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!

Western nations refusing to break with Israeli Alliance

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My letter in the Plymouth Herald (10.4.2024) – keep up the protests! The bank holiday week including Easter Monday found my article missing, although the Thought of the Day column was inhabited. The column I wrote for 2.4.24 later appeared as this letter giving me two shouts in one week. It just goes to show what a difference the political beliefs of a sub-editor makes!

Unexpurgated below:

After 6 months, it is not going away. Indeed, the occupation of Gaza by Israeli forces appears likely to expand into Lebanon, and possibly beyond. The destruction of the Iranian Embassy in Damascus by Israeli bombs last week cannot be understood as anything other than a provocation towards a wider war.

The plight of 2.3million Palestinians remains wholly unresolved. At least 32,000 people have been killed by Israeli troops, now enforcing famine and allowing deadly diseases to spread without medical aid, the hospitals all but destroyed.

On 7th October 130 Israeli children were killed by Palestinian fighters. Since then, 13,000 Palestinian children below teenage years have been killed, according to the United Nations aid workers who are on the ground.

There can be no moral defence of such a disproportionate response. Even the UK and USA governments are forced to publicly state that much. In truth, the Palestinians have been suffering subjugation and land grabs for 75 years and more.

So the dehumanisation of Palestinians, and, by implications, all Muslims, continues as a major global propaganda exercise. What makes Gaza stand-out amidst the endless litany of wars across the world, is the sheer weight of military might unleashed by Israel, using weapons provided by the USA and UK upon a civilian population.

The imagery is of colonisation and ethnic cleansing. Israel clearly wants the land and resources of Gaza for itself in a way the Europeans succeeded in taking the continent of North America for themselves by exterminating the native Americans – some 56 million indigenous Americans killed within 100 years of the sailing of the Mayflower.

The difference today is that the whole world can see what’s going-on, and with the knowledge of recent history, can recognise it as wrongdoing. They cannot kill 2 million in plain sight.

That is why we have seen so many people protest for a permanent ceasefire and for freedom and self-determination for the Palestinian people.

Every Saturday for the past six months, people have protested in Plymouth city centre on behalf of the Palestinians. Twice each month, national demonstrations in London have seen hundreds of thousands marching on the streets, shouting for an end to genocide.

The largest gathering was 800,000 in London alone, with hundreds of local protests adding to the noise. Millions have been actively engaged across Britain, and millions more beyond. These are the largest numbers counted on protests for peace and justice in our entire history. The majority of Britons want an immediate ceasefire.

The pressure on politicians is immense. Their problem? Israel represents the interests of the Capitalist West in the Middle East, that alliance ensuring corporate profits from oil and political control of the Arab World. And sales of armaments add to the drive, making huge profits for the super-rich.

Western governments cannot break allegiance to Israel. And that allegiance blackmails them into supporting the racist ideology of Zionism that is in charge in Tel Aviv.

At the same time, the public outrage at the broadcast injustice, the inhumanity, the genocide, is a material pressure from below that risks votes and regime change at home.

So our protests must and will continue, and grow. The immediate demand is to stop exporting arms to Israel. The demand for a permanent and immediate ceasefire is the demand for a halt to the spread of war which threatens us all.

Why all Racism Must be Defeated

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My weekly comment column in today’s Plymouth Herald, 8.4.24, delayed by the Easter week, and shortened to fit a new layout (not by me). Here’s the longer version:

With the period of local council electioneering about to begin, a censorship of any issues deemed “political” will be placed on newspapers and public media. From next week the demand for “balance” and “impartiality” will be used to actually quash public debate in the name of fair play.

At the same time, Party people will push leaflets through our doors making all sorts of claims, with very little public space for debate. Tories and Labour will claim they’re the best for the country despite proposing much the same policies that have failed the working class for the past fifty years.

Socialists will demand investment in housing, welfare and social infrastructure, whilst environmentalists will emphasise the need for action to protect us from the extremes of weather and climate change.

Others will claim themselves “Independent” whilst inevitably espousing ideas from somewhere on the political spectrum, however partial, confused or contradictory.

But the far-right, and much of the mainstream media, will concentrate upon whipping-up racism, and especially anti-Muslim hatred, by focussing upon “terror attacks” abroad and “illegal” immigration at home. Fear and hatred of “the Other”, the “Outsider” will be the hallmark of the racist, however sweetly wrapped and smarmy-smiled.

In an election period where we should be asking why Britain has become so impoverished – from a million pot-holes to seven million waiting routine hospital treatment, 14 million of us in poverty with an income of less than 60% of the “living wage”, a housing crisis ensuring three-quarters a million of our children live in temporary accommodation and four million of our children in absolute poverty – we will be encouraged to blame asylum seekers, and by that implication, all Black people, people of colour, non-white and non-Christian.

The Race Card is being played to divert all attention from the extreme expropriation of our national resources and huge tax revenues by the super-rich executives and Corporations. We are supposed to blame each other and keep the fight inside our rotting communities. Non-white people are overwhelmingly working class, Black and White having far more in common than all the combined elements of diversity.

Racism is a way of diverting people’s attention from the causes of their problems, and finding a ‘scapegoat’ in some other group.

At root, it means making physical or cultural differences between people into a basis for treating them differently. It can involve skin colour, or language, or religion. In politics, racism is always a basis for reaction.

The conception of dividing people by race begins with the slave trade. Defining black people as an inferior race meant that plantation owners could not only justify the enslavement of the black Africans they captured, but also of their children and their children’s children.

This ideology quickly hardened into a new pretend “science” which claimed to prove Europeans’ natural superiority. In 1760, when the slave trade was at its height, a 23 volume “universal history” was published. It described Africans as being “proud, lazy, treacherous, thievish, hot and addicted to all kinds of lusts”, in truth, the accurate description of the rich White ruling classes.

The notion of a hierarchy of races suited the British ruling class as its empire expanded across the globe, violently subjugating whole peoples. Since then, the ideologies of racism have become more sophisticated but no less powerful, carefully espousing one set of values as superior to others, especially using religion as a mobilising force.

Today the far-Right are once again in Government in most European governments, and further afield. The drive for single-race, single ethnicity countries are at the core of the governments of India and Israel, violence the inevitable outcome of such inhuman concepts.

Racism has a huge and negative impact on millions of people in Britain everyday. Racism is not natural; it is not an inevitable outcome of human nature — it needs to be taught and regularly reinforced. It can therefore be challenged and defeated.

Segregation was defeated by the Civil Rights Movement, which united black and white against the racists and their laws. In Britain the anti-slavery movement was strong among workers in the cotton industry, and throughout the 20th century different forms of racism have been challenged, from Antisemitism and anti-migrant racism to Islamophobia.

The Black Lives Matter movement has been an inspiration to a whole new generation of young activists. The huge and unprecedented scale of protests for Palestinians and a ceasefire in Gaza proves that the majority of the diverse and multicultural working class here oppose the very idea that one group of people are superior to another because of their ethnicity. Racism must be challenged and defeated today, including during the local elections.

Fight for the Rights of All Children!

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (26.03.24) has been fiercely edited, perhaps because of the space needed to insert a silly advert, or, for the paranoid, to turn the message into an incomprehensible and pointless mess. Or perhaps they’re getting tired of my ravings – the reason they first accepted my weekly prose! Anyway, the latest report of 4.3 million children’s living in poverty in the UK should evoke more than a rant, we need an uprising. What a shithole the UK has descended into caused by the active and mercenary actions of successive governments on behalf of the super-rich.

Here’s my unedited text, for what it’s worth:

Children’s Rights have always been controversial in Britain. The Victorian slogans of “spare the rod and spoil the child”, coupled with “children should be seen and not heard”, have echoed into today’s culture. We’re not supposed to care for other people’s kids, those living in comfort encouraged not to consider those living without.

Collectively, working class children are taught compliance from an early age, and individualistic competition by the time of secondary education, from Gladiators on a Saturday night to competition for college places by sixteen years of age.

There is competition for resources, and the playing field is far from level. Last week’s government publication of statistics on absolute poverty should shock everyone. The moral code that Every Child Matters has long since disappeared from our discourse. Developmental milestones are more delayed the more resources are limited or inaccessible. If children later receive enough food for basic nutrition they may catch-up with development norms, but otherwise they will suffer lifelong restricted abilities and poor health throughout their lives.

300,000 more UK children fell into absolute poverty in 2022-23 in the UK, registering soaring levels of hunger and food bank use. 4.3 million children here are living in poverty, 7 out of 10 of them in a household where one parent works, the level of housing costs, low pay and absurdly insufficient welfare benefits trapping families into debt and deprivation. At least 900,000 children in poverty in England miss out on free school meals.

Latest official reports show that 14 million of us are living in poverty – one in 5 of the population – far too many to be falsely explained by Victorian concepts of laziness and fecklessness. Due to the social barriers, imposed by institutional racism not innate ability, 47% of children from black and minority ethnic groups are in poverty compared with 24% of white children. 

Here in Plymouth UK, the life expectancy of a working class child born in Plymouth’s Devonport is 14 years shorter than a child born to professionals in Plympton on the opposite side of the City. To be born poor is to be born to suffer, even if the society has all the resources to ensure every child has everything they need. It doesn’t have to be like this, privilege is produced by the political system we are born into. 

Children are human beings who have yet to develop sufficiently to care for themselves. By nature, no one child is more important than another, all are dependent upon adults for years and years of love and nurture. Provision of care is therefore a universal birthright, and their society should be judged according to the level of provision of their care.

Societies based upon class privilege and fixed social stratification systemically confer greater rights on those born with inherited entitlements. And in a world of hierarchies based upon not only wealth but skin colour and ethnicity, babies suffer or benefit from the social status conferred upon their parents and families. 

Protecting personal wealth from the demand for redistribution in order that everyone can eat requires a culture of superiority, the dehumanisation of the poor as less-deserving and individually responsible for their plight.

Poverty is conferred onto the poor by those in power. We have more than enough resources for poverty to be eradicated overnight. Just consider the current profits from fossil fuels and banks, primarily responsible for the increase in the poor working classes struggling with housing costs and debt. 

This systemic injustice is exercised to the greatest extreme in war. Those with compassion are currently rightly exercised and stirred to protest by the treatment of children in Palestine’s Gaza. The killing of 13,000 children and contrived starvation of the rest in Gaza is genocide and must be called out and stopped, with those responsible facing punishment to ensure others don’t try out. We shall be marching for the children of Gaza next Saturday, for food convoys, permanent ceasefire and rights for all Palestinians.

