Tag: farage

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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UK must Not Accept the Euqivalent of US’s ICE!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (13.01.2026) making the links between ICE in the USA and the political direction of travel in the UK. It’s obvious really. If you agree, please build the largest ever anti-racist/anti-fascist protest in London on 28th March. You have time to recruit at least 10 of your colleagues and friends, through patient explanation and exposure of the implications of a far-Right government in Britain by 2029.

UK must Not Accept the Euqivalent of US’s ICE!

The media headlines were bold. “Bring ICE to Britain, says Farage” and “Trump should put Starmer on trial, says Tommy Robinson”.
The racist ultra-nationalist, Farage, multi-millionaire owner of the ReformUK brand, would wish to see hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people of colour from across Britain snatched from their homes and workplaces and forcibly expelled.
The fascist misogynistic white-supremacist, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, is so keen on national sovereignty that he would like a foreign President to reign over us, and accepts cash from fascist groups from across Europe and the USA. He wants to see millions of Black and Brown British citizens rounded-up and deported.
The violence implicit in both far-right leaders is for all to see. Britain’s far-Right are applauding the violence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Trump’s federal law enforcement agency under the Department of Homeland Security. In 2025 more than 131 people died while in ICE detention, agents filmed pepper-spraying clergy and medical staff, tear-gassing children and systematically terrorising Latino communities.
ICE is a $12BN armed paramilitary wing of the central State, empowered to carry out armed raids on schools, hospitals, courts, places of worship, weddings, funerals and workplaces. These involve raids by masked agents carrying automatic weapons who drive unmarked armoured vehicles.
ICE targets people of colour, anywhere and everywhere, regardless of their status.
ICE is a paramilitary group, intentionally recruiting from the volunteers of the organised far-Right, encouraged to pursue a racist white-supremacist ideology. Trump openly targeted the Somali community in Minneapolis, calling them “garbage”.
The video of a high court judge, a Black citizen, assaulted by ICE in a supermarket car park offers one picture of the millions of public assaults taking place across the USA with, as vice-President Vance insists, total immunity from legal challenge or charge. No rules.
Other film shows women being dragged across tarmac roads and beaten, children forcefully taken from private residencies, families crammed into wired cages without proper sanitation or drinking water. This is the imagery of a fascist state, of Hitler’s militia in 1930’s Nazi Germany, of the concentration camps across fascist Europe a century ago.
The murder in Minneapolis of Renee Good, 37-year old mother, shot three times in the head by an ICE agent, was greeted by Trump suggesting she deserved to die and labelling Renee as a ”professional agitator”. Thankfully, more than one thousand protests took place across America last weekend by those who do care, chanting “ICE is Trump’s Gestapo!” and “No justice, no peace—get Ice off our streets!”
A month earlier more than 7 million Americans marched against Trump. Opposition and challenge to the President’s federal boot-boys is rising, from elected officials and Police through to local white citizens outraged by such flagrant injustice and ready to defend multiculturalism and democracy.
The anti-racist majority in Britain today, thus far quite quiet and acquiescent, had better get out in the streets too. We have to show the far-Right that we will not accept the equivalent of ICE in the UK.
Whilst Starmer and Mahmood seek to appease the racists with tougher immigration laws and the incarceration of civil rights protesters, Farage and Yaxley-Lennon are preparing for power. They are stating their racist intentions should Farage be prime minister. Yaxley-Lennon is building his Black Shirt street squads in preparation for a far-Right government that will target and scapegoat minorities in order to divide the working class and rule by fear. Trump offers them a blueprint, and they are applauding him.
We have to get organised and get active here, now. Down with racism and fascism! Join and build https://www.togetheralliance.org.uk

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Here’s Hoping for a Happy New Year!

