Tag: history

Fascists are the threat, not Migrants!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (20.5.25), warning of the fascist group coming to Plymouth on Saturday 24th May, under the banner “Great British Strike”, emulating the National Socialism of the Nazis, and conning the working class. Please join the counter-demo at the Sundial, Armada Way Plymouth City Centre, 11am.

The full article:

The fascists are coming! On Saturday, Nazi-sympathisers are returning to Plymouth to parade in the city centre that their forebears flattened with blanket bombing 84 years ago. They’re not welcome here!
We say Never Again! Never will we allow Hitlerites to foment violence, scapegoating sections of the working class or minorities identified by our skin colour or gender. Never again will we be conned by talk of white power and male supremacy preached and funded by super-rich multi-millionaires and their billionaire masters.
Fascism took-over in Germany and across Europe one hundred years ago resulting in social terror and genocide and world war in which more than 70 million people died. We should be historically informed and ideologically clear enough by now to recognise and oppose fascism when it speaks.
Fascism allows no free-speech or opposition, especially not organisation of the working classes such as trade unions. All individual interests must be subordinated to the good of the nation’s rulers, defined by those with wealth and power.
Fascism promotes extreme nationalism and militarism breeding contempt for electoral democracy and cultural diversity. Fascism is a political belief in there being a natural social hierarchy, white men at the top, and the rule of an elite as an autocracy with absolute power. Fascism is favoured by sections of the Capitalist ruling class when rumblings of discontent sound loud amongst workers.
Fascist ultra-nationalism was first fomented across Europe by isolating and demonising Jewish people, dividing the working class and ending with at least 6 million murdered in industrial death camps. Today it is Muslims similarly scapegoated across Europe, and now targeted in Britain as encompassing all Black and Brown-skinned “migrants” wherever born.
Racial hatred is being whipped-up again to divide us and rule us. Onto this stage comes Keir Starmer, echoing the nonsense that migrants are a threat to Britain’s economy, culture and identity. He claims that migration is making us a “country of strangers” when it is the extreme class divisions between rich and poor which segregate and alienate.
We’ve heard it all before. In the 1960’s Enoch Powell said white people were “strangers in their own country”, Nigel Farage marched with the British National Party in the 1980’s and praised Powell as his political hero, now Starmer echoed Powell with his “island of strangers” immigration speech. The fact is, this country’s working class has never tolerated a fascist party and isn’t about to now.
Migration isn’t a threat to the security and wellbeing of the working class. Migrants are not responsible for the housing crisis – rent hikes by landlords, interest rate hikes by banks, construction material price-hikes by monopoly corporations have together caused a crisis totally out of any power or influence of Black migrants.
Migrants are not responsible for the crisis of our Health Services – in fact migrants keep it going amidst decades of underinvestment. Without so-called “foreign-labour” the NHS and care homes for the elderly would not exist. You are far more likely to be helped by a migrant worker in a hospital than be in the queue alongside them.
Migrants are not responsible for the high prices of electricity and gas – they suffer the same charges whilst watching the record profits of Corporations like Shell and BP enrich the shareholding class.
We, the working class, are being fleeced by the super-rich, and fleeced by the same people telling us to blame the poorest and most powerless of the world on the basis of the colour of their skin. We’re not that stupid!
When we see Muslims being butchered in Palestine we protest – 600,000 on the streets of London last weekend. Britain’s multiculturalism is a hallmark of our post-colonial culture and identity.
Last weekend, leading fascist organisers in Britain called on Nazis to join Reform UK. They want to fast-track racism and male-supremacy, on a roll after the Prime Minister’s inflamatory speech.
Starmer is fuelling far-Right scapegoating out of fear of the rising tide of protest against his Austerity Mark 2 programme of social welfare cuts across the UK. We want to see real change for He could raise taxes on the Rich, but he’s on their side. He could restore the Winter Fuel Allowance and gain the support of the majority of of our cash-strapped elderly. He could u-turn on the £5billion cuts to welfare for people with disabilities. He could ensure a living wage for care workers and invest in the NHS and schools rather than military rearmament.
But Starmer is not on the side of the working class. History is littered with failed politicians who sought to appease fascists rather than expose their lies. Starmer is courting the same fate. Trade unionists must stand together and demand redistribution of wealth from the super-rich to the working class.

