Tag: corruption

COP30 – Stop Climate Denial! Act Now!

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My weekly comment in the daily Plymouth Herald (4.11.25) continuing to expose the hypocrisy and corruption of tax-funding the capitalist climate chaos. The climate denial is orchestrated, massively funded and coordinated across the global capitalist ruling class. They may be raising war against each other, but they combine against any and all opposition to their acquisitive lust for accumulation of personal wealth. Little matters like climate collapse with billions of ordinary people displaced and dying cannot get in the way of this anti-human system of competition and destruction.

Stop Climate Denial – Act Now!

On Thursday 6th November, UK Prime Minister Starmer will attend the COP30 Climate Summit of world leaders in Brazil. It will be a fleeting visit. This last-minute decision is more a reaction to political competition than any commitment to reducing global heating emissions or preventing climate collapse.
The sudden almost doubling of Green Party membership following the election of Zack Polanski as “left-wing” leader could take more voters from Labour than Reform UK was able to. The majority of voters recognise climate change as a real and present danger, even if they don’t want tax rises to deal with it. Labour has to pretend to “Green” credentials even while maintaining core commitment to the future of the fossil-fuel economy and infrastructure – the industries that are destroying the Planet at speed.
From the Right, the flailing Tory Badenoch is competing with Farage to be the greatest “climate denier”, of use to Starmer in being able to argue we must not go too far or too fast.
Climate action is under attack with false claims that the cost of living crisis and job losses are caused by green policies and ‘net zero’. But the UK is facing increased heatwaves and drought, alongside more extreme floods threatening homes and farmers’ crops. The impacts of climate breakdown are already here, and are hitting hardest those who have actually done least to cause the crisis. Here in the UK, temperatures reached a previously impossible 40C record in 2022 with higher to come. Our workplaces and homes are poorly equipped to cope with these heatwaves, which cause not just stress and discomfort, but thousands of excess deaths.
But current government policy is hopelessly influenced by the corporate fossil-fuel lobby instead of concern for the safety or food security for the working class. The UK government currently provides at least £17.5 billion in fossil fuel subsidies and support per year – the highest level since 2016 despite the gross inefficiency in price, infrastructure and climate-heating emissions of the fossil-fuelled energy system compared with renewables.
Starmer’s policies will result in a slight increase in fossil fuel subsidies over this parliament compared with the previous Tory Government, totalling an estimated £87.5 billion over five years. Little wonder the world’s big banks have handed nearly $7tn (£5.6tn) in funding to the fossil fuel industry since the failed COP21 Paris Agreement of 2015 to limit carbon emissions. No major bank has yet committed to stop funding new oil and gas fields or coal capacity.
The fossil-fuel industry is too highly profitable compared with renewables for climate collapse to get in the way. The billionaire speculators gambling on the stock exchange are not going to let the government get in the way of a rise in the projected share prices of oil and gas in 2040. Yet extraction has to stop now if we are to survive.
The Labour government has pledged £22bn for projects to capture and store carbon emissions from energy, industry and hydrogen production, unproven technologies that cannot possibly contribute in time towards the scale required for reducing harmful carbon emissions. Indeed it is a Trojan horse for extending the life of planet-heating oil and gas production and an entire waste of tax money.
Reform UK has pledged to scrap all climate action just as the UK experienced its hottest summer in history with widespread drought across England. Reform UK’s Mayor of Greater Lincolnshire Dame Andrea Jenkyns says climate change does not exist, and has declared war on climate action, describing wind and solar as ‘eyesores’ whilst promoting fracking in the British countryside.
The world’s largest oil and gas companies made £437billion profit last year and are still asking for further tax subsidies for the North Sea drilling. Unite the Union identifies the average household to be paying more than £500 to energy companies profits, not services.
The UK-based oil companies pocket at least £20bn a year from the tax-payer, with an extra £2.7bn announced this year, far more than the entire cost of support for refugees and asylum seekers – but you won’t hear any complaints from the far-Right about such subsidies for the super-rich! Blame the super-poor!
As environmental tipping points are crossed and the crisis rapidly deepens, scaling up renewables, energy storage and efficient usage has to be the priority. Transformation to green energy policy is cheaper, cleaner and job-rich. Start by ending all tax reliefs for the trillion-dollar oil and gas corporations and collect the due taxes.
Continued support for the fossil fuel industry goes against the interests of working people in the UK and globally. We shall be protesting for climate action in Plymouth on Saturday 15th November, and debating all these issues at the Climate Summit in Sherwell Church Hall, North Hill, in the afternoon. Join us!