This is not a question of supporting one group of children at the expense of another. The way we see the treatment of one child impacts on the way we treat all children. Here at home, we have to build the campaign for justice for children here too, for free nutritious school meals, for affordable nursery and childcare facilities, for liveable welfare benefits and wages. It is systemic change that is required, for massive redistribution of resources for peace and social justice. Every child matters!

Revolt Against Inequality

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Published in the daily Plymouth Herald (12.3.24) soon after the Communities Secretary, Michael Gove (a far-Right racist) made his Statement to the House of Commons redefining “extremism” to target Muslim organisations that are charitable and promote peace. The obvious whipping-up of racism in front of national elections all-but back-fired as various civil liberties organisations challenged the attack as “ideological”. Nevertheless the Tories were always only speaking to their core voter base, and whipping-up the far-right extremists into more street violence. Whether they are a central purpose or a sideline, the divisions created inside the working class have to be challenged and defeated, otherwise we all perish.

We live in the most extreme of societies. In a country of 67 million human beings, the UK hosts 177 billionaires, their mutual wealth growing by £35billion to almost £1trillion last year, their numbers swelling from profits made during the COVID epidemic. The richest 10 of them own as much as the poorest 5 million of us.

One billion is one-thousand-million. To count to one million, at a rate of one number each second without pause or sleep, would take 12 days. To count to one billion would take 32 years. 

There is no comparison between millionaires and billionaires. To own a billion pounds is to live an extreme existence, above and outside of society. And most UK billionaires are multi-billionaires. Jim Ratcliffe, of the steel company Ineos is worth £30billion, his company extracting billions in surpluses from the huge increases in charges for oil and gas. 

Household appliance manufacturer, James Dyson has £23billion, the ultra-landlord Duke of Westminster £10billion – £9billion of it inherited without paying a penny in tax. Not to mention Charlie Boy, “Basher Bill” and the rest of “The Firm” living off our backs.

Together they make their money from exploiting the workers at home and abroad, extracting the surplus between the wages they pay us and the price they charge us for the goods produced by us. 

The three named here have wealth and power beyond our imagination through over-charging us for the essential heating, housing and hygiene we have to purchase. This is the case for all the 700 billionaires in the world, together owning more than nearly two-thirds of the World’s wealth. 700 versus 8,000,000,000 people – now that’s extreme!

You only get that rich through ruthless competition, destruction of challengers, the most extreme exploitation of the natural environment and mass of the world’s working class. Death and immiserisation on an industrial scale.

No-one needs the wealth of a billionaire. It is the most extreme travesty, producing a cruel lottery of birth that determines entitlement or poverty for life. 

The vast majority of us live our entire lives on a total income of a minuscule fraction of theirs to a point where the ruling class have no idea of our day to day experiences. Such extreme division is of no positive benefit to society, completely undermining democracy and human rights.

The Corporate executives – the Capitalist class – lobby and buy-off the politicians to do their bidding. The current outrage about the racist and misogynistic outbursts of Frank Hester, OBE, who donated £10million to the Tory Party is a single case in point. Hester is sole owner of a £1billion company granted £400million of NHS and prison contracts in the last 8 years. An extreme return on investment.

Yet, with typical hypocrisy, the UK government now seeks to label those who challenge such extremism as the real extremists. The new rules propose that anyone who challenges the current status quo is a potential threat to the Nation. We who expose the lies, who condemn the warmongering, who demand investment in social welfare – we are extremists allied with terrorists!

Are we extremists when we openly condemn the corruption that has seen at least £40billion of tax-payers money pocketed by private individuals through the COVID pandemic? Is it a threat to the Nation when we challenge the allocation of multi-billion contracts for the NHS to members of politician’s families?

Is it extreme to expose the multi-faceted scandal of record profits from fossil fuels whilst 12 million of us live in fuel poverty, 2 million of us are reliant on food banks, and 1 in 3 of our children suffer poor nutrition?  Are we supporting terrorism when we show that their industries endanger the future of all humanity by warming and polluting the Planet?

Even when they promise to “level-up” they prove themselves liars – less than 10% of infrastructure commitments met. The rich don’t want to spend our tax money on us. 

Is it extreme to challenge the enormous growth in the profits from sales of weapons to countries openly committing genocide, enforced migration and ethnic cleansing? 

The latest announcements by Sunak and Gove seeking to curtail democratic rights and workers’ voices are not policies promoting fairness and open society. And the Labour Opposition has supported the policy but argues it doesn’t go far enough!

 The real extremists are labelling all those opposing them as extremists! These are the policies of the real extremists in government,  seeking to maintain the corrupt privilege and power of their class by shutting down any and all challenge.

They have played the “race card” in front of the General Election, falsely labelling all Muslims as terrorists and promoting racism in an ideological offensive aimed at dividing the working class and distracting us from the real cause of our woes – the greed and violence of the ruling class.

This is class warfare. The ultimate aim of the ruling class is to atomise the working class, preventing any and all protest or collective action. We have to fight to stop them. Those truly in support of democracy, free speech, human rights and social justice must oppose this latest declaration of their supremacy over our rightful legitimacy of Faith and ethnicity, of skin colour, of gender identity, and of collective organisation including the trade union right to strike. If that labels us as extremists, so be it.

The Time has Come to Revolt Against Inequality!

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My weekly Comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (12.3.24) saying less than enough about the vile and cynical use of Parliament by the super-rich to continually fund their lifestyles on the backs of mass poverty. Their propensity for exploitation has no bounds, their audacity to extract billions of taxes paid by us to ensure the services we need only to be pocketed into offshore personal accounts is beyond criminal – extortion and corruption do not explain it well enough. The gangsters are in charge of the World.

The idea of One Nation is absurd. We live in a class society, layers upon layers of strata, of groupings, based upon wealth and power. Britain’s Capitalist class is one of the very richest in the world, and three times as rich as 15 years ago.

This is why we have political groups, Parties, purporting to represent the interests of each of the competing classes. Democracy is meant to replace open conflict by representing the tensions through debate in Parliament and local Councils, right down to neighbourhood forums

These structures are weaker now, wielding less representation of the people and demanding less accountability of those with power than anytime in the last eighty years. The adoption of free market economics, replacing the post-war mixed economy with overt competition and privatisation, has led all Parliamentary parties to value growth in profitability over social infrastructure. That’s the basis of the common political sense that “they’re all the same”. Politicians all subscribe to neoliberalism.

There are a range of very good reasons as to why most people have little faith in politicians. In recent years it has become apparent that government policies are more based upon the influence from corporate lobby groups than the People. 

It is the owners of big business who are actually in control, Parliament no longer offering even a mediating role between the needs of the bosses and the needs of the workers. 

Protection of corporate profits is now the observable purpose of government, the success rate proven by the record profits of the biggest lobbyists – banks, fossil fuels, supermarkets and arms manufacturers.

The end result is more akin to a nation of citizens and slaves than universal suffrage. The wealth is so accumulated into primarily the top 1% and minimally to the next 30%, that the bottom 70% of those in the UK have a a sliding scale of disposable income, no chance of accumulating real wealth, and a diminishing say in society. The bottom 50% (over 30 million of us), are without any honest representation or wherewithal independent of our week-by-week wage.

Last week’s budget was a stark illustration of this. A government preaching to its core supporters, giving away more tax money to the super-rich whilst trickling some crumbs to its voter-base, the formal opposition party barely disagreeing with that general political approach.

The result. Political spin and bluster on the one hand, more unending Austerity on the other.

The headline cut of another 2p in the £ off National Insurance will benefit higher earners the most: someone on £50,000 a year will save £1,310 — five times more than a worker on £20,000 and 15 times more than somebody on £15,000. It will cost the Treasury an extra £10 billion a year that could have been earmarked for State schools and the National Health Service.

But the frozen tax thresholds will actually mean those on a salary io £25,000 a year will take home £20 less a month. The tax allowance freeze disproportionately impacts the poorest workers because a larger proportion our income being taxed, our wages being low and insufficient. Similarly, pensioners with a small employment pension (they’re mostly very small) will pay more tax.

The pre-election government propaganda was a complete lie, the Chancellor shouting “Lower Taxes” pretending to help hard working people whilst actually giving handouts for bosses and the rich. Hunt increased the VAT tax threshold for small businesses from £80,000 to £90,000 and reduced the higher tax rate on property capital gains—the amount you make from selling property—from 28 percent to 24 percent.

This means more money for bosses and for rich people with big houses at the expense of all the essential services that the working classes rely upon.

The Budget announced huge public spending cuts – £20 billion in cuts by 2028, according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies. Health & Education will see 1% above inflation increases, not matching the increase in need. Public transport, universities and councils will all see devastating new austerity measures, on top of the past fourteen years of Austerity.

Successive governments have stolen, yes, held back and clawed back, some 65% of council funding compared with twenty years ago. Local services – essential services – have been slashed, those that can make a profit sold-off, the rest devastated or demolished completely. 

We have local Councils going bankrupt and forced to raise taxes, a health crisis, a housing crisis, a crisis of our children’s nutrition and mental health, a cost-of-living crisis engineered to maximise the living standards of the richest.

Working class people are not stupid. We see and understand what’s happening. And we know when we’re being lied to. In advance of the general election, few believe it will result in the fundamental changes needed for improvements to the conditions of the mass of the working class. In historical periods of such lack of trust in our leaders there is usually revolt, sparked by the experiences of inequality and injustice. Now is that time.

Time to mark International Women’s Day!

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My comment article this week in the daily Plymouth Herald (05.03.24) criticises both the lack of vigour with which the trade union movement prevents workplace sexism, and the detestable take-over of International Women’s Day (IWD) by the middle class small businesses seeking to exploit “womanhood” to make a profit from cosmetics and cleaning products. IWD belongs to the Working Classes of the World and should be a point in each year to restate our need and determination for Women’s Liberation.

Friday 8th March is International Women’s Day. Trade unions have celebrated and commemorated the event every year for generations and will do so again this year. That should hardly be surprising given that women constitute the majority of trade union members, highly represented across the public sector in particular. 

International Women’s Day has absolutely nothing to do with cooking, cosmetics and clothing that some events will focus upon, sponsored by Capitalists large and small, and seeing women as consumers not citizens. Such events actively promote the role-segregation and denigration of of women inside this sexist society.

The Day’s authentic celebrations will focus upon the struggles of working class women, starting with the Bryant & May “Matchgirls Strike” of 1888, when teenage young women, today considered children, formed a union for Health & Safety at work, much derided by employers then and now, and much needed still today. It was also a struggle against women’s oppression, for social justice, building the fight for equal rights at work and at home. A woman’s right to vote, to have full representation in society, to have control over their bodies, their finances and for the right to work.