Oppose Rearmament and Militarism

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This week’s comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (6.5.25), uncharacteristically offering a personal memory in pursuit of a wider general point. Being against imperialist war is not a pacifist stance necessarily – it is a recognition of class society. Workers are sent to die for the ambitions and profits of the ruling class. And the Second World War was, above all, an imperialist war. We need to build working class resistance to oppose the drive towards the third world war, urgently.

The full text:

“Those who celebrate war have never seen it”. The words of my father, who fought through the entire 6 years of the Second World War. A skilled sailor, a gunner on the convoys, steering a landing craft on D-Day, he never spoke of his experiences until in his late seventies, and then seemed unable to stop recounting the horror.
My mother lost her first husband in ‘41. He was a bomber pilot. She, a young widow, then served as a fire warden, spotting the bombs to warn the emergency services. My parents married on VE Day +1, a date later to become their granddaughter’s birthday. The wedding was brief and a celebratory act, Dad about to finish his training at Turnchapel to captain an assault craft for the ground invasion of Japan.
Victory in Europe didn’t mean the war had finished. Their hasty marriage reflected fear as well as happiness, and the war experience infected the rest of their long but haunted lives.
There has been more war ever since, the competition between imperialist powers continuing to today, with a war in Europe and clamour for more war in the Middle East and against China.
Eighty Years on there are few who remember the impacts of war at home as well as abroad, even if the emotions are handed down the generations. I’ll never forget my old man’s eyes, glaring through his memories as he described the killing, his friends on fire as the ship began listing from the explosions, enemy planes strafing the deck, him seeing the face of his foe in the cockpit as he shot him down.
The trauma doesn’t go away when the fighting stops. War doesn’t ever stop once it’s in your head.
And yet this week, service men and women will be in school classrooms exalting military service. Infant and Primary School teachers, and even nursery staff will be encouraging the glorification of wearing uniform and dying for your country.
Teachers’ trade unions are warning against the militarisation of the curriculum. Whole classrooms will empty to learn the rudiments of marching on Plymouth Hoe, waving union jacks and singing the national anthem. Are pupils being brainwashed into this generation’s cannon fodder? Tax money for armaments has been taken from education budgets – mistaken priorities, surely?
Don’t tell me we’re not being prepared for war. Don’t pretend this week is a commemoration of a horror never to be repeated. The horror is continuing today in the Middle East, Europe and Africa and the messaging is towards the glorification of War, not a celebration of Peace.
Prime Minister Starmer, joining at Plymouth, slept a night onboard aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales a fortnight ago, addressing the deployment of young sailors from HMS Drake and elsewhere in battle fatigues reminiscent of Thatcher’s photos as a tank commander. Hurried rearmament was his message.
Starmer’s sending forces to the South China Seas via the Mediterranean, targeting Gaza, threatening Iran, bombing Yemen, and trying to deploy “troops on the ground” in war zones. Prime Ministers all want to command a war as their legacy. Remembering Blair he’d be advised to be careful what to wish for.
The week Starmer’s government announced an additional £5bn for the armed forces he also announced £5bn in cuts to disabilities allowances and PiP. War costs. He’s now spending £10bn a year on Trident nuclear weaponry that can never be used. Basic rate tax is bound to rise.
My MP, the Armed Forces Minister Luke Pollard, has developed a keenness for war preparations, raising spending to 2.5% of GDP and not stopping there, despite 1 in 4 of our children living in poverty amidst crumbling infrastructure and Austerity Mark II.
Plymouth’s former Royal Marines officer, Fred Thomas MP, might regret the rising rate of homelessness of veterans but his government is cutting public services for all. At the same time, the far-Right scream for the return of National Service if not conscription.
Raising military spending to 3% or even the 5% wished-for by President Trump is a target in the Government’s eye, a preparation for war. Deterring war requires detente and diplomacy, not militarism. Let our children study Peace.
We are being prepared. Wall-to-wall glorification of war, promotion of illegal weapons of mass-destruction both chemical and nuclear, plastic-doll cuddling of soldiers in uniform, ultra-nationalism being required as standard, the identification of all “others” as threats and potential enemies. Hatred of the “sub-humans”. Call of Duty 1-6. Militarism is a tool for authoritarian control, jingoism and subjugation.
I shall commemorate the dead and campaign for Peace in their memory. Welfare not Warfare!

