My weekly comment was published in the daily Plymouth Herald newspaper on 6th September 2023. The news of the week was that a number of school buildings had to be shut, and students told to stay at home, just one week before the beginning of the Autumn term. I had wanted to write about the onset of the Neoliberal global politic and economic policies from the early 1970’s and the abject lack of investment in social infrastructure ever since, but I am no economist and the article became an enormous ramble. So I limited my thoughts to the role of health & safety at work today, and what trade union reps should be doing. as always I’m finally interested in promoting working class agency.

It’s not only schools that are crumbling. Hospitals are documented as having “concrete cancer” as are many public buildings, including our own Civic Centre in Plymouth.

The headlines are that 156 schools have to close classrooms and send children home, yet the real toll of buildings beyond their sell-by date is far far higher. 

The Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (RAAC) system of lightweight, and more crucially, cheaper, construction material for roofs and walls became popular from the 1950’s. Most of our post-war buildings have it. 

RAAC use has gone alongside the use of asbestos in buildings, a carcinogenic substance that trade unions had to fight for generations before winning legal acknowledgement of its dangers, let alone any liability for the associated painful and debilitating lung disease and deaths. 

Health & Safety activists, members of the Hazards movement and trade unions have reported on the poor state of our schools, hospitals and infra-structure ever since the 70s and 80s. None of this is news.

What is news is the collapse of a beam and the official recommendation of closures and remedial work. This should be an opportunity to pause and ask how any required remediation could hit two known requirements for a healthier and safer future – the removal of all asbestos in these buildings and consideration to climate and environmentally sensitive upgrades to any buildings – or asbestos removal, demolition and re-building green.

The government’s response is to “do as little as we can to get over this as quickly as we can” in order to appease the lobby of low-tax, small State voters ready to vote for no action on public welfare at the coming general election. 

It is a matter of public record that Rishi Sunak halved the budget for repairing dangerous schools when he was chancellor in 2021. Meanwhile, Gillian Keegan, Secretary of State for schools, authorised a £34 million revamp of her offices in April 2023.

Our safety is not their priority. 

Of course, previous governments have been as culpable, for generations. This lack of investment in social infrastructure has been continuous, leading to tower block collapses and make-shift props holding-up community buildings.

The question of when the next disaster will occur should not be asked. Instead, we should be taking collective action to ensure major State investment in all the services we pay for through our taxes. 

Union reps should immediately be asking questions of their employer about all of this now and trying to get the above on the agenda and talking to your union official and branch if their members are affected immediately.

For real action, trade union leaders should be telling teachers and other staff to refuse to work until there is certainty that schools are safe. And students should refuse to be herded into potentially unsafe schools.

This article was published in the daily newspaper, The Plymouth Herald, on 29th August 2023. The title above is my original, but the Editor decided that “Workplaces Lack Humanity Now” was more fitting. The article had originally focussed upon the case of Lucy Letby, the nurse convicted of multiple killings of new born babies. Ghastly as that is, the parallel issue has to be that senior managers at the hospital overrode the medical concerns and linked professional whistleblowing of consultants and others. In our privatised NHS the quality of service is secondary to budget lines and performance indicators. My unexpurgated draft is below:

There is general support for the doctors’ strikes, despite the immediate challenges they cause. Most of us recognise that the recent strike days haven’t caused the crisis across the health service. We also know that medical consultants do not go on strike without good reason, and that junior doctors average an 80-hour working week for around £14 per hour, after paying big money for their first 5-years of specialist education. 

Alongside privatisation of our public services, the ideological destruction of the Welfare State, we’ve suffered the rise of managerialism.

Unaccountable management based upon budgets not human need. The case of Lucy Letby exposes, amongst many horrors, the absolute power of higher Management. The unimaginable pain of the parents of the babies she killed or maimed is only amplified by the fact that some would have been saved had the whistleblowers been listened to.

Consultants with more than ten years of specialist education and medical training, each focussed upon birth and the new born, identified Letby as a cause for concern quite early on. By all accounts, they were shut up and shut down, under threat of not only disciplinary action as employees of the NHS but the humiliation of deregistration as doctors.

There is a rather nasty level of authoritarianism in our medical establishments, hospital staff stratified from low to high grade, each wielding power and authority against those of lower status. Consultants are party to this wretched system, one that prevents effective teamwork and any holistic approach to illness and recovery. 

Yet it was always considered that, if a consultant says something is so, it is taken seriously if not as gospel. The consultants who came together to put concerns about Letby in writing would understand both the seriousness of such an act and the power of their document.

Except, in this privatised and de-regulated National Health Service based solely upon budgetary controls, Medicine takes second or even third place. The patients are of even lower importance. Of primary concern has to be the public status of the establishment – the reputation of the hospital outweighs any and all other issues. 

There is a set of analytics to be used by Human Resources to monitor and assess the in-house effectiveness of the organisation’s Reputation Management. Highly paid managers, many higher paid than doctors tho’ so very less qualified, are employed only to ensure Agency Protection. 

The strata, the over-paid layer within The Management, has grown exponentially in recent years with the conjoint aims of minimising costs and maximising the positive corporate image to the outside world.

The high salary costs paid to ensure absolute allegiance of those Colonels and Majors dishing out the orders have been paid for by cutting staff at the other end – the providers, we who do that actual work. Their pay is mirrored by their level of unaccountable and unquestionable power within the system. This is corporate fascism, devoid of any democratic challenge.

And so the Consultants at the Countess of Chester Hospital were forced not only to shut up about their concerns for the safety of babies under their care but to apologise to a serial killer, in writing. All this is so far in the public domain, reported through nine months of court hearings. The Inquiry will undoubtedly uncover even more evidence.

This is no isolated case. Across all human services – Health, social welfare, child protection, public transport, schools and education establishments, local council services, Policing, Courts and legal advice, disabilities centres and recreational facilities – the reputation and protection of the service from challenge or law suit a greater motivator than the quality of the actual service they exist to provide.

Across private sector manufacturing and production businesses, employees are expected to cover-up mistakes, overlook product faults and at times falsify documents in order to keep the business running smoothly and the reputation intact. Just think of the diesel emissions scandals across the car industry as a case in point, or those sealing cracks in nuclear reactor pipes using superglue. If you don’t know, you can find out.

The only way we get to know is through whistleblowers, the most hated of all people by Capitalist entrepreneurs and business owners. These are people, probably overwhelmed by their own social conscience and moral compass, to speak-out despite the consequences. Most are the true working class martyrs of the current age, likely to experience the modern equivalent of burning at the stake or deportation on prison ships.

The legal protection of whistleblowers should be a fundamental element of democratic systems. Even where their accusations are found to be false, at least we can be reassured that checks and balances have taken place as a result of their allegations. What’s not to support?

The Capitalist system cannot manage whistleblowers. The dog-eat-dog competition inherent to the system ensures that all production and purveyance is subject to short-cuts, rough-cuts and petit-corruption. The survival of every business is dependent upon image over content, brand recognition more than quality control, propaganda over proper provision. 

What we can be sure of is that every hospital has this class of management, bullying and covering-up. We can also conclude that we don’t need them. Whilst the Consultants should never be allowed to be a law unto themselves, they should be entrusted to own their decisions subject to collective peer review.

And this is true for the entire working class. It is generally the case that those who actually produce the goods best know what it takes to ensure a positive and high quality outcome. If treated like idiots and paid like serfs we are likely to learn to not give a damn. But when recognised as having the skills of our trade, workers choose to excel, to go home feeling we’ve worked well and achieved high standards.

Britain’s current low-pay, long working hours, excessive charges culture requires the fat strata of uniformed and badged managers to keep us in our place. We should unite to expose them all as the charlatans they are and fight to see the back of the lot of them. Strikes are by far the most effective way of reclaiming workers’ power.

This article was published in the Plymouth Herald on Tuesday 15th August 2023, edited to omit reference to the era of Austerity and including a misprint that suggested 1 in 100 die of Covid, rather than the actual figure of 1 in 500.

Health & Safety has always been of central concern to trade unionists. Over generations we have organised and pressured employers and authorities to care for the wellbeing of everyone at work and in communities. We have been responsible for the development of hazard reduction in the workplace and fought for a work-life-balance – basic employment rights to sick pay, maternity and paternity pay, protection from oppressive behaviours and bullying. 

Before the first legislation placing responsibilities upon employers to ensure safety, accidents and perilous workplaces were common. The big fights led by trade unions to prove the risks from asbestos, coal dust, and infections such as Legionnaires Disease managed to bring down work-related deaths by 75% and days lost to work-related illness to around 25 million per year by 2012. 

Now, after a decade of deregulation, deletion of laws protecting workers rights, restrictions on legal challenges to employers, and the development of intense productivity-hikes, work-related illness has increased by a third, with 2 workplace deaths in every working week in the UK, largely in the construction, transport and manufacturing sectors.

In this Era of Austerity, the care of the worker and the responsibilities of the employer have been eroded.

Our new generation of young workers are being expected to put-up and shut-up – just do it, whatever the risk. And if you go off sick don’t expect to be paid, at least for the first three days and then only by the State, not the employer. 

Nowhere is this more pronounced and overt than in the current extreme prejudice meted out to those suffering infections. Flu? Take a Lemsip and come into work, who cares if you infect everyone around you – they’ll get through it.

COVID? If you don’t take a test you won’t be expected to stay off work. 

COVID is a livid case in point. With three new variants actively infecting our population and a current 25% increase in confirmed cases (underestimated because testing is not obligatory and the kits are no longer free), COVID is back.

In fact, it never went away. In the UK, 229,000 people have died from COVID so far, about one in very five-hundred who have suffered the infection. Some 2-million workers are experiencing long-COVID, the majority struggling to continue to work despite significant ill health. COVID attacks all the body’s organs, the most vulnerable organ sustaining lasting damage – limbs, heart, brain, liver. The dramatic rise in heart attacks in the under-35’s is due to COVID, that age-group unlikely to have received the vaccine.

Scientists are now monitoring another mutation, with a combination of mutations showing increased immune-evasion and producing more severe infections. This combination, referred to as “FLip,” is most prevalent in Spain and Brazil, with the former seeing a rapid spike in cases in recent weeks.

The official position is to “live with it”. Or die from it. The Pandemic is officially over.

Except it’s not. In recent weeks it has become clear that Britain, as well as the USA, Italy, Japan, Britain, Spain and other countries throughout the world are undergoing a significant new surge of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is taking place with virtually no public awareness, reporting in the corporate media or communication from government officials.

