Tag: china

Trump’s Tariffs will not Help the Working Class

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (8.4.25), following a weekend campaign stall which heard many local people saying they “like Trump”. In general, nationalist sentiments and comments were the majority. Socialists really do need to heed this shift to the right, and argue back. I can’t offer any deep economic analysis and would never predict the global impact of Trump’s tariffs, but one thing’s for sure. The working class is going to pay a heavy price, everywhere.

What have tariffs to do with us?

In Truth there is no such thing as the “National Interest”. We are not one nation, not because of any differences in skin colour or ethnicity, but because of social class. The richest 20% of British citizens live totally separate and different lives from the poorest 20%. In general their bonuses come from our losses.
Tax cuts for the rich do not benefit the poor in any way. Surplus personal wealth tends to be spent on luxuries, the larger amounts squirrelled away in off-shore tax-free bank accounts. In Britain the luxuries mostly come from overseas, the luxury holidays generally happen overseas, the upper-middle and super-rich upper class investing in cheap labour overseas. The working class hardly ever see the real wealth of our Nation.
Trump’s tariffs are portrayed as his attempt to pull production back to the United States of America in order to revitalise their endebted economy and improve the condition of the poorest. He has no such intention, and in any case, tariffs don’t do that. Trump’s taxes on imports to the USA will fuel price rises, maintaining or even increasing inflation at home and abroad.
The tariffs will damage any capitalist’s confidence in investing, anywhere. Last week’s sudden record losses on stock markets worldwide are evidence of this. The retaliation of other countries with large economies, imposing tariffs on US goods will replicate the inflationary pressures worldwide.
The UK’s economy is stagnant already. Before Trump, for the poorest 50% of people in the UK, prices kept going up and our spending power decline. The tariffs will ensure this continues. The outlook is stagflation.
We are already suffering disgusting inequality and poverty levels. Low wages, precarious work, 6 million households in fuel poverty, 4 million children in poverty. To judge where you sit in the hierarchy of rich v poor, just consider that Britain’s median hourly wage is around £37,000 per year before tax, roughly the same as in 2006. Most wage-rates have been pulled down by wage-compression resulting in the top 10% of salaries averaging £73k, the poorest 10% less than £23k. Standard Universal Credit per adult £5kpa. State pensioner a maximum of 12kpa. Of course the super-rich aren’t in these stats – they’re the directors and executives and property owners – not the workers – averaging £200kpa before bonuses and dividends. Where do you sit?
The top 10% of households hold 43% of the country’s wealth while the bottom 50% of us (33 million citizens) share just 9%. The 170 UK multi-billionaires own £700billion between them, their collective income rising over £30bn in the last year. We never see their money.
America’s gap between rich and poor is even more extreme. Trump’s primary motive in enforcing tariffs is to get more dollars into the USA’s federal budget to be able to further cut the rate of tax for the wealthiest in America. Damn the poor, the social infrastructure and welfare services. Why any working class person would still wish to support Trump beggars belief.
We have lived the fact that the rich having more cash doesn’t trickle down to the poor, quite the opposite. The poor pay substantially more of our disposable income on essentials with little or nothing for luxuries, the prices of which will now skyrocket.
Trump’s tariffs will make the price of essentials increase. Here in the UK. The world’s smallest countries are being hit so hard they will be plunged into even more abject poverty (the current jokes about penguins are not really funny). The big economies responding with tariffs of their own will cost their working class a double-whammy.
Trump’s administration isn’t benign. His people know the history of trade wars. They’re not stupid. Tariffs deepen economic competition and lead to military competition. Trade wars lead to world wars. The USA has a military budget that dwarfs the rest of the world’s combined. And wars make huge money for the arms manufacturers at the expense of everyone else.
Little wonder Starmer’s government and those across the world are now preaching rearmament and militarism. Nationalism is being drummed into our working class mindset as a prelude to war. And wars always make the working classes much poorer, economically, socially and emotionally. Surely, war is not in our interest. And neither is Trump.
More than one million people protested across the USA last weekend, against Trump’s offensive. The working class here must challenge Trump’s poverty policies here, too. Welfare not Warfare!

Needs of People Must Come Before Profits

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (21.1.25). Damning Trump from the Left is made easy by his overt racism and denial of climate breakdown. But linking his true intent to that of other governments and especially our own is the vital task. What does Trump mean to Britain? How do we respond? His is a decaying Capitalism in crisis, taking us all down into its feverish hallucinations and bitter violence. Ours must be the struggle for socialist revolution.

The Needs of People have to Come Before Profit

There’s just so much happening, its enough to cause brain-freeze. There are periods in history where nothing appears to happen, and there are times of rapid change.

History repeats the pattern when the central power can no longer hold the reins. This year, governments are collapsing into inner conflict across most free-market capitalist countries.

The way forward is up-for-grabs: will it be corporate-led authoritarianism or socialism – collectively organised across the working class? More imprisonment of protesters and persecution of minorities? Top-down repression or bottom-up liberation?

The genocide in Gaza represents absolute repression: an overwhelming power of one side seeking to negate any possibility of self defence and self-determination for the other. Our challenge for a just and lasting ceasefire and reparations for Palestinians represent a wider call for worldwide social justice.

Trump and his maverick oligarchs represent extreme systemic inequality: the domination of the super-rich, society organised for the sole purpose of accumulating more wealth into the pockets of the ruling class.

Trump is no peacemaker, and neither is Starmer or Macron or Meloni or whoever is the Chancellor of Germany this week. Capitalism is based upon competition, on the international stage between alliances of countries seeking military and imperialist regional domination.

Trump is not seeking peace in the Middle East, just profits for his corporate interests based in America. He’s hardly interested in wars in Europe other than to see European countries pay for them.

Russia’s gangster-capitalist economy is of little threat to the USA. But State-Capitalist China is growing fast enough to overtake the USA and represents a threat to the wealth and power of Trump’s cohort. The new American President has pledged to build-up to war with China, ramping-up nuclear warheads and military spending at the expense of an already devastated social infrastructure at home.

What’s the alternative? Trump is not in power for the vast majority of US citizens – the working class. He’s there for his adopted class of the super-rich. He’s brazened in his approach. Opposition to Trump needs to be brazened in response.

Socialism is defined as social and economic planning organised to meet the needs of everyone, a social system where we all offer to the collective society what we can in terms of effort, labour and commitment in return for our individual needs to be provided for. A lifestyle of mutual cooperation not individual competition.

Majorities in this country still hold to socialist principles. The National Health Service is based on socialist ideals of paying into a common purse in order to receive health care whenever we need it. Services are falling apart because, over decades the Capitalists have encroached to privatise and make money out of our basic needs.

Most workers want and need cheap public transport services, coordinated and convenient – socialised. Most workers want well-funded universal education for our children. But the Capitalists have privatised it all, over-pricing and hollowing-out services for profit not need.

Public services have been defamed as if representing incompetence and bloated waste, when all the time that’s precisely what has been created by privatisation. The level of ideological propaganda and disinformation spewed-out by the Trumpists and their acolytes in the UK has overwhelmed fact and reason.

And so, Starmer as the leader of a Labour Party supposed to have socialist origins is instead pandering to Trumpism, raising military spending at the expense of welfare benefits and workers spending-power, and funding more privatisation for the domination of US corporations, pharmaceuticals and insurance companies.

We need fresh international socialist organisation championing the needs of the working class and campaigning across the UK and everywhere.

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We Have to Stop the Drive to Global War

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

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

The narrative has changed suddenly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tony Staunton, Plymouth Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament