Tag: andrew

We’re Constantly Distracted by Crisis

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (7.4.26), where I write a piece, edit it down to the maximum of 600 words, and then it’s edited again to meet the so-called “standards” of the corporate media. Little surprises me these days, but to see my phrase “Distracted from paedophile Presidents and Princes…” have the term “paedophile” edited out did raise my eyebrows. I thought, at least, that Trump has had a court case rule him as such, and that Randy Andy had been stripped of all titles and wealth because his alliance with Epstein. Oh well, there we go, the article is about the Climate crisis anyway!

The unedited version below, or read the published article by expanding the picture.

The latest HD pictures of the Earth from space are undeniably moving. An expressed emotional response often includes something about vulnerability.

So it should. One look at the globe and its obvious that everything is connected. The question is, what should we focus upon? Is there a first priority if we are to protect and sustain life on Earth?

Where should we start? Right now, moonshots are distracting from illegal wars and genocide distracting from the rise of fascist organisations distracting from paedophile Presidents and Princes distracting from corrupt exploitative billionaires and all distracting from the climate crisis.

And there it is. One look at our world and it should be clear that climate and environment are top and centre.

“Planet Earth is being pushed beyond its limits”, announced United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres reporting on the 2025 State of the Global Climate Report, completely eclipsed in its urgency and warnings by the war in the Middle East. The Earth’s energy imbalance – the gap between heat absorbed and heat released – is the highest on record. The vast majority of the heat, 91%, is absorbed by the ocean, harming marine life, fuelling storms and causing ice melt. Arctic and Antarctic ice loss together with melting glaciers are driving sea-level rise. Our weather has become more extreme. In 2025, heatwaves, wildfires, drought, tropical cyclones, storms and flooding impacted hundreds of millions of people and caused billions in economic losses.

In February this year, the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee, on which heads of MI5 and MI6 sit, released a heavily edited version of its national security assessment of the climate crisis. It came with a stark warning: “some ecosystems will start to collapse by 2030 or sooner”, suggesting an immediate threat to national security, prosperity, food systems and public health.

Government intelligence agencies have compiled full scientific reports on the imminent national security implications of climate breakdown, biodiversity loss and global ecosystem collapse.There’s talk across the Establishment of adaptation to a world at an average temperature 3C higher than 150 years ago. We are locked-in to a return to Pliocene conditions, 3C hotter and, eventually, a 20m sea-level rise.

You may expect the government to share this knowledge with everyone so we can all make important life decisions. But the UK’s Defra has refused a Freedom of Information request to see the full, uncensored report prepared by the Joint Intelligence Chiefs in connection with national security threats associated with climate and ecological breakdown.

The question remains unanswered: what do we need to do to be able live in these conditions? Perhaps die in our billions? Those who have significant resources to build away from floods and fires, insulate our homes against severe temperatures, access nutritious foods that are grown despite soil-depletion and chemical pollution, will live. But that’s not the most of us.

It is no coincidence that the far-Right is being sponsored to call-out climate science as false conspiracy, and oppose net-zero targets at the ballot box. “Drill, Drill, Drill!” Is the cry of the oil industry lobbyists, echoed by far-Right idiots hoping for crumbs of cash and power from the Billionaires’ tables. The barbaric decadence at the top of global capitalist society has never been more obvious, now funding climate denial to a greater extent than their previous campaigns denying cancer from smoking or asbestosis from unsafe chemical production. Starmer complies with support for new drilling at the Rosebank field in the North Sea.

The global North is being lulled into believing we’re safe from the climate crisis. Those in the tropics and Earth’s southern regions are already suffering climate chaos. As Jane Fonda said last week, “There’d be no climate crisis without racism!” This is probably the main reason behind Trump and Farage opposing net zero goals away from fossil fuel dependency: in the first instance, stopping climate chaos will be of primary benefit to the countries of the global south, non-white populations! To hell with that, let them die first! Racist it is, but also very short sighted – the worse chaos global heating causes the tropics, the more likely the temperate zones will suffer seasonal dissonance, extreme weather and food shortages. The climate does not recognise national boundaries or human cultural differences.

The climate crisis is not a matter of opinion. The real conspiracy is the opposite of that spouted by The Deniers – governments have compiled the information on the Climate Crisis already – they’re just not letting us see it, preferring to distract us with photos from space. We should each make the links and act now.

We are each at liberty, for now, to submit a Freedom of Information request to government to release the full report produced by the Joint Intelligence Committee on the national security implications of climate breakdown, biodiversity loss and global ecosystem collapse. Email your Freedom of Information (FoI) to informationrequests@defra.gov.uk

In the meantime, stop war to stop the murder, massive environmental destruction, pollution and global heating carbon emissions, and campaign against the opening of any and all oil and gas fields, most urgently, Stop Rosebank!