Waning immunity has been made worse by the  humid “mizzly” weather trapping infected aerosols and encouraging more into indoor spaces.

As schools reopen globally in the coming weeks after summer or winter break, hundreds of millions of children will be packed into overcrowded, poorly ventilated classrooms, deepening the current wave while society remains totally unprepared.

The best way to manage the spread of the virus is to have the vaccination, regularly and thoroughly wash hands and wear a mask. Whilst 80% of those eligible had the first vaccination, only 50% have had the third booster. There is no encouragement to do so. This Autumn there are further restrictions on who is eligible for the fourth, with no public challenge and indeed a rising tide of opposition to even the suggestion that COVID is a killer. 

And no-one is wearing a mask. Culturally, as if in response to a public campaign of denial, it has become almost alien to be seen wearing a mask in public or in the workplace. The mask, properly worn, is more a common courtesy to prevent others from receiving your infected aerosols that carry all sorts of viruses. 

It is little wonder that COVID is caught in hospitals given that staff no longer observe the pandemic rules, largely not even masked with the flimsy cheap face coverings.

How has this come about? Denial. Official denial. Political obfuscation of the facts and a cancel-culture perpetrated by those more interested in maintaining Big Business as usual than protecting the People.

In such a situation it is unlikely that anyone will adhere to a new period of Lockdown, the contrived opposition to the primacy of public health having been completely undermined by both government incompetence and survival-of-the-fittest ideology. And lies – a mantra routinely chanted by government ministers being that COVID caused current inflation. Nonsense, the drive to replenish and exceed lost profits driving inflation. 

At least we should welcome the new laboratory opened at the top-secret military germ-warfare establishment of Porton Down to investigate the new COVID strains as well as “DISEASE X” – the feared next pandemic caused by climate change heating the atmosphere into a petri-dish of new viruses. But will they make the preparations and speedy social response so absent from the COVID onset in 2019?

Trade unions are going to have to reassert our primary role as tribunes of the working class and fight, once more, for basic health & safety at work, starting with the requirement for strong protections against new COVID.

This article was published in the Plymouth Herald daily newspaper on the 8th August 2023, strangely cutting-out references to uranium tipped radioactive shells being used in Ukraine. My unexpurgated version is here below:

August 9th commemorates the dropping of an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, three days after a similar nuclear detonation destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. The Japanese Government had voted to surrender on 20th June that year, but the bombing continued. The United States and key Allies wanted to prove their dominant power to the entire world.

These two bombs have been responsible for around 350,000 premature deaths over the years since.

Contrary to urban mythology, most do not die instantly from a nuclear blast. True, maybe hundreds near to “ground-zero”, the epicentre of the explosion will be vaporised, many thousands will spend a few minutes simultaneously burning and asphyxiating in the heat blast as it pushes out, sucking-up oxygen, and many more will take hours or days to die in agony as the radioisotopes burn their bodies from within. 

Then, over years and many decades, the radioactive particles mutate living tissues, from foetus to adult, to invoke all manner of cell-malforming cancers, ensuring years of ill-health and shortened lives, genetic mutations passed-on from one generation to the next. Nuclear weapons are unlike all others.

The notion, popularised by the cinematic splendour of the new “Oppenheimer” film, that a nuclear blast is just a bigger bang is nonsense. The release of radioactive particles produces long-lasting toxic pollution to all life on earth. Eighty years-on from the splitting of the atom, human-made radioisotopes have infected all land, water and air, the current use of “depleted uranium” shells in Ukraine polluting the “breadbasket of Europe” with radioactive dust.  

We have adapted to live with, and die by, the sickness it has caused.

The idea that the use of nuclear weapons represents the entire wipeout of all humanity is not realistic. Nuclear war is the highest state of barbarism, creating a dystopian future for humanity. 

It is suggested that there has been no use of nuclear weapons since Nagasaki because of the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction, a term with the most suitable of acronyms. It is said that the use of one nuclear device would instantly trigger the launch of Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles carrying thousands of warheads ten-times the size of the “Little Boy” dropped upon Nagasaki. The need to “strike first” in order to survive requires such early warning and precision timing that launch has been largely handed-over to computers to fire the starting gun.

There are currently more than 12,000 nuclear warheads immediately ready for use by missiles, aircraft, ships and submarines. The figures once again obscure the reality. There are few scenarios in which most of them would be fired. War simulations and practice runs today focus upon limited nuclear exchanges, including use of so-called “low-yield” battlefield warheads (little-less than the size of the Nagasaki explosion).

The idea would be to quickly “take-out” the core military infrastructure of the enemy using a couple of 5-10km radius explosions. Strategists admit that it’s impossible to accurately model exactly what would happen. Could a nuclear State get away with “limited use” as did the USA in 1945? It’s on all their agendas.

The current construction of a new generation of “strategic nuclear weapons” designed for “first use”, at the cost of hundreds of billions of pounds of tax-payers money, is evidence that all sides are getting ready. 

The concern of unleashing Armageddon is no longer preventing nuclear war. 

Such nuclear escalation would probably see billions of human beings perish, but many billions more will continue into a toxic and debased future unworthy of humanity’s potential, let alone the natural environment. We must not allow it. 

Nuclear weapons are illegal under international law as weapons of mass destruction. Decades of anti-nuclear campaigning has further won the International Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, with more than 100 countries now signed-up. Anti-nuclear campaigners are neither deranged nor deluded – we can win a nuclear-free world, the opposition to nuclear weapons growing daily.

The problem remains, the nuclear-armed States won’t sign, and nor will the countries most enthusiastic about acquiring such power. The UK is spending at least £5,000,000,000 each year on new generation of “Trident” nuclear weapons systems, the total allocated £210,000,000,000 representing money diverted from our health and wellbeing, and the climate crisis.

The United States is now placing its nuclear weapons back on UK soil, ensuring we will be a first strike target for any enemy.

In 2023 this is no side issue. We need mass engagement, the active participation of millions of us through protest, petitioning and targeted voting, to force the politicians to dismantle the nuclear arsenals. In 2023 this is no longer a side issue. The imminent use of nuclear weapons has never been higher. The actions of anti-nuclear campaigners never more vital.

An edited version was printed in the Plymouth Herald on 2nd August 2023. My anger generally gets lost in print, so here’s the original:

Last week the Nat West Banking group announced a £3.6 billion profit for first six months of 2023. The other UK-based banks are now announcing similar amounts. 

There’s a context to be understood here. Most crucially, the throw-away reference to “billions” needs to be explained. For example, were you to choose to count to one million at one number each second, 1 elephant, 2 elephants, 3 elephants, etc, it would take you 11.5 days without stopping for meals, naps or pees. That’s how big one million is. More than half of us won’t earn one million pounds across our entire working life.

If you were to choose to count to one billion at the same rate it would take 32.7 years. One billion is one-thousand-millions.

One billion is not a few million. 

Business turnover is not the same as profit.

The profit is the surplus made above and beyond all the costs of the business – wages & pensions, buildings, transport, contractual obligations, advertising – the lot. There would usually be pre- and post-profit figures, except that the UK tax-payer still owns 40% of Nat West, so the company doesn’t pay tax. True, Nat West will pay £190million to the UK Government as a shareholder. That equates to around 5% of the profits, not the 18% corporation tax they should pay.

Taxes are very political. People on the far-Right expose the cost to the tax-payer of help to refugees or those on benefits (asylum-seekers don’t receive welfare benefits). People with more socialist views counter this by exposing the waste of billions of tax-payers pounds on subsidies to the fossil-fuel companies making record profits, and the greater need to increase cash for the NHS rather than nuclear weapons. 

Those who want a smaller State want lower taxes; those who want a welfare state want more say over how taxes are raised and spent. Under the current Government there is only one tax policy – use all the taxes to support and enhance the profits of private companies. Any tax cash that subsidises workers’ health and welfare is seen as a “burden”, whilst any tax deductions for owners of businesses or houses is seen as “legitimate”. 

The Universal Credit additions claimed by 5-million low-paid workers is seen as a benefit, even tho’ it actually subsidises business profits by keeping their workforce on minimum wages. The lower the cost of wages and pensions, the higher the profit rate for the boss and shareholders.

A socialist government would, obviously, use collective taxes from the common purse to alleviate poverty, ensure our health and education, affordable public transport, and address all threats to our wellbeing – prioritising the climate crisis. Today, with all these services cut-to-the-bone and worse it is clear whose side the government is on. 

Which brings us back to the banks. 

The controversy created by some politicians being denied bank accounts, or at least investigated about their affiliations and potential liabilities, has made headline news.

Chief Executives have been forced to resign and no less than the UK Prime Minister has admonished the sector. Not for the excess profits, but for the banks interference in the affairs of politicians.

It is as if politicians should be untouchable. 

The current “scandal” is a distraction that hides the real issues. The same politicians who wish to end the Human Rights Act have demanded that having a bank account is a “basic human right”! Really? What about the right to a roof over your head despite banks raising interest rates to a point where millions can no longer afford their mortgage repayments or rent?

What about the continued investment by UK-based banks in fossil-fuel extraction, Barclays being the largest financier for new oil and gas fields in the North Sea? The climate crisis is fuelled by banks and their political allies. As the world boils, where are the resignations of culpable bankers?

There should be no tears shed for the manipulative politicians or the profiteering bankers. We should remember that UK banks deliberately, systemically, missold over £40bn of Payment Protection Insurance, ripping money out of the hands of the public including many vulnerable people through a period in which no bank CEO resigned.

And Iceland’s Government was the only one, globally, to ensure any banker was jailed for the reckless and fraudulent derivatives scandal that broke the banks in 2008. The bank executives and shareholders were protected by governments, trillions of pounds of tax-payers money lost in propping them up, leading to severe cuts across all public services, forced-privatisation of health and social care, and this seemingly endless Age of Austerity. 

Most bankers continue to pocket billions in bonuses.

The working class, the majority of British tax-payers, those of us without Capital who, were we to become unemployed would have less than 6-months lee-way before long-term impoverishment. We are being shafted by both the bankers and the politicians. 

The record profits recently recorded by banks, fossil-fuel corporations and supermarkets are a direct result of political decisions to allow inflation to run riot. 

And this is not some rabid left-wing statement of bias or bile. Listen to the most recent statement from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the international authority with a history of forcing governments to privatise public services: “The rise in corporate profits account for almost half the rise in inflation in Europe over the past two years, with companies raising prices more than the soaring cost of imported energy. “

And all businesses have followed suit, deregulated and unaccountable as a result of  Government Free-Market policies. 

