Tag: exploitation

Challenge supermarket domination – transform food production!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (28.10.25), beginning a few weeks of focus on elements of the climate catastrophe and how it effects working class people on a daily basis. It’s probably all been said before, but as fossil fuel corporate executives and their pet politicians gather in Brazil for the COP climate conference, it’s worth reflecting upon why we’re in this dire state. Of course, as usual, the Paper chooses the headline, sufficient but way off point:

Nutritional food is a Right for All

Food prices are going-up, supermarkets crying poverty. Ahead of next month’s government Budget, the powerful food industry is lobbying MP’s demanding protection from increases in taxes or workers’ rights. Supermarkets have the power and influence to bully and bribe government ministers to do their bidding.
Sixty-five percent of our food shopping takes place in the top five supermarkets. They dominate our choices, our diet and the price of food. Annual food price inflation was at over 20% only two years ago, prices continuing to rise at over 5%, with butter prices up by 19% and milk over 12%. Add-on the so-closed “shrinkflation” of paying more for smaller sized packs and there’s only one result.
High profits! Lidl has tripled its profits in the last year. Tescos is expecting the highest profits at over £3,000,000,000 (£3bn) this year! That’s three-thousand million pounds surplus over-and-above the costs of running the business!
Food prices are rising to increase their rate of profit and still they are crying poverty! They attempt to hide their greed and extortion by blaming the government. The big five set prices amongst themselves that bear little relation to the actual costs of production. £1 for an apple? You must be joking! They grow on trees!
Supermarkets are attacking increases in the minimum wage despite the fact that their employees cannot live on the minimum wage, have to apply for state help with welfare benefits to subsidise their wages (actually subsiding the employer paying low wages), and needing two or more jobs or massive overtime working to afford housing, heating and the very food they stack and serve.
The top directors and shareholders are making a killing. Tesco’s chairman’s “salary” doubled to more than £9.6 million last year. With pension rights and other dividends his personal income is way over £10m a year. Sainsbury’s boss got a 20% increase adding £1m a year to his £5+m annual salary. No-one deserve such income, especially when their private wealth comes from the artificially hiked prices we pay for the essentials we need.
The corporate bosses are attacking any potential higher taxation, saying they have to cut jobs to pay for increases in national insurance contributions, the increases which are needed to keep pace with the inflation that they are in part responsible for! They threaten us with job losses whilst arguing for Budget cuts to the State pensions, education and hospitals.
The supermarkets limit their tax liabilities to the minimum with off-shore arrangements and transnational corporate status, yet shout through TV-ad megaphones to build public support against increases to proper taxation of their high profits. The profits go into the pockets of wealthy shareholders themselves playing fast-and-loose with their private tax liabilities. They’re scamming us. Tax the Rich!
Supermarkets see the highest profit margins from the highly processed “cheap” foodstuffs, mass produced in low-wage factories. The production risks, transport costs and limited life of fresh food makes it far less profitable and are therefore discouraged by high pricing agreed between the supermarket cartel, ready meals encouraged in heavy advertising and clever “bargain” pricing. These industrially produced chemical “foodstuffs” barely contain any real nutrition.
Farmers, already plagued by extreme and unpredictable weather events caused by the deepening climate crisis are complaining of bullying and extortionate demands forced upon them by take-it-or-leave-it supermarket contractors. Migrant workers are subjected to horrific working practices and vulnerable to modern slavery to minimise the wholesale costs of fruit and vegetables and maximise the profits of this big corporations.
And the drive to minimise costs in order to maximise share prices is seeing agricultural land polluted by short-term chemical fixes, destroying the soil’s natural processes for replenishment, creating deserts in the regions we rely heavily upon for the import of food, and forcing human mass migration. We are facing global food shortages as a result.
Don’t cry for the supermarket bosses, and don’t believe their propaganda. Their entire system of food production and distribution is unsustainable, deeply destructive and highly exploitative of both the natural environment and of the working classes here and across the world. We have to organise for a fundamental transformation of food production.
We should revolt against their profiteering, challenge their shareholder’s demands for never-ending growth in profit margins, and not only tax them properly but cap the profits and dividends they are allowed to reap. Nutritional food should be human right for all, not a source of massive private wealth for a privileged few at our expense.