May Day is International Workers Day

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This week’s Comment column for the daily Plymouth Herald newspaper (29.4.25), needing to use the space to advertise our May Day march and rally, 12 midday at the Plymouth Guildhall Square, Armada Way, and trade union Rally at the Athenaeum Theatre, Derry’s Cross, in the city centre. We will march! Please bring banners. Workshops from 2.15 at the Athenaeum Theatre, on trade union struggle; standing up to racism and fascism; and opposing militarism – Welfare not Warfare! Afternoon free cinema showing the vital film documentary, “Censoring Palestine” at 3.15pm. Light refreshments available.

Please join us.

It might feel like it, but this is not the start of Summer. Meteorologically, Summer will be welcomed-in on Saturday 21st June. Nevertheless, we’ve always celebrated May Day as a turning point, the days expanding and the trees in leaf again. Phew!

Workers celebrate May 1st for a very different reason. May Day is a celebration of the collective and organised power of the working class. 

For most of us, on every continent since the very start of the system of Capitalism, workers have had little to celebrate, condemned to precarious employment, wage-slavery and gross exploitation.

From the fourteenth century, the rise of a new Capitalist class, mercantilists competing with and largely replacing the ruling Feudal Landlord class, cleared the lands of peasants and herded them, with enforced ethnic-cleansing, into their hurriedly constructed slums and their 14-hour day factories producing the global Industrial Revolution which continues today.

Workers were combined into the Proletariat, the label an acknowledgment of the cruelly stratified system of the ancient Roman Empire within which the proletarii owned little or no property. Proletarian struggle could overthrow imperial governments. That’s why workers’ organisations are continually challenged and forcefully put down by the Capitalist Class who know the history and recognise that we are the many and they are the few. 

The Capitalist class organises, by any means possible, to ensure that workers cannot gain economic, social or political control. Should workers win, the exploitation of Capitalism will be ended, the social conditions of individual competition for private gain at the expense of others finally ended.

On 1st May 1886, workers in the United States of America called a strike for the 8-hour day. Workers across the continent heeded the call, downing tools, refusing to work. The bosses put-down the disputes with great violence, imprisoning and even executing activists. This only produced more opposition and demands for a legislated maximum working day.

By 1890 the international organisation of workers proclaimed May Day as International Workers Day, adopting the workers’ anthem written by French member of the Paris commune, Eugene Pottier: The Internationale, sung every year since across five continents, beginning “Arise Ye Workers from Your Slumber, Arise Ye Prisoners of Want!”

We commemorate the struggles and gains made by the labour movement, with marches and rallies. Trade Unionists will be marching for May Day in London this Thursday, celebrating our proud heritage. On Saturday we will March in Plymouth and enjoy an afternoon of festival and campaigning at the Athenaeum Theatre, Derry’s Cross.

It is worth remembering our heritage, and all the struggles that have been fought at great cost for regulated working hours, health & safety, and decent pay rates. Today, the celebrations across the UK are muted by the effect of decades of direct attack by successive government on worker’s rights, the right to strike and more recent restrictions on the right to protest. 

Much of the gains made by collective trade union actions through the post-war period have been reversed, young people facing precarious employment, a low-wage economy, housing crisis and the return of long working hours and the prospect of never reaching pension-age. 

Most importantly, we support action today against vicious employers. We support the Birmingham “bin workers” striking against pay cuts of £8k a year. We support delivery workers organising for income security.

