Here’s my weekly comment column sent to the Plymouth Herald for publication on 20th October – the same day as Nigel Farage was speaking to 300 loyal RUKs at Plymouth’s arena (which holds 2,500!), My article was sent to lawyers and declined – only the second time I’ve been cut in a full three years of weekly columns. The Herald published pages of interview with Farage, allowing his bile full publicity. The question is why? I will not fall into conspiracy theories and editorial alliances, but instead observe that local newspapers are extremely afraid of litigation, probably because of cost rather than reputational damage, used as a tool by those with power to bully and cajole. Ironically the UK press is probably more constrained than in the USA. Of course, with 85% of all media owned by billionaires, there’s little chance of either unbiased or objective investigative journalism. I have raised the simple issue of the lack of space for any commentary or statements to the Left of the Labour Party, leaving all socialist commentary and ideas strictly curtailed if not invisible. Yet socialists number in our millions here, and socialist movements across the USA and Europe are growing is scale and activity very fast. Given Britain’s political history its more than ironic, isn’t it, and a signal of an increasingly authoritarian right wing society. We must protest, and we did on the day!
I’ve added below a similar comment, probably defamatory by comparison with mine, published in London by an associate, as an example of the differences in editorial control. And a picture of our 100+ people protest outside the Farage rally. Anyway, here’s the unpublished article. See what you think.
The moment you believe that every criticism is a lie, that each alternative view is nonsense, that every allegation is false, all rational inquiry is gone. Such is the closed mind of the bigot.
The bigot is obstinate and unreasoning, laid rigid in a coffin of narrow-minded opinion, buried by intolerance.
Racism is a form of bigotry. Racism is the opinion that humans can be divided into separate races with human traits and capacities that produce inherent superiority of a particular race. Racism is an idea with no scientific fact to back it up. Politicians use racism, so-called “anti-woke” bigotry, sexism and prejudice to bolster their personal power and control.
Racism is having a renaissance, being made respectable by political groups furthering their own self-interest by spreading fear and loathing of “others”. For example, the idea that some human beings are “illegal” is broadcast so loudly that it is being stated as “fact”.
No human being is illegal. Those attacking “the illegals” are focussed upon people arriving on boats without a visa or prior agreement to enter the UK. The Law says the process is illegal, not the person.
The person risking a small boat to get into Britain is seeking asylum from conditions they faced elsewhere that, frankly, anyone with ability would seek to flee from. You would. But, unlike most other countries – States who have taken-in and accepted far more asylum seekers than has Britain – there is no legal route here for a person to claim asylum before they are in the country.
The Tories passed the Nationality and Borders Act in 2022, stating that if a person is in danger in their country of origin or residence and want the UK to grant them international protection, they can only claim asylum once they are in the UK. It is not possible to claim asylum from outside the UK. Most people in peril have no choice but to enter the UK without permission. There is no legal route.
Any reasonable human being would agree that the law should be changed in order to allow asylum seekers a “safe route” to apply. This would end the flow of boats and the business of those profiteering from human suffering and death by drowning.
Instead, the chancers and ideologues of the far-Right are using the situation they themselves have created to win power and influence and personal wealth. It is no coincidence that most of the prominent Tory MPs who pushed that law back in 2022 are now prominent members of Reform UK. They created the “enemy” around which they could organise reactionary opinion, hoping to regain the votes the Tories lost through their avarice and incompetence when in government.
These established racists have produced a false demon that they cannot easily control. The fascist gangs are on the streets. All Farage can do is up-the-racism! Farage’s party is intensifying the bigotry as it faces more competition from the fascist parties, promising the end of asylum altogether. Restore Britain, Rupert Lowe’s far-Right breakaway from Reform UK, is soaking up votes from Farage by promoting hatred of Muslims and Black people.
The racist Reform candidates displayed on ITV, screaming to deport all Asian people from Britain and training up white men to drag Muslims from their homes are competing with Restore Britain for credentials as the true British Fascists. The fascist street thugs, the Blackshirt bigots are baying for blood. They must be exposed and put down.
Nigel Farage is in-league with them, challenging for leadership of an authoritarian establishment based upon white male supremacy. He should not be welcome in Plymouth!
My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (13.10.2026), reacting off-the-cuff to Monday’s Prime Ministerial announcement of forthcoming talks with the European Union. I have no doubt its all about rearmament, but at the same time the wily Burnham is using the angst of the middle class voters to blame Austerity on Brexit, rebuilding the liberal vote for the Labour Party. The idea that Brexit is behind the current economic crisis appears almost hegemonic. Of course it didn’t help, but it’s not the source of the cost-of-living crisis nor much to do with the enormous shift of wealth from the poor to the super-rich everywhere. We really have to call out the disinformation and political sleight-of-hand.
The unedited version below (not my headline – I don’t do first-person!). Please scroll down to the bottom of the page for the subscribe button on the right-hand side!
Those of us on “The Left” who voted to “Leave” are not about to be cowed into submission. Burnham’s ploy of uniting the middle class vote behind Labour in pursuit of a fresh “Remain” campaign is cynical in the extreme. There is nothing benign or at all socialist about the European Union. Europe has never been a friend of the working class.
It is worth remembering. Some 52 percent opted for exit, on a turnout of 72 percent, higher than almost any general election. They did so in the face of opposition from three quarters of MPs, the leadership of all three of the biggest parliamentary parties — the Conservatives, Labour and the Scottish National Party — the overwhelming bulk of British industry and almost every major capitalist institution, from the Bank of England to the International Monetary Fund.
Why? Europe is, and was formed as, a Bosses Club. The European Parliament was created as the frontpiece, the cover, just as are national parliaments, for promotion of regional competition on the world stage – the advantage of Capitalist corporations in competition with Russia and China for the plunder of resources from Africa and India and South America. Sometimes in league with the USA, sometimes independently.
The European Union is a neoliberal organisation acting in the interests of European capital. It has forced the Greek people and then most of the rest into the economic stranglehold and poverty of austerity, cutting social welfare provision and pay rates in pursuit of free trade agreements to raise the rate of profit accumulated by the big corporations sitting inside its borders.
Britain would have been no better off staying inside the European Market. Oh, perhaps a few of the larger UK based companies would have benefited, but not us workers. Just look at the protests on the streets of Paris and Berlin and Madrid. In 2026 our working class youth are suffering irrespective of national borders. Youth unemployment, wages too low to live on, a raging housing crisis caused by rapacious landlords, cuts to all social provision from health and social care through to pensions. The experience of the economic crisis in Britain is precisely the same in both cause and conditions across Europe and beyond – heightened exploitation in pursuit of private profit. All the wealth we produce gets sucked-up through inflated salaries of the management and into the offshore bank accounts of the big investors and corporate executives.
At the time of the vote back in 2016, Europe was viciously enforcing neoliberalism across the continent, breaking democracy and sovereign States like Greece, and it hasn’t let-up since. In Britain the vote was, above all else, a rebellion by working class people who feel they have had their lives torn apart by the ruling elite. Two-thirds of those classified as skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers voted to leave, compared to just 43 percent among those in “intermediate” or “higher” managerial, professional or administrative roles.
And it wasn’t as simple as a vote for racism. A third of Asian and a quarter of black voters chose Leave. Large, ethnically diverse cities in the north of England voted for exit — including Sheffield, Birmingham and Bradford. Racism was obvious on the Leave side, where anti-immigrant arguments from the UK Independence Party (now Reform UK) and Conservative politicians played a prominent role, especially in the final weeks of campaigning.
In the final weeks of the Brexit campaign, xenophobia and scapegoating spewed out by the press and politicians to deflect from anger over austerity and privatisation. Many principled people voted Remain with good anti-racist reasoning. It was never a clean or clear-cut poll between opposites.
Class consciousness played a core role in the Brexit vote. This was not about the vacuous superficiality of European travel or buying a second home in the Algarve – the freedom of the wealthy few. The vote was about the pain of Austerity imposed by the collapse of the corrupt banking system in 2008-9. Wage labourers were hurting bad back then, and still are.
It’s all happening again! This time, as the world economy dives into fresh chaos, the ruling class are using racism and the threat of war as tools to suppress our discontent. Sections of the British Ruling Class were hurt badly by Brexit. The moves to “rejoin” Europe are precepts for emergency rearmament, the military-industrial complex seeking cross-border cooperation to maximise market penetration and profit. Burnham is arguing for Britain’s pride of place in the coming wars against Russia and China. And he’s using the sham of rejoining Europe to fool us all.
Instead, socialists should combine struggles against racism with struggles against the wider attacks on the working class – a major uprising against the cost-of-living crisis. Join with the mass strikes across Europe for international working class unity, not the European Union of Capitalist Profiteers! End Austerity!
My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (6.10.26), mourning the lost opportunities for a class fight against privatisation and Austerity in Britain. Look to the French! And Spanish! Today’s mass strike in France is the key element – workers remain key to wealth creation and when we down tools we have key collective power at the point of production. Simple, but so hard to achieve. Protest does work, to a limited extent and inside the confines of social democracy. Mass Strike works whatever the society. Student protests tend to lead to mass strike when workers see their children attacked by the State, coshed, shot at and their hands blown-off if not murdered. Today’s mass strike in France has already won concessions against pay cuts. In Spain the protests have forced a General Election. this is all what has to happen here – a socialist workers’ mass revolt, not a White Riot!
The edited version is printed here. Please expand the pic at the bottom to read the published article. And please subscribe to this Blog by clicking the button in the bottom right-hand corner.
In an Emergency, Break the Glass!
There is a case for violent riots. As Martin Luther King said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.” There are a lot of people unheard in the world. There is a general sense here, too, that we have very little say over our lives or concern for our needs.
Looking across at Europe right now, perhaps we, too, should be breaking glass to regain our voice. The protests in France and Spain are advisory. School students in France have taken to the streets to publicise the terrible state of schools and colleges. They have been soundly beaten by Police, shooting them with rubber bullets. In response some have resorted to violence.
It is a core human condition of basic justice that “self defence is no offence”. No government, no municipal authority, no educational body has taken any of the students long-standing grievances on board. At heart, the extreme weather this summer has brought issues to the boil. Classrooms were at over 35 degrees centigrade, impossible to learn in, and now as winter approaches, they’re down to 15C. No-one can learn in these conditions, and shouldn’t be expected to.
Nor can anyone teach properly in these dilapidated state schools. On United Nations’ (UN) World Teachers’ Day yesterday, teachers in France took strike action and stood with the students, demanding new funding and reparations to the crumbling education estate. Unions are staging a mass strike today. France has experienced the neoliberal onslaught more recently but much faster than Britain, with €46 Billion in cuts now in train. To date, French workers have fought back against privatisation and austerity in a way we have not, with huge protests and strike action. The French government weakens and falls back one step at a time, yesterday withdrawing plans to lower wages further but continueing to freeze pensions. The protests continue. All power to the working class!
In Spain, last weekend’s street violence, perpetrated by incredibly violent policing worthy of the fascist regime of General Franco, has been challenged by a mass outpouring of anger against the injustice of the housing markets. The protests have been so large that they have forced a General Election! Local people have been forced into poverty and squalor by speculators playing the market to raise the price of homes ridiculously above anything working class people can possibly afford. In response, landlords have raised rents to prices that defy value and overwhelm the wages of most.