These charlatans continue to get away with it. The question is begged. What will it take to hold the corporate bosses and their political puppets to account?

My column this week in the Plymouth Herald (25.7.23), ahead of a local protest march by supporters of “Freedom” and “The Light” condemning Plymouth City Council for declaring a Climate Emergency, the protesters headlining that Climate Change is lie. 
Climate Denial has to be challenged forthrightly and publicly, even if at first it appears too idiotic to take seriously. As we move towards a General Election, action on Climate will be weaponised as a political tool to divide the working class, climate activists scapegoated and demonised alongside climate refugees.

Climate Emergency is in Front of Our Eyes

The Climate Emergency is very real. The past two weeks have seen the highest temperatures ever recorded, and the proportion of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) in the Earth’s atmosphere 30% higher than in the last million years. 
Interrogate the gases trapped in ice-sheets over millennia and it is undeniable that Earth’s temperatures correspond with the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. 
Excess CO2 emissions do warm our Planet, and we’ve been creating them since the invention of the coal-burning steam, later amplified by oil and gas emissions.
There is no conspiracy here. The crisis of our climate is not made-up. We can all see it for ourselves: the wild fires from Canada across to Siberia, Central Africa to Greece, The Amazon to Australia. 
The Glacial melt of the Himalayas, Andes and Antarctic, Greenland and New Zealand, are undeniable with the threat to water supplies witnessed by hundreds of millions.
This is not a natural cycle of Nature, nor is it the work of a destructive God. The speed of change over less than two-hundred years has no comparison in geological history – we can see that by digging-up rocks and analysing their contents. We can believe our own eyes.
The intensity of extreme weather is now experienced by billions of people everywhere. And let’s be clear, Weather is not the same as Climate. Whilst “weather” is the description of what is happening outside our doors right now, “climate” is the description we give to the local pattern of weather over at least a 30 year period. Whilst changes in the Weather are not proof of Climate Change, the changing patterns are.
Our children will see power outages and food shortages. Our grandchildren will see the desertification of the countries bordering the Mediterranean and the immersion of Florida, Bangladesh and England’s East Coast.
The only solution is to end all global heating gas emissions, and adapt our living conditions to best manage extreme weather. These are hard tasks to accomplish. Yet, twice in times of world war our entire economy and forces of production have been turned over to the Cause. We melted our iron railings and aluminium pots, accepted ration-cards for a completely changed diet, reduced our electricity use substantially, and shared transport to limit our movements. All this in the shared aspiration for survival and freedom from fascist totalitarianism.
Comparable levels of adaptation are required again, on a societal level and immediately unless we’re prepared to see economic collapse here, billions of people forced to migrate or die of famine, drought, pestilence and wars over access to the basic essentials of life. 
Working class people care about the climate because we care about our grandchildren. Indeed, it doesn’t take much intelligence to dismiss the irrational and metaphysical reactions of so-called “climate-deniers” proclaiming personal freedom over whole-population protection. 
We can see how the System we’ve been living-in has exploited all the natural resources of the Earth and its people. Whilst the vast majority of the world’s population struggle day-to-day for subsistence (including at least 2 million in the UK surviving on charitable Food banks), a tiny fraction of humanity hoards the wealth extracted from our labouring, living in a luxury they hope will keep them safe from the storms. 
This system has to be replaced lest we perish. The wealth of the billionaires has to be redistributed. The priorities for production have to be for the needs of the many in this unparalleled period of global crisis.
It’s not a conspiracy, it’s how the current system has always operated. The blame should be directed against Capitalism.

There is much talk this week of “Freedom”. It should be undeniable that each of us should have an inalienable right to think and believe anything they choose, free from persecution. The complication occurs whenever anybody acts upon those beliefs in a way that seeks to force them on others. One person’s freedom is the other’s persecution.

We live inside a tension between opposites. We may be prepared to die for the Cause of our beliefs, and that often happens because there are others willing to kill for theirs. 

Some beliefs are so anti-human as to drive a wish for the extermination of people who don’t believe in them. At the extreme end there are some who believe that “humanity is the problem that needs to be exterminated”. 

The survival of humanity depends upon limiting tolerance. Tolerance ends at the point of tolerating the intolerable. 

Free speech, as with all freedom, has limits. A community that allows the individual full freedom to torture, maim, rape and kill is not a society, it is anti-social. Indeed it is inhuman, because humans are gregarious, cooperative and inter-dependent for our very survival. 

Nuances abound. We should not be banned from upsetting people by our words. Opinions are almost infinite and therefore bound to clash. The limits to what can be said are surely somewhere around the point at which a set of ideas are taken-up by a large enough group of people to produce sufficient power to shut others down.

That’s why it is important to seek fact from fiction, evidence and validation, and the motive behind opinions. Our own mind is our personal sanctuary, and sacrosanct. But when we act on our beliefs we cannot help but have an impact on others. To speak out is to invite responses including opposition.

We have to own-up to our personal responsibilities towards other people. That is what restricts social behaviours – if everyone is free to do exactly what we want, no-one can be free because everyone will be negatively impacted by the care-less behaviours of others.

There are always social rules governing human societies, and always will be. Perhaps, in a classless society in which no-one has any more or any less agency than anyone else, individual power over others no longer exist and self-determination is valued to the utmost, rules would be at a minimum. Indeed, we would be born and raised not even thinking that we could impose ourselves on someone else.

But Capitalist society is very far from any Utopia, the social class tensions produced by the competitive quest for wealth and power-over-others at a premium. 

We live in contest. Every penny paid to a worker is a penny less in profit for the business owner. That’s simple enough. Every idea that benefits the collective rights of the worker is an idea that impacts upon the right of the business owner to exploit us. Ideas matter in the real world. The current so-called “Culture-Wars” is evidence enough – opinions have an impact. 

The Culture War is going to dominate the fast-approaching General Election. The right-wing of the far-Right Tory Party are preparing to mount an ideological assault on our society, promoting nationalist racism, anti-woke anti-Trans white-male supremacy, and the “Good Old Victorian Values” of “know Thy Place”, Respect the Rich Protestant Capitalism.

The immediate example is be Climate Change, general denial now raising its head again after the calming-down of Greta Thunberg’s great school strikes. Following last week’s three by-elections, the London ULEZ low emissions zone brought to the fore as an anti-working class, anti-business agenda, the Opposition Labour Party has matched the Tory pull-back on climate action, and will go further. 

It doesn’t much matter that there is sufficient evidence of climate crisis from the hundreds of thousands of peer-reviewed scientific studies identifying the fastest changes to climate ever recorded, linking this unnatural phenomenon to the emissions of global heating gases from burning of fossil fuels since the start of the Industrial Revolution. From international scientific analysis and personal observation you’d think it undeniable.

Politicians are encouraging those people who think the environmental studies are lies and part of a global conspiracy seeking to limit our freedoms. Some deny Climate Change outright whilst others choose to believe it’s nothing to do with the recent activities of humanity but instead is natural or god given – either way, we shouldn’t be doing anything about it. There are even people who think climate collapse will make humanity extinct which they consider would be a benefit to the environment and Ecology they say they love. 

There are also people with power and privilege who, as ever, want to use the crisis to make money, exploit our concerns and force the working class to pay through poorer living conditions and restrictions on movement. 

There are groups who want to impose solutions, and opposing groups – like the one I belong to – who want to organise cooperatively to find solutions and adapt to survive as a caring and inclusive society seeking a new equilibrium with Nature.

This Summer’s record-breaking heatwaves, fires, floods and famines certainly require action if we are to protect each other. We will each do according to our beliefs. But denial of the facts will impose a heavy price on the lives of others, and those pronouncing the climate crisis as a conspiracy to be ignored should expect to be challenged by those of us demanding the freedom to live.

An edited version was printed in the Plymouth Herald on 18.7.23. The unexpurgated version is below:

It is a sad fact that neither the British Medical Association (BMA) nor the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) are affiliated to our Trades Union Congress (TUC), the coalition of most trades unions in Britain. They always chose not to join, stating they were professional organisations and did not do things such as protest or strike.

How times have changed. Nurses and doctors out on loud and lively picket lines, complaining they cannot live on the salaries eroded over decades, nor survive in the under-staffed and micro-managed chaos of the National Health Service. For all the fancy computer hardware analysing our heart-rates and brain connections, it’s the workers who love us and save us.

But “care” is increasingly being prohibited by systems dominated by the need for measurable outcomes, performance management and uniformity. 

The political term for this is “proletarianisation”, the tendency, as machines are employed to digitise and routinise the workplace, for work to become ever-more repetitive and monotonous. The “speed-of-the-line”, whatever the job, is speeded-up by middle managers employed solely on constant growth in productivity – increasing the rate of exploitation for the same, or less, cost to the business, whatever it may be. We must forever do more for less.

Work that is focussed upon the health and wellbeing of living human beings has become digitised, automated and rationed. Take, for example, the home care workers, unpaid when traveling between “customers” and required by computer-algorithms to get an elderly infirm person, often isolated and prone to confusion, bed-bathed, up, dressed and breakfasted in a 15 minute slot timed to the second by the “spy-in-the-cab” hand-held computer, pre-programmed to deny any variations from the defined norm of the average person’s needs. 

It is dehumanising for both the stressed carer and the uncared-for being processed like a doll on a conveyor belt. It is also not the fault or device of machines. It’s all designed by humans, and always will be. The digital world of “computer says” has definite administrative benefits, no arguments there. But computer programs can’t care and never will. The most immediate impact of Artificial Intelligence, generally wildly over-exaggerated as a replacement human beings, is not in machines doing of the horrible menial tasks for us but in the taking-over of the supervisory role in the workplace. 

Supervisory grades were once held in such low-esteem on the “shop-floor” as to produce the adult nursery rhyme, “the working class can kiss my a**e, I’ve got the foreman’s job at last”. A song now long-forgotten in an age of “behaviour management”, it remains very lived as a tension in the workplace. 

The growth in “middle” or supervisory management with the focus upon time-and-motion, dress-codes and pre-rehearsed scripts is only begrudgingly accepted by a new generation of workers, sold the pup that if they comply and work hard then maybe, one day, they’ll get to boss others around.

Being told what to do  just goes with the job. We all now expect to be efficient and incorporated into ever rising standards, even tho’ we see all around us, gross inefficiencies and new systems being introduced every six-months on the whim of the latest high-flying boss, at high-cost but without benefit. And as customers of these services, whether in the cafe or on the phone, we may be speaking with a human but they sound like a robot. 