This week’s celebrations across the UK are muted by the direct attack of successive governments on worker’s rights, the right to strike, and more recent restrictions on the right to protest by Starmer’s Labour government.

Trade unions have been bureaucratised and the notion of collective struggle demonised as if now irrelevant or counter-productive. Yet the central dynamic of Capitalism requires the extraction of surplus value from our labours, into the pockets of employers. That exploitation will always produce fights for workers’ rights. As individuals we are rendered powerless in the workplace, and forced together to support each other’s common need for decent pay and conditions.

Today the global proletariat number more than half of the entire human population. Strikes are happening every day across the world, and often winning. On an international scale, that’s a powerful force if ever brought together. Here in the UK, it’s time to build such collective resistance once again. 

Imperialist War only Helps the Rich to Get Richer

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (11.3.25), attempting to steer clear of censorship by not mentioning Ukraine or Gaza whilst opposing imperialist war (my original, printed below, did the mention but didn’t get away with it). The pro-war liberals and socialists appear to be confused by the Trump demand for Peace, as if you can’t oppose Trump and Putin and Imperialism. Choosing sides means being with the international working class always, with the bosses never, and consistently against Imperialism as the most powerful form of Capitalism. I haven’t got away with writing that yet!

The original:

The times they are a’changing.
The accelerating shift towards the domination of far-Right political leadership is happening because the global system of Capitalism is in crisis. Regions are scrabbling for resources. Competition is acute.
At such times, as in the 1910’s and the 1930’s, the vulnerable sections of the world’s ruling class turn away from the pleasantries of democracy and towards totalitarian control. Authoritarianism is growing everywhere seeking to make popular the politics of the far-Right.
At best, and only during times of relative prosperity, parliamentary democracy offers a chimera of popular suffrage – the ‘right to vote” symbolising a symbolic engagement of every citizen with the real forces of the Boss Class that rule over our lives and futures. In truth we have little say.
The “mixed-economy” of the 1950’s and ‘60’s allowed the social infrastructure to be rebuilt from the ruins of the Second World War, State taxes claiming 95% of each £ for the highest earners, raising the cash for social (council) housing, health, education, care of children and the elderly and vulnerable, and our nationally owned utilities.
But once the certainty of a working class healthy and educated enough to meet modern employment needs was established, the Capitalists decided to reclaim their profit rates by reducing the amount of tax they pay, at least by half, and organise to get most of the rest back in State-paid allowances to their private businesses. They returned to laissez-faire neo-liberal free-market economics.
The working classes are left to pay for our own services. Today, the super-rich and billionaires pay hardly anything into the common purse whilst getting subsidised by us. They are insatiable and in no way satisfied by the enormous increase in their private wealth and power since the 1970’s.
Most of the huge transnational corporate monopolies are now simply too big to fail, receiving routine tax-bail-outs whilst increasing levels of unrepayable debt.
They are too vulnerable to global tensions to spend their hoards of money. There’s little or no investment from the billions of billions in profits into maintaining the social infrastructure that their businesses need society to provide. If the bosses had to pay for the welfare of their workforce they’d make little profit. Instead, with the global growth of the working class, they don’t need a full pool of locally educated and healthy workers when they can trawl the world for cheap and able labour.
So our Western infrastructure is crumbling, the USA and UK being some of the worst examples. The Capitalists want sure-fired short-term high-yield returns on any investments they make. Public health, public housing, public education (just about anything publicly owned) doesn’t make big profits.
Many essential services and utilities aren’t profitable except through a one-time asset-stripping robbery. Transition of energy supplies to renewables doesn’t make the scale of profits from oil.
So what does make big short term profit apart from fossil fuels (oh, and mind-numbing drugs to manage the alienation of wage-slavery)? War.
A bullet or bomb can only explode once and has to be replaced. There’s no multi-use for munitions. The price of munitions is determined by the market – the more wars, the more demand, the higher the profit. The military-industrial complex cherry-picks for high-return investment, leaving the tax-payer to pay for the true costs of militarisation. High-tech, big bangs and nuclear capabilities make the biggest killing.
As an aside, the destruction of huge areas of infrastructure, let’s say Gaza or the Donbas region of Ukraine, the higher the value of the land and real-estate for fresh private investment. The decaying old infrastructure, now collapsed, can be purloined, owned and rebuilt with high profit margins. The prime land is worth investing in again.
Little wonder there is now a drive to war. It’s not so much about freedom for the People as freedom for the corporations to rejuvenate their portfolios and profit margins. They need to free-up the congested and aging markets to kick-start a fresh round of exploitation of people and natural resources. Wars kick-start a fresh round of plunder of people and natural resources.
Even then, it is the tax-payer who is expected to make the investment in building a new military, not the billionaires. Ruling classes and their tame politicians identify enemies, whip-up nationalism, glory in militarism, start the looting of land, minerals and the cheap labour of the battered survivors.
Politicians make a song and dance about security and justice, whipping-up fear and racism in their drive for compliance, whilst mostly it’s about competition between corporate states for market domination. That’s the definition of imperialism.
War is built-in to the Capitalist System. And always it’s the working class who are conscripted, either through financial imperative or legal requirement, to fight and be shot or die, whilst the profiteers rake-in the cash from wholesale destruction. We pay the price.
Be cautious of any enthusiasm for rearmament. In the immediate, the billions spent on war come at the price of cuts to the essential services we all need. Wars destroy our social infrastructure. Wars come at terrible cost to the survivors, our quality of life shattered, our memories polluted with images of horror, our relationships distorted, all supposedly in the name of our national interest.
The workers of the world never benefit from war. We must invest in Peace. Welfare not Warfare!

