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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the issue is emissions, emissions, emissions. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We need system change, now. 

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

Plymouth climate change protesters to take to the streets!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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