The standardised, digitised behaviours required of the workforce are written firstly by executives, rubber-stamped by shareholders, interpreted by managers with degrees in management but who have never done “the job”, and then translated into orders by people qualified in computer programming, not human well-being.

Indeed all services are being dehumanised, the farewell “have a nice day” being a required patter, not meant to be meant.

Most of us have experienced a point in time in the workplace where we’ve said, with unassuming self-assurance, that we could do the work much better if left alone and not micro-managed. Instructions passed-down tend not to make sense or even work properly in practice. When can it ever be correct to have to ask and have it authorised before going to the loo? These systems can only be ultimately understood in terms of budget-lines and profit-margins. It no longer matters if the service is poor and starved of resources so long as the accountants are happy.

This is certainly the case in the NHS, swathes of qualified staff resigning out of fatigue and frustration, micro-managed close to death. It appears to be also true in education where the national curriculum syllabus is timed to the moment without any recognition that children learn at different rates. The purpose, surely, is for our children are socialised into acquiescence within “The System”.

It’s everywhere. Even inside the trade unions – undoubtedly the most collective and democratic of all businesses – the decently paid employees, our own “organisers” or “officer class” are required to tow the Party line, to convey corporate logo and loyalty, and keep the membership manageable. Heaven forfend should the union members actually take-over and enact the policy and procedures and organise together, independent of the bureaucracy.   

Trade union appointed bureaucrats are distant, separated, politically constrained and the official supervisors of members thoughts and actions. There are classes even inside the working class. Layers of groups with differing levels of power and status, ultimately working against their common interests.

The common interest should be for us all to have a voice and say in our employment and the work we do. The petit-rules fine-printed to prevent any possible challenge to “the Programme” are at an all time high. We’re being conned into thinking “the machines are taking-over” – it’s actually just the latest manifestation of Capitalist exploitation, same as it ever was.

The irony is that, as the machines develop artificial intelligence, so it is the middle managers who are being sacked as an entire class, replaced by buzzing timers on workers’ smart phones. The system is working against its most loyal servants. 

It could be hoped that fewer supervisors will allow more funding of more practitioners, those who actually produce. That’s not The Plan. As we head into deeper recession and indeed, stagflation, unemployment will rise again. There is no celebration in the loss of even one job at whatever level in such circumstances. 

But it would be sensible for the “foremen” of all industries to recognise that they’re currently being used as the gravediggers of their own futures. The NHS strikes, school strikes, rail strikes are not simply about pay – the workers are calling for the re-humanisation of the services and the workload. And the management would be wise to support them.

Postscript:

As an aside, yet even more important to consider, the global shift to electronics is wholly unsustainable, unaffordable and time-limited. The deepening climate crisis requires, as a priority amongst many requirements, the lowering of energy use. All the precious metals in the world cannot resource the amount of super-conductors, microchips and circuitry required for a digitised economy. The energy required for aircraft hanger-sized processing hubs cannot be maintained in the immediate period, let alone an infrastructure where we can immediately cut global warming emissions to zero to prevent societal collapse in time. The digital economy will have to be rethought if we are to halve our energy use. 

We will soon need to return to reliance upon human activities and prioritise production for human need. That could offer us the opportunity to restructure employment and to re-establish workers rights and workplace democracy. All efforts directed towards survival not spreadsheets, cooperative planning not corporate management.

An edited version was printed in the Plymouth Herald on 11.7.23. The unexpurgated version is below:

Just Stop Oil stopped tennis match by scattering golden confetti on court during a break in play. The incident lasted less than 5 minutes. A runner dropping orange dust was carried-off a cricket pitch by a sportsman, the cricketer applauded to the rafters from a crowd seeming to bay for blood. 

The climate-denying ex-Chancellor George Osborne had two handfuls of orange confetti pawed towards his head after his wedding, although not a JSO action. The idea is taking hold. No-one was harmed, the spaces were not harmed, the protesters expressed no anger, intimidation or destruction. Indeed, only by disruption do the issues receive any airtime.

It’s bonkers that fans were encouraged to be upset by 4 minutes of disturbance in a game of tennis when the world is rapidly descending into catastrophe. By comparison, Wimbledon lost a quarter of a weeks’ playtime from rain. We have to gather some perspective here. Individual protesters are available to be attacked, whereas the real culprits, politicians and oil executives remain untouchable. 

Workers queue for hours in traffic jams on their way to-and-from work every day. In most regions, scheduled commuter buses don’t turn-up, trains are cancelled minutes before they’re due, roadworks snarl-up highways for weeks. But get stopped for a few minutes by a peaceful protester calling for government action to protect our children’s future, and suddenly its OK to kick, punch and drag the unresisting body away from a slow-walk protest, screened on prime-time news by sneering media and watched by laughing policemen. 

The government’s recent response to extreme weather conditions is to cancel their climate emergency plans, underwrite new high-emissions projects and enact draconian laws to incarcerate the compassionate climate activists for jail periods longer than those for manslaughter. 

Prime Minister Sunak spends over half-a-million pounds of tax-payers money by travelling on private jets in a period of a fortnight, leading Britain into the record books as having more private jet take-offs than any other country across Europe. Indeed, all the actions of his Government suggest a policy of climate-change-denial fuelling the far-right conspiracy theorists who say it’s all a Big Lie.

Only last week, the United Nations General Secretary declared “climate change is out of control”. The UK government’s own Climate Change Committee has condemned the Conservative Cabinet decision to authorise over 100 oil and gas licences, the government having already given permission for a new coal mine. These decisions will produce millions of tonnes of global heating emissions. Opposition leader Starmer has promised they will not be rescinded under a Labour Government, and expressed his personal hatred of “tree-huggers”. The Climate Change Committee Chairperson, Lord Debeen, a Tory and previous environment minister, has resigned in disgust at Sunak’s policy-turn but has received no support from anyone in the Establishment.

Government policy encourages denial of basic and obvious facts, and indeed is encouraging anger against anyone who speaks-up or acts-out. The climate emergency is real. It’s not that the Government is saying the emergency is a hoax, just that they don’t really care. But that affords chancers and hoaxers the opportunity to swamp social media with elaborate arguments to say the world is as it ever was. 

Tell that to the sweltering ex-pat British residents in Tarragonna, Spain, swept away in their cars in flash floods; citizens of the southern states of the USA dying inside the continuing “heat dome”; the wildlife of the Antarctic experiencing the temperatures of an average day in England’s Spring; or the Canadians losing their homes to the seemingly endless forest fires. 

They’re all unprecedented, way outside anything recorded or even predicted to happen at this stage in the crisis.

June 2023 was the hottest month ever recorded, globally and locally. Last week’s July temperatures exceeded that, with projections that this month will reach the hottest global temperatures in some 120,000 years. Even those idiots (I use the term according to its original definition of “politically ignorant”) – those who care not a jot for the peoples of North Africa or India or Bangladesh or China suffering extremes of heat and drought  – may wish to consider the impact of the temperature changes here killing their own aging relatives and asthmatic children, with worse to come. 

This summer’s anomalies suggest widespread crop failures and the development of a global food crisis in the immediate future, possibly by the end of this year. Sensible people will thank their heavens should this not happen, whilst the ignorant will condemn the science as false. 

This catastrophe is coming our way, within years, exacerbated by the sixth great extinction of life on earth, a wholesale destruction of the Ecology. More than 70% of our insect population has gone extinct since 1970, risking lack of pollination and thereby destroying the potential of harvests even where crops can be protected from drought.

Most working class people – the silent majority – express concern about climate change whilst at the same time getting on with life, as the issue appears wholly outside our control. The climate challenge can only be managed on a societal level. It will require a transformation of social production and infrastructure. We know that real freedom requires mutual support and social organisation to ensure we are all cared for. 

We’re not about to be taken-in by claims of climate conspiracy – the science is real and born-out by real events from glacier melts to off-the-scale hurricanes. The climate deniers are either paid by the fossil fuel corporations to create doubt, or individual chancers deeply alienated from human society. We mustn’t be conned.

85% of the UK adult population queued up for vaccination during the COVID pandemic despite claims by “anti-Vaxers” of a worldwide conspiracy. Their current claims of climate conspiracy is no less absurd than their claims that the Earth is flat! The comparison is useful in helping to recognise what’s really going on. Through the Pandemic, billions of pounds was made in profit by pharmaceutical agencies, not through any conspiracy but because that’s how the system of capitalism works – someone always  looks to make a fortune out of a crisis. And that’s how the rich view climate change – not caring about the real threat to life and livelihood of billions of people, but as a chance to rake-in billions of dollars in private profit. 

So, rather than admit we have to end the extraction of fossil fuels without delay, the Capitalist class protects those profits whilst pretending that yet-to-be-proven technologies will solve the problem. Pie-in-the-sky techno-fixes and superficial tokenism is sucking-up billions of tax-payers money in hopeless greenwash projects such as carbon-capture-and-storage and biofuels. 

When they say they want growth, they mean continuous growth in their profit margins and private wealth, not growth in our standards of living or wellbeing.

We want growth, but in green jobs. The jobs to insulate 11 million homes to protect from the damp in winter and the heat in summer. The engineering jobs adapting our infrastructure to ensure transfer away from the 25 million gas boilers delivering our central heating. The jobs producing the low-emissions energy generation and the new transmission grids needed to supply us. And the jobs in health and welfare – services that will grow in demand as the climate makes us ever-more sick. 

The only problem is that all these jobs, all the essential industries required to adapt to climate change in time, all the.zero-emissions systems already fully tested and available, make only a fraction of the profits of petrol, diesel, oil and gas. So the big fossil corporations won’t allow the changes needed within the time we have left.

The net-Zero plan is too little too late to avoid global catastrophe, but is daily fought against by the right-wing dailies like the Mail and the Sun. Workers are being hoodwinked and brainwashed by a denial that is far more palatable than the facts. Let’s pretend everything’s fine. Just keep calm and carry on.

The actions of JSO offer a voice in an unhearing world. We need to transition away from fossil fuels. Stop all oil and gas exploration and exploitation. This is a climate crisis, with many parts of the world already experiencing catastrophe. Just Stop Oil is drawing attention to the most critical issue that humans have ever faced.

But they’re too few in number and suffering a heavy price for their sacrifices. They are likely to be remembered decades from now very favourably compared with the insults, assaults and incarceration they suffer now, just as with the women’s suffrage movement, the anti-fascists, the anti-slavery abolitionists of the past. 