When those with wealth are free from rules and regulations, devoid of legal or moral constraint, they run riot. It is the rich who are violently assaulting the working classes everywhere, copying each other internationally in pursuit of private wealth at the expense of the majority. This has long been the case in Britain, one of the first countries to adopt the neoliberal economic model as an experiment, imposed by the International Monetary Fund in the 1970’s.
Margaret Thatcher ensured the privatisation and eradication of our council housing stock that has led to today’s deep housing crisis. Her legacy, with plaudits from today’s annual conference of the defunct Tory Party, includes the highest number of people sleeping rough ever recorded. In England we have 135,000 households living in temporary accommodation including 176,000 children. It will take 119 Years to clear housing waiting lists. We have parasitic housing corporations charging exorbitant service charges for home maintenance never delivered.
The hikes in housing costs here are unaffordable and, in their consequences, wholly illegitimate. And yet the Tories and their ex-colleagues who have fled to Reform UK, braying in their respective conferences, are promising more deregulation and more free market competition, planning to suck the very lifeblood out of working class people.
In comparison with the French and Spanish, we have just let the deep crisis across all social services happen, unopposed. We few who do shout out are bombarded by screaming Blackshirts saying the housing crisis is all the fault of migrants, the schools dilapidation caused by Black children and Muslims. These racists are the lackeys of the landlords, whipped-up by flagrant lies to secure and protect the exploitation of the property-owning elite. Fooled.
There is another way. We can fight back. Take to the streets. Demand housing regulation, legally enforced rent caps, public investment in education and social care. Learn from workers and students in France and Spain. That’s the element of rejoining Europe worthy of chasing!
My weekly Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (29th September 2026), addressing the Labour Party Conference from afar. This was written a day before Burnham’s speech which sought to rally a beleaguered Party around working class issues. I stand by what I wrote. It was pie-in-the-sky with sleight-of-hand pledges, for example, cutting the pensioners triple-lock security while promising unspecified future help with social care. No mention of the challenge of rising fascism, racism and misogyny, and whispered asides on climate change and war. Capitalism is in global polycrisis globally and this Prime Ministerial address drowned in its denial. Time will unravel the pledges and expose the deceit.
Below is my unedited draft, or please expand the picture to read the published version. I would not have chosen their headline. Here’s mine.
We need an international socialist movement
When a prime minister declares they will not be calling a general election you can be sure they’re under mounting pressure to do so. The honeymoon period, the “Burnham Bounce”, is already over. Burnham is facing a winter of crisis and chaos borne of Austerity economics, war and climate catastrophe.
Political activists, left, right and centre wanted to see the back of Starmer. Whatever your concern, he wasn’t helping. Of course, in a class society based upon extremes of wealth and deprivation, individual power and competition, you can’t please everyone all the time. But it takes a special skill to please no-one at all.
You have to choose sides and take a political position. And Burnham has.
Quietly, and with a smile that Starmer could never manage, he’s carrying-on the same old “pro-growth” Great Lie of all his predecessors. In this rapacious class society, “growth” and “re-industrialisation” can only mean more profits for the super-rich and their corporations, almost exclusively the military-industrial complex.
Labour, as always, ends up doing the jobs for the Rich that the Tories couldn’t get away with.
How? By tying the trade union leadership to its governmental coat tails. Generally, unions don’t fight a Labour Government even when their members re under terrible assault. The collective strike wave of 1978-9, labelled by Tories as the “Winter of Discontent” was an exception driven very much “from below” by workers plunged into poverty by Labour policies forcing wage restraint and welfare cuts amidst high inflation.
Overall, UK poverty was lower in 1979 than today despite a much larger economy. The rich have gotten richer, billionaires’ wealth rising five times as fast as the average earner.
The lack of TU action has allowed the far-Right to fill the vacuum of zero representation for the beleaguered working class. It’s happened time-and-again in our history. But this time the level of fascist organisation across the world funds and informs the most serious threat to democracy.
Yet Burnham is looking rightwards, seeking to compete and placate the racist bigots when he should be beating back the corrupt profiteering of the super-rich landlords and corporate executives.
Rather than taxing the super-rich and spending the money on council homes, he’s announced loans from the taxpayer for the private purchase of first homes, protecting the profits of the banks and mortgage companies.
Rather than repealing Tory laws and producing a legal and safe application route for asylum seekers, he’s using the refugees from the global south as whipping posts to outdo the neo-fascists.
Rather than publishing last year’s UK government climate national security report suppressed by Starmer, he’s briefing other governments on impending collapse of ecosystems across the world whilst opening-up Rosebank and other fossil fuel sources at home.
Rather than damning Israel’s genocide in Gaza he’s still licensing the supply of weapons made in the UK to Israel, and allowing the United States to use UK bases to wage Trump’s illegal wars in Iran and Yemen.
Through all this runs the reason why the ruling capitalist class sometimes prefer the ostensibly pro-worker Labour Government to an honestly pro-Capitalist class Tory or Reform led government. Labour can get away with more without a class war.
Labour plays the bait-and-switch approach, offers the sweetener for the bitter pill, provides a prettier fig-leaf over the latest abuse, the window-dressing hiding the back-stage offensive.
So give a small amount of extra cash to councils and communities to cover-up the massive tax-allowances to the finance corporations.
Allow Milliband wax-lyrical about green energy targets whilst continuing to subsidise and protect fossil-fuel use and the extreme profits of the oil companies.
Labour has not committed to anything called “socialist” for many generations now. Callaghan made cuts to the Welfare State much larger in one full-swoop than anything Thatcher managed. Blair privatised more of the public estate than any other prime minister ever. Starmer followed in Blair’s shadow, and worse.
Capitalists depend on our taxes to fund the modicum of social infrastructure they need for workers to be fit enough and able to travel to work. We pay for our health and social care, not them. Sometimes they accept a about Government to rebuild the modicum of social infrastructure they need for workers to be fit enough and able to travel to work. We pay for our health and social care, not them.
Burnham is not a socialist. He’s a player. And his Labour government will continue the role of administering Capitalism on behalf of the interests of the capitalist ruling class. This will result in more racism and persecution of minorities, more war, more climate chaos, more inequality and poverty.
And every Party to the Right will produce an even worse result.
The political divide is strengthening across Europe and the US with new socialist forces growing rapidly. It’s time to reassert international socialist principles and fight for workers’ rights. In Germany the far-Right has electorally taken the East whilst the big cities have shifted far to the socialist Left. In the United States the openly Democratic Socialist Party has endured the election of Mamdani in New York and is building a serious left alternative to Trump’s militarism, racism and misogyny.
Its time to reassert socialist principles and fight for workers’ rights. Declare yourself a socialist, for a system based upon meeting human need not private profit, challenging exploitation and oppression, for equality, Peace, climate action and redistribution of wealth to eradicate poverty now!
My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (22.9.26), predicting more of the Austerity ideology trying to make us pay for profits and war. The Budget looms, the call for cuts to benefits raises to a crescendo, and the organised working class has to fight or pay up. Mine has been a lifetime in the socialist and trade union movements, now long-toothed enough and battle scarred sufficiently to know the primary cause of our descent – the falsehoods spun by reformist leaders projecting two lies – the first that gradual improvements come from patient negotiations with receptive employers, and the second, that “workers won’t fight”. The truth, as shown by the Cancer Research Strikers only this week, is that workers are ready to fight with the correct leadership offering a positive and militant strategy. Very soon, workers will have to defy their nay-saying leaders and take collective action against their advice and, if necessary, the Law, in order to survive. That is the socialist perspective in the face of the poly crisis of 2026.
The unedited version below, or expand and read the picture to read the published article.
Ideas are a central element of class struggle. Our security and welfare is currently as much under attack from ideology as from war and climate. Every day we are assaulted by media predictions of global chaos, whilst “at home” we are threatened by experts telling us we, the People, are too expensive.
Wall to wall capitalist propaganda says demands we tighten our belts: cut support for low-paid workers, pensioners and the disabled. Its all Lies! The money’s there!
We, the People, are not the problem. Britain is more wealthy today than it has ever been.
Check it out. On average, Britons today have access to far more goods, services, technology, healthcare, education, housing amenities, and infrastructure than people of the 1950’s to 2000’s, the inter war years, Victorian Britain or earlier periods.
According to the Office for National Statistics, the country possesses an enormous stock of property, financial assets, physical possessions, businesses, infrastructure, and pension funds. The UK’s median net wealth sits at roughly $125,000 per adult making us the world’s 6th largest economy out 193 countries.
Britain is neither “broken” nor poor. Britain is richer than ever. But the “sense” of living here denies the statistics. Real incomes have stagnated compared with the rapid growth of the post-war decades. Wealth is distributed extremely unevenly. The richest 10% of British households hold around 43% of wealth, while the poorest half – that’s 35 million of us – hold about 9%. The rich have hoarded the overwhelming majority of the wealth created by the productivity of the working class.
We live in extremes of wealth and poverty. How? Because the neoliberal experiment that promised “Trickle down” was always a lie. It never happened. The economics of the “Free Market” sucked all the wealth from the working class, through the gross lowering of wage rates, the tripling of housing costs, and the privatisation of public services that ate-up most of the tax-payers contributions previously spent on social support and infrastructure.
Unbridled profiteering in a gangster economy. The top 5% have doubled their wealth through open and applauded extreme exploitation of the rest of us.
As the General Secretary of Unite the Union, Sharon Graham reflects, “After a decade that has seen prices rise by 40%, workers are sick of paying for crises they did not cause. Energy bills set to be the highest in three years, while the privatised profiteers rake in billions. Mortgage rates are spiking while the banks make money hand over fist.”
Couldn’t put it better myself. The problem exposes the sleight of hand. Trade unions never, never challenged neoliberalism or fought privatisation, instead bending to “follow our members” into one asset-stripping private corporation after another. Housing “externalised” from local council control, health services and social care sold off to private companies, public transport – indeed everything in public ownership – sold off to the cheapest bidder all at the expense of wages and working conditions.
Some of us always knew the dangers of privatisation. We tried to fight, and failed.
Now, with workers really hurting, unable to live on the sickly-sloganed “Living Wage”, we see through the empty rhetoric of union leaders and Labour politicians who have actively done little or nothing. We should have seen mass strike action against “Austerity Britain” from the very beginning, demanding socialist policies for public ownership, redistribution of wealth and the eradication of poverty.
The failure of working-class leadership is directly responsible for the rise of the far-Right. The transnational billionaires are funding Farage and the far-Right precisely because they want their wealth, power and control to continue. They want us to blame the poor and refugees. They feed on passivity and hopelessness.
Union leaders and career politicians have “sold-out” in return for cosy lives and entitlements – crumbs form the tables of the super-rich. The Autumn Budget will attack us again. We need a new trade union leadership ready for a fight, and a real agitational socialist leadership inside workplaces, organising collective protection and challenging the media lies funded by the ruling class. And a government ready to get our wealth back – tax the rich!