Tony Staunton1 Comment

My final weekly comment column of 2025 in the daily Plymouth Herald (30.12.25) inevitably rounding-up my priorities for the coming year, whilst coldly acknowledging how much more needs to be addressed. No, I haven’t mentioned Your Party, not from any lack of commitment but because this new socialist potential will only succeed by the action it takes to secure the priorities as listed below. If it is yet another organisation created of and for itself, a Party existing in order to simple exist, then it will fail. The point is to raise the socialist banner high and, most importantly, know what we’re fighting for!

Here’s hoping for a Happy New Year!

New Year, whichever and whenever it occurs for you, offers space for reflection as well as projection. The Gregorian calendar fixes ours as 1st January each year, irrespective of the position of the sun or the moon, but close enough to the winter solstice to symbolise new light and fresh beginnings.
New Year is worthy of a wish list, fresh aspirations. In a human world of significant turmoil and uncertainty, so much needs fixing that it’s difficult to prioritise. But here goes. Let’s hope in 2026:

  1. The fascist-led racist movements of Farage and Yaxley-Lennon are finally and overwhelmingly defeated by mass mobilisations of working class people outraged by racism and misogyny and challenging the false culture-wars that decry empathy as weakness;
  2. The £13billion a year UK tax-funding for illegal nuclear weapons of indiscriminate mass-destruction is ended, the cash transferred into the National Health Service to fully fund our health and welfare needs rather than warfare. Let’s also ensure an anti-racist campaign in hospitals to value the one-in-three doctors working here from oversees, and encourage our health staff to stay because we value, not abuse, them. Oh, and ensure the NHS is protected from plans to fully privatise our services – the selling of our health records to the private corporation Palantir to be roundly rejected;
  3. An emergency plan for funding to address the housing crisis, including skills apprenticeships for our unemployed young people, for good quality new build of social housing and refurbishment of our 13 million homes in need of repair and insulation, placing rent caps and legal liabilities on private landlords and taxing large landlords to fund the reparations they should have undertaken;
  4. The end of this seemingly endless period of Austerity economics, where workers wages have stagnated since the banking crisis of 2008, our real spending-power actually fallen despite our taxes bailing out the banks without any prosecutions or detriment to the bankers incomes, dividends and bonuses. End the low wage long working hours culture where employers are subsidised by our taxes to keep our wages low. Make the rich pay proportionally the same taxes as the working class instead of being allowed to hide their riches in off-shore accounts;
  5. The acceleration, depth and seriousness of the Climate Crisis is finally accepted and understood, all the lies and denial defeated and replaced by urgent action to end emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, Britain playing a lead role on the international stage to force climate action onto the US Presidency and win funding for the vital transformation of the world economy away from oil and gas and into funded renewable energy delivery North and South. Stop subsidising the oil companies who are reaping record profits from inflated prices causing our fuel poverty;
  6. Child poverty is ended, the 1 in 3 working class kids no longer deprived of some of the basics of life, and our schools refunded under state control;
  7. The genocidal racist Netanyahu is brought to trial and jailed, his far-Right government collapsed. Starmer’s Government support for Zionism and funding of arms to Israel is ended, the protesters against the persecution of Palestinians vindicated and applauded.
    There are so many more issues that must be addressed. Well, we have to live in hope. We are in a period of very fast moving human history, and nothing is impossible. The course of human history has always been determined by the mass movements of working people, not the feeble compromises of the self-promoting political class.
    Best wishes for a campaigning New Year for Peace with Social Justice!
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Welfare not Warfare and Militarism!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (25.3.25), raving mad about the benefits cuts. This is an attack on the poorest and most vulnerable in society, grabbing-back cash wherever possible to fund rearmament and war. This is militarism and authoritarianism, and must be defeated. We shall protest, demonstrate, campaign and oppose.