One-hundred-and-thirty-five years later the struggle for women’s liberation continues, here in the UK and across the world. Internationally, the rape and killing of women is accentuated by war and social conflict.

At home, the Age of Austerity, officially blamed upon COVID, war and climate change rather than record Corporate and Banking profits, has produced mass domestic poverty, women suffering the brunt.

Whilst women constitute the majority of trade union members in the UK, trade unions have a chequered history of fighting for women’s rights. The false divide between men and women in the workplace is exploited by employers, portraying women as a threat to jobs, weak and unreliable – ideas not always challenged. There have been bosses campaigns to identify women as a threat to men’s jobs, unchallenged by unions until women themselves organised against prejudice and discrimination, having to educate male trade unionists as well as employers.

The Great Miners Strike of 1984-5, which began 40 years ago this week, was maintained for an entire year only through the determination of the women in miners communities and beyond, active and leading on picket lines and in support groups, and changing the “male culture” of the union in the process.

Yet today, despite a series of major employment laws for equal pay, won by strike action such as the famous women’s strikes at Ford Dagenham, women workers still earn less than 82% of the man’s wage undertaking work of equal value. 

For part-time workers (of whom many are women) the gap rises to around 30 percent. Over her lifetime a woman will earn on average half of what a man will earn, primarily because of the role women still play as primary carers for children – not to mention all the other family members women will often find themselves responsible for, simply because of oppressive social norms. 

Domestic labour is an asset for the employing class, women reproducing and looking after the workforce free of charge. Women’s oppression is essential to ensure high profits, minimising the costs of social provision of welfare, nurseries and care of the elderly.

Little wonder we see the continued media promotion of the backlash against Feminism, orchestrated by the far-Right from the 1990’s onwards, which has seen a rise in workplace sexism and discrimination, including sexual abuse. Much of the gains won from the 1970’s have been eroded. There is a deepening culture of violence against women and girls, institutionally and socially.

More than 80% of all domestic abuse is from men against women in the UK, with one-in-four women experiencing an abusive relationship for an average period of 6 years of their lives (compared with 1 in 18 of men) – that’s over 6 million women experiencing abuse right now, precisely the same statistic as recorded in the early 1970’s. No change. 

Worse still, 68,000 rapes were recorded by Police in 2022-3, half of which are carried out by the woman’s partner or ex-partner and six out of seven rapes perpetrated by someone she knows, with charges brought in just 2.4% of cases, and far fewer convicted. Little wonder that 5 in 6 women who are raped don’t report it, out of lack of faith in the police and legal system. The succession of cases of sexual abuse by police officers, politicians and sportsmen deliver appalling role models.

9 out of ten girls and young women say they’ve experienced sexist name-calling at school, the era of smartphones resulting in “dick pics” and other sexual images being received, unwanted and unsolicited, and causing a common sense of threat, fear and subjugation. 

The backlash against women’s rights is being ramped-up. The misogynist Andrew Tate’s vile internet broadcasts stating that “women are men’s property” is watched by hundreds of millions, influencing the current young generation, his bile being just the tip of a deep iceberg of political male-supremacy rising-up alongside white-supremacy and racism.

Working class men are stupid idiots to denigrate women – our partners, sisters and daughters, friends and workmates. Indeed, the sense of “protection” evoked by male-dominated culture that arouses men to action when their family members are abused, is hypocritically forgotten when putting down women in the workplace with sexist remarks, shielded as “banter”, and the objectification of women’s bodies, dehumanising women and exerting power over women as a source of domination and self-aggrandisement.

In Plymouth we have experienced, all too horrifically, the results of the campaign for male-supremacy, a gunman who expressed misogynistic and homophobic views shooting his mother and four passers-by, shown to have been part of the “intel” movement promoting male domination and the hatred of women.

The International Women’s Day events this Friday should not simply be a celebration, and certainly not any vehicle for reproducing the sexist imagery and Capitalist cultural domination of women as things and products. We need a huge campaign of education and challenge against women’s subjugation and for true women’s liberation.

The sexual division in the working class should not be underestimated as a the obstacle in achieving the class unity that can win decent pay and conditions for everyone. 

It took militancy and collective action to make the gains now at risk if not lost. Any decent working class men – and we exist in our millions – should restate the pledge this week to challenge all aspects of sexism and women’s subjugation, and join with women if they’re fight against oppression. 

Trade Unionists will stand in solidarity with Plymouth’s Women’s Liberation event 12-2pm on Friday at the Sundial, Armada Way.

Beware, Fascism is on the Rise.

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (27.2.24) trying to say too much in too little space. But the point is made, I hope, that the political games at Westminster about Gaza are intended to divide and rule us, at a time when polls and protests suggest more than two-thirds of the UK population want a Ceasefire. The unedited version is below:

Beware, Fascism is on the Rise.

For those of us concerned for the advancement of human rights and social justice, last week’s chaos in the Commons offered many warnings.

Parliament was supposed to debate a motion about the destruction of Gaza and deaths of at least 30,000 civilians, including no fewer than 12,000 children under the age of 14, all trapped without means of escape.

By the weekend we could all be excused for believing that the debate had actually been about the mortal threat to MPs at the hands of extremists and terrorists inside the UK. The original motion, tabled by the Scottish nationalists, deploring the very apparent “collective punishment” of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli State and calling for an immediate Ceasefire had been cancelled-out by self-interested politicking.

The shenanigans in the House of Commons saw both Tory and Scottish MPs walk out in disgust, leaving a Labour amendment to be voted for, unanimously by the Labour benches, declaring there should be a humanitarian ceasefire (without explanation of what that may look like), no military assault on Rafah, release of all hostages and immediate humanitarian relief.

There’s no sign of that happening amidst growing reports of hundreds of thousands now suffering malnutrition in a collective condition of enforced starvation. Instead, the UK’s Prime Minister accused the Speaker of the House of Commons to have “sided with terrorists”. 

The Tory Party had stood with Israel’s right to self-defence in opposition to the Scottish motion. The Labour Party had carefully manipulated the proposed debate to prevent the UK agreeing to an immediate Ceasefire, effectively condoning the continuation of the killing of civilians. 

It was later revealed that Keir Starmer spoke to the President of Israel, Isaac Herzog, before drawing-up Labour’s amendment, whilst the Speaker of the House, Lyndsey Hoyle recently visited Israel and that his father, Doug Hoyle, helped found Labour Friends of Israel. The complicity is obvious to all. Hoyle helped Starmer to block a vote on the humanitarian SNP motion, depriving the public of any voice.

Criticism of the policies and actions of the Israeli State is not a criticism or attack on Jews. Support for Palestinian rights – equal to the human rights of everyone else – is not anti-semitic. The level of active protests across Britain, numbering into millions of people on our streets since the 7th October proves beyond doubt that the majority opinion in Britain is of horror and outrage at the level of death and destruction in Gaza. Once again, Parliament has not represented The People, not just in Scotland but across the entirety of Britain, including England.

It is astounding, even in comparison with all the morally bankrupt political games of the past few years, that a debate on human rights – civilians should not be intentionally bombed in their thousands under any circumstances – has been used to introduce yet more laws against our freedoms and suffrage. 

This is political gaslighting: the psychological manipulation of the electorate, repeatedly challenging our understanding and perception of reality, seeking to confuse and create uncertainty, creating a passivity, giving-in to the perpetrators of the abuse.

Gaslighting can be a very effective tool for the abuser to control an individual. It’s done slowly so the victim writes-off the event as a one-off or oddity and doesn’t realize they are being controlled and manipulated.

Just as politicians impose ever-greater authority over us, they claim they are the victims. New laws are proposed for lawful assembly and protest to be further curtailed this week specially to protect MPs from us, adding to the most extreme laws against strike action and protest already enacted in the last year. Those supporting war abroad are also using it to force tighter social controls at home.

This is important. Democracy here is in chaos and being undermined daily. Authoritarianism is being advanced and ramped-up through a mix of gaslighting, warmongering and racism. Ministerial statements minimising the impact of war whilst dehumanising entire populations are used to promote the UK production and sale of ever-more deadly arms to dictatorships, warlords and gangsters on all sides.

The ramping-up of Islamaphobia by back-benchers such as Lee Anderson, Liz Truss and Suella Braverman calling for “direct action” against refugees, minorities and the Left – that is, those of us protesting for human rights – and praising the likes of Tommy Robinson, sees them empowering the home-grown fascist thugs to go on the attack, not only with their vile on-line threats and abuse but with violence on the streets. They are building a new Party of the Far-Right, of which Reform UK is seeking to become the mass vehicle. 

For the record, the majority of those here protesting for a ceasefire in Gaza are White working class anti-racists, not least because we know that racism divides and weakens us.  Our  protests for Freedom for Palestine need to be ramped-up. Those moved into action by the horror must recognise that this is not only a call for a ceasefire and international social justice but also human rights at home. 

In these volatile times it is not difficult to imagine Britain falling into a totalitarian state. All that is needed is for working class people to be convinced of imminent risk and attack from a “foreign force” alongside personal risk from the “enemy within”. This falsehood, this “Great Lie”, is being enacted. Now.

Free Julian Assange!

Tony Staunton1 Comment

My weekly Comment in the daily Plymouth Herald newspaper (20.2.24). I note they chose a title not including the name of Julian Assange, the subject of the piece, nor acknowledging the piece as exposing the general distrust of all politicians by Britain’s electorate. The issue is really about the death of investigative journalism, the Assange case being just one part of the long-term drive to shut-down all opposition to capitalism and imperialism.

Free Julian Assange!

It is always a turning point, an historic watershed, when the majority of the people of a country no longer believe or trust their Government. Yet here we are.

The general lack of support for Britain’s Political Class was best exemplified by last week’s by-elections where only a small minority bothered to vote at all, and those that did overwhelmingly trounced Sunak’s Government.

It goes far deeper than that. In such a polarised, class-based society it is hard to find any majority agreement. After all, social being determines social consciousness: those with wherewithal live in a completely different and separate Britain from those without, resulting in conflicting interests and beliefs.

Nevertheless, most people don’t believe government promises on future economic growth, the official statistics on wage increases, Britain’s social security, or, for that matter, much else. We don’t believe Them.

Most of us inside the bottom 80% of the nation’s income levels are too busy surviving to do much about our political thoughts and aspirations. But the working classes do keep one eye on the Big Picture. 

Most of us know that the Government has diverted most of our taxes into the private sector, the very businesses they have personal shares in – the corporations that lobby them and buy their allegiance. We know they make wars for money, the global military-industrial complex wedded to to fossil fuelled economies caring nothing for the lives of ordinary people. We have a sense of the depth of corruption inside our current system.