My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (15.9.26), emphasising the drive to war but without exaggeration. The piece underplays my personal distress at the sheer absence of any serious organised outcry against the rearmament and militarism encouraged by this, a Labour Government. I’m unsurprised given the role of Blair’s government in the illegal war against Iraq, but at least then we had a single-day demonstration of 2 million people including trade unions demanding “Stop the War!” Today, nothing. Governments in the pockets of the military-industrial complex taking billions from the taxpayer for their private profit. We’re being instructed to “prepare”. I agree – the working class needs to act for Peace before it’s too late.
The unedited version below, or expand the picture (or buy the Herald) to read the published version:
“Stock Up” warnings Worth Heeding
It’s the final countdown. “Britain will be at war with Russia by 2030”, warns Badenoch. You may take it with a pinch of salt – she’s a Tory! But when the hard-nosed Jonathan Powell, UK National Security adviser to government warns that Europe must be ready to endure “real hardship” this winter we should take note.
Immediately the question comes, what can we do? The Defence Secretary, Wes Streeting, issued an urgent warning last Friday, for households to stock-up especially with canned foods and water, and to put together an “emergency kit” of survival items.
The UK government is hurriedly producing the “Prepare Campaign”, a multi-media public information message similar to the “Protect & Survive” booklet that went through every letterbox fifty years ago, telling people how to survive a nuclear attack. Pardon me?
Citing the threats from war and extreme weather induced by climate change which together are creating food and energy shortages, this warning of rationing is of historic importance. Yet day-to-day life continues with such a sense of “business-as-usual” as to defy both warnings and material reality.
The “carry on” brigade are championed by capitalist billionaires who need consumers to keep consuming and workers to keep working to maintain the status quo which creates their corporate profits. But the government warnings are a political recognition that social chaos is around the corner. Its an “arse-covering” exercise for politicians to say “we told you but you didn’t listen – you’re on your own” when the s**t hits.
Some capitalists are fast-funding the far-Right to ensure an authoritarian government that will protect their businesses during the deepening crisis. The rush to cryptocurrencies and Artificial Intelligence Data Centres represent the panic response of short-term speculators seeking the accumulation of wealth as quickly as possible before The Big Crash that is likely to dwarf 2008-9.
The military-industrial complex are rubbing their hands with glee – war makes money for the arms manufacturers. The rest of the ruling class, transnational corporations and nation states alike, are buying gold in the recognition of the potential for wheelbarrows full of Deutschmarks. The price of gold has increased by 145% and is accelerating whilst the real and hidden levels of inflation is devaluing our currency daily. Cash is soon likely to be worthless. Hoard your jewellery!
Today, the Trades Union Congress meets at our annual conference in Brighton, representing over 6 million paying members, an with some considerable recognition of the perilous state of things for the working class. With fewer than 70,000 UK millionaires able to protect themselves, the bottom seventy percent of the UK population are devoid of any personal wealth that could fund us through a crisis.
Most are already unprotected from social upheaval, the 12 million elderly, 11 million under 18, some 17 million with a health disability, and the 5 million low-paid in work but requiring top-ups from State benefits, all face serious cuts to social support as the economy is turned towards war. Over 8 million of us are reliant on Universal Credit because wages are so low and RPI inflation which includes housing costs is rising above 5% per year. But instead of fighting for higher wages the unaffordable cost of welfare is the live debate, not the ludicrous and inhuman cost of rapid rearmament.
A vital proposition from the education trade union, UCU, is detailing the political demand for “Welfare not Warfare!” Housing, Health and Education are each already in crisis ahead of inevitable economic tremors this Winter and massive spending cuts next Spring.
Socialists want to build on our current trade unions policy of social investment in people before profits, and peace not war. The trade unions with members in the arms industries will vote for jobs, their short-termism of “jam today” placing the funding of war preparations into competition with the many more jobs in the service sectors now at risk. This will be a fierce debate but a crucial vote. Will the unions fall-in with a war economy and military governance?
For the working class, the only power we have is collective. The question at our conference is why have the union leaders done so little to explain, agitate and organise for mass action against poverty as well as war.
It is always the working class that pay for war. From the start of war we will be on our own – stock up now!Governments won’t protect us, but we are not alone while we have each other. We will need food sharing, neighbour-checking and community organisation, but most of all, right now we need collective trade union organisation and mass action to demand peace with social justice!
My weekly Comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (8.9.26), calling for mobilisation against the far-Right racists and fascists. Plymouth now has two elected Councillors representing Restore Britain. They have to be challenged. And the thugs have called a march and rally in Plymouth Hoe on Saturday 19th September – they have to be stopped! Stand Up To Racism, while you still can.
My full article below or expand the picture to read the edited version in print.
We haven’t forgotten fascism. There are routine reminders in this newspaper of the blanket bombing of Plymouth and the heroism of the fight that defeated fascism in the Second World War. Yet now we have two councillors who proclaim themselves members of a fascist party they were not elected to, sat in Plymouth’s Council House. They mimic the racist policies of Hitler and his Nazis.
Restore Britain is a fascist party. The two councillors were not voted-in as fascists but have now declared their true colours, exposing the deceit. Restore Britain is an ethno-nationalist racist party and they know it! Their call for “remigration” – a euphemism for the expulsion of all non-white people – is a racist threat illegal at Law.
The black clad thugs blocking roads in Dover and Portsmouth last weekend are intent on banning the Islamic burqa and niqab whilst themselves wearing full head coverings and masks. The Islamophobia of Restore UK and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon aka “Tommy Robinson” and his associate Daniel Thoms – aka “Danny Tommo” – are front and centre, whipping-up lies about Muslim invasion and refugees as sexual abusers.
Refugees arriving in boats are a tiny fraction at 0.29% of the population compared with the 70 million people living in Britain, and impossible to be responsible for the low level of wages or the crisis in our Housing, NHS and Education. But the powerlessness of the refugee makes them an easy scapegoat. The fascists are the real threat.
Make no mistake. The “Tommies” are out for power and control. They use fear in their political propaganda and street violence to build support for extreme responses to made-up threats. These are not people who believe in “live and let live”. They are people with pretensions that they have the right, the privilege and the entitlement to tell others how they should live and who they should be. They believe it is they who should determine our beliefs, both political and faith, the relationships we are allowed and identities that must be proscribed.
The majority of us don’t want to be ruled by a militaristic fascist State machine. But times change, the global economic darkening towards deepening war, fuel disruption and price hikes, food shortages caused by climate change and a predictable global banking crash as the AI Bubble bursts are making us fearful, seeking safety. If there is a fascist party in place with its street boot boys terrorising all opposition, the People may acquiesce.
Under fascism the working class will receive nothing but pain. The far-Right financiers and paid-for politicians will censor all talk of opposition and omit to speak of the neighbourhood atrocities perpetrated by the politically empowered criminal street gangs. It’s happening already. And the Police, already institutionally riddled with right-wing culture, will facilitate the Black Shirts just as they did for Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in the 1930’s.
The Public Order Act 1936 was designed to stop extremists like Oswald Mosleys Union of Fascists “Blackshirts”. The Act makes it illegal in the UK to wear a uniform in a public place or meeting to show support for a political organisation. Why do police mass in force and the government use all their powers to arrest and incarcerate Just Stop Oil protesters demanding climate action while a paramilitary force terrorise our towns and go home unchecked?
Why won’t authorities or journalists call it out the fascists for what they are? Name it! Because they’re scared? Because they know the fascists use brutal, illegal force and intimidation against their enemies. The entire political class is looking to appease the far-right, not condemn them. This mistaken appeasement – the idea that fascism is a passing aberration – is precisely what allowed Hitler to gain power in the 1930’s.
The far-right extremist AfD has won a majority in East Germany. They are fascists. Their success is largely due to the failure of the Left to address the economic pain experienced by the working class. Fascism is the political management of capitalism through a dictatorial leader, centralised autocracy, exclusive party organisation enforcing ultranationalist militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived interest of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
Fascism uses democracy to demolish democracy. But this is not a repeat of the twentieth century. Fascism today is a far more class-centric movement organised to sure up the ideology of Capitalism and the power of the super-rich at the expense of everyone else in a period of global economic crisis. Fascism favours the well-off middle classes but offers the working class nothing. Once the Blackshirts have smashed dissent the new fascist rulers will quash them on behalf of the transnational corporations.
The billionaire, Elon Musk, himself ready to use Hitler’s Nazi fascist salute publicly, funds both Restore’s fascist leader Rupert Lowe and the fascist Tommy Robinson. Indeed, the tech billionaires from Peter Thiel to Curtis Yarvin are widely recognised as Techno-fascists, arguing for the end of democracy in favour of a technocratic rich elite running society worldwide.
The global crisis of capitalism is seeing fascism funded as the System’s saviour. Those conned by its promises of salvation will ultimately be disappointed. But it is vital that we rise-up to ensure the defeat of fascism before it can take hold. The Trades Union Congress in the South West supports the organisations of Stand Up To Racism and the Together Alliance against the far-Right to rid our streets and political chambers of the fascist menace. Join us.
The fascists from outside the city are invading Plymouth Hoe on September 19th – they must be stopped.
My weekly Comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (1st September 2026), trying to counter the wall-to-wall right-wing media coverage of the prisons crisis, each and all focussed on the threat from criminals when there is less threat now than for decades. Of course, a separate piece would place the issue within the wider crisis of the entire public sector, detailing the politics and impact of Austerity. But on punishment versus rehabilitation alone, the issue of humanity and welfare rips large. My unabridged article below, or click on the picture to expand to read the printed version. Please subscribe to my Blog (below)
There are some very very nasty people who should not be free in any decent society. That’s why we have prisons, largely due to the absence of any community resources that can adequately manage their behaviours.
The record numbers of prisoners represents a societal demand for punishment rather than rehabilitation, not an increase in crime. Right-wing governments have demanded longer sentences whilst cutting community provision to the bone. Politicians believe voters want vengeance not welfare.
As a consequence, according to the Prison Reform Trust, over the past two decades the prison population has grown dramatically. Sentences have become longer, and the use of custody has expanded. Yet It may be of some solace that the nearly 88,000 prisoners constitute just 0.13 of the population.
Domestic burglary and vehicle-related theft have fallen dramatically. Robbery has also fallen substantially. Most of us behave.
The victims of crime are rightfully pained and mostly traumatised, the threat of repeat a constant nightmare. Many simply demand that rehabilitation of the offender is offered to ensure common safety when back in the community. The right-wing media’s Hue & Cry over early release should demand closer scrutiny. The hang’em-and-flog’em brigade want jailor’s keys thrown away. Most of us do not.
Vengeance is rarely the demand. Firstly, the majority of manslaughter does not occur at the hands of psychopaths. Killings happen due to a wide range of immediate circumstances and are not predetermined, the families of the convicted suffering for their imprisoned loved-one almost as much as the bereaved.
The majority of those convicted represent little further risk, although the Dickensian conditions of our brutal prison environments may well dehumanise them into a mindset of survival that embitters them before release.
Secondly, violent crime in Britain has decreased by 80% since the mid-1990’s, the chances of being a victim of violence today are lower than anytime in our history. You may not know this because there is a current focus on vicious criminals roaming our streets being whipped-up in a politically directed media frenzy.