The full script below:

Say a Big Lie loud enough, long enough and across all the media and, probably, it will become an accepted Truth. Unless challenged by a louder voice.
“There’s no money” is most easily challenged when you see the government finding huge sums – billions and billions of tax-payers pounds – for war, rearmament and militarisation of society. “There’s no money” rings hollow even to the most unthinking when the numbers of individual with billions of pounds double in their own number and become, not billionaires but multi-billionaires, flaunting their wealth and the power it brings.
Of course there’s the money, it’s just not for us, the working classes.
To build the Lie, the Government is pitching those in work against those reliant on welfare benefits, broadcasting the despicable Big Lie that people are pretending to be disabled and should be forced back into minimum wage alienated employment to ensure the economic “Growth” that clearly only benefits the super-rich.
Journalists trawl through hundreds of street vox-pops to find the one disgruntled, downbeaten sod so hopeless as to hate her disabled neighbour for getting a Personal Independence Payment (PIP) instead of her. Those who call disabled people “scrounges” are at best one-step away from an accident or illness that will render them reliant on precisely the welfare they condemn. And it won’t be there for them when they need it.
Capitalism breeds individual competition from the bottom-up.
More than 1 million people in Britain will lose their disability benefits next Spring, losing mobility, dignity, help and hope. Welfare cuts are set to be part of tomorrow’s spring statement ‘package’ which will also involve planning reform, Whitehall cuts and regulation cuts.
Starmer’s condemnation of our civil services, “doing a Musk” in slashing the departments that coordinate and provide our social infrastructure, is a far-Right populist propaganda Big Lie meant to appease the forces of reaction. It will only encourage them.
A Labour government focus on attacking the poor and the dispossessed has happened before, but not to such a level as this that would make Thatcher’s eyes water. Blame the refugees, Stop the Boats are the slogans of a false narrative that obscures the barbaric levels of disparity between the Rich and the Poor in this country. For the record, the tax-costs of refugees is a minute fraction of the costs of our Health & Welfare Services, and an even smaller fraction of the hundreds of billions of pounds due but unpaid by the richest 5% of Britains.
The welfare bill is not spiralling out of control. It is at the same level as 2013, lower than 2020. The benefits cuts will save less than £5billion by 2030 to pay for an extra £6billion going into arms production. A Wealth Tax, not the same as Income Tax, skimming 2% from the personal wealth of those super-rich owning more than £10million would pull-in £24billion to the Exchequor over the same period. The rich would hardly notice the top-slice.
But the rich try not to pay any tax. There is a loss to to our budgets of at least 30% through fraud and evasion of tax due by the rich, amounting to upwards of £130billion. Yet Reeves is sacking the civil servants who could chase the money down and replenish our coffers for health and education.
And whilst just 0.2% of welfare benefits are fraudulently claimed, less than £1billion, that is what the toady journalists seize upon, not the corruption of the rich, who want us to blame the poor to take the heat off themselves.
Britain has a low pay, long working hours culture, where those with capital are free to exploit the ordinary working person. One of the core reasons we are seeing a rise in mental distress and long-term ill-health is the impact of demeaning employment, the bullying and repetitive mindless labour of low-paid shit employment ensuring a life of subsistence, demoralising us into hopelessness.
Britain’s “free-market deregulation, already extreme compared with most countries in the world, is being enhanced to allow Landlords to extort more and get welfare tax-cash to top-up their outrageous rent hikes, employers to extort more without inspection, cashing-in on Universal Credit to pay an unliveable minimum minimum wage topped-up by the tax-payer for their maximum profit.
We, the working class, are unaffordable, we’re told. Despite being the ones that pay the taxes – the Rich simply do not – we are ineligible for any rebate. We are being heckled and smeared to compete for an ever thinner slice of a mouldering cake.
It can be different: Rent caps to ensure affordable housing for all; a £15 minimum wage to end the need to claim UC uplifts; regulations enforcing a legal obligation for landlords to keep tenancies healthy and habitable; home refits to reduce energy costs; a 2% increase in taxes on income over £80,000pa; the cancellation of the US-leased Trident nuclear weapons programme freeing-up at least £210billion for welfare.
The money’s there! But Starmer, Badenoch and Farage aren’t going to redistribute any of Britain’s wealth back to the working class who produced it. We’re going to have to fight them for it. We must challenge Austerity #2 and Militarism. Welfare not Warfare!