For a Party of the Working Class

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (22.7.25). I found myself in the interesting position of not being able to write this as part of any official mainstream organisation. It is the rule of the Trade Union Congress that representatives can only support the Labour Party. And it is the general policy of lobby and campaign groups not to be directly associated with any political party. There’s a dilemma. A new party of the working class will need affiliates from the broad progressive movements. Campaigns will have to pin their political colours to their masts and produce a confederation tied to a set of principles not unlike organisations of the working class across Europe and beyond. It demands an ideological and constitutional change away from the cosy neutrality of post-war reformism. All that is over and gone. The need for a new working class party is the result of the end of the old order and norms.

The working class needs a new Party. The level of representation of working class interests in the UK Parliament is as low as that if the 1910’s. Multi-millionaire career politicians preside on all sides.

The working class – those of us wholly reliant on wages and/or top-up welfare benefits – number 2/3rds if the population – at least 40 million people in England & Wales. Parliamentary decisions, over spending policies and laws governing our behaviour and beliefs, are made in the interests of the super-wealthy and their corrupt capitalist system.

We, the majority, have little voice. Our political representatives have a basic salary of at least twice the average wage, and can take additional jobs kowtowing to the corporate lobbyists. They oppose the regulation of working conditions, wages, housing conditions and rents, health standards and utility costs. Their talk of freedom is of the individual right to take liberties on charges and levels of exploitation to maximise profits, not the freedom from poverty and oppression. And now, the support for Israel amidst genocide, and rearmament towards a third world war is linked with widespread funding of individual MPS by Israeli lobby groups.

These self-interested politicians hold the Houses. 

Starmer’s Labour (and Blair’s before that) place growth in profitability way above the eradication of deprivation. The highest utility costs in the western world and poorest State pension, attacks on the paltry incomes of people with disabilities, blaming migrant labour despite their gross levels of cheap labour and servitude for the middle classes – that’s not a party for workers.

The Tories, from Thatcher to Cameron, Johnson to Sunak, mercilessly plundered the British Exchequor to enrich and engorge the billionaire class at the expense of every public service and all the essential needs of workers, whilst cutting their own tax liabilities to a minimum. 

The Liberals, yellow Tories now useless, devoid of that one chance at coalition given the lessons of when they threw working class students into decades of severe debt, capped redundancy pay, privatised Royal Mail (look how that worked-out for jobs and public services) and forced through cuts to health and welfare to expedite the new Age of Austerity. Not on our side.

And Reform UK, another Party of and for the Establishment, lead and funded by multi-millionaires and supported by rabid right wing billionaires based in the USA and Russia. For Farage’s patriotism read representation of the ultra wealthy, tax cuts for the rich, full privatisation of the NHS with further cuts to the new dilapidated public services, and spend tax money on war instead whilst destroying democracy and dividing working class communities through rampant racism.

As for the Greens, their broad church approach suggests workers and socialists are included yet, in practice, when running a Council in Britain or part of a coalition in Europe, they act purely on behalf of capitalism and attack workers on strike, reneging even on environmental promises.

None of these Parties represent or even care about working people. In our fragmented and polarised society, those with money are looking after themselves and their own at the expense of the many.

A Party of and for the working class would ensure class principles of collective organisation and solidarity, challenging the vast inequalities so apparent across the UK today. Taking hold of the resources of the world’s 6th richest economy, a government placing need above profit could redistribute our wealth to benefit the vast majority. 

In this world of plenty there should be no poverty, and therefore no billionaires. The super-rich can be legally bound to pay their taxes, to cap their prices, and to produce for the common good. The principles of working class solidarity would end Austerity, fight racism and welcome refugees, oppose oppression of minorities, fund welfare instead of warfare and militarisation of society, and take urgent action on climate change.

This is no dream world. The proposal for a new working class Party is on the table, and across the country, enthusiasm for these policies has already found electoral support at or above voting preferences identifying Labour, the current party of Government.

Everywhere, workers are demanding change – real change. In the absence of a progressive left-wing party, workers are turning to Reform UK as a protest vote despite its obvious contradictions. But this acceptance of racism and division is the greatest threat to our future safety and security.

The unity of the working class has to be created by the working class, organised and combined. 

Whilst Corbyn and Sultana have broadcast the call for a new Party it is up to ordinary workers of all communities and occupations to make it happen and decide its purpose and policies. 

A working class party, interpreting and realising the socialist call in the 21st Century, is now an urgent necessity: a society formed from the efforts each person according to their abilities and providing to each according to their needs. It’s time!

Workers’ control of production will require a revolution

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My weekly Comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (15.4.25), looking at one aspect of the current crisis of British Steel. Of course we want all utilities and public services nationalised, but under what governance exactly? There’s no reason for workers to trust State Capitalism – it simply maintains the competition and exploitation at the very heart of the System. Workers’ control of production will require a revolution.