But to recognise that the State is not only acting against our interests but is destroying our right to dissent raises more fundamental questions of Freedom, Justice and Democracy. Have we lost all our rights and any element of agency? In response, the government seeks constantly to change and influence the popular narrative in their favour, by controlling the propaganda and information in the public domain.

Today heralds Julian Assange’s court hearing against extradition from the UK’s high-security Belmarsh prison to the USA on grounds of espionage. This relates to the leaked  publication of military information released in the USA by a serving soldier, Chelsea Manning, which the Australian journalist Julian Assange published as part of the Wikileaks papers in 2010.

The 391,000 secret State papers exposed government lies alongside illegal and inhuman military conduct, including assassinations, extradition, detention and torture throughout the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2003-8. The Iraq War was an illegal invasion for oil and corporate control.

Assange is suffering the effects of psychological torture after 14 years of incarceration. He should be released forthwith. It is the case, as a matter of human rights law, that no-one can be extradited to another country for political offences. This is because one country’s laws will differ from another – one nation’s rules for “media coverage” is another nation’s censorship. 

Espionage is therefore a political offence – one country’s freedom fighter is another country’s terrorist. For example, Britain’s anti-Nazi Underground guerrilla fighters in France during WW2 were defenders of democracy, not terrorists.

There has always been propaganda and censorship. It took years for the proof to emerge that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, because the only journalists allowed into the war zone were government-approved and “embedded” within US/UK forces. Those “unauthorised” were “disappeared”.

Governments had learnt the hard way from the Vietnam War, when freelance journalists and photographers effectively exposed the most horrific massacres of civilians, children and women, on the orders of government officials. A relatively Free Press had huge influence over the ending of that war, the TV images raising huge protests and an international movement for Peace.

Now we see the majority of journalists in Gaza being systematically killed – more than 170 in 110 days. This also kills access to facts of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians, and the many day-to-day truths of illegal invasion and occupation.

For public knowledge and agency to be assured, investigative journalists need protection from threats and censorship.

Censorship is also a tool of “free” trade. Apart from war, more journalists are killed for investigating illegal environmental destruction than any other single issue. Publication of the Truth can be a threat to corporate profits. 

Of course, for decades, the UK has had a more back-room approach to such censorship. Journalists and publications have been issued “D” notices to prevent publication, not only of “State Secrets” but also of facts that may embarrass Ministers or Princes. At the same time, with fewer than 8 billionaire media moguls controlling more the 80% of all public information, their editorial control suppresses most of any news that might hold them to account.

The indictment of Assange, if successful, will further criminalise journalistic activities, scaring journalists into subservience and restricting free speech to ensure the dominant politics of our national government will decide what can be published and what cannot. Such control represents dictatorship.

Anyone who wants to know the facts and cares for human suffrage needs to challenge censorship and support Assange. 

Labour Dumps the Climate

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The hypocrisy and negligence of the political class in Britain is second to none. Amongst all the travesties, from the inhumanity towards Palestinians in Gaza to the one-in-three children living in relative poverty here at home, the disassociation of politicians from the lives of the vast majority is total. The denial of Climate Chaos is just one element, but a crucial one. This is the unedited version of my weekly Comment in the daily Plymouth Herald newspaper, wholly inadequate in the face of the absurdity and corruption of Parliamentary politics today.

So, not only the Tories but  now the Labour Party have dropped their pledges towards emissions reductions. Labour have taken away the pledge of £28 billion a year promised to protect us from global warming. 

Workers want the the investment in new infrastructure, Labour’s green industrial policy promising new jobs at a time when vacancies are falling and companies going bust, better public transport as travel costs escalate, cleaner city air to combat extreme pollution levels, and cheaper electricity, or at least affordable! 

Now it looks like the remaining funds identified will be eaten-up by the continued commitment to the absurdly expensive and wasteful nuclear power programme at the expense of all else.

Germany, meanwhile, alongside states across Europe and even the USA, is increasing investment, the country’s investment bank identifying green (non-nuclear) investment to a total of 15% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product. 

Britain needs the same level of infrastructure rebuild, if not more.

After the hottest year ever, with extreme weather shocking and destroying communities across the world, 2023 officially crossed the safe limit for global temperature increase. Yet there is no part of our political establishment prepared to take the threat of the deepening climate crisis seriously. 

Our economy, our food supply, our personal safety, indeed our freedom is at risk from the global Climate Catastrophe. We are facing disaster.

Why would politicians not act? It would appear that their prime purpose is to trumpet denial in front of the deniers. The political chase for the far-right and populist vote has become very dangerous. Tories are chasing the far-right “Reform” vote, Labour is chasing the Tory vote. The Greens have shifted rightwards to prove their commitment to a Capitalist future.

None are representative. Years of research prove that the vast majority of workers are concerned about climate change. Why wouldn’t we be? We have children and grandchildren, we enjoy the Great Outdoors, and we really value the world’s wildlife. There is huge concern for the growing level of extinction of everything from polar bears to bees, and we are more alert than ever to the threat from toxic pollution, chemicals and plastics.

Our collective problem is our own perceived lack of agency. We are continually instructed and moralised to that we should change our lifestyles, as if this is all our fault. But, whilst most of us recycle, we simply haven’t the resources to make the scale of change needed.

So when people in power instruct us to move away from car use whilst at the same time cutting back on public transport, we rightly feel put-upon and abused. 

When low-emissions zones are proposed to limit the high levels of debilitating city pollution but we are fined rather than facilitated, it is in the context of human rights that we shout-out and challenge the imposition.

When we are shouted at from a moral high-ground to buy an electric car when half our income goes out in rent and the other half in food and utilities, our personal debt racked-up by avaricious bankers and fossil fuel corporations, our blood rightly boils! 

But this is not climate denial! It is our outrage at the intentional demolition of society.

Working class families expect and demand a health service free at the point of need, an education service as-of-right for each of our children, a safe community to live in. Only the very rich care nothing for social infrastructure funded through the common purse, because they alone, the top fifteen percent. The rich are self-sufficient, protected in their accumulated wealth – they don’t need society and are contemptuous of it.

But it can also feel we are being talked down to and patronised by a middle class who at least have some agency and lifestyle choices. 

For the rest of us, our very survival requires the industries and System reliant on fossil fuels to be changed, completely, at societal level. 

The end of reliance on fossil fuels is a collective economic necessity. All the wealth, resource and technology is available now with which to save humanity and the environment, it is only the investment that is not.

We need government that organises and manages the basic needs of life. Our human drive for existence drives our demand for the infrastructure to prevent climate chaos and adapt to ensure safety from periods of extreme weather – floods, fires, droughts – as a basic human right.

The political class, overwhelmingly members of the top 5% of the wealthy, is cut-off from the lives of the vast majority of us, the working class. In this pre-election period they are second-guessing what we think, misinformed by absurdly superficial feedback from tiny chat-groups and social network 

The last thing we need is moralistic lectures from above. Essentially, we need agency.

Eleven million homes require insulation and refit away from gas and oil – that means mass funding of jobs and resources to bring our housing into the twenty-first century. We know that private landlords will not dip into their private profits in order to do this, so legislation and tax-cash is vital to force the change. We deserve warmer drier homes, but Labour has now reneged on that promise.

Public transport is not public at all, but run by private companies for their profit. We need massive public investment for an affordable and integrated transport system that gets us where we need to be when we need to be there. We need electrification of our bus and rail systems, Tory and now Labour unprepared to help.

And essentially, we urgently need complete refit of our electricity transmission system so that the renewable energy can get from where it’s made, off-and-onshore, to where it’s needed. 

That’s what Labour promised to do, against the Tory nonsense that the “private sector” will pay for it despite the negative return on any investment. 

Only a mass movement for mass investment, threatening the Vote, will force the political change needed. Only the wealthy can deny the need, even tho’ they, too, will face the social collapse as the climate system fragments. And trade unions have the collective power in workplaces to demand adaptation at an industrial level. It’s time to act!

Support for Palestine Will Be Maintained

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My weekly Comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald, published on 6th February 2024, ranting again about the genocide in Gaza. This 100+ days of rabid slaughter and wanton destruction exposes the true face of western imperialism, and the level of institutional hegemony sustained by the military-industrial complex, apparently unassailable. So confident are our masters that we can put into print almost anything, we can protest in our millions, yet they do as they please, and they bomb with pleasure. The Movement must grow.

Almost absent from news media has been the prolonged and immense amount of protest for Palestine. The numbers are enormous.

Last Saturday more than 200,000 marched from the BBC to Downing Street in London, demanding coverage of the call for a ceasefire in Gaza and the end of financial and military support to Israel  from the British Government.

The numbers in London were fewer than the November march of 800,000 largely because of the simultaneous numbers of local protests in most towns and cites, including Plymouth.

This time, a large array of of trade union banners were brandished and trade union General Secretaries spoke at the rally. Their call was for a workplace day of action on Wednesday 7th February, with students and workers showing their solidarity with stoppages, lunchtime walkouts and open air meetings. There will be such a lunchtime protest at Plymouth University.

The horror of the last 100+ days of the War on Gaza is observable through social media and on the Al Jazeera news channel, so transparently opposite to all coverage on BBC, ITV and Ch4 News as to question the ideological bent of editors on all media.

Much of the mortal statistics cannot be denied simply because of the video imagery. To see the entire North of Gaza flattened by aerial and ground bombardment makes any challenge to the numbers said to be dead and injured quite incredible. High Tech weaponry and high explosives against defenceless and homeless civilians.

67,000 Palestinians injured and 35,000 killed including at least 30,000 civilians: 15,000 children and 7,000 women, 700 healthcare professionals killed. Two million people displaced, more than two-hundred thousand homes collapsed, three hundred schools destroyed, twenty six hospitals bombed. Cultural centres, universities and mosques completely destroyed in an effort to eradicate any trace of the heritage and culture of Palestine completely.

Perhaps of the most immediate concern, the denial of food, clean water, sanitation and medicines is now resulting in hundreds of thousand of the entrapped two million human beings suffering all the deadly illnesses that sit alongside disease, malnutrition and starvation. 

All this is visible daily online. 

Quite openly, Israeli government ministers state their aim of permanently occupying the entire area and ending Gaza as a Palestinian homeland.

It should be of little wonder that the International Court of Justice has opened an inquiry into the charge of “genocide” against the Israeli State military and government. Probably of more surprise is the United States demanding Israel stop the killing and displacement in Palestine’s West Bank, albeit at the same time as supplying more military aid to the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF).

The hypocrisy and duplicity of the United States and United Kingdom, continually blocking any negotiated permanent ceasefire should be investigated as part of the crime of genocide. 