Trump Buying Gaza? Is he Just Flying a Kite?

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (11.2.25).

The unedited version here, or just widen the picture to read the printed version below.

Flying a kite is supposed to be therapeutic, especially in windy weather. The coloured cloth, swaying ducking and diving makes us chuckle, imagining we’re riding on its back.
Flying a kite is also used as an analogy in politics, meaning to test a proposal in order to see which way the wind blows.
When the world’s most powerful (if most bankrupted) property developer says he’s going to purchase Gaza we all need to understand it as a ploy – he’s flying a kite.
Two-thirds of the residential Palestinian territory of Gaza, home to 2.2million human beings, has been bombed to the ground, leading to President Trump putting-in a bid for ownership and land clearance, exactly as any unprincipled land speculator would do. But who is he proposing to buy it all from?
Our Victorian era saw factory owners ensure such pitiful wages as to render residential areas into slums, then change their caps to announce themselves as Landlords, turfing-out the poor people they had produced in order to clear the estate and rebuild to make money both from the stolen capital and the increased revenue.
Today this continues in Britain in the street-by-street “gentrification”, privatising the people’s Council Housing and speculating on property prices. Across the world the clearance of entire estates is recognised as ethnic cleansing.
The puppet-men of western parliaments have responded to Trump’s proposal with guffaws rather than outright condemnation, in awe at the height and speed and light of Trump’s kite display. Secretly, of course, being of the same ilk, they wish they’d had the guts to suggest it. They believe in the unethical and unprincipled system of Capitalism.
Gaza is a bomb site. It is, as Trump says, full of unexplored ordnance as well as the rotting corpses of tens of thousands of women and children, as inseparable from the collapsed concrete rubble as is the human dust of those burnt to death in the Grenfell Tower horror – also caused by property speculators.
Officially the body parts of around 50,000 humans can be offered as proof of mass killing of Gazans by the American bombs and bullets supplied to the Israeli Defence Forces. The missing, unaccounted for or deceased due to starvation and disease raise the number towards 200,000, two-thirds of whom were women or children.
This is why we follow the United Nations International Court of Justice in identifying all this as the indicators of Genocide – illegal under the Geneva Convention and the laws of so many States, including our own. Such levels of one-sided murder and maiming also explain why President Trump’s Disunited States of America has withdrawn itself from all matters of international community and international law, and exempted themselves from accountability at home.
Every predatory Capitalist will tell you. State laws get in the way of making money.
Most if not all laws protecting human rights have been fought for and won only by collective campaigning and open fights for them over generations – mainly by the world’s working classes. The working day, women’s rights, health & safety, housing and medical care are not offered freely by those who have wealth and power. We have campaigned and fought, and many died, in pursuit of our human rights.
And every time we take our newly-won comforts for granted, the predators creep-up to take them from us again. In Britain we have returned to a low-waged, long-working hours dog-eat-dog crumbling terrain.
In Gaza, and now planned for the much larger Palestinian region of the West Bank, the final solution for dealing with Gazans as “surplus humanity” (the term used by a self-proclaimed fascist and racist war minister in the Israeli Knesset) is to have them “clear out”.
It’s a class thing. For the ruling class, we the masses are there to produce more wealth for them. If we don’t we’re in the way. Surplus. An impediment to growth and prosperity.
For Trump, clearing Gaza is worth a try, for him and his peers to make $$$billions from the process of land-clearance that made America “great” in the first place – the murder of millions of native Americans already living there, and the slave-labour of the millions imported to build the new estate.
Unless we challenge Imperialism, the international height of Capitalist exploitation, we too will be enslaved. If Gazans are deemed surplus today you can rest assured it’ll be you soon after.
That’s why the fight for human rights for Palestinians, and the right of Gazans to stay and prosper in their homeland funded by reparations for the genocide they’ve endured, is a fight for the entire global working class. In this regard, we are all Palestinians.
Any self-respecting politician who claims to care for the working classes has to be held by this standard. Are you a true tribune of the oppressed? Do you care for and fight for those born at a disadvantage? To each and every Labour politician the question is asked. Do you recognise Palestine?
We will March again on Saturday 15th February – join us.