The full unedited article here:

To eliminate poverty every essential product should be managed not for profit but for human need. Those needs are determined by the daily requirements for survival.
Every human being needs nutritious food, warm and dry shelter, protective clothing, love and nurturing, and education that ensures we learn how to look after ourselves and others. Socialism is the idea of a society that meets those needs for everyone – collective ownership of the means of production.
In a society of 67million human beings our needs have to be produced at scale. So we need mass production of food and housing and wherewithal, which in turn means we need large quantities of nutrients and bricks and materials, including steel for transport and buildings.
It becomes clear that these materials should be regarded as essential, not luxury items that we may also want but not need.

It stands to reason that all essential production should be considered as part of public services, socially organised. Private businesses do not operate according to social need, but rather for short-term private profit.
The fact that British Steel plc was privatised by Thatcher in 1988 and fleeced for shareholder profits ever since is a case in point. Steel is an essential social resource. If the Steel industry was publicly owned and controlled, the steel would be produced at cost, environmental concerns regulated and climate damage addressed, jobs valued, and the products – from building construction to railway lines – locally supplied.
As it is, British Steel has been a cash cow for private investors – shareholders seeking a maximum return on their money – for decades. Along the way they’ve sucked dry the blast-furnaces in Port Talbot and Llanwern, steel making in Teesside and the electric arc furnace in Rotherham.
The current crisis of the Scunthorpe steel plant is the latest example. The Dutch Corus Group bought BS in 1999, sold to Indian-registered company Tata Steel in 2010 who sold it in 2016 to Greybull Capital LLP for £1 in 2016, sucking-out its cash equity before going into insolvency in 2019.
Greybull is one of those predatory capitalist cowboy-firms buying vulnerable companies cheap and sucking them dry at the cost of thousands of jobs and livelihoods, including the Monarch Airline company.
The Chinese capitalist conglomerate Jingye bought British Steel from Greybull in 2020 promising huge investments, wanting a Made-in-Britain badge in the steel it supplies at market rates. The UK Governments pledged £3.2billion to support the UK’s steel industry, with more to come in the next few months.
Surely, throwing billions of tax-payers money at private companies makes no sense. Why couldn’t we just buy it for £1 and own and control it as an essential asset? Indeed, why did the State ever sell it off?
The answer is not economic but ideological. Successive governments, Tory, Tory/LibDem and Labour have all fully committed to the political philosophy of neoliberalism: free-market Capitalism – the opposite of socialism. First sponsored by President Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the belief is that the neoliberal State should not own anything that can make a profit for a private business.
Under this ideology, only when essential businesses go to the wall should the State intervene to bail out and protect shareholders for as limited time as possible. Hence the creeping privatisation of the NHS, and absurd ups-and-downs of the rail and bus industries, their profits wholly underwritten by our taxes. Socialism always and only for the super-rich, profits guarantee from the common wealth.
Now, as a Labour Government takes over the management of British Steel wielding statutory powers over the still privatised business, there are calls for renationalisation.
There are many forms and purposes of nationalisation. Capitalism required it for the reconstruction of industry after the Second World War. Indeed, Hitler’s fascist government, and Mussolini’s Italian fascist State utilised nationalisation as a tool of totalitarian control. It is not, of itself, a cure for poverty, unemployment, exploitation or oppression.
Trade unions like nationalisation of a certain kind. Democratic public ownership and control, with workers full engagement allows security of production and jobs despite market turbulence, able to deliver the goods for need not profit. Socialists demand workers’ control of industry.
In successive polls, at least 65% of the electorate like the idea of returning our services to public ownership – including water, energy, transport, the NHS and Royal Mail. Nationalism is seen as better than corporate ownership.
Starmer’s Labour government, like Blair’s before him, hates nationalisation, only ever doing so to protect the business owners for as short a time as possible. The Tories, now all-but defunct, agree. The millionaire Nigel Farage, executive director of Reform 2025 Ltd, the business behind the political party, Reform UK, bizarrely demands full nationalisation without compensation to the Chinese owners – at face-value a full-on socialist demand.
Bizarre because Reform UK is a thoroughly neoliberal organisation on the side of big business, seeking the smallest State possible with policies for privatisation of the NHS and against workers’ rights and State regulation. The arch-Nationalist Farage may pretend to be a friend of the working class ahead of the May elections, but there is nothing socialist about Reform UK.
The end of steel production here should not be an opportunity for false promises. The long-term failure of businesses to invest at all amongst the general industrial decline across the UK is a vindication of all of us who have warned against and opposed neo-liberalism from the start. This decaying corpse of a failed political creed represents a serious crisis for jobs and cost-of-living that demands we take control, in the collective interests of the working class not the careless greedy bosses.