But their small actions won’t be enough to successfully shackle the big corporations. There will be many more protests from here-on in. We need mass public action, focussed upon the politicians and the wealthy and powerful Executives, stopping all business-as-usual in order to create the adaptation required. That will require workers to challenge their bosses, in every industry, to Just Stop Oil.

An edited version was printed in the Plymouth Herald on 6.7.23. The unexpurgated version is below:

There is nothing namby-pamby about the quest for Peace.

Saturday 8th July is yet another day of events across the country and wider Europe, anti-war activists campaigning for a ceasefire in the war in Ukraine. 

Responses will be divided between those who believe outright victory is essential, and those of us who want de-escalation and an immediate ceasefire. 

We will all be united in distress for the terrible suffering of all civilians caught-up in the horror. Ukraine itself is now the landscape for the most bloody of industrialised wars – towns and villages utterly destroyed, large areas of fertile land polluted and front-lines peppered with land mines and unexploded munitions. 

Hundreds of thousands have died, on both sides.

It is not disrespectful to call for a ceasefire and negotiations now. Lives matter. This is no apology for Putin’s invasion. But the situation has developed into a battle-ground between the Russian State and the  Western NATO alliance. Indeed such a dynamic has been developing for well over a decade. 

Putin is an oligarch presiding over a powerful nuclear-armed nation. NATO has nuclear weapons close to and aimed at Russia. This represents imperialist rivalry, not a war of totalitarian communism versus free-market capitalism, but the latest Proxy-war between market rivals.  

Putin is outspoken against the Russian Revolution of 1917, has nothing to do with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics other than a nod to the totalitarianism of Joseph Stalin, and praises the previous absolutist monarchy of Tzar Nicholas II. Putin’s billionaire friends envision Russia as a major imperialist Capitalist power in the world.

And Putin has support from many countries outside the European Union and USA. The vast country, almost a continent that he presides over has an abundance of fossil fuel, agricultural and mineral wealth, much sought after. Russia is no push-over.

At the same time, Russia’s economy is a small percentage of the West’s, and Russia’s annual military spending one-tenth of that of the USA. Put together, suggestions that Putin is finished or that Russia can be defeated are extreme exaggerations. But he is under pressure to make military gains despite the assumed mutiny of the deadly Wagner Group.

The country’s dependence upon well-trained paid mercenaries is not unique, the level of private military and “security” forces in the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, for example, representing more than half the western military deployment. Private armies are also hired by corporations across the world, notably the oil and gas companies, collaborating with national governments to pursue their interests in land-grabs and exports of precious commodities. Wars always have an economic dimension as well as the issues of freedom and justice.

Wars are also enormously destructive of the environment, with pollution from radioactive depleted uranium shells through to the smoke from fossil fuelled armies and the explosions themselves. As we learnt from Agent Orange in Vietnam, so many wars before have dispersed toxic chemicals so widely that entire populations suffer ghastly health impacts for generations afterwards.

The military-industrial complex of arms manufacturing through to armed forces worldwide is the single largest emitter of the global warming gases that are driving climate catastrophe – environmental activists should, to a person, be against war.

Britain has now given over ten-thousand-millions of pounds in military support to Ukraine; the USA, ten times that amount. Welfare aid to the people of Ukraine has been a tiny fraction by comparison. There’s seemingly unlimited tax-payers cash for more arms-spending whilst funding for health, welfare, climate transition or simple wage rises in this cost-of-living crisis are disallowed. 

Next week’s NATO Summit in Vilnius, Lithuania will provide the West with another opportunity to ramp up the war in Ukraine. The conference will likely see calls for further pledges of billions of pounds worth of arms for Ukraine despite the increasingly bloody stalemate on the battlefield.

The costs of war are just too high on all fronts. Destruction of Russia as a State will result in the same break-up into volatile, regional militarised War-Lords as has been the outcome of the western invasions of Iraq and Libya. And, should Putin really be cornered, the chance of use of nuclear weapons has never been higher. His administration is not one to submit.

A ceasefire with negotiations may mean a tense stand-off for years to come, but that’s infinitely preferable to years of war that could easily spread towards global nuclear conflagration. 

Peace is preferable. Please support the call.

This is the full-length version of my weekly column in the Plymouth Herald, published on Tuesday 27th June 2023 as less than the 600 words allowed, the editor taking-out my mention of teachers routinely supporting families with food and money. Such is the state of Britain today.

The annual “Broken Plate” survey published this week details that British children at 5 years old are shorter than their peers in other developed nations. Children’s height is widely used as a measure of their nutritional status. 

Differences in height are also recognisable in the classroom, those living in the most deprived areas shorter than those in high-income areas. Clearly our society’s health is determined by the social class into which we are born, between which there has been no discernible mobility over the past thirty years. The social class into which we are born is the key determinant of our future health and prosperity.

Poor diet is by-far the biggest cause of ill-health in this country, with predictions that treatment of type-2 diabetes will soon cost the NHS as much as is spent on treating all cancers, collapsing budgets and threatening a sick and impoverished population.

Childhood obesity varies considerably between the poorest and the wealthiest families, with a growing prevalence of obesity in teenagers from low-income households. These inequalities affect health and development and future outcomes.

It is possible to be both obese and undernourished – known as the “invisible hunger”. Conversely it is possible to be of average weight and unhealthy. Poor nutrition creates poor health, with ultra-processed foods filling us up on saturated fats, salt and sugar. Huge numbers are facing diabetes, early heart failure and strokes from relying upon processed foods – ready meals, crisps and carbonated sugar-water drinks –  even if limiting their intake.  

The government has gone backwards on banning advertising and buy-one-get-one-free deals for industrially produced concoctions of chemicals and animal waste devoid of nutritional value, whist placing limits on school-meals expenditure that almost defies the best of chefs from offering real food. 

In this class-riven society, those with assured income tend to blame the parents for their poverty. They deny the reality of a country where less than 7% of families can afford private education. Apart from the privileged few we all rely on the collective State provision of education as well as health and social welfare. 

The individualisation of parents as being the problem represents a false belief system that “there is no such thing as society”. We are to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and blamed if we don’t. It ends with a “survival of the fittest” approach to life; the fascist eugenics movement of selective breeding, letting the poorest perish.   

But over 3-million of our children do not have access to the levels of nutrition they need. Indeed, one-in-three live in poverty, denied provision of at least one of the essentials of life – safe housing, nutrition, accessible education, health care (including dentistry) or secure nurturement. This scale of deprivation cannot be blamed on individual haplessness – it is created by government policy.

It is set to get even worse. Prices are continuing to rise due to food shortages caused by climate change. The United Kingdom is reliant of food imports now impacted by unexpectedly poor yields due to extreme weather events – cold winter, heatwaves and floods. There is an under-considered long-term food security challenge.

Internationally there’s an even graver crisis. Last year 12 million children were displaced by climate change. It is estimated that a total of 43.3 million children will be in a condition of forced displacement this year. For most of them, this will be their experience throughout their childhood, and the numbers will increase significant;y in the coming years.

The international crisis is already affecting families here. Food inflation disproportionally affects the poorest fifth of British households, especially those from minority ethnic groups and people living with disabilities. Over 70% percent of the poorest one-fifth of households are reporting cutting back on food and other essential, and prices are not likely to reduce at all whilst wages and benefits are being held stagnant.

Altogether this raises the crucial questions of how we care, and how much we care, for children. We are not yet at the point of  guarded conditional love for our own children whilst disliking everyone else’s, but it is the direction of travel. If that is arguable, then just begin with thinking about how much we, individually and as a society, care for children (yes, up to 18 years of age) who are refugees of climate catastrophe or war for dwindling resources. 

Social deprivation on such a scale is the core challenge in our schools. So schools are routinely propping-up the diets of a third (or more) of their pupils, teachers often digging into their own pockets to help families. A child cannot digest information and knowledge if they’re hungry, let alone concentrate for more than a few minutes with the highs-and lows of sugar-intake playing havoc with their metabolism and behaviours.

The working class must act collectively in the best interests of our children. Teachers are going on strike for two days next week. They are torn between their genuine care for the children and the deep-felt horror at the poor state of educational funding, the welfare of their pupils as well as their own declining incomes. They are fighting for all our tomorrows, and this fight must be widened and generalised. Right now, the teaching unions need and deserve the support of every parent and child.

Tony Staunton

President, Plymouth Trades Union Council

Published in Plymouth Herald: Forced into Debt – 22.6.23

The Bank of England raised UK interest rates to 5% today, after inflation figures stuck at 8.7%CPI in May, the real rate measured by RPI far higher, and food price inflation up to 3 times that rate.

Another rise in interest rates will be welcomed by some. Those with money in the bank might see a slight increase in the interest paid on their savings, especially if their hoard is substantial. But for the rest of us, it’s just more of the cost-of-living crisis hitting the majority. Ours is a very divided society.

According to government figures, some 25% of us have no savings, and another 25% have less than £2,000 stored for a rainy day. In any case, inflation is eating away the actual value of whatever wealth we may have. Inflation raises costs, most of which never come down again.

In past times, we’ve coped with a cycle of boom and slump expecting things will get better again. These are not normal times. There have been years of pandemic amplified by a deepening war in Europe, together impacting on production and supply lines increasingly disrupted by extreme weather events.

Companies are now trying to recoup any past losses and bulwarking their future by raising their profit margins and hoarding their reserves. The UK economy is particularly reliant upon the housing market and the aspiration of home ownership as a tie-in to Capitalist economics and ideology. 

There is a crisis developing. We can all see the records of the oil and gas companies, and the fact they get away with such exploitation is unconscionable. Now, most businesses are copying their behaviours, with food inflation at over 20% hitting the poorest hardest.

Profits for FTSE350 firms have shot up by 73% since 2019. One of the main factors driving inflation right now is called “price gauging” – big corporations hiking prices of goods far higher than necessary to anticipate further price rises, resulting in a spiral of speculative hikes.

Headlines from the Bank of England through to mainstream media insists inflation is caused by wage increases – in other words, “blame the unions”. Yet most wage rises have happened in the private sector and are below the rate of inflation. Those strikes by workers providing public services such as health, education and public transport have seen below inflation wage increases or none over the past ten years.

There is a very questionable notion amongst some economists (economics is an art not a science, and subject to a wide spectrum of philosophical commitments) that stopping people spending reduces the demand for goods and therefore slows prices. There is little historical evidence for this. Higher interest rates makes money more expensive, making higher profits for banks.

The profits of the UK banks are jumping sky high. Bank profits – paid out to executives and shareholders – have increased sharply to over £31billion in 2022, in part because financial institutions have increased interest rates on our debts. More than 90 per cent of household debt in the UK is mortgage debt, now accounting for a far bigger proportion of household expenditure than 30 years ago.

Whilst the majority of the population are now “home-owners”, thirteen million households are the subject of a mortgage, a proportion of which are paid by buy-to-let landlords now feeling the pinch and raising charges. Around 5 million of us are renters in this private sector with rents also the subject of price gauging.

With mortgage rates now at over 6%, workers are facing crisis. The average standard mortgage is to go up by a staggering £290 a month. More than 400,000 people will see their existing fixed deals end between July and September. Figures from the Resolution Foundation show the impact of the hikes – already taking a record toll on homes – still has further to run through next year and up to 2026. The inevitable result is repossessions, evictions, homelessness, and longer queues at food banks.

The working class are experiencing a serious cash crisis, best exemplified by the supermarket security tags on butter and baby foods, the mother forced into shop-lifting jailed whilst the profiteers and their political cheerleaders lorded and applauded. The cost of the average weekly shop has increased by over £1,000 a year, whilst Sainsbury’s announced an unexpected £690m in profits, and Tesco, £753m. 

There is a very real and current economic crisis that has shone a spotlight on all the economic injustices we have endured over the past few decade, with an ever-smaller elite forcing huge costs onto the majority and the collapsing environment – it’s unsustainable.

There is a tension that belies the facts. The focus upon the very real climate catastrophe and need to Just Stop Oil appears to be placing an impossible demand upon working people. Stop car use, insulate your home, change you diet to sustainable “non-industrialised” foods, use less water, end reliance on fossil fuels… These are either additional and extraneous demands when faced with unpayable bills in the here-and-now, or represent the demands to “tighten our belts” routinely made by politicians and their corporate masters, the focus of dismissal by many.

The future will not be built through individual acts of austerity but mass collective action of a force that can actually challenge those in power.

The question is, why do not more people want to place the blame and responsibility where it truly lies? Are we not allowed to challenge the banks and corporations? Shouldn’t we be crying out: “Tax the Rich!” and “Cap the Profits!”? We have been forced into debt, itself a form of social control. But as more pain is inflicted the greater is the need for protest, strikes and a real fightback.

Tony Staunton

President, Plymouth Trades Union Council

This article was written and sent into the Plymouth herald one day before the ghastly sinking of a refugee boat off the coast of Greece, drowning hundreds of children, women and men. The outrage and coverage was extremely short-lived, unlike the top-of-the-page coverage of the 5 billionaires stranded on a submersible a week later. Had I waited, I would have asked how billionaires can be worth more than asylum seekers. the question hangs in the air.

Plymouth herald 12.6.23

“The statement in national media was quickly refuted by the Plymouth Herald (9.6.2023): “There are no current plans for a converted barge housing refugees to be docked in Plymouth.”

This potential, however, released a flood of statements and letters of every hue. Our MPs were quick to say Plymouth is an unsuitable place for the barge, rather than barges are unsuitable places for refugees, only Luke Pollard adding that Plymouth welcomes refugees.

Sunak and Braverman want to “stop the boats” by making life as hard as possible for anyone whose life has been so impossibly hard that they have wandered thousands of miles in the hope of sanctuary. They propose that harsh treatment of refugees will make it less likely they will want to come here.

Britain, we are told, has a proud history of human rights and welcoming those seeking asylum from war, famine and persecution, but with the caveat that they should be of good character, whatever that means. Actually the UK has taken a smaller numbers of asylum seekers, either from Ukraine or other wars in Syria, Sudan, Iraq, Kurdistan and Afghanistan compared with, say, Germany, France, Spain or Austria. Germany took two-and-a-half-times as many in 2022.

The honest reality is that we can afford and indeed could value another million people in a country of 65million.

The arguments against no more asylum seekers includes “we’re full already”. Untrue. Less than 10% of all land has housing on it. The truth of our deep housing crisis is the result of wholesale privatisation of affordable council housing leading to profiteering by private landlords and over-pricing of housing, now exacerbated by bank interest rate hikes making mortgages unaffordable. 

It is true that working class citizens here are suffering low wages, high prices, long working hours and record lows in welfare benefits and pensions. Trade unions are taking action to challenge our deteriorating conditions. But refugees can’t possibly be blamed for any of this. There is evidence of profiteering in the price rises of electricity and gas, food and rents, the private businesses seeing others raise their prices and so doing the same, making for record profits. 

At the same time, the questionable headline of £6billion broadcast in UK asylum costs are never placed in context. It’s a tiny amount of the world’s seventh largest economy.  

The UK spends £231bn in 2022\3 on benefits, £112bn on state pensions, 277bn on health, £27bn on adult social care and £15bn on housing benefits, making refugees account for less than 0.5% of all state provision and less than 0.000004% of our annual Gross Domestic Product of £2.2trillion.

It is also true that the UK economy is in trouble, caused by deregulation of rules for businesses alongside global turbulence caused by the war in Ukraine and extreme weather events.

The question of what to do with refugees will never go away. Climate Change is seeing the displacement of hundreds of millions of people. Huge areas of Central America, Africa, the Far East and China are experiencing large areas no longer able to sustain life, those born there forced by fire, famine or flood to migrate without help or planning. Most of us, if facing the same circumstances, would seek to find shelter in lands less affected. Canada’s fires and the USA’s midwestern drought are affecting millions more. And the UK is currently one of the least affected, whilst countries surrounding the Mediterranean, including France, are experiencing water shortages and crop-destroying heatwave upon heatwave.  

There will be, according to the United Nations, one billion refugees seeking sanctuary before 2040. There are solutions. For example, if we welcomed asylum seekers and allowed them to work – currently they cannot – we could begin to resolve the staff shortages in key sectors, begin a house-building renaissance, and reduce the NHS vacancies currently standing at over 120,000. Already, the refugees offered “leave to stay” are contributing more into our economy through work and taxation than they cost to process. Welcoming refugees would boost our economy. But none of that is on the agenda.

The point is, we need to the UK’s asylum system more compassionate, not even worse. But scapegoating has a job to do for the government, and blaming the outsider, the “other” has been a tool of those in power for centuries past. The use of crowded barges is unlikely to deter the already traumatised, homeless and displaced, but they have a symbolic job to divert attention from state incompetence by using racism to divide and rule.

The barges are effectively floating prisons to cage refugees. Just look at the Bibby Stockholm barge being militarised in Falmouth before being placed off Portland, Dorset. The barge was previously described as an “oppressive environment” by the Dutch government, which had been housing asylum seekers on the boat with reports of at least one death on board while the Dutch state used it.

Security will be positioned on board, not so much to keep the refugees safe but to minimise disruption to local communities, according to the Home Office, which has bought two further vessels to accommodate migrants.

Shamefully, alongside the barges the Tories hope to keep refugees in disused army bases and deport thousands at a cost likely to increase rather than decrease government spending. 

We must oppose the barges while declaring “Refugees are Welcome Here”, open the borders and challenge government policies that absurdly declare  some human beings to be “illegal”. Stand Up To Racism!”

24.5.23

Wednesday 24th May is the International Women’s Day for Peace and Disarmament. Across the continents we celebrate the historic and current efforts of women for peacebuilding and disarmament. The campaign is for a just and peaceful world, one that meets human needs, not military ones!

In 2023 the demand is pressing. War in Europe, tensions rising between India and Pakistan, and new nuclear weaponry in the South China Sea are just three of the major potential flashpoints.

This year in Plymouth we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the day more than 400 women spanned the Tamar Bridge, linking arms in a symbolic joining of our City and Cornwall in a united demand for the dismantling of nuclear arsenals, home and abroad. This week there are repeated presentations of “In Other Words”, the powerful theatrical docudrama exploring the issues surrounding that Plymouth protest. 

The focus of those Peace protests was the placement of nuclear weapons and their associated infrastructure by the United States military at bases across Britain. The most famous of those campaigns was the Women’s Camp at RAF Greenham Common.

Begun in 1981, 36 women marched from Wales to Berkshire and chained themselves to the gates of the Base. Their ensuing encampment became an international focus for the end of nuclear weapons, hundreds of thousands joining their days of action, including trade union delegations offering the women resources and solidarity in the face of harsh prison sentences despite their commitment to non-violent direct action.

This was the time of such nuclear tensions that the government posted a 10 page pamphlet entitled “Protect & Survive” absurdly detailing “what to do in the event of a nuclear attack” with the specific instruction to draw the curtains and make a home shelter from doors and mattresses before the bombs drop. 

Protests were everywhere, including more than a quarter-of-a-million marching through London.

The Greenham Common protest Camp took years to win, and continued until the year 2000, preserved today as a formally acknowledged commemorative and historic site. By 1991 nuclear warheads many times more powerful than that dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, were flown back to the USA along with their military personnel, after the signing of a new Treaty restricting siting of weapons, signed by the USA and Russia. The Treaty included the core wording proclaimed by the women of the camp, “…conscious that nuclear weapons would have devastating consequences for all mankind.”

Today, the Treaties broken, the world’s nuclear states are hastening the increased production and placement of nuclear weapons. The UK is spending £205,000,000,000 tax-money on new nuclear weapons systems. The USA is once again establishing its nuclear arsenals in England, with last Saturday’s huge demonstration by the CND at RAF Lakenheath, Suffolk reviving both the ‘80’s memories and the Peace Movement itself.

As world leaders from the seven most powerful nuclear states met last weekend in, of all places, Hiroshima, Japan, to increase the provision of arms in what is now, clearly, a proxy war in Ukraine between NATO and Russia, talk of nuclear war chattered across the political class and their media. 

Western leaders are building more nuclear bases with US nuclear bases in Eastern Europe surrounding Russia, and Putin, if pushed towards failure, has threatened nuclear exchange, including upon Britain. “Our” nuclear bases (actually the Trident nuclear weapons system is owned and controlled by the United States), will be targets, including Plymouth.

Once again it is time to Protest and Survive! Peace! Now!

The “In Other Words” play will be presented at Plymouth Central Library on Wednesday 24th May, 7pm; at The Plot on Union Street, 6:30pm Thursday 25th May; and the Unitarian Church on Notte Street, Saturday 27th May at 2:30pm.

Tony Staunton

Plymouth CND

Yesterday I stood at my local bus stop at Plymouth Railway Station. Or rather, the absence of the bus stop. Alongside college students travelling to Kings Road, the sick and elderly to Derriford Hospital, forces personnel heading for Drake, we have all been used to shelter from the wind and rain, and seating. It’s all gone, leaving not even a signpost. 