We Have Never Been Closer to Catastrophe

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (28.1.25), back on the anti-nuclear megaphone. We’ll be holding a day of anti-nuclear protest at Devoport Dockyard on Saturday 7th June – a date for your diary. Log it now!
Meanwhile, unedited:

Tomorrow we will hear the annual assessment of the world’s atomic scientists on the level of risks we face. They will publish the 2025 “Doomsday Clock”, symbolising the current likelihood of a human-made global catastrophe. The imagery was created by nuclear physicists Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer along with biophysicist Eugene Rabinowitch in 1947 as a response to the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima, and Nagasaki towards the end of the Second World War in 1945.
The closer the clock’s “time” towards midnight represents just how immediate the accumulated and conjoined threats are to human annihilation. In 1947, as the world’s most powerful nations accelerated the race for nuclear armaments and the Cold War started to become inevitable, they startled the world by suggesting we were only 7 minutes before the end – midnight. Bang!
For the last two years the clock has stood at 90 seconds.
90 seconds. It will be difficult to identify any good news for peace and prosperity in 2025. The current clock is so close to detonation because of the entire and accumulated global facts surrounding the developments in hostilities, political conflicts, and scientific and technological advances which, each or together could cause irrevocable harm to humanity.
Today we have never been closer to catastrophe, the contemporary ingredients being nuclear warfare, climate change and unregulated Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Putting to one side the contentious but poorly understood development of AI (worthy of a statement on its own and devoid of political controls or safety features), the remaining ingredients should send shivers down our spines.
The President of the most powerful military empire the human race has ever seen is much in favour of nuclear weapons, and has declared his willingness to unleash them. President Trump is ordering the expansion of the US nuclear arsenal from a free-market ideology that welcomes proliferation – let nations have their nuclear weapons, the US will simply have bigger and better ones.
And the leading proponents, Trump and Putin (and now apparently, Starmer), as noting that the new AI assisted generation of nuclear weapons can be unstoppable and make a bigger bang. Dismissing the environment-destroying radiation that makes nuclear an illegal chemical, biological and illegal weapon of mass-destruction they conceive that their “first-use” of nuclear warhead could finish a conflict in minutes. All systems are now set to “first-use, not retaliation. But nuclear weapons were never considered deterrents – just consider how much war has taken place since 1945, and is continuing today.
The true impact of of nuclear-exchange is not Armageddon at all, but the slow and painful death of the human race. After the initial blasts and firestorms there will remain billions of survivors cast into a pain and misery of internal burns, famine and social collapse. The Judgement Day scenario is a myth – Armageddon is a slow death. But hey, who cares, nuclear weapons are a cash-rich investment opportunity right now.
Trump’s fellow billionaire oligarchs include the winners of the US tech giant corporations that modern nuclear warfare relies upon. Elon Musk, friend and financier of the far-Right organisations across the world, owns 45% of all the satellites orbiting the Earth. His Starlink system, a division of the SpaceX corporation, has around 4,500 communications satellites encircling the Earth which encompass and incorporate military systems – right now coordinating all Ukraine’s military capabilities.