The Banks are Funding the Fascists

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (22.10.24). The huge upsurge in organised racist protests have to be challenged on the streets, and in print, especially when this local newspaper prints so many letters from the far-Right. This was published before the national demonstration in London called by the fascist Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) who was imprisoned the day before it took place. The united front group, Stand Up To Racism correctly called a counter-protest, and two rallied at either end of Whitehall, London on 26th October: the racist anti-muslim march numbered over 25,000 brandishing giant Union Jacks and flags of Israel. The anti-racists saw 26 trade union banners, 13 General Secretaries and 3 MPs speak to upwards of 20,000. This is a warning from history. The fascists are well funded and better organised, and all those interested in democracy, freedom, multiculturalism, diversity and human rights had better step-up and take back our streets and workplaces. Or it will be, suddenly, too late. Fascists have called a regional South West demonstration on 30th November in Torquay and we are all required to mobilise to stop them.

There is almost universal agreement that the big banks and corporations wield too much power over humanity and are motivated by greed. The service or product they offer is secondary to the gross salaries of their owners and executives and the huge shareholder payouts. Theirs is the drive for a never-ending growth in profits, exploiting workers with productivity demands and low wages, exploiting the consumer with higher prices for low-quality goods, and evading their tax liabilities. 

The Forbes Rich List identifies around one-hundred large, transnational corporations that own just about everything, globally. The brand names we know are often subsidiaries or larger conglomerates with internal economies larger than entire countries. This reality is cited by economists as “monopoly capitalism”, consortia or cartels of individuals using inherited wealth to become wealthier and more powerful, scheming to beat all competition and corner markets, locally and globally.

The largest companies are headed by the world’s richest billionaires, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates being household names. There are 12 people who are worth more than £100,000,000,000, their fortunes growing by $220 billion in the past 6 months. 700 individuals are responsible for half the world’s wealth, their assets multiplying with nothing trickling down.

It is observable to all that the gap between rich and poor is obscene and unsustainable. And so the human world is descending into wars between the contending owners of wealth, and rising tensions inside each country between the classes competing for the right to life, liberty and social justice.

The United States of America holds the lease on the wealthiest and most powerful, the global economy remaining US-centric. Corporate power infects all of life, the natural world and the way we live. These corporations dominate not only our working lives but our media, our education systems, our environment, our diets, health and recreation. The actions of industry, why and how we produce things, is determined not by need but by profit margins. We see destruction everywhere as a direct consequence of this systemic dysfunction. If society were a family, we would require restraint of such predatory, gaslighting, sociopathic domination, the perpetrator judged to be breaking basic laws of acceptable behaviour. 

The deepening debate, nay, the conflict, is about how to overcome this tyranny.

Working people and our trade unions have long sought reforms for a greater share and more say – redistribution of wealth and power. It is becoming clear that no reforms are likely or even possible. The rich won’t have it.

To prevent us organising for a better society, they not only strengthen their laws against our protestations, but fund and encourage an ideology that says this state of affairs is natural and unchangeable. Theirs is the law of “survival of the fittest” by which is inferred the meanest, most violent, most self-centred should run the world.

Onto this stage has come the far-Right, rising once again across the western world and beyond, being organised into fascist parties and pretending to be in opposition to the billionaires but all the time working in their interests.

Fascism does not represent any sort of freedom or hope. Fascism is not anti-capitalist, just anti-democracy. It is the totalitarian domination of elite power, liquidating any inkling of human rights, equality or social justice. Fascism divides and scapegoats in order to destroy all sense of self-determination and personal freedom. Its main tools are hatred, spreading race-hate and misogyny and the promise of male-white-supremacy for the chosen few. Fascism is organising here, now.

We have seen fascism rise and be overthrown by mass mobilisations and at huge human cost through the twentieth century. We must learn the lessons of history, rise again and demonstrate our determination, in our millions – Never Again!

Revolt Against Inequality

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Published in the daily Plymouth Herald (12.3.24) soon after the Communities Secretary, Michael Gove (a far-Right racist) made his Statement to the House of Commons redefining “extremism” to target Muslim organisations that are charitable and promote peace. The obvious whipping-up of racism in front of national elections all-but back-fired as various civil liberties organisations challenged the attack as “ideological”. Nevertheless the Tories were always only speaking to their core voter base, and whipping-up the far-right extremists into more street violence. Whether they are a central purpose or a sideline, the divisions created inside the working class have to be challenged and defeated, otherwise we all perish.