50 bus shelters have been removed in order to cut the maintenance costs. Their removal made me wonder at the sheer and visible poverty of Plymouth City Council.

What has gone wrong, badly wrong, is the result of decades of under-funding alongside ideological attacks against so-called “municipal socialism”.

Continuous attacks have included government cuts and directives such as the Private Finance Initiative that have put councils as well as hospitals and schools into hock, enforcing privatisation with all the added costs incurred by increasing loan and interest payments, and wholesale transfer of services to external businesses who insist on high profit margins. 

Councils today have a quarter of the spending power of 60 years ago, and a fifth of the assets – our collective property paid by universal taxation has all been sold off. 

Just in the last decade, government grants to local councils have been cut by more than 40%, pushing increases to council tax and cutting councils’ spending by at least a third.

This is not an argument for higher Council Tax. Quite the opposite, we should demand that central Government gives back the trillions of pounds robbed, and a positive politic that prioritises social welfare.

The Council Tax system shares many features of the previous Poll Tax with its gross inequalities between poor and rich households and only a “very weak link” to property values. In fact, it is highly regressive, the small gap between bands causing many of us living in low value tenancies to be paying proportionately five times more than someone living in a multi-million pound house. 

The charges to those on benefits have also created significant injustices: debt, prosecutions for the “crime” of being too poor to pay-up, and court-imposed extra charges. 

This must all change. We need a sliding scale of taxation that represents household income and capital wealth. The less you can afford the less you should have to pay towards the common good, and vice versa. This would redistribute rather than raise the tax burden, relieve the poor and generate billions of pounds more in tax to be invested in renewing council services. 

Over the decades the private businesses have lobbied successfully to privatise services for them to  the tax-cash. And of course, the contractors and property speculators have become Councillors in order to direct the cash flow away from the common good and into private pockets.

So now we can’t afford bus shelters or trees, sufficient care homes or child protection services, decent roads and pavements, and can’t pay the wages of the workers who used to care for them. Crucially, the essential services and adaptations needed to protect against extreme weather events, shelters from the heatwaves and flash flooding, cold snaps and power outages expected as climate change accelerates, will remain without funds. 

We elect the Councillors who are supposed to represent and advocate for our needs. But who or what do they represent? Successive councillors should have been relentlessly challenging successive governments, and campaigning for proper funding,  defying the government cuts. Instead, they have rolled with the punches, cut after cut after cut, in return for meagre privileges and Empire medals. Who now honestly advocates for the services we need?

Tony Staunton

President, Plymouth Trades Union Council

14.4.23

We must hold politicians to account. Democracy is being dissolved. They must be questioned.

This May, if you have no official identification with a photo on it you cannot vote. This restriction on universal suffrage is new. For the majority of us, with a driving licence, a travel pass or a passport, it does not represent a problem, so long as we remember to take it to the Polling Station when we vote on 4th May. 

Official statistics show that more than 20% of the population do not have Photo ID. And this raises the issue of human rights and of democracy. In a country where there is no significant evidence of voter-fraud, this new rule appears to exclude rather than empower. It can only be experienced as a further shift towards authoritarian governance. 

There is day-to-day experience of heightened anxiety across our society. Agencies, polls and commentators identify growing mental distress, from the increased use of anti-depressants through to rising levels of protest and strike action. The working class is under tension, with continually rising inflation maintaining a daily cost-of-living crisis for most, and the “Bigger Picture” of Pandemics, War and Climate Change impacting our sense of social security, whatever our personal beliefs.

The current political system in Britain is under deep stress. There is evidence that the majority of us feel we have little influence of personal power over decisions affecting our lives. The extent to which we live in a democracy where “the people decide” is in question. Not least, the fresh perception of a political class, a group separated from the People, politicians locally and globally acting  in their own interests and living a very privileged life from the vast majority of citizens. 

We know we are no longer represented. We are not stupid. It is unlikely that anyone can spend a day in a workplace, or in a cafe or bar (if you can afford to go to the pub) or even at a family meal, where there is no mention of the rotten state of politics, and politicians, today.

We know we have to reassert democratic structures and demands. For example, junior doctors and nurses are not simply on strike for more money – they are afraid for the current condition and very future of our health services, and are demanding that the politicians who have broken the system either rebuild our NHS or are kicked-out of office.

The same goes for our teachers, on strike against cuts to school budgets as well as debilitating workloads, our transport workers demanding investment in public services to revive basic public transport, and our civil servants no longer able to subsist on the minimum wage that does not keep pace with food inflation running at 18%. 

This place of strife is not going away. The prices do not go back down even if inflation lowers. Next year the prices will be higher than this year, the wages lower still. More taxes will serve to subsidise the profits of fuel companies and exploitative landlords. The war in Ukraine is expected to expand and deepen, diverting UK tax-money from public services to military spending and further disrupting supplies, raising prices further.

And as importantly, the increase in extreme weather events, unpredictable, disrupting and costly, will only serve to deepen discomfort – home heating unaffordable, mouldy damp winters and sweaty sleepless heatwaves, crop failures and empty supermarket shelves, floods and fires.

We need politicians who are going to be truly representative, accountable and ready to act as tribunes of the people, not parasites. That’s why we are holding a “hustings”, a public Question Time of Plymouth Council candidates, on Tuesday 18th April at 7pm at the Athenaeum Theatre, PL1 2AU. It’s a small contribution to the assertion of participatory democracy, and an important one. But I do wonder if any budding politicians will be prepared to face the People. Will the elections be about them or us? Are they all the same, just in it for themselves? 

Tony Staunton

President, Plymouth Trades Union Council

I wrote this back in January, having helped with the protest at Newquay Airport on the most bitterly cold and wet day of the winter. The Virgin Space launch failed, since when the company itself has gone into liquidation with nearly 100 job losses. So be it. But then and now, no-one has discussed the military and nuclear components of this initiative. The militarisation of space, its drive towards space wars and self-destructive pollution, remains very real and very ill-considered.

Plymouth Herald January 2023

I oppose the Newquay Space Port! Monday night’s launch included at least two pairs of military satellites predicted to be placed in space from “Cosmic Girl” (as if a rocket has a gender!). The military component was hardly mentioned by the Media in its haste to glorify UK rocket launches.  Launching military hardware from Cornwall is the latest step in a new era of expansion into space by the military with the UK wholeheartedly joining a space arms race which will inevitably lead to greater risk of instability and conflict.

And it is Branson’s Virgin transnational predatory corporation that is profiting from the misspending of our taxes, just as it does from our privatised health service and education. Whilst the cost-of-living crisis is causing distress to millions of us, our taxes are passed to private companies and shareholders to pocket billions of pounds from death and destruction. 

Space is rapidly becoming a key domain for military operations as modern wars rely heavily on space-based assets for command and control,  surveillance,  intelligence gathering, missile warning and supporting forces deployed overseas. Satellites also enable communications links for military and security forces, including communications needed to remotely fly armed drones.

Over the past two years we have seen the setting up of the UK Space Command, the government publication of the Defence Space Strategy outlining how the Ministry of Defence (MoD) will “protect the UK’s national interests in space” and the announcement of a portfolio of new military programmes to develop space assets and infrastructure.   

MoD ministers have openly stated that they now determine space to be a war fighting domain and a cash-cow for private military companies.

Rather than this military expansion into space the UK should be upholding the Outer Space Treaty, signed in 1967, which recognises that space is a ‘global commons’ to be used for peaceful purposes and for the benefit of all countries and humankind. The billions should be used to fund nurses pay and public welfare services.

There needs to be proper and detailed research undertaken into the environmental impact of a UK space programme. Space is a region of wonder and inspiration. It continues to challenge and inspire many people who wish to explore and discover. However, a growing number of space activities are now focussing on commercial exploitation and warfighting. This must change.

Tony Staunton

Plymouth CND

6.3.23

There will be national demonstrations with tens of thousands standing up to racism in every capital city of the UK next Saturday. These shouldn’t be about a sports celebrity, and they will be about caring for refugees fleeing persecution and horror. But, for the sake of democracy and common decency we should also be offering support to Gary Lineker, the freelance sports presenter forced to “step-back” from hosting BBC’s weekly Match of the Day “until agreement is reached on his social media use”. 

This is not about Lineker the man, but about what he said and the reaction against it. It is all about racism and compassion. His was not “hate speech” but more “Love Speech”, showing care for fellow human beings and political democracy. 

Last week, Lineker compared the language used by the Home Secretary in announcing the Illegal Migration Bill to language used by the Government in 1930’s Germany. For the record, he posted on Twitter that the Bill was “…an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in a language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the ‘30’s”, referencing a period of history when all democratic procedures and rights were ended, masses persecuted, incarcerated and ultimately murdered. People quickly stated he was equating Sunak’s policies to those of the fascist Nazi party, but that’s not what he said.

Somewhat ironically in response, a minority of far-right Tory MPs demanded an apology from Lineker and a full investigation. 

The BBC now says he should keep well away from taking sides on party political issues or political controversies. Through this they are censoring any statements that can be deemed critical of the current right wing government or in any way critical of ministers. Most sports commentators have jumped to his support and effectively gone on strike against the BBCs dictator, and hundreds of thousands signed a petition for Lineker’s reinstatement in just hours following the announcement. 

We are protesting that, in this divide-and-rule era of “culture wars” promoted by a beleaguered and floundering government, only supporters of nationalism, privatisation, super-profits for the super-rich (and austerity for the rest of us) will be allowed to comment. 

To criticise an openly racist policy, dehumanising asylum seekers as if a human being can be deemed “illegal”, is apparently no longer allowed. But do carry-on whipping-up scapegoating, white-supremacy and extreme nationalism..sorry, I mean “patriotism” to quote Braverman, quoting Trump.

Its one law for those in power, another for the rest of us. There are many examples. Andrew Neil, one of the most high-profile political journalists and interviewers on the BBC for many years, is the Chairman of the right-wing magazine, the Spectator, allowed to freely express political opinions on Twitter as much as he wants.  The Chairman of the BBC, Richard Sharp, who donated £400,000 to the Conservative Party and helped arranged an £800,000 loan for the leader of the Tory Party, Boris Johnson. Sir Robbie Gibb, who was the Communications Director for the former Tory leader, Teresa May, is on the BBC Board. 

