into their short-term profitability and allows predators ready to risk the Earth in order to make a buck to take over.

It is the system of capitalism that has created this existential crisis, a system that cannot solve it.

The working class – we who actually produce the goods, have to organise to force the dramatic changes required for survival. We have to refuse to continue with business as usual. Time is short. We know what needs to be done. Fight Fossil Fuels.

We need system change, now. 

This is the published text of a press release ahead of the Plymouth Climate Rally I organised for 16th September 2023, as part of a worldwide day of action spanning 5 continents, totalling 600,000 people on the streets from Ontario to Adelaide. 70 of us marched in Plymouth on the day, a paltry amount with an estimated average age in our 50’s. We publicised as best we could, had one or two representatives from most of the environment and climate groups in the City and made a noise. But really, the level of engagement is ridiculously low compared to the challenge we face, inexplicably passive compared with any comparable threat to society humanity has faced in the past. And, for the first time, as the one with the megaphone I was challenged by aggressive men half-a-dozen times on the march, their repeated shouting identifying climate change as a hoax and a conspiracy propagated by the ruling elite seeking total global control. Despite the science we are very far from winning the argument.

Plymouth climate change protesters to take to the streets!

Rally outside Guildhall will be start of Autumn of Climate Action with city protesters predicting ‘global chaos’ if climate change is not addressed.

Climate change protesters are to take to the streets in Plymouth predicting “global chaos for humanity” if governments do not act swiftly. A Plymouth rally has been arranged for Saturday, September 16, from midday in Guildhall Square – one of a number of protests around the UK and even globally.

Organiser Plymouth Hub for Climate Justice wants protesters to turn up in droves and bring “friends and family, work colleagues, trade union banners, placards and sounds”. Stalls and street art are welcome, and there will be four-minute open-mic slots for people to have their say.

Tony Staunton, from Plymouth Hub for Climate Justice, said: “This is the start of the local and global Autumn of Climate Action, leading to 12-days of challenge during the United Nations Climate Conference COP28 in December. In Plymouth we will be holding a climate march and climate summit on Saturday, December 2, heralding a week of climate events to inform and galvanise public demand for emergency action to stop emissions and build structural adaptations to protect from the deepening crisis. Please get involved.”

Mr Staunton added: “With the G20 this weekend unable and unwilling to improve any government performance on tackling the climate emergency, we have to take to the streets. The United Nations meets next weekend at a three-day Climate Ambitions Conference in New York which, once again, will end in failure.

“How do we know? Because 27 international Climate Conferences since 1992 have done less than nothing to prevent escalating emissions which are heating the planet towards and over the tipping points for climate collapse. The extreme weather events, caused by the heating of land, sea and air, are proof enough.

The science, for those who care to read it, is emotionally traumatising – the devastation of the planet’s ecology now in full-swing, the sixth great extinction of plant and animal life, and the inability of at least one billion billion to survive in the next decade due to homelessness, forced migration, food shortages and disrupted supply routes. The collapse of entire economies will cause global chaos for humanity well in advance of any projected climate reset heralding a new equilibrium for nature itself.

There is a single solution – end emissions of global warming gases, especially Carbon Dioxide and Methane, now. That means no more fossil fuels. No more extraction. No more burning. No more emissions.

And that will require millions of activists globally challenging the fossil fuel companies and their puppet politicians. If we desire a liveable future for humanity, our children and grandchildren, we have to act now. Whilst conditions are deteriorating fast, it’s never too late.”