It is impossible for anyone to suggest this is a two-sided war. The scenes of suffering in Gaza are indescribable. The withdrawal of US/UK/German aid the the UN relief agency UNWRA on the challenged basis that a handful out of their hundreds of thousands of local staff may or may not have worked with Hamas is now so questionable and unconscionable that many countries are increasing their funding for UNWRA, including Span, Portugal, Ireland and Scotland.

Why is this so poorly reported? And why is our political class supporting and funding this horror so enthusiastically? The answer is a toxic mix of political opportunism, support for the power of western imperialism to impose economic and military control across the rest of the world, and protection of the profits of the oil corporations and arms manufacturers over-and-above any humanitarian considerations.

The question of social justice is always paramount for trade unionists, focussed as we are upon challenging oppression and exploitation, at home and abroad. There are undoubtedly those who seek to condemn the entire Palestinian people as deserving of this fate, but the vast majority recognise the suffering of fellow human beings as a cause for care and compassion.

Justice for the Palestinian people will require more than compassion. We need to challenge the corporations here who fund the Israeli military either by investments or the selling of Israeli goods. To end the mass killing we have to challenge the Israeli State as a settler-colonialist endeavour based upon forcing Palestinians out of their homelands. And we have to expose the political creed of Zionism as a wholly abhorrent racist ideology wholly separate from Judaism and the human rights of Jewish people. It s not antisemitic to challenge Zionism.

The protests will not end until there is a permanent ceasefire, and that means challenging support for Israel in workplaces and colleges. We need to increase the mass pressure for a ceasefire. We’ll be marching again locally every Saturday, and nationally on the 17th. The campaign will not end without justice for the Palestinian people – Freedom for Palestine!

We Have to Stop the Drive to Global War

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My weekly Comment column for the daily Plymouth Herald newspaper, published on 30th January 2024. Thankfully, the following Saturday, 3rd February was to see more than 200,000 marching through central London for Palestine and against wider warfare, just as the US and UK dropped hundreds of bombs and missiles on Yemen and sites in Northern Syria. The protests were amplified by local events in Plymouth and across the country (and beyond of course) was to further pressurise western leaders, with the calls for “restraint” by Israel’s government becoming louder the more the street marches grew. But it will take far more, as the increasing bombing of Gaza in and around Ramallah prove all to horrifically.

The narrative has changed suddenly.

We are heading for World War Three and need to prepare society.

The UK’s Defence Secretary, Grant Shapps, warned last week that we are moving “from a post-war to a pre-war world”. Debates this week, or rather lack of any democratic debates inside the formalities of Parliament, suggest the UK will increase overt military support for Israel in Gaza despite the International Court of Justice investigation into genocide there. 

And Prime Minister Sunak is falling over himself to support President Biden’s retaliatory actions after three American troops were killed and dozens more injured in an overnight drone strike in Northeast Jordan. There is no questioning as to what US troops and bases are doing there.

With United States military bases and routine intervention growing across the Middle East, the focus is upon Islam as a threat and Iran as the primary enemy, allegedly funding every nation state and group that is challenging western domination. The charge comes with little evidence, Iran experiencing a crisis economy that suggests they can’t afford war, and the denying complicity. But the links between States across the Arab world are certainly made stronger in the face of US imperialist domination of their homelands and resources.

Wall to wall, we are being fed fear and focus upon the enemy abroad, the “them” who are determined to destroy the “us”. Despite escalating climate chaos, economic crisis and corrosion of our social infrastructure at home, we are being asked to accept the unifying threat from “outsiders” – whoever we choose to believe them to be. 

Internationally, beleaguered ruling classes are driving for war, perhaps in a desperate attempt to survive the general and global crisis of Capitalism, reminiscent of the 1930’s.

In Europe, the German government is moving to end the curbs on its military activities since the Second World War, on the premise that Russian troops could march westwards from Belarus, despite Russia’s economy at a condition impossible to fund military expansion by even a tenth of the level the West is already spending. Indeed, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has exposed the war as an extension of the escalating tension between East and West, the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) accelerating fast, nations queuing-up to join the West’s military alliance which has both global and offensive capabilities.

Following this month’s general election in Taiwan, the mainstream western media is hyping the potential for China to invade the island and the need for increased US presence in the South China Seas.

North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un has tested more missiles and pledged to build more nuclear weapons, simply mirroring the Western expansion in nuclear weapons which appear, at least, to be the required marker for the level of ultimate military power that ensures national security. 

But there comes a point where nuclear weapons become useable, and we appear to be very near. The so-called “nuclear deterrent” said to prevent use becomes an obvious target when the threat becomes too great. At such a point they need to be used before anyone else does. 

Populations have to be won to the reasonableness of firing-up nuclear warheads, the threat against us needing to be understood as imminent and beyond reasonable doubt. But how do you know – remember the lies of Iraq’s WMDs? The latest pre-war propaganda exercise is now in full swing, once again full of lies. 

So in all current commentary about the threat from the “East”, twentieth century imagery of the threat of “communism” is being regurgitated despite the USSR being demolished thirty years ago  (Putin’s Russia being a privatised capitalist State) and China now challenging the USA as the world’s most successful economy inside global capitalism. They don’t need to invade anywhere. 

We are being whipped-up to prepare for war when we need to be whipped-up to protest for Peace.

The BBC has broadcast warnings of the increased potential for the use of nuclear weapons in any of these flashpoints, peppering radio and TV news reports of the renewed tensions and the potential for global war. America is preparing to place its nuclear weapons at Lakenheath, Suffolk, their long-wished-for retaliation for the women’s protests in the 1980’s which forced US nukes out of Greenham Common and off UK shores. It puts the UK on the nuclear front-line, a proxy target to shield the USA.

Perhaps the most bizarre pro-war propaganda exercise was last Monday’s Radio 4 Women’s Hour programme which began with a convincing statement from a current RAF Group Captain explaining that the next global war is “inevitable”, human history showing these cycles repeat themselves, whatever. Women had better prepare. 

On the back of all this, ultra-nationalists and xenophobes in the UK get airtime and oxygen for the call for Britain to return to conscription, euphemistically dressed-up as “National Service”, as the essential preparation of our young working class to be ready for call-up as cannon-fodder, able to use arms and fit enough to manage battleground conditions.

Our ruling class is ramping-up the drive to war. Central to this is separating out nation from nation, strengthening and militarising borders, and damning as “wish-washy liberal” any suggestion that international co-operation, heaven forfend “International Aid”, “International Law”, negotiations and ceasefires should be the most urgent response to the rising tension.

Right now the Hawks have it at Government level. They are in turn sponsored by the military-industrial complex of corporations selling arms to all sides and reaping the massive profits from the growing human carnage. 

We have to counter the propaganda and lies flooding into popular consciousness. Challenge the warmongers, Stop the War! 

Tony Staunton, Plymouth Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

The Right To Strike is Worth Fighting For!

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After a break, my weekly Comment published in the daily Plymouth Herald on 26th January 2024 offered an advert for the national demonstration called by Britain’s national trade union federation, the Trades Union Congress (TUC), on the following Saturday. There had been little advertising either inside the trade union movement or the national media, despite the issue. The government has passed new legislation effectively banning strike action. Public services, including education, transport and health care are subject to legal prosecution where any strike action does not maintain “minimum service levels, for example, 40% of train service or 80% of health care. It renders redundant the power of the strike action. What would be the point? This is easily the harshest anti-union law since the time of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980’s. Nevertheless, this has been the TUC’s only action on the issue. The demonstration widened a local demonstration originally called to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the campaign for recognition of trade unions at the GCHQ spy headquarters in Cheltenham (the most conservative and heavily vetted of all civil service staff), so that the national trade union bureaucracy could be seen to have “done something” whilst doing the least possible. In the end, over 5,000 activists marched proudly despite the poor organisation, and friendly reports also included the non-plussed but supportive comments of by-standers who couldn’t work out what the march was for. The spineless and weak response of the national leadership to this terrible attack on basic human rights should be a cause for outrage.

Tens of thousands of trade unionists will be marching in Cheltenham this Saturday. We are outraged. The cause should be of deep concern to all, even if hardly mentioned in the mainstream media. 

The UK’s Government for the Bosses has created a law that can force people to work against their will. The introduction of the Minimum Service Levels Act effectively undermines the “Right to Strike” – the right to withdraw our labour in collective pursuit of decent pay and treatment at work. 

Workers, such as train drivers or nurses, can be forced by law to go into work whilst being trade union members called into strike action. To defy the Law is to face immediate dismissal and potential prosecution.

To be forced into work is nothing less than slavery. More importantly, it is the end of the democratic human right be a member of trade union. 

After at least fifteen laws restricting and threatening trade union organisation made by successive Conservative governments from the 1980’s onwards, this is the most authoritarian and undemocratic of them all.

Little wonder that the Labour Party has promised to repeal the Act should it become the next government, but we are sceptical unless huge pressure is exhibited by mass protest from below – Blair and Brown did not repeal even one of Thatcher’s anti-union laws.

Indeed, Tony Blair boasted that Britain has the most strict employment laws limiting strike action anywhere across Western Europe. 

Nevertheless, in the wake of last year’s largest levels of strike action in 30 years, strikes continue.

Last week’s national strike by doctors was the longest in the history of the NHS, and more is planned. Doctors have lost over 25% of real pay in the last decade, the majority earning less than tradespeople. They are also profoundly angered by the dilapidation of the NHS they observe everyday.

Next week the train driver’s union, ASLEF, begins the next round of rail strikes, fighting not only for an inflation-rate of pay rise but also against plans for unsafe working conditions. Under this new law, the union is to be held responsible for ensuring a minimum 40% of services are maintained, neutering almost all impact of strike action. 

Teachers in schools and colleges are once again considering strike action, the conditions of our education system quite the worst in three generations. 

All these workers and more are identified by the new law and can be forced into work, all their collective power undermined by maintaining minimum services. Rather than protect the sick, the students’ quality of education or the travelling public, this new Law will simply create even more chaos and disruption. It has to be challenged and defied. 

The attacks on working class conditions and our right to collective organisation are being ramped-up in front of the General Election, asking the question, “which side are you on?”. 

What power have we as workers got, except to join together and stand in defiance of exploitation, oppression and injustice? The right to strike is immutable, and worth fighting for. 

The Trades Union Congress has called the demonstration in Cheltenham in recognition of the 40th Anniversary of the GCHQ strikes against the banning of trade union organisation in that government security agency. Workers were bribed into non-union status and those who refused, sacked. Their union rights were restored in 1997 after a long campaign. 

The lesson must be that we have to fight to win, not only by marching in our thousands on Saturday but taking the fight to the heart of government, by refusing to abide by this unjust law. 