Sir Alan Sugar is allowed to speak politically through social media without challenge, including famously publishing a photoshopped picture of Jeremy Corbyn wearing a Nazi uniform sitting in a car alongside Adolf Hitler. That was shared millions of times on national media websites, without a murmur from the BBC Board. Jeremy Clarkson has a column in The Sun and the Sunday Times, for decades on the BBC and frequently expresses opinions which many recognise as extremely right wing and offensive. 

The decision to suspend Lineker was announced by the Director General of the BBC, Tim Davy, who used to be the Deputy Chairman of the Hammersmith and Fulham Conservative Party, standing as a Tory candidate in local elections voicing a political manifesto. It makes perfect sense to assume that, had Lineker tweeted in support of the “Illegal Migration Bill”, the BBC would have said not a word. 

Gary Lineker makes one comment about a policy that has been condemned by the United Nations and many human rights groups, and is suspended, having previously been allowed, if not actively encouraged, to state on air a number of times during the World Cup criticisms of human rights abuses by Qatar. Why is he encouraged to criticise the political policies of Arab countries but not allowed to criticise the human rights record of the country he lives in? 

The current BBC leadership’s remit is not only to support the Tory Government as its mouthpiece, but to actually dismember and sell-off the BBC by the time of its’ Charter renewal in 2027, when according to Government plans the BBC will become a subscription-only media platform. The Tory managers at the BBC have caved-in to the baying mob of the far-Right in this country. 

The BBC was never a neutral platform. It has long recited the narratives of power, and failed to distinguish between balance and impartiality. Through the decades there have been non-stop campaigns for democratic ownership and control of our news, free from corporate interference and control from the big media bosses. But under Sharp and Davie – Tory donor and former Tory candidate respectively – the pretence of objectivity has gone. We need a properly independent broadcaster, not a State-controlled Establishment propaganda machine. 

Tony Staunton, President, Plymouth Trades Union Council

20th February 2023

Many people will be travelling to London on Saturday to join the march and rally called by the Stop the War Coalition and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. It was twenty years ago when two-million of us marched in London, alongside many millions more internationally, in an attempt to stop the start of the invasion of Iraq. 

Thousands travelled from Plymouth on that day. It is true that we didn’t stop what became recognised as an illegal invasion, but we did hold politicians to some account. Protests do have some effect, not least in helping those involved feel they are not alone in opposing the political decisions of governments.

What would have stopped the invasion of Iraq? Widespread strike action shutting down production of the necessary weapons of war is an obvious and powerful answer. That didn’t happen, despite more than twenty of our national trade unions supporting the Stop the War Coalition.

In time, the huge exposure of the lies around supposed “weapons of mass destruction”, never found, and the terrible destruction of an entire society, with over a million dead and war lords spreading terror amidst the rubble, proved us to be right.

Saturday’s protest will be calling for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine. The current competition to see which western country can put the most arms into Ukraine represents an escalation that threatens World War Three and the very real use of nuclear weapons. 

Those in favour of war immediately charge us as “Putin apologists” if not supporters of his illegal invasion. We are nothing of the sort. Putin is on the far-Right of the political spectrum, governing a chaotic Capitalist economy in the interest of billionaire oligarchs, and seeking to compete as a regional military power on the global markets. We are not on his side.

But two wrongs don’t make a right. Pouring arms into Ukraine, a drive led by the UK and USA spearheading NATO expansion, has produced a “proxy war” between the USA and Russia, threatening world peace. The poor Ukrainians are suffering slaughter and economic destruction as their country is used as a battle field for global tensions between east and west. 

The best military strategists suggest it will go on for years. Some predict use of nuclear weapons in 2025. This must not be allowed. 

The hard truth is that wars throughout history generally end in a negotiated peace. And those negotiations should start now. 

The Russian economy is one-eighteenth the size of the combined economies of the USA and Europe. Russian people are already suffering, with huge losses of young men and women drafted into the armed forces. There is dissent and there are continuing protests against the war, despite western media portraying Russian people as solidly behind Putin. We can be the subject of pro-war propaganda from “our side”, too. 

The warmongers would have Russia defeated. But the sensible western political strategists know that the collapse of the Russian economy would deeply impact the entire global economy. Russia must not be destroyed. There are talks. For example, negotiations between the two-sides are happening this week to attempt to have Russia release food supplies in order to prevent widespread famine and the starvation of millions. They could talk about Peace, too.

What would “winning” in Ukraine look like? Indeed, what does “winning” a war look like anywhere? No-one won the First World War, hence the Second. 60 million died between 1939 and ‘45, thankfully preventing fascist dictatorship – are we expecting to go through that, and worse, again? Look at Burma, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria… and now Ukraine. The outcomes do not favour the civilian working classes of any of those countries, nor should we understate the environmental destruction. 

War makes money for the armaments manufacturers and associated corporations of the military-industrial complex. Wars do not benefit humanity. Every penny comes from our taxes, each one spent on more armaments is a penny less for health and social welfare everywhere. 

We have to talk. Putin can be pushed to the table by his people and out of economic necessity. Or NATO escalation can push China to defend the Russian alliance and push us further towards world war.

We have to protest against NATO escalation and for Peace. Now. 

Tony Staunton

Plymouth Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

This week I spent a glorious evening attending a small but perfectly formed meeting to discuss Climate Justice. It was never going to be a mass gathering, the subject matter appearing at first glance both too high-minded and too challenging. For most, the rigours of work and domestic demands are far too engrossing to allow for a period of reflection on “Big Picture” stuff.

I cannot portray the level of hope I gained there. I came away elated. A dozen activists, reasoned and assertive, informed and rational. But most of all, mostly young, with four engaged participants under the age of 21 and clearly practiced in deep thought and focussed action. Without betraying confidentialities, a 17-year old 6th form student offered a matter-of-fact picture of his entire cohort being politically engaged, climate aware and system-critical. 

The discussions were so wide, exploratory and crucial that I wanted the meeting not to end. Reinvigorating is an understatement. The meeting opened with a reading from a short set of definitions of climate justice agreed by UNICEF. Crucially, “The climate crisis is the result of a system which prioritises profit over sustainability…the world’s richest 10% are responsible for 50% of greenhouse gas emissions and the poorest 50% are only responsible for 10% despite population and energy consumption increasing.”

The 17-year old already knew well the requirement for reparations from the early-industrialised North to the Global South. There can be no solution to the deepening climate catastrophe without that happening. A young woman student interrogated the United Nations-sponsored evidence that 90% of those most impacted by current climate change are women. It became clear that the global oppression of women left most with the responsibility of family and child-rearing, managing conditions of systemic discrimination and abuse alongside the day-long material horrors of food shortages, insecure housing and repeated displacement. 

This spun the conversation sideways into an examination of the United Nations itself. 192 nations making policies based upon both the lowest-common-denominator and the imperialist powers exerting political censorship in their own interests.  Those at the top distorting and obfuscating all facts, whether on the rights of Palestinians or the IPCC scientific reports on just how bad the climate emergency actually is.

The discussions clearly related oppression to exploitation, both of people and the ecology. It was wholly unnecessary for the seasoned adults in the room to raise the issue of the inequities of social class society. The corruption of the political class, and the anti-human and uncaring domination of the mighty corporations were exposed, in quiet but clear voices, by the young. 

And they voiced their hopes and aspirations. This juxtaposition between full acknowledgment of the coming societal turmoil and the drive to live full lives, to continue to learn and have agency, was inspiring. I joined a small group where a young man who works in Aldi explained in detail the strengths and weaknesses of online media in this age of corporate-sponsored fake news. I was enthralled. 

He could not only see through the misinformation but has a critical method for sifting facts from lies. 

At the same time, another young woman student identified the immense pressures of life today, and we discussed how to stay solid, composed and focussed – how to care for ourselves so as not to go under. There was a draft of chilling emotional distress pervading the room.

There was also ready acknowledgment of the resulting use of social opiates to manage the dystopia, offered to keep us from engaging with society. From drugs through to online gaming and TicToc, we are constantly and consistently distracted from immersing ourselves in the real human society. It’s part of what keeps the billionaires in power, we all agreed.

The nuances of divide-and-rule were examined, the racism, weaponisation of gender and current “culture wars”. Class unity was valued. And more, the crucial recognition that this is an irreconcilably polarised society, and indeed world, between ultimately the two Great Classes, the producers on the one side and “profiteers” – owners of Capital – on the other, working class and ruling class, proletariat and bourgeois. There is a class war, the intensification of which is inevitable as society strains to the disruption caused by unpredictable extreme weather events.

We all shared much the same moral codes and ethics. How much high-mindedness changes anything was up for debate. Indeed, if you are not anxious in this era of human history you’re probably not looking. We shouldn’t be required to remain chilled or passive. The debate developed about the role of anger. I confided that I found it difficult to look at any aspect of Capitalist society without feeling and expressing anger. Surprisingly, no-one felt anger to be a negative emotion. It just requires focus and collective expression so as not to eat the individual alive. 

The personal disclosures raised the question of the power of the individual and strength of the collective. To what extent do individual acts, for example being a vegan or boycotting dairy, really matter. There was an absence of belief, even by the vegans in the room, that individual acts change society. These personal choices simply help self-management and positive self-image. Those in their teens observed that “telling people” not to do this or that usually promoted the opposite response. This is not a time to be dictated to. Quite the opposite, this is the time of individual agency within a collective enterprise. There was general consensus that there can be no consensus. There are sides to be taken, with the very real threat that if our side doesn’t get organised for the protection of people and planet, there shall be fascism – the social organisation of humanity with no care for the individual, only pursuit of tyrannical national and racial domination.

And so we need organisation. We need to join together, debate our differences, share our strengths and, above all, act in unity to change society. I had declared my identification with Marxism and Trotskyist organisation at the very beginning of the meeting in order to avoid hidden agendas or accusations of manipulation. I remained unchallenged, perhaps out of politeness but I don’t think so. Those attending had no time for half-measures or niceties.

The penny has dropped for a new generation. There can no more business as usual. Things will not stay the same. Indeed, our facilitator closed the meeting with this observation, “the world is changing every day, it always is. Nothing stays still. The question is what drives the change that happens, and what should we do to make the change we dream of?” 

Tomorrow isn’t written. But there are patterns that predict some of what is likely. The most conscious amongst the young, (and they are in the majority) know much of what is to be faced. Fast-accelerating climate change is bringing mass injustice to the fore: war (both global and civil); rationing (self-imposed as well as dictated by availability); oppression (by the top onto the bottom); and system change (either imposed or won). 

However bad it all seems, another world is possible. The only question is, Who’s World? Let’s make it ours. It’s never too late and anyway, every generation has had to fight for their future.