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Bombing Iran will NOT liberate the People

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (3.3.26), damning the suggestion that bombing women liberates women, anywhere. International Women’s Day on 8th March should see a battle cry rage against Trump’s misogyny, racism, anti-Trans bile and deadly military imperialism. They’re all linked!

Bombing Iran Will Not Liberate the People!

Welfare not Warfare!

The illegal Israeli military mass-bombing of the girls’ school in Minab in the south of Iran killed at least 153 women and girls last Saturday. This cannot claim to be in the interests of the liberation of women in Iran.

The rights of Iranian people have never been on the agenda of Western powers. Women, and men in Iran have protested heroically to change their government towards women’s rights, with death their only answer. The bombing of Iran offers no solution to women’s oppression there or anywhere. War always treats women as targets.

There’s so much hypocrisy spoken about women’s rights that we should all take responsibility for calling it out. We live in a deeply sexist human world. A global system based upon individual power and control vested primarily in super-rich men. The Epstein files show how corruption and sexism are so pervasive and entrenched. Andrew represents the corruption, both financial and sexual, of unaccountable wealth. Trump symbolises white male supremacy. Women’s oppression and capitalist class society are intertwined.

The genocide in Gaza has exposed the brutality of war and the unique impact on women, famine, physical abuse and incarceration impacting menstrual health and pregnancy. We still have a long way to go to win a world free of women’s oppression.

Let’s be clear: women’s oppression encompasses all social, economic, and political spaces causing personal subjugation for simply being a woman. Its is based upon class: wealthy women whilst suffering the indignity of being considered primarily as sexual objects have sufficient agency to combat much of the oppression. They side with the class privilege of wealthy men and collude in the exploitation and oppression of other women as low-paid nannies, personal assistants and cleaners.

Most working class women’s experiences of oppression are internalised into self-blame. Interactions and relationships are all based upon sexism – the portrayal of women as objects to be used, owned and controlled permeate all aspects of women’s lives. The modern capitalist family requires women to fund the domestic budget by working as well as running the home as carer, educator, nurse, chef, bottle-washer and on-call lover.

Next weekend we celebrate International Women’s Day, March 8th, in deteriorating circumstances. The backlash against campaigns for women’s liberation is well-funded and growing. In the name of women’s rights, the far-Right now proclaim themselves the defenders of the “traditional” heterosexual family as the “natural order”, recruiting women to specific roles in political organisations, “Pink Ladies” mobilised to protest outside refugee hostels for traditional women’s roles and heterosexual family values, and to keep white children safe from Black men. Disgusting!

Farage and his Reform UK private business echoes vice President J D Vance in demanding women should have more babies, referring to Musk’s “population apocalypse” of white families in the face of migration, inter-marriage, LGBT+ parents and left-wing “wokism”. The far-Right are reawakening the fascist campaigns of last century, for “children, kitchen and Church”, opposing women’s rights and imposing a woman’s place apart from any self-determination.

International Women’s Day (IWD) has been celebrated for over 100 years, born from mass revolts of young women workers challenging exploitation and the abusive power of the Boss class. Today many companies and businesses use IWD to sell cosmetics and gimmicks to reinforce the cardboard cut-out female rather than address the issues women face.

But IWD has radical roots and is a day to remember those who have fought for women’s liberation – from the Suffragettes in the UK to the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement in Iran. The women trade unionists and the men who have joined their cause remain clear-eyed – the working class have nothing to gain from women’s oppression. Free domestic labour, tasks still primarily allocated to women, protect the profits of big business not having to pay for the child care and raising of the next generation of the workforce.

And so, women are kept down. One-in-four women in Britain suffer domestic violence and abuse, often sexual, an average for a period of 6 years of their adult life. Rape in this country is lawless, only 3% of alleged cases followed through to a conviction. Child sexual abuse is reportedly on the increase again, the vast majority of cases girls abused inside the family, the majority of families being white. Sexual abuse is not the preserve of the black male refugee but the privileged white misogynist.

The cuts to social welfare, repeated and enforced in order to divert essential funding away from our health and welfare services and into war and military spending, affect women most acutely. Women’s rights depend upon a well-funded Welfare State alongside the ideological struggle for liberation from this system enforcing roles and relationships of power-and-control.

Here in Plymouth, trade unionists are fighting the cuts to health services, including stopping the closure of Plymouth’s Sexual Abuse Referral Centre, reducing the support that women and children receive following rape and abuse. You won’t see the far-Right protesting about that except as a “drain on the tax-payer” and a symbol of the “Nanny State” they want demolished.

For socialists, the challenge to class exploitation has to have the fight against oppression at its heart. We encourage and support the struggle by women against all forms of oppression, including gender stereotyping, role-segregation and being made scapegoats blamed for the imposition of low wages, high child care costs and poor social conditions. Welfare not Warfare! On this International Women’s Day we must remember the struggles of the past and unite for social justice and women’s liberation today!

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