There are fewer than 500 homicides a year, 499 in 2025-6 – the lowest since 1973: murder, manslaughter and infanticide representing 1 murder in every 130,000 people or fewer than 2 across the entire population of Plymouth expected in a year. All manifestations of violence have declined, according to all crime surveys and recent research by Cambridge University. Knife crime is down, decreasing as shown by admissions to hospitals for stab wounds, a fall by a third since 2019 from 5,000 to 3,800.
And 60% of those in prison have committees sexual offences or crimes against the person, none due for “enhanced early release”. 4% are people who can be described as “political prisoners”, those who have protested against elements of the system, including people of conscience opposing climate devastation or genocide and received harsh sentences.
18,000 places are taken-up by those on remand, held for long periods due to the court backlog – doubled since 2018 and the highest number in 50 years. 10,000 of those are foreign nationals on-remand, easily identifiable and instantly imprisonable by the Police, with many of those found not guilty when finally brought to trial. The racial profiling in the “justice system” is well documented.
Looking through the prism of class society, the latest study in 2021 found that people from England’s 10 most deprived local-authority areas were imprisoned at about 307 per 100,000, compared with 30 per 100,000 in the 10 least deprived areas, a roughly 10-to-1 difference. Prisoners are disproportionately likely to have experienced unemployment, homelessness, debt, unstable housing and other forms of disadvantage.
Poor and deprived people are disproportionally over-represented in prison, while multi-millionaires are vastly under-represented. That the rich commit crime cannot be questioned. We don’t need to interrogate the Epstein Files or Baroness Bone to recognise the ruling class’s range of sexual offences and domestic abuse through to grand larceny, huge tax-evasion and fraud. They are facilitated to defend themselves. We are not.
There is one law for the rich and another for the poor. The ruling class promotes and creates the fear and judgement upon thugs and “illegals” in order to divide the working class one from another and prevent us challenging the gross inequalities.
After nearly 20 years of austerity economics, the super-rich doubling their personal wealth, it is not just the prison service that is in crisis. Community provision and welfare support has been slashed. Courts are in backlog and Probation Services on their knees following failed Privatisation that sucked public money into the profits of private contractors and demolished the services, requiring expensive renationalisation..
In London, the investment in community services including youth centres and provisions has reduced knife crime. The £50k a year cost of keeping someone in prison is better spent on preventive services in the community, and restorative services including support after release from prison.
My weekly published Comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (4.8.26), responding to the previous day’s outrageous press conference staged by Reform UK detailing the use of naval warships to prevent refugees crossing the English Channel “by all means possible”. They had the audacity to invoke the European Human Rights Charter in defence of their proposed military challenge to asylum seekers, all the while pledging to delete human rights laws the moment they gain office. RUK must be stopped! Prior to their announcement I had planned to publish commemoration of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and the peril we face with continued nuclear proliferation and threats. We have a stall on Saturday 8th challenging the nuclear weapons manufacturer, Babcock, in Plymouth City Centre (Armada Way Piazza, 11-2pm). But that has to wait – the immediate challenge to the far-Right has to remain paramount. Expose the threat of fascist rule.
The full text below, or expand the pic for the published version (much the same):
There can be no such thing as an illegal human being. Our individual actions may break a nation’s laws, and different countries have different laws, making The Law different from universal human conditions. But no-one can be called “an illegal”.
Those who choose to label others as illegals are dehumanising the person and devaluing life. It suits those who seek power and privilege and status in the pecking order of class society. Creating division through proffering privilege and entitlement does a job for class rule. Identifying a group as unworthy, undeserving or illegitimate has been an overused and ancient ploy of those seeking or wielding power.
So calling refugees “illegals” has a big job to do for the far-Right everywhere. Trump deploys his power through his ICE thugs kicking down doors to seize “illegals” from their beds or workplaces. The neo-Nazi AfD in Germany organise street gangs to burn migrants homes. The far-Right nationalists, Reassemblement National, rabble-rouses for xenophobia and antisemitism. Spanish fascist groups smash-up migrant meeting places.
In Britain, Reform UK and their fascist breakaway, Restore Britain, utilises all the lessons from the far-Right across the globe to build hatred and division here, targeting Black people seeking refuge by undertaking one of the ostensible perilous sea journeys across the English Channel.
On the surface, “Stop the Boats” is a very sensible suggestion. No-one should need to risk their life to reach safety. And no-one should profit from another person’s misfortune. But the boat campaign is a cover for ultra-nationalism, white-supremacy and racism.
The call of reform UK for a “Fortress Britain”, pledging to launch ‘the biggest military operation in the Channel since World War Two’ to end migrant crossings. They picture British warships capsizing small boats and dumping survivors back on “foreign” shores. Engaging the UK military against Africans and Asians is designed to evoke a mythical and fanatical patriotism from a British Empire that was always questioned and can never exist again.
In truth, they seek power for themselves by blaming and scapegoating the most powerless and stateless of human beings for all the ills of the society.
Be clear, an immigrant is someone who has crossed a border and can still go home in safety if they choose. A refugee is someone who has crossed a border because home is no longer safe at all. Asylum seekers are simply refugees waiting for that truth to be recognised on paper.
Confusing, misnaming or bad-mouthing these categories is a purposeful and deceitful lie with the intention of “othering” the “foreigner” and people-of-colour in its broadest racist incarnation. It is the tip of the ice-berg of propaganda aimed at putting a white-supremacist government into power to protect big business and the billionaire financiers of this bile.
The people on boats are homeless and stateless. Those seeking refuge come mainly from countries where UK-based corporations have sold arms for the wars over extraction of fossil fuels or rare metals, wars that have pulverised entire regions. And they escape regions rendered no longer habitable for human communities because of the climate catastrophe scorching and deluging their lands with floods and famine. Should we expect them simply to die, presumably because we view them as lesser humans, inferior to us?
Let them in! Refugees are Welcome Here!
Britain can afford to help. Our NHS is not in crisis because of migrants – it depends upon them. Our housing is not in crisis because of migrants – rents and mortgages are too high and property speculators only invest in high short-term returns. Our water is not overpriced and rivers wholly polluted because of migration – it’s the avarice of private shareholders! Our low wages are not caused by immigration – Capitalist, large and small, always seek to pay the least to gain the most private income from their business.
Racism is whipped-up intentionally to divide the working class one from the other and prevent collective opposition to the profiteering, landlordism and exploitation of the ruling class. We should not be fooled. Trade unions will openly expose and challenge racist and fascist organisations targeting Plymouth.
My Comment column this week, printed in the daily Plymouth Herald, challenging the deceit that there is no money for Welfare. At an ailing 72 years of age I declare a personal interest – we need more money for Adult Social Care. And the money’s there! I hope you agree.
Do we care so little for ourselves? The majority of us will suffer with a chronic condition by the age of sixty-two. One in seven of us will require others to care for us full-time through our final years of life in full-on residential nursing care. Many more will need three-times a day home care with washes and toileting. It could be you!
Yet, in a State budget of £1,220 billion in 2024/25, Adult Social Care – looking after those who have difficulty looking after themselves – has an overall spend of just £35 billion, itself part of the “social protection” budget which includes housing benefit to a total of £130bn. Paltry compared with Health (£165bn), the state pension (£124bn) and debt interest (£105bn).
Prime Minister Burnham has staked his “political capital” (whatever that may be) on sorting out social care. Clearly, this can’t be done without spending more money. The narrative has already been skewed in the direction of us all having to pay more even while Britain is the 6th wealthiest of 195 countries and Britain’s richest having increased their private wealth by 65% since 2019.
That the money for social care could be found if politicians desired, is proven by the simple fact that governments can find the money whenever they need it. Take COVID, £35bn (yes, the same amount as the total for social care) spent on Lockdown inside 20 months, including the missing £10bn lost in contracts to “preferred suppliers” (political mates) in contracts for protective items never supplied.
And never mind financial rules, outside of political party pledges and manifesto commitments, this year alone, some £25bn is being added to the arms and military budget in a single fell swoop, £14bn of which is to be spent on illegal weapons of mass destruction – nuclear warheads.
We can find the money for social care easily if we want. The money for adult social care is paltry at the moment, the tiny sum excused by government pleas of poverty and indebtedness. How about changing the debt repayments, the bankers and financiers could live well on half the interest rates currently paid – a government action first applied at a time of war or social crisis. We are in a social crisis.
And a rent cap, and mortgage interest cap, preventing excessive profiteering by landlords and banks from our essential requirement of a roof over our head, would cut Housing Benefit costs significantly, the money transferred to social care. The government could replace the sacked tax inspectors to ensure the more than £60bn per year in current taxes left unpaid by evasion and fraudsters is collected. They could nearly triple the adult social care budget overnight!
A Wealth Tax, by whichever permutation you would wish to enact it, would rebalance to a limited extent the gross inequality found in Britain today. The top fifth of UK households own 63% of the country’s wealth, while the bottom fifth, including two-thirds of those needing social care support, holding together only 0.5%. The richest 10% of UK citizens possess nearly half of all the nation’s wealth.
Britain’s social care system has been broken by the neoliberal free-market brutal system of raw capitalism. Privatisation. More than 85% of adult social care operates inside the private for-profit sector of the economy, relying on an an abused migrant workforce paid minimum wages. Social care workers are the most exploited and oppressed of all our 6.2 million public service workers who together have not had a real-wage increase in the past decade despite rampant inflation caused by excess profits. Cap profits, pay the workers!
In fact, Capitalism depends upon the Family to sustain a society based upon class exploitation and private wealth. The National Care Association identifies that more than 4 million of us operate as the primary carer for adult relatives, unpaid and ill-considered, representing at least two lives plunged into poverty for every one of us in need.
Don’t accept the lies and deceit of arguments for us to pay more if we are to enjoy a comfortable old age. We already pay enough, our taxes simply falling into the wrong hands through the wrong priorities. Engage with the current “national conversation” to demand prioritising social care over private profit!
My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (7.7.26), intentionally poking a sideways jab at Nigel Farage, his £5million bung from a billionaire, alongside many other dubious “donations” much in the news right now. I was encouraged by a Vox pop 10 second interview with a working class woman on BBC radio, saying “if someone gave me £5 million I’d take it…”, as f anyone was ever going to! Farage says “nothing to see here”, and indeed, his is the tip of iceberg of corruption for which he’s neither the first nor the worst. But he’s a far-right racist bigot, and his corruption should be made an example of, even if he and his followers think there’s “nothing to see here!”. Unbridled vicious Capitalism, very visible indeed.
The unexpurgated version here or read the printed version by expanding the pic below:
One million pounds is a lot of money. £5million is a lot more. Based on current UK tax and National Insurance rules, a worker employed full-time from age 18 to 67 (a 49-year career) will finish with lifetime earnings of just over £1m if they earn the National Minimum Wage, or £1.5m if they earn the average UK median full-time salary. £1million is a working class lifetime.
The median UK household disposable income (after taxes and benefits) is approximately £37,000. Roughly 30% of UK households share an income below the minimum acceptable standard, well below the national median. Those households never see £1m in their entire lifetime.
And for those of us who earn a million or two in our lives, the fact is it mostly goes out again – we have to spend it all to survive. The lucky minority, investing in property, may accumulate a package by retirement age, much of which will be spent on our own health and social care in our final years, and what’s left may help the next generation. Working class wealth largely depends upon inheritance – it’s far harder to become wealthy and shift up a class by your own efforts.
If you’re born into wealth, it’s a doozy! An investment of £1m in the UK will earn a return interest of between £30,000 and 75,000 per year, cash, about the same or more than the average income from working. One million pounds is a lot of money. Imagine the investment income of a billionaire (a billion is a thousand millions) or a trillionaire (a million million)!
The above is an explanation of why socialists call the working class “wage slaves”. The employer-class pay us to make money for them, only for us to have to pay them back to be fed (badly), watered (hmm, water companies) and housed (poorly, overall), with little or no personal agency except for a week’s holiday if we scrimp and save. And for this we have to do as we’re told, watch what we say, and serve “The Man”.
Yet, as President Trump eulogised last week at his, albeit spartan celebration of the founding of the Great USA, the American, nee Capitalist, Dream is a back. The myth that we can all be millionaires is being sold to us again. We should aspire to millionaires, value and adore millionaires.
It’s here in the UK, too. we are expected to believe that millionaires are best placed to lead us and make decisions for us. Most strangely, the far-Right MPs who receive millions of pounds in “donations” are targeting the poorest in the country for votes and extra-parliamentary support. There is a tradition here dating back to the first working class suffrage of 1867 – the wealthy bought the votes of ordinary men with bribes or jobs or gin.
In return, MPs were bought by big businessmen seeking legal privileges and a competitive edge. Today, the proportion of multi-millionaire MPs in the House of Commons is over 50%, hidden but assessable, much higher than the population where fewer than 5% are millionaires.
When we read of a single politician, self-publicised as being “anti-Establishment”, receiving £5m from a billionaire and “millions” more from a billionaire convicted felon, his claims of being “a man of the people” must fall far short. Those who support what Trump stands for may argue that we need rich businessmen to run society because they know best how to manage “The System”
This is probably true. But why should we support this “System” that enslaves us? Britain is seen abroad as having one of the most corrupt Establishments in the world. The City of London is joked about as the western world’s laundry, cleaning wealth gained illegally – drugs, people trafficking, prostitution and illegal arms sales. As a direct consequence, the spending power of the working class in England has fallen by 20% since 2008 – when the wholesale corruption of the millionaire bankers and financiers cost us all very dearly.
MPs routinely receiving bungs weds them to corruption as the condition of the status quo. We should expose and depose every single one of them.
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (9.6.26), predicting the outcry by Tory leader Badenoch, calling today for “Common Sense”! Her focus, racism experienced by white people in a predominantly white society! Another weaponisation of prejudice in the pursuit of power. No mention of institutional racism that systemically marginalises and criminalises people of colour. The culture wars continue, amplified to the extreme by an Establishment fragmented and floundering. We must keep up the pressure – no to racism, fascism and misogyny!
And yes, I know Palestine is not in the World Cup finals, but, just like FIFA, we should still fly the flag!
My unedited text below (not my chosen headline) or expand the pic to read the printed version.
World Cup: Let’s hope the Best team Wins!
Everyone’s shouting for Common Sense! Apparently, the Truth should be obvious to all. The only problem being, there is no such thing as common sense. We each have different experiences and receive the world differently. This diversity makes humanity dynamic and resilient. We’re not all the same – enjoy!
We commonly live in a class society. Deny that if you can. The stratification of the 70+ millions of us is such that the entire experience of the 20% (14 million people) at one end of the class spectrum has absolutely nothing in common with the opportunities and privileges afforded the 20% at the other end. That much is obvious the moment we walk down the street. Rolls Royces speeding past the tents of the homeless.
Fewer than one million of us, one in 70, will ever experience flight in a private jet. However much we dream of it or transport ourselves into the lives of the billionaires, the class system will not allow any level of social mobility that can possibly allow you to get that rich.
The private schools for the top 6% of society protect offspring and inheritance from seeping down let alone having any poor wretch be accepted into the multimillionaire class. We speak different languages inside broad the English vocabulary. We perceive a very different world, Britain, England dependent upon our class placement.
The England-based company director, protected by private millions of pounds in share holdings, expects returns on stock market gamblings many thousands of times greater per day than we, the majority, looking for a 10% return on a £10 bet using the smartphone bingo app. Or the 14m:1 potential of Lotto. The dice is heavily weighted. Money goes to money.
The banking investor wants maximum returns on capital, benefitting from high interest rates. The working class family whose home is mortgaged to the bank wishes for low interest rates. No commonality there.
The house-builder expects to make a hefty profit and stops building unless so assured. The large landlord wants to charge the highest rental, and does so to such a degree that we have a housing crisis. The renter wants a fair if not low rent in exchange for a well cared-for building. One side’s gain is the other’s loss.
Oxfam’s research gives evidence that the wealth gap between rich and poor in the UK is stark: just 58 billionaires in the UK hold more combined wealth than 27 million other people (39% of the population). Oxfam highlights that an estimated 14.5 million people – nearly a quarter of the UK population – live in poverty, while the richest 1% own over a fifth of the nation’s total wealth.
It makes no sense for working class people to demand that the rich get richer at our expense! What’s the sense in that? It does make sense for billionaires to tell the working class we must accept welfare cuts and higher prices in order to protect and grow their profits! That is the “Common Sense” spouted by the politicians seeking to protect the current state of things, a status quo that has overseen serious deterioration to working class living standards and expectations over the past forty years.
Nationalism is the primary vehicle for demanding common sense. After all, we all live on this Island and therefore should have something in common, shouldn’t we? It’s only common sense for us to support our military for our shared security, isn’t it? It is apparently common sense that we should ration health, education and welfare in order to put more billions into the private military-industrial arms corporations. Only sections of society benefit from military arms expenditure, by no means the majority. Surely, common sense would agree that war is not in our interests.
And there can be no common sense where racism and sexism exist in society. Racism divides on the basis of one perceived ethnicity or skin colour being superior to another, with a baseline of white supremacy. Sexism is the exercise for imposing male supremacy. White people do not commonly experience the different and detrimental looks and behaviour experienced daily by people of colour. Men do not experience levels of rape and domestic abuse that women daily receive in Britain. The prejudice that flood the senses of being Black or female in a society based upon competition and discrimination are not common to all.
Perversely, those demanding common sense usually align such an imposition with racism and religious prejudice. Their common sense is meant as common only to Christian white-skinned people. Right now, such nationalist common sense demands for us all to support England at the World Cup. We should be proud to be British as opposed to care about any of the 48 competing FIFA Nations, shouldn’t we, even when Scotland has a much better squad!
Hold on, why should we compete to be superior to the peoples of other nations and regions, when all the other countries live under the same class divisions, their working class experiencing the self-same exploitation, oppression, repression and deprivations as us? We have more in common with working class people living in Africa, South America and Asia than we have with the English billionaires holed-up in the Cotswolds.
Can we have some “Class Sense” please? Can we prioritise and cheer-on what’s in the interests of the majority – the working class – not seek some fake allegiance with billionaires who push nationalism and “common sense” in their property-owning class’s self-interests, not ours?
In the meantime, wouldn’t a human, caring common sense want the best team to win, or care for the underdog? It’s only a game of football after all, but, for what it’s worth, c’mon Palestine!
My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald Newspaper (2.6.26), rehearsing the necessary arguments against Starmer’s forthcoming increase in immediate arms spending, again. He is under pressure to deliver more UK war-preparations ahead of the major NATO Summit in July, and has to “find the money” – that is, defy his Chancellor and demand cuts to welfare. There is an element of Whitehall tittle-tattle, but the final analysis has to be that UK will be a frontline aggressor in the West’s drive to more warfare, pushed by Trump. Meanwhile, we dissolve into worker-on-worker violence – both social and military – or organise collectively to stop the warmongers.
The unedited version below:
We need a sharp turn away from military expenditure. Arms expenditure is a waste of money. This may sound offensive to many in Plymouth, but the reality is we are as divided a set of communities as anywhere else. The retired ex-military who have settled here, and the Yardies of yesterday and today, will stake their lives upon loyalty to armed forces and the arms corporations they’ve worked for all their lives. They are not alone in feeling pride in their work.
The majority of the working class in Plymouth have not worked inside or even adjacent to the local military-industrial complex. There are more employed at our regional hospital at Derriford than inside Devonport dockyard, and twice as many again employed through the services managed by Plymouth City Council, in education, social care and environmental services.
We have in no way benefitted from Plymouth being characterised as a Naval City, and we’re not about to benefit now. Plymouth Dockyards require a healthy level of craft services, but the higher-than-average salaries are for the technicians and military personnel. They live outside and away from the City and their comparatively high incomes are spent elsewhere.
Equally, the Dockyard companies are private, their profits also stored and spent way away – across Europe and America. Consequently, in the neighbourhoods bordering the dockyard we have one-in-three children living in poverty and across-the-board indicators of social deprivation higher than the national average. Plymouth is a poor city. The health and life-expectancy disparities between the working class living in the West of Plymouth and the white-collar professionals to the East, totally unacceptable.Our small middle class live around 14 years longer and with twenty years of better health than manual and semi-skilled workers.
Once again, our political leaders propagandise that the £4.4 billion of tax money promised to Plymouth’s military business over the next ten to fifteen years will bring us the prosperity promised to previous generations. It won’t.
We need huge investment in welfare services, our children’s education, health and social housing. That £4.4billion could serve us well, locally paying off the £1bn debt owed by Plymouth City Council and turning round the decades of cuts to essential services. It could refurbish our local housing, much of it acknowledged as poor by national standards – damp, mouldy and dilapidated.
Instead, Starmer’s Defence Investment Plan (DIP) committing to a £18 billion per-year increase in military spending ahead of next month’s NATO Summit, includes nuclear warheads, drone swarms and missile interceptors for Britain’s armed forces. In reality, it will increase national debt and divert State expenditure away from social need and towards wholesale human destruction. Preparation for war always atrophies social spending and cuts wages across the entire economy.
For Plymouth the DIP will continue our descent into a Company Town, visibly dominated by Babcock and associates, reeking of militarism and the drive to rearmament ahead of the apparently inevitable next war. Beware a society dominated by the military security services, embedded everywhere. For example, Plymouth University is a likely sign-up as a “Defence University”, in a strategic relationship with arms companies that will deplete the college’s commitments to health and education training even further.
Compulsory conscription is advocated by the political Right, our primary Schools now being encouraged, with funding, to invite and embed military personnel into the fabric of classroom life and curriculum, the better to prepare the next generation as twenty-first century “cannon fodder” for the wars of the 2030’s.
Future wars are portrayed as robot-wars conducted by technical experts fielding underwater and low-flying drones as if in a computer game. The reality of current wars in Ukraine and the Middle East show something very different. Drones and missiles destroying civilian targets, from high-rise flats to entire towns. This is the destructive force being the sole area of investment for Plymouth.
And at the City’s heart, the illegal mass exterminator, the weapons of mass destruction costing us at least £14billion a year and unmanageable toxic pollution. The nuclear weaponry that, if and when used will herald the end of human society as we know it. That is absolutely nothing to boast about!
When endless tax money is dedicated to warfare the truth is exposed. The money can be found. We can have a society where every child is comfortably housed, growing healthily with nutritious food and well-resourced schooling. Now that’s worth fighting for – Welfare Not Warfare!
My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (19.5.26) keeping-up the assault of the Left against the far-Right, following the previous Saturday’s excellent Palestine Solidarity/Stand Up To Racism demonstration in London, overwhelming the much-reduced far-Right “Unite the Nation” march called by the Islamophobe, Tommy Robinson. Plymouth has a range of fascist and racist organisation competing against each other for pride of place, pretending to demand protecting of women and children from refugee men whilst, in practice, working alongside white men with convictions for abuse. The Left is also in their sights, our charge of racism having a serious effect upon their credibility and support. We must not be complacent and must increase and deepen our efforts until they are off our streets. The next counter demonstration is next Monday.
Unedited version below, or expand the pic for the published version.
Women’s liberation would benefit men. Working class men, at least. The ability of the Bosses to pay women less than men for doing the same work, having the same or even more skills but being denigrated, denied recognition and prevented from rising-up the management hierarchy, harms everyone…except the bosses. Unequal pay holds down the general pay-rate. Any excuse is used to hold down wages in order to increase profits, including ideas that women are not worth as much as men.
Women’s oppression, the consideration of women as less than men – weaker, more emotional and therefore fickle and untrustworthy – is increasing again in Britain. After a few decades of winning better women’s rights at work and at home, there’s now a push back. And misogyny is the hard end of this – male hatred of women – a political campaign for male supremacy overwhelming the online Manosphere and poisoning young men’s minds.
Sexism doesn’t make sense. If women had the same rights as men, men would be freed from the results of women’s oppression. If we broke the stereotypes assigned to gender roles we could be honest about our emotions, we could share responsibilities, mix our teams and, oh yes, increase the rate of pay for all, setting the bar at the highest common denominator, not the lowest.
Women in the UK still get paid on average of 18% below men’s pay rates for work of the same value. Trade unions still shout about this. The essential priority for campaigners for women’s rights is correctly focussed upon male coercion, sexual abuse and rape. It is estimated that up to 900,000 people across the country experience sexual assault each year, including attempted rape and penetration. Much has been done to strengthen laws against sexual violence and yet it is widespread, less than 3% of reported rapes ending up in a successful prosecution and punishment.
Predatory abusive men have little to fear. One-in-three women in the UK experience an average of 7-years of domestic abuse at the hands of their partners, statistics that hasn’t changed for the past 50 years. Around 90% of rapes are committed by people known to the victim, often by someone who the survivor previously trusted or even loved. Rapists are usually friends, colleagues, clients, neighbours, family, partners or exes.
Sexual abuse happens in every community. In England, where more than four out of five of the population are white-skinned, this means that the vast majority of sexual abusers are white men abusing white women.
Yet a new campaign group, publicised by the Plymouth Herald, is calling for action against Black men. “Women Reclaim The Streets Plymouth” (WRTSP) is claiming that our streets have been made unsafe by immigrants seeking to abuse women.
WRTSP states “We will feel safer on the Right than the Left always, with rising amounts of illegal undocumented men coming here on boats and the amounts of rapes and murders by these men We Stand (sic) together for closed borders and the illegal undocumented men send (sic) straight back.”
They have no evidence, and as such this is hate speech, a hate crime, promoting fear and racial hostility through the false claim that asylum seekers are responsible for a rising number of rapes.
They wrongly raise the threat of “stranger danger” when women and children are most likely to be abused by someone known to them. Their propaganda is placing women and children at more risk, intentionally or not, implying that family and friends are always safe.
This outcry against asylum seekers and young refugee men as rapists is being fomented by organised fascists. The misogynists who hate women also hate Black people. The ultra-nationalists framing patriotism as white-supremacy are waving flags to intimidate ethnic minorities. The men in high-viz jackets waving Union jacks with the Reclaim the Streets group outside Theatre Royal last week have amongst them thugs convicted for violence against women.
These racist groups are planning a series of local protests against refugees, starting next Monday. They threaten to hold more demonstrations outside our primary schools, claiming to “protect our children” and targeting local Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMO) as if they all house illegal refugees. Their sheer ignorance is jaw-dropping.
Far-right organisations are springing-up across the city, competing with each other for pole position as the most racist, the most patriotic. They plan to protest outside the Plymouth Courts at a hearing of Black men of a sexual attack. Yet all six cases of serious rape and abuse of women heard in Plymouth last year had no such protests outside in the cause of keeping women and children safe – all six were white men – no protests to keep us safe from them, was there?
Women’s safety must not be a tool for racism. Women and children are at risk from low wages, insecure housing, inadequate access to support and benefits as well as sexual abuse. Women are at risk from the sexism and misogyny in our general culture. Women’s sexist oppression and abuse cannot be defeated through the racist oppression and abuse of Black men. We must counter these racist demonstrations and honestly campaign for women’s liberation.
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (12.5.26), tangentially addressing last week’s extreme meltdown of the political centre of politics in Britain. More than 1400 Councillors were elected for the Reform UK last Thursday, including openly racist and fascist representatives, an historic shift to the far-Right in British politics. Or at least, a shift towards the extremes, the centre ground emptied. As part of the essential campaign of opposition to the far-Right I felt it important to state what fascism represents here and now.
Below is the unedited longer version, and the pic of the much reduced published article:
Are you now, or have you ever been, a Leftie? If so, those who have usurped the national flags to impose a culture of racism and misogyny, those who want to see a million migrant workers forcibly expelled from Britain, those who protest with their children outside schools, intimidating staff and pupils alike, want you to shut up and be shut down.
The far-Right in Plymouth have broadened their focus to not only include scapegoating people of colour but also openly threatening “Lefties” and, in particular, socialists. This is not a tussle between two clubs or rival gangs – it is the current condition of general politics in our society – divided towards the poles.
The far-Right, individuals and organisations of right wing ultra-nationalists, racists and fascists, is currently stoking anti-refugee and anti-Muslim racism, throwing-in classic accusations that black men are a threat to children. They seek white male supremacy, lauding Western colonialism and campaigning to Restore Britain with the return of the military British Empire.
The Left, meanwhile, is a broad spectrum of individuals and organisations that recognise and value all of life on Earth, of diversity, democracy and human rights.
So there is a real and present divide, a gulf, between Left and Right. The Left recognise the danger of the climate crisis, oppose imperialist war, demand full rights for women and Trans people, expose and challenge genocide and ethnic cleansing, stand for the rights of the disabled and demand social welfare paid from the common wealth of taxes and corporate profits.
The Right seek self-advancement at the expense of others. Beyond their own clan they hate humanity. And humanism. The far-Right add attributes to their desired dog-eat-dog world including white-skinned, male, heterosexual cultural domination. Their end result is the defence and protection of unbridled capitalism through an autocratic totalitarian and militarised state – see fascist Italy, Spain, Germany and the Axis powers of the twentieth century. A reactionary conservative creed.
Being “on the Left”, for the Right, does not require a commitment to socialism. Anything “progressive” is deemed “woke”, a term of abuse used by the far-Right.
Not all of the Left are socialist. Many seek reforms to the harshest and sharpest edges of the global and local system of Capitalism, accepting that Capitalism is here and probably inevitable, but can be tamed and controlled. Many reforms have elements of socialism: a universal health service paid for through taxation to be free at the point of need. Subsidised public transport. Fee State education paid for from the public purse. Welfare Benefits to those who cannot fully manage on their own. Social Security ”Council” Housing, the stock owned and maintained by the local council tax payer ensuring decent and affordable housing for all (a thing of the past thanks to previous and current right-wing governments).
Capitalism can have a mixed economy containing elements of socialism just enough to sustain the working class. The Right hate the Welfare State and cannot understand why anyone should pay taxes towards anyone else’s needs. Until, it seems, they become homeless or sick or infirm and complain that the services are not there, because of immigration rather than spending cuts and privatisation.
Socialists are a left section of the Left. In essence we want a different construction of socialist society. Socialism is a society based on meeting the needs of people and the environment, not maximising the profits of the rich. It would be a radically democratic society, with ordinary people collectively running things for ourselves.
A socialist society would be one where items are produced because they are needed, rather than because they are profitable. It would mean an end to a system where millions of people struggle to make ends meet while the rich sit on piles of money. In a socialist society, the working class would collectively own big industries and services, democratically deciding what to produce and how to use the Earth’s resources.
Socialism is therefore international, recognising we each impact upon everyone else, migration and global trade being ancient human attributes that benefit and bind us together as one human race.
Fascism asserts national identity and geographic boundaries in order to accentuate individual competition and bind the people to an internal collective fear and hostility of “the outsider”, “the Alien”, “the Other”.
Fascism is the absolute power of the capitalist. Presumably, that’s why it is considered to be of the “Hard-Left” to seek an end to Capitalism. Although, the redistribution of wealth downwards away from billionaires and multi-millionaires to eradicate child poverty and unemployment should appear perfectly reasonable.
Not least, it’s increasingly obvious that the Capitalist dream of becoming super-rich is sheer mythology – a propaganda tool to tie us to the yolk of wage-slavery. The super-rich are a class apart, managing the State, the laws and social culture to maintain their power and keep all the wealth inside their families and Corporations, preventing social mobility.
Fascism gives this Capitalist ruling class absolute power inside a totalitarian State. An autocratic corporate dictatorship. The fascists pander to the super-rich in the hope of receiving crumbs from their table. In reply, the World’s billionaires, especially the techno-billionaires, are currently funding the rising fascist media and organisations here and across the world.
But why would working class people want an even harsher administration of capitalism in which we are even further atomised away from any mutual aid and self-organisation? Fascists destroy trade unions.
Why would we want to live in a hostile neighbourhood of State-snitches dobbing each other in on false accusations of proscribed relationships, unpatriotic activities or subversive thoughts? How could we condone paramilitary snatch-squads funded by the state and private corporations, smashing-in the door of our family members, friends or neighbours and stealing people away to be disappeared as “enemies of the State”?
Humans have experienced long periods of fascist society all across the world. Fascism adapts to its local conditions, but we all know what fascism looks like. So let’s be clear. That’s the end game of the fascist “Tommy Robinson” and the far-right parliamentary-wing represented by Farage’s Reform UK. Fascists lie and deceive and threaten in order to achieve absolute power. Fascism is not what anyone voted for last week. But fascism is here, now, and must be actively confronted and opposed. We will oppose Tommy Robinson in London next Saturday, and local fascists day-and-night from now on.
My two-page reflection on the General Strike 1926, published in the Plymouth Herald (30.4.26). The synopsis reflects the mood of the new book by socialist historians Judy Cox and Charlie Kimber, long term comrades, reminding the world that workers can and do fight, and workers in Britain have joined in mass dispute over and over again, including throughout my lifetime. The sell-out of the General Strike was used by Capitalist historians, including the reformist Labourites, the Webbs, to impose the cultural and political imposition against mass strike action, indeed, to undermine and criticise any and all strike action ever since. This top-down bureaucratic domination of the Labour Movement has plagued the working class ever since. I have always fought and organised for rank-and-file bottom-up collective action emanating from workplaces and working class communities. It will erupt again, the pay and job cuts and rate of gross exploitation too tense to be permanent or managed. The Workers, United, will never be Defeated!
One Hundred Years since the British General Strike
Plymouth Trades Union Council is hosting a Festival for International Workers Day in Plymouth on Saturday 2nd May at Sherwell Church, North Hill, with talks from socialist historians and a full length film on the 100th Anniversary of Britain’s General Strike 3-12th May 1926. Here, Tony Staunton, records the local events of the time.
On May 3rd 1926 four-and-a-half million workers went on strike across Britain for 9 consecutive days the longest period of a mass strike in Britain’s history. A real working class challenge to the UK government. In fact the strikes went on far longer.
The General Strike has been rewritten and dismissed by Capitalist historians. In fact it proved the real potential of working class collective power in the workplace, and the violence of the capitalist business owners ready to use their power to smash opposition.
General workers unions from the 1880’s had seen the match-girls strikes, 1910-14 huge explosion in general strikes in UK, continuing to a degree through the war, and then mass strikes at the end of the war across Europe. A new strike wave saw half of Britian on strike in 1919, including many police forces, pushing for better pay and conditions.
The British working class was the largest in the world, the First World War politicising workers, the British Empire declining and the British ruling class needing to break the growth of working class revolts. By the 1920’s, the bosses were desperate to take back control of industry from the war-time State. With coal fuelling all of industry, coal miners were at the frontline – mine owners supported by the government for privatisation and immediately imposing 50% wage cuts and longer working hours.
With one million miners in Britain, the threat of poverty wages and increased in hours was recognised as the focus for a general strike across the organised working class. Their first fight in 1921 published demands for 30% increase in wages, a 30-hour working week and nationalisation of the mines under workers’ control. It was defeated on Black Friday when the rest of the trade union movement failed to offer support.
The Labour Party was right-wing but offered a political voice to the organised working class in these circumstances. Unsurprisingly, in 1924 the first Labour Government was elected, but only just, as a minority administration which collapsed in November the same year. This had nevertheless rattled the ruling class recognising they had to break trade union and labour power and beat-back the working class especially on wages and hours
The Triple Alliance came in support of the Miners: Miners, Railways and Transport workers, pushing their own demands. The Tory government called a Royal Commission to investigate the Mining Industry, agreeing a 10% wage increase and a 8-hour working day, giving mine owners a 9-month subsidy to stop wage reductions.
This cut across class struggle and diffusing anger. It was a temporary victory, the government preparing whilst the TUC didn’t. The Miners won on Red Friday, the mine owners and government recognising they weren’t ready for the showdown to come.
The Royal Commission finally called for increased working hours and cuts to wages, ending the Government subsidies to the mine owners. On 30th June 1925 the Miners Owners announced pay cuts and increase in working hours. Tory Prime minister Stanley Baldwin announced in parliament that all workers, not just miners, would have to take wage cuts and work longer hours to put the economy back on its feet.
In 1926 the Mine owners gave a 2-week notice of 50% wage cuts. Workers knew that if the miners lost this time, the bosses would come for the rest of the working class. On 1st May 1926 a general vote of TUC special conference recorded 3.6m for a GS, 50,000 against. The TUC made no plans for action. It focussed upon respectability – “stay at home, don’t go to picket lines, tend the garden and pigeons, organise cricket matches with the police and opposition”. A non-threatening general strike! The TUC Congress voted unanimously to stand with the Miners but refused to organise defence against the policing and government.
In fact, the TUC called the strike only 2 days before with minimum preparation. It was pushed by an unofficial strike of printer workers at the Daily mail refusing to print a headline against the Miners and TUC headed “For King and Country!”. Baldwin demanded the strikes were called-off. The TUC repudiated the Daily Mail strike but the Government snubbed them.
The Government was fully prepared, with huge coal stocks and military preparations, and wanted the strike. It had imprisoned most of the leadership of the British Communist Party along with thousands of known militants, and shut down leftwing newspapers and political meetings.
The Tory Government invoked the Organisation of Maintenance and Supplies (OMS) a government-funded paramilitary strike-breaking organisation recruiting 100,000 mainly middle class volunteers – with contacts between the Tory Government, the British Union of fascists and the visible presence of the Armed Forces on the streets, not least the Navy deployed in ports visibly threatening port towns. Over 200,000 were recruited into special Police.
The Government ensured a broad propaganda campaign against the strike, setting-up the daily “British Gazette” edited by Winston Churchill to organise a “scab army” of strike-breakers, facilitated but the Daily Mail and Daily Express. The editorial was that the strike is a threat to country, the monarchy, the Empire, to law and order, the family and the Christian religion.
The BBC ensured repeated appeals for scab recruitment, fake reports of mass defections from the strike. The head of the Catholic Church came out to declare that the strike was a sin against God!
In response, the “British Worker” newspaper was set up by the TUC emphasising that the strike was simply an industrial dispute, no threat to the Constitution, and arguing for restraint. TUC leadership organised against any and all semblance of rank and file organisation, and used the local trades councils to prevent or reign-in the Councils of Action (local Strike Committees for agitation and propaganda, demanding all power to the TUC General Council “for the preservation of peace and order”.
At midnight on 3rd May the country stopped. The industrial heartlands, railways and public services brought to a halt, industry came to a complete standstill. In London al 4,000 buses stood still, 9 of 2,000 trams and 15 out of 15,000 tube trains moved. Docks shut down, the volunteer strike-breaking force ineffectual, the students crashing trains and buses.
Dockers, Iron and Steel, metal and chemical workers, woodworkers, printers, building workers on strike. Shipping and shipbuilders, power workers, the Post office and telephone engineers, didn’t strike although many came out during the 9 days. Large numbers of unorganised workers joined the strike – nobody wanted to be that person seen to be on the side of the bosses.
The General Strike was heavily supported, mass pickets on 4th May stopping scabs, fierce street battles including deaths, trucks and cars and busses set alight, railway stations invaded to stop transport. Women laid babies on the road to stop scab vehicles and allow the drivers to be evicted and engines to be broken.
The General Strike unleashed working class anger at their exploitation with a popular wave of physical confrontation against the power of the State. Women’s organisations ensured infrastructure for the strike, including financial levies for universal welfare and organised groups to challenge strike-breakers.
At Millbay Docks in Plymouth there was open conflict, the Dockers struck in sympathy with miners, leading to the docks becoming a major flashpoint for clashes with police. As the strike developed, it was important to stop all business as usual. On Saturday, 8 May, Police used batons to disperse crowds near Drake Circus and Old Town Street after a No 6 tram was attacked, with several protesters arrested. A procession of around 4,000 strikers attempted to block the operation of trams by “volunteers”. This resulted in violent confrontations, with trams having windows smashed and destination boards torn off by protesters.
Battle ships were moored off Plymouth and on the Mersey, the Clyde, and other cities. Hyde Park in London was turned into a military camp. For the Tory Government, the workers had to crawl back to work humiliated. The working class must not get any idea that strikes can win.
The TUC sought talks, the government disinterested, even when the TUC leadership agreed to prevent the Miners from being part of negotiations because they were pledged not to back down. Meanwhile, Councils of Action spread across the country from the 2nd Day coordinating strike action, picketing, permits for transport and workers defence forces.
Just as the momentum was rising and more workers were joining, on 12th May the General Council of the TUC called-off the strike, without any agreement with the government or employers. They felt the situation was getting out of their control. In short, the union leaders shrank from confrontation because it imperilled their carefully built organisations. But the impact was to leave workers to the punishments meted out by the employers.
The Daily Mail headline “surrender of the revolutionaries!” Trades Councils, strike committees and all were outraged and incensed at the call back to work. It represented nothing on the ground. There were more people on strike the day after the strike was called-off, with more people who were non-unionised too! It took time to quell the fight.
The Miners carried-on the strike and were beaten. It was a defeat for the Mineworkers Federation and a major defeat for the general working class, the government and employers weeding-out all the militants and activists across industries.
Printers unions stayed on strike demanding the reinstatement of all workers. Even the strike-breakers said the end of the strike shouldn’t be a rout and a punishment. Big wage cuts and job mass sackings followed. The Bosses stated “you’ve got nothing” and forced 25-40% wage cuts – a bitter defeat of the entire working class. The rail owners sacked 45,000 workers after the GS defeat, giving the jobs to the scabs.
The betrayal of 1926 opened the way for the brutal repression of the Unemployed Movement, the 1932 Great Hunger March assaulted by Police, all leaders jailed in the 1930s and State assaults on the anti-fascist mobilisations before and after the second world war.
The Labour leaders declared general strikes should never happen again. It has pervaded debates across the labour movement ever since. The reformist historians, the Webb’s recorded that British workers aren’t revolutionary and British bosses aren’t fascist: “British culture is immunised against the continental virus of open class antagonism and political extremism”. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.
The true legacy of the General Strike is that workers can and do fight back against exploitation and repression. The worker’s history shows that we can and do stand together, and most importantly have power. There is always the question of leadership in any conflict. People do not break from forms of democracy and coordination that are handed down to them without the realistic prospect of something different. For 9 days the prospect of real change, of something better had become a reality. Those with a self-interest in the maintenance of the status quo disallowed such aspiration. Such is the lesson of the General Strike of 1926 for today.
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (28.4.26) challenging the motives of all candidates in the current Council elections. What are they doing about poverty, deprivation and the gross inequalities we live with each day.
Notable that the Editor would not print the swearword “sod”, replacing it with “Forget”, despite f and c words on our telly every evening. Apparently being angry is unacceptable.
Sod potholes, why don’t candidates address poverty in Plymouth!
Around two-thirds of Plymouth residents eligible to vote are likely not to do so in the local council election on May 7th. There is no single reason, but any class analysis will prove that the wealthy don’t bother to vote – they don’t use public services and find taxation an unjust burden they seek to evade – whilst the poor wisely recognise that politicians don’t do anything for them.
So democracy, flimsy at is, is for the middle classes. And local election campaigns tend to focus on the day-to-day niggles affecting middle-earners and the otherwise comfortably-off: pot holes, business rates and regulations affecting small businesses.
Some national issues invade local democracy, especially when racists and warmongers seek to divert issues of municipal welfare into white-nationalist xenophobia – from rearmament to fight foreigners and the damning of all people of colour through to ultra-parochial slogans demanding “Plymouth People First!”
The one thing not to be spoken of, politely or otherwise, is poverty. Much of the growing anxiety and discontent is borne of the fact that millions of us do not have sufficient income to cover essential expenses. All our politics has moved towards the extremes as we’ve become more divided and more unequal. Voting for a new bunch of multi-millionaires seeking to out-do the established lot is not going to bring any real difference to working class lives. The Status Quo is no good for most people.
Candidates should offer real and substantial change. Britain has the highest increase in child poverty in the whole of Europe, the richest 10% live an average of 20 years longer than the poorest, and in much better health. This record level of income inequality and class polarisation is visible on our streets and in our neighbourhoods. Never mind the potholes, what about the homeless?
So saying we’re going to carry on as we are shouldn’t be a political message that gains votes. It represents only a 15% strata of the comfortably-off. Meanwhile the super-rich are continuing to change society away from mutual aid and collective care in their struggle to accumulate more and more of society’s wealth.
In Plymouth, one in three of our children live in poverty, defined as being deprived of one-or-more of essential human need – nutritious food, heath care including teeth and emotional support, secure and safe housing, self-actualising education, and a loving environment promoting positive self-esteem.
Pot holes aren’t on the list. They affect car owners and cyclists. Owning a car requires expenditure of at least £50 a week for an old banger, hundreds for a new vehicle, placing them outside the affordability for at least 20% of us. Public transport is the real issue and requires massive investment if we are to have any equality of mobility.
Spending around £40million on refurbishing Armada Way is of benefit to local businesses seeking higher footfall, and property speculators wanting to make a fortune out of new city centre accommodation, but for families in Honicknowle or Southway the bus costs of getting into the city to play amongst the water features are wholly unaffordable.
What we need is £40 million spent on breakfast clubs, play parks and youth centres on our estates.
More so, we need refurbishment of our housing stock which is now, notably, the worst in all of Europe. Housing conditions are so poor that 14 million homes in England and Wales require extensive repair and retrofitting to stop water ingress and provide the insulation required to end fuel poverty. Plymouth has one of the highest rates of household damp and mould in the UK, with studies showing 36% of homes are damp, 14% with serious mould, and 25% of Plymouth households living in unhealthily cold homes.
The private landlords, a large proportion amongst our elected Councillors, certainly don’t want the housing crisis as a campaign issue. Caring for their tenants will eat into their private profits.
Trade unions have always campaigned against poverty, but the sectional self-interest of workers in specific industries often overwhelms our founding socialist principles. Jobs at the Dockyard and through the Freeport are emphasised as the growth Plymouth needs, whilst in all accounting for only 10% of our economy and doing nothing to alleviate poverty. Plymouth Devonport is one of the very poorest electoral wards in England.
Low pay is endemic, workers on the Minimum Wage often needing top-ups from Universal Credit in order pay the rent – effectively a tax-incentive for landlords to charge inflated rents.
Pay in the health service, schools and all public services has lost at least 15% real spending power since the 2008 crash. Our public services need substantial investment, not further privatisation pumping the offshore corporations’ profits.
Council spending power per person will be at least 15% lower in real terms in 2028/29 than in 2010/11. That’s more cuts and austerity policies to come this year and next. Central government must give back the money it has stolen from local authorities. Any candidate that isn’t ranting about this isn’t worth the time of day!
Now we are heading for another crash, probably the worst yet. A quarter of a million people will likely lose their jobs by the middle of next year as Britain experiences price-hikes, food inflation at 5%pa+ right now, and a recession because of nil investment and the chaos caused by the illegal war in Iran.
Should anyone knock at your door, ask them about the gross inequalities and deprivation in Plymouth and what they’re going to do about it
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (31.3.26) advertising next weekend’s mass blockade of US Air Force base at Lakenheath, Suffolk where US Bombers, fully armed, are taking-off to drop pay-loads on Iranian civilians in an illegal war. You’d think Starmer’s Government and our local MP Luke Pollard would be more embarrassed. Instead, they promote the drive towards nuclear war. Sickening. Inhuman. Detestable. Pandering to their rich imperialist paymasters.
Unedited below:
The illegal war on Iran is in its 4th week, upwards of two thousand Iranian civilians are confirmed dead so far, 24,000 injured and over three million displaced. 13 US military personnel killed and 300 injured. Iran has bombed Israel and Arab States in retaliation. In the West the care and concern is for prices at the petrol pumps and for home heating, the wider implications obscured by immediate self-interest.
This latest war is not going to end any time soon. Indeed, the media chatter is focussed upon the question of whether the Third World War has already begun. In associated reports the people of Ukraine generally accept it already has.
Following the nuclear bombs dropped upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 it was always assumed that WW3 would be a nuclear war.
Throughout March 2026 the two nuclear-armed states of USA and Israel have been pounding nuclear energy installations holding deadly radioactive materials in Iran. There are growing threats to nuclear facilities as has been the case in Ukraine where nuclear power plants have been damaged. In Iran, Israel has targeted the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant, the country’s only operational civilian nuclear power plant, and Iran threatening the nuclear site in Dimona, Southern Israel. Nuclear installations are frontline targets in war, posing the greatest mass threat to civilians downwind of radioactive fallout.
Targeting nuclear installations is act an of defiance of the UN Charter detailing rules of war. Indeed, nuclear weapons themselves are illegal under international law as weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction. But in 2026, the Old World Order is well and truly dead. The new situation has been being developed for decades, international agreements on nuclear arms reduction being eroded, disregarded or broken. Trump finally ended the New START Treaty last year despite the second major nuclear power, Russia, proposing its extension.
As a result we are seeing global nuclear proliferation, including by Britain. China is expanding its arsenal, Pakistan and India make routine threats against each other, US and UK building new “useable” so-called low-yield warheads with explosive power still larger than the Hiroshima bomb. They are designed for “first use”.
Local Plymouth MP and minister for military procurement, Luke Pollard, has waxed lyrically recently extolling the virtues of huge new investments in the US Trident nuclear system, the nuclear weapons system leased to the UK. At least one quarter of the entire UK military budget is now dedicated to nukes. He suggests nuclear weapons are a deterrent never to be used. He argues that nuclear weapons represent jobs and prosperity and a power too horrific to be unleashed, protecting the Peace. What’s not to like?
Such nonsense is belied by the list of hundreds of millions subjected to wars since 1945. What Peace has been protected? The international Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has offered evidence this year that the imminent potential for use of a nuclear weapon has never been greater. Only fools believe nuclear war cannot happen or that it can be contained once the first bomb is dropped.
Thankfully, despite Pollard, the majority of political leaders across the world understand this threat. Trump is not getting support from allies, governments like Spain actively defying Trump’s unbridled aggression. But Britain has fudged its direct involvement in Iran as “defensive support”, an increasingly untenable position. UK and US bases in Britain are launching attacks on Iran. At RAF Fairford there are 21 bombers running bombing raids twice a day, dropping the same 20-30k bombs that Israel has been dropping on residential areas in Iran, Palestine and Lebanon.
Bombers are also flying from USAF Lakenheath nuclear-weapons base in Suffolk, with the agreement of the UK government.
In all, the Iran war is being used as a nationalist propaganda tool promoting UK’s massive rearmament programme and militarised culture, in preparation for wider war. Yet there is strong public opposition to both US bases and US nuclear weapons here. 65% of UK citizens oppose nuclear weapons and over 70% oppose the war in Iran.
Defying public opinion, the political establishment and government are demanding we reorient towards European military coordination and nuclear expansion. The NATO nuclear alliance is being pulled-apart over continued US military alliance.
The joint committee on the National Security Strategy published last Friday, says Britain must delink from the US Trident weapons system and have an independent nuclear weapons system. In other words, build more nuclear weapons. And the government still hasn’t published its National Investment Plan due last year because of a £200billion shortfall – where are they going to get the money from? Higher taxes and cuts to welfare services, of course.
Meanwhile, we are building alliances and coalitions calling on a rethink of the nuclear expansion. Anti-nuclear campaigners are protesting. Our Peace Camp at USAF Lakenheath this week will demand the removal of all US nuclear weapons from Britain. We will blockade the base this weekend, demanding Welfare not Warfare! No Nukes! US Bases off British Soil! Join us at CNDuk.org
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (24.3.26), obviously advertising the mass demonstration against the far-Right taking place at the weekend. The back-room complexities of fund-raising and organising coaches, and filling them with activists, remains unseen. Commercial hire is absurdly overpriced. We are in debt and need donations, if you can. But more, we need to fill the coaches and build the mass movement against fascism.
Join us in Challenging the Rise of the Far Right
Hundreds of people will be travelling from Plymouth to London on Saturday to join the national demonstration against the far-Right. The protest by the Together Alliance and accompanying festival of diversity in Trafalgar Square will be the largest assembly against race-hate and fascism in British history. The threat of fascism is very real and present. The numbers of fascist organisations in Britain have grown, and their ranks expanded, greater than the National Front in the 1970’s or the British National Party in the 1990’s. At the same time, the level of public awareness has decreased as we have been separated and isolated into private social bubbles by financial Austerity, the Covid Pandemic and the sense of vulnerability caused by wars and climate crisis. We are emotionally jostled by conspiracy theorists seeking power through spreading fear and threat. We are lied to by far-Right politicians blaming and scapegoating minorities for all society’s ills. We are confused by politicians broadcasting conflicting fake facts in the name of Truth, just to further their own influence. Our children are subjected to all this in a concentrated form of professionally produced propaganda on-line, the Incel “Manosphere” telling boys they must be ready to fight, and girls they must submit to men’s needs. The saturating levels of You Tube generated sexism and misogyny is alive in the playground and classrooms, daily observed and documented by teachers themselves, taking a collective toll on the mental health and wellbeing of all concerned. Racism, the learnt prejudgment and assumptions of people of colour or minority ethnic group, is being encouraged and organised by antisemites, white supremacists and Christian fundamentalists, the targeting of Muslims most prevalent. Powerful political forces and social dynamics are being forged to develop fascist organisation here and across the world. In the United States of America, President Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) armed street thugs are terrorising minority communities, a style of para-military State organisation that Nigel Farage of Reform UK and all to his Right are pledging to bring here the moment they achieve power, targeting a million or more people of colour for forced deportation. Yet we know it’s not migrants that have created the cost of living crisis, food and fuel poverty, our austerity has been caused by the blatant profiteering of the richest multi-millionaires on the planet. Across Europe, openly racist and Islamophobic parties including the AfD in German, with whom Britain’s Tory Party are allied, is building street organisation to assert white privilege and forcibly smash all resistance. In France the same is happening with the leadership of the ultra-nationalist and openly racist National Rally set to win the Presidency within the next year. It is not an extreme view to be concerned about these developments. It is not politically extreme to oppose racism and fascism. Opposing the far-Right is essential to personal preservation as a member of the working class. It is now essential that we counter the rise of fascism on our streets and in our workplaces. We remember the history of the twentieth century, the death and devastation caused by the fascist parties that took power in Spain, Italy and Germany. We know that the totalitarian dog-eat-dog militarised organisation of society in the interests of a small super-rich all powerful elite produces a life of fear and subjugation, threat and violence for the majority. For example, after Hitler’s fascists, the Nazis, seized power in 1933 they banned political parties, trade unions and civil society organisations. They were “razing to their foundations” the institutions of any and all working class democracy. No semblance of resistance was tolerated. Key to this was the funding and organisation by the wealthy of violent street gangs recruited from the dispossessed, to “take the streets” and destroy all opposition. This is the blueprint and the goal of the fascist organisations in Britain today. Funded and informed by USA groups including the Homeland Party, the successors to the BNP including Patriotic Alternative and Britain First are joined by the reformed UKIP group led by the self-styled fascist Nic Tenconi, and others. The Flag Force groups encouraged by the White-supremacist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) are raising the English flag and Union Jack as symbols of neighbourhood domination in order to intimidate minorities. They are mirroring the 1930’s fascist strategies in a new era of capitalist crisis, nationalism and expanding warfare. In Britain there are currently many more anti-racists than racists. We must not allow ourselves to be out-organised. When we show our strength in numbers, the bullies and dominators disappear back into the shadows. Now is the time to stop the far-Right. Challenge far-right propaganda. Counter fascist-led demonstrations. It will only get harder, the longer they are left alone to breed hate and division. Join the demonstration in London, coaches from Plymouth and across the South West: go to togetheralliance.org.uk/getting-there
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!