Heading into Strife

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My weekly Comment int he daily Plymouth Herald (14.5.24) seeking to expose the “disaster capitalism” manifesto of Rishi Sunak, ex-hedge fund manager who made millions out of the global financial crash of 2008. It is difficult to say “corrupt”, “gangster”, “liar” and “spiv” of a Prime Minister and get it published. Nevertheless, my hatred of Sunak and his billionaire class has to be broadcast by whatever means necessary.

The Prime Minister began this week by warning that the next five years will see fundamental changes to the way of life in Britain. What could he be speaking of?

The beleaguered Sunak predicts more will change in the next five years than in the last 30.

“I’m convinced that the next few years will be some of the most dangerous yet most transformational our country has ever known.”

It sounds more like a threat than a promise. The signs are there. Tensions inside this country and across the world are ramping-up exponentially. Governments are responsible for the highest levels of corruption and self-interest, using propaganda mechanisms of nationalism and racism to maintain social control by setting us each against the other. 

All the time the politicians are managing the plundering of the tax-payers’ coffers and extracting record profits from all the necessities of life, our where-with-all being hoarded into the private off-shore bank accounts of the super-rich.

Internationally we are seeing deepening and entrenched warfare, Britain being drawn on the coat tails of the United States of America into direct engagement in Ukraine and Palestine, Africa and the South China Seas. Little wonder more tax money will be diverted to the military and away from spending on social welfare at home.

And no wonder that more millions of human beings are being forced to seek asylum, to migrate from their homelands, forced by everything from ethnic cleansing and genocides to climate collapse. 

The climate emergency has turned already into catastrophe for hundreds of millions across what is politically termed the “Global South” – those regions that have seen labour and natural resources plundered for the benefit of the nations of the North. Their crisis is coming our way, fast.

The climate changes that are killing millions each year are now hitting us. In Britain, eight months of record breaking rain represents new and less predictable patterns of extremes, in temperature, precipitation, meteorological seasons and the power of extreme weather events.

The unique speed of the rise in global temperatures is causing not only food shortages but the spread of disease. The classic killers and disabling infections of hot climates, such as malaria and Lyme disease are here now, brought north by warmer conditions by mosquitos and ticks, and fungal spores. 

The economic inequalities caused by harvest collapse, food shortages and transport disruption caused by both war and climate change will only produce more poverty, war and global warming.

So, sad as it is to admit, Sunak is correct. We are heading into social strife. 

What is left unsaid is that this is all the doing of Sunak and his Capitalist ilk, as part of the global political class and their Corporate masters who have created all these conditions: funding wars to reap massive profits for the arms manufacturers and fossil fuel companies; denying and investing billions in propaganda campaigns against the science of climate change and effective remedies; demanding tax-billions for pharmaceutical companies to cherry-pick the most lucrative vaccine markets and disregard the rest; and the super-rich driven by avarice, ready to make a short-term profit at the expense of the future of humanity.

The single most noticeable change we will experience over the next 5 years is the intensification of authoritarianism, whatever the party of government. More punishments for strikers and protesters daring to challenge all the above and demand investment in the future of humanity. More intense political repression is inevitable, that is, unless we increase protests now to protect democracy and force the political change we need. 

Right now, the students are leading the way!  Show them every support! Turn up with food and water, send them money, protect them from assault. Build the Resistance!

The Time has Come to Revolt Against Inequality!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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