Coaches from Plymouth are organised by the Unite trade union and others. Contact your union for a seat now, and join a union wherever you work. 

The Climate Crisis Demands a Unified Response

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My weekly Comment in the daily Plymouth Herald, published on 2nd January 2024, making very basic and obvious points about the refreshed politic of climate denial being ramped-up by the mainstream parties. As the General Election looms closer, the backtracking and pooh-poohing of demands for action to save people and planet are going to overwhelm the mainstream media, despite all evidence to the contrary. We have to speak out and Act Now!

Last weekend’s welcomed rest and relaxation was certainly disrupted. Fierce downpours onto already sodden land ensured more local flooding. The transport disruption and electricity outages had one common cause – our increasingly extreme weather conditions.

There’s more to come. According to the World Metereological Association, 2023 saw a “deafening cacophony of broken records” across all climate measurements, the record heat set to escalate due to the “super El Niño” this year. Entire regions are already experiencing environmental and social catastrophe.

Last  year was the hottest year on record, and 2024 will be hotter still. Extreme heat, driven not only by the unprecedented levels of greenhouse gas emissions but also the development of the peak in the eleven year cycle of ocean warming, will ensure more intense heatwaves, wildfires and heavy rains which will threaten food production and transport dislocation.

The response to this, locally and globally, is abysmal. Here, and across much of the world, governments and politicians are pulling back from previous commitments and any future promises towards climate action.

In general they consider that any State spending on emissions reduction is a vote loser, the majority of the electorate (not the same grouping as the majority of the population) do not want to see tax money spent on social infrastructure such as home insulation, subsidies for renewable energy production and carbon-zero heating. 

This is untrue, of course. Most of us are worried about climate change, made anxious not so much the big threats of species extinction and global climate collapse which we feel powerless to affect, but the local day-to-day and observable impacts that cause us higher costs and growing discomfort. 

We also share a common nagging tension at the back of our heads about the potential major challenges facing our children. 

But the reaction against climate action is gaining hold. 2024 is election year, not just here in the UK but in the huge economies of the United States and India as well as countries across Europe. 

In every country where political tension is increasing due to the continuing cost-of-living crisis, investment in social infrastructure is being disparaged and condemned in favour of tax cuts – mainly for the wealthy. 

A narrative is being stoked – squeeze the power and costs of the State and free us all to live by our own wits and resources. It is an extreme individualist argument, borne of the far-Right of the political spectrum which always espouses survival of the fittest – despising and damning the poor and those in need of levels of help they cannot manage alone. 

The organised far-Right in every land is growing in capacity and influence. And the traditionally mainstream parties are kowtowing to this contrived “populist” vote, scapegoating minorities and ridiculing warnings of potential catastrophe. 

The “culture wars” are being ramped-up to publicly condemn any show of concern for others, for social welfare, or for the climate, as “woke”, spineless and unrealistic. 

There appears to be no mainstream party now demanding the scale of action required to reorder society to ensure resilience to the deepening climate crisis. The challenge to the Climate Movement, failing to be heard let alone to win timely government acton at the scale required, is immense. 

Nevertheless, our strategy has to be broadcast. Nothing less than a National Climate Service, overseeing all government agencies and ensuring the focus of all policy and spending towards climate action, will ensure protection of the tens of millions of working class people here. We require help to mitigate environmentally destructive routines and adapt to life inside unpredictable environmental conditions. 

This cannot be achieved by a local and piecemeal approach alone. We have to campaign for societal reorganisation and investment. And this year, that campaign is distinctly ideological, openly challenging the forces of corporate power and far-Right class privilege. 

Christmas was Cancelled in Bethlehem this year

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My column in the daily Plymouth Herald this week (27.12.23), brief and to the point, pointing to the hypocrisy and endemic racism of the Western Establishment. What more is there to say?

Bethlehem town, just South of Jerusalem in the Palestinian West Bank, has shut down in solidarity with the people of Gaza, the Palestinian enclave on the Mediterranean Coast. 

People of every Faith recognise Bethlehem as the stated birthplace of Jesus of Nazareth. For Christians Jesus is the Son of God, for Muslims, Sikhs, Jews, Rastafari and other Abrahamic religions He is a crucial holy prophet. In any case, His birthplace is a place of global pilgrimage, with two million people visiting the town each year out of curiosity or deep faith. 

The shops are shut, the town deserted, and the Church of the Nativity built on the site of the stable where the faithful believe Jesus to have been born has constructed, instead of the traditional nativity scene of Mary, Joseph and Jesus in a manger, a pile of stone rubble and dust with a baby in swaddling lying in the middle.

This is a Christian church, not an outlet for Hamas propaganda. The shut-down is in recognition of the twenty thousand Palestinian civilians who have been killed inside 9 weeks, the sixty thousand casualties suffering without proper hospital or medical support, and the nearly two-million now living without clean water and experiencing enforced starvation and associated deadly diseases.

The Church’s local Reverend Munther Isaac spoke from the pulpit, “This year Christmas feels different…It is impossible to celebrate when there is a genocide taking place in our land…and we are wondering is this our fate too, in Bethlehem, in Ramallah, across the West Bank?” 

Already, 300 have been killed in the Palestinian West Bank by Israeli settlers and troops since October 7th, turfed out of their homes and shot on their streets.

In Gaza, the number of children – at least seven thousand – now recorded as the largest casualty rate of children in such a period of war, any war in the history of humanity, is a devastating indictment that lies on the conscience of us all. 

In a very real and historical sense, this devastation of a civilian population is of Biblical proportions. 

Christians worldwide, and, increasingly Jewish groups everywhere, have called-out the carnage and called for a Ceasefire, to no avail.

And here’s the rub. This military invasion and occupation of the Palestinian territory of Gaza is not a religious war. It can hardly be recognised as a war at all given the immense difference of military power and resource between the Israeli Defence Forces, backed-up by US and UK fire-power, and the small number of street-fighters associated with the Hamas government.

This is a conflict not of Islam against Jew or the Holy against heathens. This is a territorial war born of imperial domination and colonial power. Most vitally, this is western Imperialism maintaining its interests over the Arab World. 

Those who, out of prejudice and ignorance, hate Arabs or Islam or both, wish to perpetrate the lie that Jews everywhere are at existential risk from terrorists, and that the extermination of all potential enemies is the only reasonable response. 

In reality, the Israeli State is not the same as the Jewish people, nor do the Zionist settlers represent Judaism. Zionism is a separatist political creed whilst Judaism is a world faith. 

Those who support Israel in this so-called war number a small minority of the human race and an even smaller number of nation States. 

Indeed, in a vote at the United Nations a last week, only the United States voted against a ceasefire, the power of the World’s most armed and dominant imperialist nation ever conceived being enough to veto the wishes and concerns of the rest of humanity.

On Christmas Eve Israeli fighter planes bombed residences and killed nearly 200, not by precision but as an expression of total power against a captive population of over 2 million people. This is a politics of domination, one over another.

Such wars do not ensure a peaceful outcome.

We who demand a ceasefire and oppose the war are not antisemitic, on the contrary we are anti-racists. And we want peace with social justice and human rights for all.

The New Year beckons with the question, where does this end? War against those in Lebanon? Expansion of western forces into Yemen, or even Iran? In these days of growing conflict, the demand for Peace on Earth must not be confined to Christmas. 

Another Year of Inaction on the Climate Disaster

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald published on 14th December 2023. The protests in Plymouth this year were small, the core of climate activists here depleted dramatically from the thousands pre-COVID lockdown. It’s hard to know why the issue has so little resonance at present, other than the cost-of-living crisis and general emotional sense of vulnerability seeing into the consciousness of the entire working class here. It’s a time for shutting the front door, keeping the outside outside and seeking some solace in the warm hearth of the holiday period (if you can afford the heating). Our climate march, joined with the local Palestine protest, managed over 120 people, whilst the Climate Summit, heavily publicised and built towards over the previous 6 months, drew 50 people – all already in the know. These are increasingly hard times, but a Movement of millions must be built quickly if we are to survive.

Why shouldn’t we be angry about the COP28 idiocy? A hugely expensive jamboree in the oil-rich Police State of UAE where 90% of the population are disallowed citizenship or human rights, protests are dangerously illegal, the government ministers and fossil fuel corporate executives packing-in 5-times the numbers of any citizen or NGO representatives, the rich flown-in on private jets to proclaim that it is the rest of us who have to tighten our belts because of the climate crisis whilst the poor remain voiceless.

Indeed, apparently, the climate catastrophe already killing millions each year and displacing millions more as climate refugees, is not the fault of greenhouse gas emissions. The President of COP28 this year, Sultan Al Jaber, head of the UAE State oil and gas company, says there is “no science” showing that we need to phase-out fossil fuels to restrict global heating to 1.5C.

After 30 years of this farce they’ve done nothing other than to protect the oil companies and their own voracious demand to get as rich as rich can be at the expense of people and planet. Yet thousands of scientific papers, peer-and-government reviewed before publication and published through the same United Nations entity, proves the precise opposite. These oil-rich billionaires should be considered as scum (a term recently judged by a UK court to be a perfectly legal derogatory term). 

The global average temperature in 2023 – the hottest year on record – actually reached 1.5C for a period. In fact, for three days it reached 2C. Whatever we do now, the changes to the earth’s climate have past tipping points that will ensure undeniable change everywhere – floods, fires, crop-failures, transport disruption and sudden extreme weather conditions displacing and killing people even here in wet-and-to-be-even-wetter England.

Unless we leave fossil fuels in the ground we have absolutely no hope of preventing climate breakdown. We are still putting more emissions into the atmosphere than we are stopping by moving to wind and solar. It doesn’t matter how many wind turbines you put up, or how many solar panels, unless you are scrapping the fossil fuel infrastructure and ensuring, through legislation, to leave coal, gas and oil in the ground, the Planet is going to boil. 

The highly effective and lethal fossil fuel lobbying, both inside the COP Conferences since 1992 and all day and night, every day and night, year-in and year-out, since the Second World War and before, has prevented most if not all effective action.

This has thwarted the simple things that need to be done. And while we sit and the years tick by, and we have so few years left now. We’re going to have to take drastic action if we’re going to avoid what could well be Earth systems collapse. This is the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced, and by design – as a result of the enormous oppressive and exploitative power of the fossil fuel industries.

And now they want the working classes of the world to pay for the clean-up, with our lives. Whilst the well-off and already entitled middle classes join the call for working class people to buy electric cars, eat pulses and wear hair-shirts, we live hand-to-mouth. One-third of Plymouth’s children are living in the poverty of damp housing, poor nutrition, rationed and paltry public transport, and charity-shop clothing, topped-up with food banks unable to meet the accelerating demands. 

Don’t you dare preach to us about buying an electric car or heat pump! Individually we haven’t the wherewithal. We challenge all moralising against the masses – individual actions are of little consequence given the scale of the challenge – it is the emissions at the point of production that have to be shut down, the rest will follow. The System has to change. 

The fossil fuel companies receive tax incentives to the tune of £11.5billion each year from the taxes we pay despite making record profits from energy bills three times the cost of 5 years ago. It is they, collectively, who should pay for this climate crisis, their billions in profits to be paid back-in to our society to immediately insulate and damp-proof our 14 million homes and decaying hospitals and schools, to renationalise and invest in decent free-to-use public transport, and train and recruit the millions of people required to change all production away from fossil fuels. 

We are in crisis right now – it’s visible. And that means we’ll have to change how we live, either by choice or necessity. But the lack of action by governments and corporation has shown we can’t rely upon them. Politicians will not legislate to stop all extraction of coal, gas and oil, and the corporations can’t transition in time, even if they wanted to. It’s the System of Capitalist exploitation – private profit -that has to be replaced or we face a torrid and barbaric future. 

We Have to Keep protesting for Gaza!

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My weekly column published in the Plymouth Herald on 5th December 2023. I am in tears and choked by the horror of the genocide in Gaza, the Second Nakba (Catastrophe) in which twice the numbers of Palestinians have now been displaced compared with the first Nakba in 1948, and 5 times the number of civilians killed, including at least 6,000 children. This will never be forgotten, but, as the bombing and destruction starts again, with 1.9 million people suffering without food, water or shelter, I can only voice my outrage and call everyone onto the streets.

It’s no good. We have to talk about Gaza.

There can be no greater expression of absolute power than in having fighter planes, drones, ships, tanks and super-armed militia pummel civilian neighbourhoods and then stop, let in tiny amounts of water and food, and then begin the killing all over again.

You may say “It’s War”. You may point to an enemy hidden amongst the civilians. You may choose sides. 

But, by any reckoning, 14,000 casualties in 7 weeks, set against 1500 (max) Israelis, is asymmetrical, in military terms, 10:1.

And for every person killed in Gaza there are at least 3 others injured with life-changing, debilitating wounds and without any decent hospital treatment as the fuel and medical supplies have run out. Now amounting to 38,000 injured – more than the entire population of Barnstaple.

The Israeli government this week declared that the entire region of Gaza is now subject to their military occupation and assault. This will not stop, they say, until all their goals are achieved. Their published goals include the extermination of the Hamas governance and infrastructure, but they do not disclose their entire plan. What happens afterwards?

There remains more than 2 million Gazan Palestinians – human beings by the way, now corralled into Southern Gaza, an area measuring 12 miles by 7 miles – smaller than our PL postcode area which crams-in fewer than 320,000. These people, to repeat, these 2 million people, include more than 1 million offered no more than crowded tents in winter weather conditions. They are now being continuously strafed by fighter planes, bombed, with reports of incendiary weapons that continue to burn on contact with skin, and targeted if they dare to move.

There are over 1,000 bomb craters visible from space in Gaza, the result of over 8,000 bombs drops on 12,000 targets in an area of just over six square miles – the size of Plymouth’s Devonport.  

We should remind ourselves that more than 5,000 of the dead are children below the age of 13, and 45% of those killed are women according to the United Nations medical officials there on the ground. The world has watched, the West supporting the death and destruction, the Global South (the majority of the world’s governments) condemning the deaths yet all nations united in doing nothing to end it. 

This so-called “war” is to continue at least over our Christmas period. In fact, it is intensifying. The United States have suggested that Israel should lower the proportion of civilian deaths during their “exercises”, but last Saturday, in one single day, 700 were killed. 

Most crucially for us, the UK has ramped-up its military support to Israel and activity in the occupation of Gaza. The Royal Air Force is conducting the drone surveillance flights using Shadow R1 reconnaissance aircraft over Gaza to track and target movements on the ground, whilst Commandos are deployed and Vanguard-class nuclear submarine supports two US aircraft carrier convoys in the southern Mediterranean Sea.

Such a huge use of military might against the impoverished and besieged people of Palestine is not only questionable, it is unconscionable. 

The British trade union movement called early-on for a ceasefire, mindful of the inequality in the level of military power and consequential one-sided civilian casualties. We cautiously welcomed the “lull” of last week, giving hope that it could be made permanent. The sheer horror of the continuation of the mass killing is made all more unjust by the sheer proven fact that it can be stopped at will. 

Specifically, the UK must stop arming Israel. Now! We have nothing to do but shout-out our opposition. The trade unions’ Day of Action on Thursday 7th December will see many workplaces and students stage walkouts for an immediate cessation to the killing.

The demand for a ceasefire is the only humane approach. The fact that our MPs and local politicians refuse to call for an end to the mass killing of children and civilians is the most seering indictment of their complicity, their support for UK military involvement tantamount to support for genocide, a war crime. 

For our part, we shall continue to protest and expose the hypocrisy and warmongering of our elected leaders. We can only ask that everyone of conscience and with any moral compass join us.

COP28 used for Corporate Deals!

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald published on 27th November 2023. It was then of little surprise that, days later it emerged the President of COP28, Sultan Al Jabar, was quoted as saying that fossil fuels were not responsible for climate change (I paraphrase, but you get the gist). the corruption is beyond question, their culpability amounts to the greatest genocide in human history.

It should be of no surprise that the person in charge of this week’s Climate Conference is using the event to sign deals to extract more oil. The United Nations Conference of Parties (COP) has been held almost every year for more than three decades now and has achieved little or nothing. Some years ago it set targets for the global reductions in the emissions that warm the planet and destabilise the climate. In 2023 the emissions continue to rise, the target now requiring a 45% reduction in all our gases by 2030. 

It’s probably the case that no one believes the targets can possibly be reached. We are fast descending into a prolonged period of catastrophe for humanity and Nature’s Ecology. We are deep into the 6th Great Extinction of plant and animal life on the Planet, with Britain being the region most divested of wildlife on the Planet. 

The Climate Catastrophe, repeatedly predicted for over a century, is now with us, with 20,000 children forced to move forever from their inhospitable birthplaces every day. We face one billion, one thousand million humans, leaving their homelands in the Tropics, the southern states of the USA and southern countries of Europe, the centre of India and Southern China by the 2040’s.

Food shortages due to extreme weather conditions as well as long term regional climate changes will most certainly produce repeated global food shortages and transport disruption by the mid 2030’s if not much sooner. The resultant wars between states for the resources to maintain their societies have been predicted but are now actually with us – more than one hundred conflicts across Africa alone, and armies lining-up inside Europe itself. 

Civil wars sparked by food-shortages and unmanageable inflation levels are ensuring brutal repression of entire populations. The fear of mass migration is being ramped-up to ensure we are all desensitised to the plight of tens-of-millions of human beings, most but not all people of colour. Racism as a tool to dehumanise is being used to watch and ignore the development of refugee camps, millions of families living in crowded tents reliant on charitable food and water aid, and guarded by militia ready to shoot those who chance their lives on fleeing Northward for life and income.

So the revelations about the Conferences being used as bargaining bases to ensure higher emissions is just the latest damning indictment of the entire system. The United Nations is supposed to be the place where nations are brought together for international solidarity and support. It is not publicised as the broker of Corporate deals. The highest principal of the COP President is to rise above personal and national net rests to seek solutions for the common good. If the President of the COP process is seeking self-interest, then why shouldn’t everyone else? Trust in the COP process has collapsed. 

The COP28 Conference is supposed to be focussed upon the cutting the fossil-fuelled global warming emissions of C02, Methane, Nitrous Oxide and Fluorinated gases – all potent greenhouse gases. The drive towards renewable energy, greater energy efficiency leading to the reduction in the demand, and support and justice for those who are suffering the terrible consequences of climate change should be the focus for all decisions.

But the President of the COP28, the man presiding over the entire affair, is using the stage to ensure far more emissions. Dr Sultan al-Jaber is the head of the United Arab Emirates’ Oil company Adnoc. His company is talking with delegates to the COP28 about liquid natural gas projects in Mozambique, Canada and Australia, in collaboration with Germany and Egypt. The oil and gas deals carry-on being sealed, ensuring the predicted rise in global temperatures by at least 3Celcius by 2100, creating chaos to all human societies across the world.

This is corporate genocide on a global scale, funded and supported by corrupt government politicians focussed solely on short-term personal gain. From below, millions of conscious and empathetic human beings will be protesting throughout COP28, for human suffrage, climate justice and system change. The oil magnates and Sultans must be deposed. We have to force the end of fossil-fuel industries and global warming emissions now, or witness the end of human civilisation. 

Climate Conference Wake-up Call

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My weekly column published in the daily Plymouth Herald on 24th November. This is the local lead-up to our 10-days of actions and events coinciding with the COP28 United Nations Climate Conference in Dubai, UAE from next weekend. There is too much to say in less than 600 words, at a time when Climate is off the agenda and all protest actions are correctly focussed upon the genocide in Gaza. My attempt is to link the protests locally, identifying the common cause of climate collapse and genocide as Capitalism, and its most powerful presentation in the form of imperialism. the call for a joint protest march through the City centre is quite a gamble.

The TV news scenes flashed-up cars under water in Dubai following flash floods this week. The terms, “unprecedented” and “record-breaking” were spoken gravely for all the salaciousness and excitement that pulp-journalism could offer. They omitted to mention that Dubai will host the annual United Nations Climate Conference, a gathering of all interested parties next week. Corporations and their police allies will dominate the agenda.

This will be the COP28, in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, chaired by the oil magnate Sultan Al Jaber, managing director and group CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. Over the past thirty years (they missed-off a couple of meetings) the COP process have intended to agree on policies to limit global temperature rises and adapt to impacts associated with climate change. 

They’ve failed miserably, the targets constantly revised upward, and with 2023 now witnessing the first period where global temperatures reached 2degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels, the COP target being 1.5C. So much for greenwash talk. No wonder we’re protesting. 

Earlier this month, 9 women faced court charged with causing half-a-million pounds worth of criminal damage to the Canary Wharf headquarters of HSBC. None of the defendants, aged between 23 and 71, denied that, in April 2021, they used hammers and chisels to crack the windows of the Corporate headquarters and glued-on stickers reading “£80billion invested fossil fuels in the last five years” – “Just Stop Oil!”. 

The prosecution argued that, whatever their motives, there was no lawful excuse for what they did. last Thursday, the Jury disagreed, and unanimously found the women “Not Guilty”. Groups like this may be dismissed as troublemakers, but that was how people once responded to the suffragettes and those who marched in the Civil Rights Movement. 