We live in the most extreme of societies. In a country of 67 million human beings, the UK hosts 177 billionaires, their mutual wealth growing by £35billion to almost £1trillion last year, their numbers swelling from profits made during the COVID epidemic. The richest 10 of them own as much as the poorest 5 million of us.

One billion is one-thousand-million. To count to one million, at a rate of one number each second without pause or sleep, would take 12 days. To count to one billion would take 32 years. 

There is no comparison between millionaires and billionaires. To own a billion pounds is to live an extreme existence, above and outside of society. And most UK billionaires are multi-billionaires. Jim Ratcliffe, of the steel company Ineos is worth £30billion, his company extracting billions in surpluses from the huge increases in charges for oil and gas. 

Household appliance manufacturer, James Dyson has £23billion, the ultra-landlord Duke of Westminster £10billion – £9billion of it inherited without paying a penny in tax. Not to mention Charlie Boy, “Basher Bill” and the rest of “The Firm” living off our backs.

Together they make their money from exploiting the workers at home and abroad, extracting the surplus between the wages they pay us and the price they charge us for the goods produced by us. 

The three named here have wealth and power beyond our imagination through over-charging us for the essential heating, housing and hygiene we have to purchase. This is the case for all the 700 billionaires in the world, together owning more than nearly two-thirds of the World’s wealth. 700 versus 8,000,000,000 people – now that’s extreme!

You only get that rich through ruthless competition, destruction of challengers, the most extreme exploitation of the natural environment and mass of the world’s working class. Death and immiserisation on an industrial scale.

No-one needs the wealth of a billionaire. It is the most extreme travesty, producing a cruel lottery of birth that determines entitlement or poverty for life. 

The vast majority of us live our entire lives on a total income of a minuscule fraction of theirs to a point where the ruling class have no idea of our day to day experiences. Such extreme division is of no positive benefit to society, completely undermining democracy and human rights.

The Corporate executives – the Capitalist class – lobby and buy-off the politicians to do their bidding. The current outrage about the racist and misogynistic outbursts of Frank Hester, OBE, who donated £10million to the Tory Party is a single case in point. Hester is sole owner of a £1billion company granted £400million of NHS and prison contracts in the last 8 years. An extreme return on investment.

Yet, with typical hypocrisy, the UK government now seeks to label those who challenge such extremism as the real extremists. The new rules propose that anyone who challenges the current status quo is a potential threat to the Nation. We who expose the lies, who condemn the warmongering, who demand investment in social welfare – we are extremists allied with terrorists!

Are we extremists when we openly condemn the corruption that has seen at least £40billion of tax-payers money pocketed by private individuals through the COVID pandemic? Is it a threat to the Nation when we challenge the allocation of multi-billion contracts for the NHS to members of politician’s families?

Is it extreme to expose the multi-faceted scandal of record profits from fossil fuels whilst 12 million of us live in fuel poverty, 2 million of us are reliant on food banks, and 1 in 3 of our children suffer poor nutrition?  Are we supporting terrorism when we show that their industries endanger the future of all humanity by warming and polluting the Planet?

Even when they promise to “level-up” they prove themselves liars – less than 10% of infrastructure commitments met. The rich don’t want to spend our tax money on us. 

Is it extreme to challenge the enormous growth in the profits from sales of weapons to countries openly committing genocide, enforced migration and ethnic cleansing? 

The latest announcements by Sunak and Gove seeking to curtail democratic rights and workers’ voices are not policies promoting fairness and open society. And the Labour Opposition has supported the policy but argues it doesn’t go far enough!

 The real extremists are labelling all those opposing them as extremists! These are the policies of the real extremists in government,  seeking to maintain the corrupt privilege and power of their class by shutting down any and all challenge.

They have played the “race card” in front of the General Election, falsely labelling all Muslims as terrorists and promoting racism in an ideological offensive aimed at dividing the working class and distracting us from the real cause of our woes – the greed and violence of the ruling class.

This is class warfare. The ultimate aim of the ruling class is to atomise the working class, preventing any and all protest or collective action. We have to fight to stop them. Those truly in support of democracy, free speech, human rights and social justice must oppose this latest declaration of their supremacy over our rightful legitimacy of Faith and ethnicity, of skin colour, of gender identity, and of collective organisation including the trade union right to strike. If that labels us as extremists, so be it.

The Time has Come to Revolt Against Inequality!

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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.