Our attitudes may depend on how we think about Climate Change, and that will depend upon where in the World we live. After the case, one of the women, Susan, a retired community worker, said she’d spent her life caring for others. She quoted a UNICEF report detailing that weather disasters, exacerbated by climate change, permanently displaces 20,000 children from their homes every day. 

Most of us agree with Susan that our lives are inextricably linked with everyone else’s, not just inside our national boundaries but across the world. After all, the changing climate knows no national borders or separations caused by language of culture. What happens in the Antarctic has a direct bearing on weather conditions here. When people are permanently displaced by the destruction of their birthplace, happening now across the continents of Africa or Asia of South America, the countries of the North, so far less ravaged by fires and floods, and the desertification caused by high temperatures impossible to live through, feel the pressure of mass migration – Climate Refugees. We are all connected.

Scientists now observe that 2023 is the hottest year since records began. Indeed, global temperatures reached peaks not recorded in the evidence from trapped ancient gases in some half-a-million years – that is, before the dawn of our human species. That’s worth thinking about.

The UK government, alongside most across the world, is actively denying there’s a problem. Those who support them, and those who actively seek an early catastrophe, Armageddon in their lifetime, bullishly advertise and promote Climate Denial. There is a new movement, not those of us deeply concerned about the immediate threat of extreme weather to lives and livelihoods here as well as abroad. This far-Right movement has been named “Clexit”, and they, too are on the streets. Shouting out “Climate Exit”, they want complete withdrawal from all actions to limit Climate Change: the end of push towards electrification of transport; no investment in home insulation or heat pumps; more support and more money for new oil and gas fields. Let’s burn, burn, burn!

The Sunak Government has acceded. Most of even Johnson’s meagre measures to curb the emissions that cause global heating and climate collapse are being withdrawn. That’s the sub-text of this week’s Autumn Statement by the Chancellor. Where action to create new Climate Jobs and a low carbon economy can reflate and protect our economy, the domination of the oil corporations heralds ever-deeper disaster. Capitalist Business as usual in an era of fundamental change to our Planet. Absurd!

We are All Engaged in the Class War

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This is a time of polycrisis. The New Age of Catastrophe. With 130,000 killed by the war in Ukraine to date, at least 10,000 in Gaza, and 20,000 children permanently displaced by the impact of climate change each day, we can all see and feel the crisis. The tension, the need, is to keep hold of the Big Picture whilst also acting upon the local and immediate. This is my weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald printed 13th November 2023, my local chemist (a lifeline for some 3,000 people each week), is being shut down in the name of short-term profit by an offshore hedge fund consortium. This drip-drip-drip fof cuts to essential social infrastructure has to be challenged, alongside the global issues of imperialism and climate collapse.

They’re closing our local Boots the Chemist. The shop manages thousands of prescriptions each week. The pharmacist spends time with individuals, he knows us, advises when there’s no chance of a timely GP appointment, his staff offer a smile. This doorstep service ensures those with mobility challenges have local access to help. The chemists has been a central core of our personal security and sense of safety.

It’s just the latest service lost to our community. Most of us are experiencing enforced rationing as if it’s wartime.

Not only has the cost-of-living crisis cut our real-spending power – lowering wages and raising the prices of the necessities of life: shelter, food and utilities – but the human services for health and welfare have all but disappeared. The working class pay a great deal through taxation for a social infrastructure that is rapidly diminishing. In fact, 40% of gross domestic product each year goes into our State coffers as tax, and goes out again to maintain a semblance of society. Yet we feel ourselves to be getting less-and-less back from the taxes deducted from our wages and purchases. 

Our health services are in crisis, the educational standards of our children are declining by all international comparisons, the general housing stock has become both unaffordable and in need of urgent repairs, local government is going bankrupt causing care of the vulnerable to become all but unavailable. The community hubs of libraries, parks and recreational facilities, paid for from our Community Taxes, are crumbling from lack of maintenance.  

We are not in a State of War. So what is going on? 

Firstly, we live in an unequal society riven by social class. The descriptions above are not experienced by those in the top ten percent of the population with individual income above £50,000 a year or a bank stash hoarded from inherited wealth. The richest one percent of the population live lives wholly separated from the challenges most of us face daily.

Secondly, the incredible level of polarisation between rich and poor has, by and large, been funded by our taxes. This is best summed-up by even the most superficial consideration of the political creed of “Privatisation”. Tax-payers funds have been squandered on transferring all our essential services into the hands of private companies and their shareholders, started by the Labour Government of the mid-1970’s and accelerated by all from Thatcher to Sunak ever since. 

Our water was sold-off in the early 1980’s, since when £75 billion pounds has gone into shareholders private accounts whilst our rivers and coastal shores became polluted and the charges for fresh water and sewage disposal have risen to a point where many – yes many – can’t afford flush their toilet through the day. 

The privatisation of electricity and gas supplies has seen record profits, record dividends for the bosses and large stockholders, and record prices to a point where we are now expected to not heat our homes but huddle under blankets. 

Fuel prices rise and fall at the whim of producers, but at base are three times the price of five years ago and the profits are three times as high – all this with UK-based oil producers receiving at least £10.5 billion a year in subsidies from us, the tax-payers, whilst they pay next to nothing into the Exchequer. 

And that’s the third thing – profit. Britain has become an internationally low-waged, long working-hours economy. Small and even Medium Sized businesses, known as SMEs, are undoubtedly struggling, keeping wages low in order that the tax-payer donates to the wages of their workforce by paying Universal Benefit top-ups, whilst our taxes pay-out Housing Benefits, not to the tenant but to the landlord who has increased the rent to unaffordable prices, able to increase homelessness through the licence to evict without cause with two months notice. Private profit divides and rules us all. 

It’s all rotten. It is the big businesses, the transnational corporations who do not respect our national borders but demand tax-incentives – bail-outs and subsidies from our pay-ins – who are bleeding us dry. The hundreds of billions in tax relief for corporations dwarf the tax money spent on supporting the homeless or refugees who we are told to blame for our poverty.

And all the while, the corporations are looking to increase their profits and dividends at the expense of most of us. Smaller companies go to the wall, the larger ones seek to restrict services and sack staff solely in order to make ever-larger pay-outs to their owners. 

That’s why Boots the Chemist is closing our local pharmacy – private profit over human need. Our medical prescriptions deliver them millions in profits paid by us, the tax-payers. Boots, its private equity owners, Walgreens, based in Switzerland (for the tax-avoidance no doubt) made a profit of £137million last year, its boss taking home a £3,800,000 million pay cheque. Apparently that’s not enough.

It’s never enough, is it? The impact of the closure upon our community’s health will be severe, but the greed of the system of Capitalism doesn’t give a damn.

We are engaged in a war, currently one-sided – the Class War. We have to fight for a better system based upon need not profit! This week that fight demands a campaign to save our local pharmacy.

Protests are a call for Peace and basic Humanity

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald published on 7th November. The censorship of the media still in accelerating swing, with employers banning discussion of Gaza or any signs of support for Palestinians in or around the workplace (a social work colleague of mine hauled before her manager last week fo stating her support for Gaza’s on Facebook!). The protests continue to build.

What would you most associate with Remembrance Day: the commemoration of a ceasefire at the end of the most horrific of all wars to date, or endorsing and celebrating war?

The answer is remembering the joy of Peace, of course. The remembrance element of 11th November each year is the emotional engagement with the moment the war ended, the two-minutes silence at 11am offering a moment of reflection of the sheer horror of warfare and empathising with all the individual war dead and their grieving relatives.  Initially the remembrance of those killed in the First World War, Remembrance Sunday has developed over recent decades to recall and ponder all wars, the dead, the injured and the scarred emotional memory of those who survive. 

In Britain, Remembrance Sunday has the King, Prime Ministers past and present, and all sections of the military establishment march through Whitehall, London, to the Cenotaph to lay wreaths and stand silently still in commemoration of those who died for the Country. It is a yearly moment of overt nationalism and military pride.

On the 11th November there is a two minute silence, usually falling on a busy week day. This year the 11th is a Saturday. Apart from the two-minutes of silence, often drowned-out by the beeping horns and cash-til pings of commerce, nothing else happens. The remembrance is for Sunday.

So it is with the utmost hypocrisy that a section of our Government and national media choose to vilify the huge numbers of people across Britain organising for one of the largest ever demonstrations in London taking place on Saturday. The march, sprawling across the centre of London but nowhere near to the Cenotaph, will be calling, resolutely, for Peace. 

An immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and Occupied West Bank, as demanded by the United Nations but denied by the military Israeli State, is all that will be called for.

The USA and UK deny that even a pause in the War in Gaza should take place. It is, by any standard, hardly a war. The Palestinian fighters have no tanks or fighter aircraft but have been constantly bombarded for 4 weeks by the most heavily armed State across the entire Middle East, resulting in more than 10,000 Palestinians killed including 4,000 children. 

Why shouldn’t we protest to put a halt to that? Millions in Britain and across the world are currently engaged in mass vigils, meetings and protest marches calling for a ceasefire in the war on Gaza, Palestine.

Nevertheless, our Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, calls us all supporters of terrorism and calls the protests, “hate marches”. The double standard is jaw-dropping in its sheer hypocrisy. The Prime Minister has warned of disruption at the Cenotaph on Sunday, when the Ceasefire march is taking place the previous day! This is baseless scaremongering of the highest order, and should be exposed as propaganda – the government’s ideological weaponisation of Remembrance Sunday is outrageous. 

Peace protesters care for humanity. We cannot stand by and watch war crimes without shouting-out for the carnage to stop. The Government, intent upon supporting western supremacy and imperialist interests across the Middle East, what is actually the “Arab World”, will obviously stop at nothing to shut down all opposition. 

Yet the protests are building, upwards of a million people expected on the streets of London this Saturday, with coachloads travelling from across the country including from Plymouth, despite a promised Police crackdown on all of us who protest. This Government-sponsored political offensive comes from the very far-right of the political spectrum, seeking urgent legislation to outlaw protests that oppose the ideology of a single political party, soon to be ousted from office. Whilst Prime Minister Sunak calls for arrests of those defending Palestinians, he will stand at the front of a march which will, in its ranks, host a contingent of the British fascist party, the National Front. 

It would seem it is no longer fascism that is the enemy, but, ironically, freedom of association. There are growing numbers of statements from individuals at work and students in colleges threatened with discipline and even dismissal over wearing badges or carrying flags in support of the Palestinian people. School students and teachers are being instructed not to discuss the War. The danger to democracy is quite obvious.

Trade unions will defend its members against such repression.