White racial supremacist misogynist autocrats are in charge. Whatever could go wrong [see 1930’s, Ed.]?!
Prime Minister Starmer has enjoyed feint praise from the President in recent days, mostly because Starmer is leading Europe in increasing expenditure on military rearmament towards 5% of our annual Gross Domestic Product and in particular, a new generation of nuclear weaponry. Trump has every reason to be pleased, the UK-based Trident replacement systems being licensed and controlled from the USA, but funded by the UK tax-payer.
Some £5billion a year is going towards the UK development of all things nuclear, a further £1billion a year announced for the ailing Rolls Royce only last last week. This, at the same time as more real-income cuts to education, health and welfare benefits.
The US Air Force base at Lakenheath, Suffolk has now invested $1billion in preparations for the placement of US nuclear warheads there, placing the UK on the nuclear frontline. The B61-12 satellite guided bombs have three times the destructive power of the US atomic bomb, which killed over 200,000 people in Hiroshima in 1945.
Polling shows that 59% of the population oppose US nuclear weapons being stationed in Britain. But here’s the rub. You won’t hear a right-wing nationalist ever arguing for cuts to all-things military, nor demands for more welfare expenditure. Our home-grown far-Right, echoing Trump, wants no more action to protect the working class from the storms, fires, droughts and harvest chaos caused by climate change, let alone nuclear war. Instead Farage’s crew want us to gear-up for war – internationally against Muslims and nationally against migrants and all people of colour.
This is a recipe for disaster, speed-cooked in an air-fryer. We have to stop Trump placing US nuclear warheads at USAF Lakenheath in Suffolk or anywhere here. The 59% have to make their voice heard. Join the protests at Lakenheath 14-25th April.

Needs of People Must Come Before Profits

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

The Needs of People have to Come Before Profit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May be an illustration of 1 person and text

Religion is Political

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (24.12.24) getting over-philosophical (it’s the time of year) and challenging all orthodoxies. No more Business as Usual (if we want to survive). Seasons Greetings, the unexpurgated version below:

We are constantly warned of extremism. Not only the terrorism of car-driving, gun-toting or axe-wielding fanatics but the social orators of various fundamentalisms, political as well as religious.

We are taught to see those who haven’t been raised to our orthodoxies as potential threats.

We are told to be cautious of those who wear the symbols and emblems of a religious group or engage in mass rituals. A society with a regime that requires specific behaviours of all citizens, stopping all they would normally do in order to respect a specific religious date, is to be frowned upon as an example of anything from forced indoctrination through to mass hysteria. Oops, there goes Christmas!

All religion stems from the primordial human need to understand why we are here as well as why we die. The apparent impossibility of answering those questions opens the door to an all-but infinite number of explanations. Events and situations that are unconscionable are explained by the wisdom of god or gods who do know that which we cannot know.

Religion offers hope amidst the pains of living, and a heart in a heartless world. Faith allows acceptance of fallibility, the inhuman actions of human beings, the unreasoned and unreasonable.

Because Faith seeks to define acceptable behaviour, it is deeply political. Politics is, after all, about how people live together and behave towards each other. And so, as religions develop and grow they become organised and led, by leaders, enrobed and ordained with the word of god, to tell people how to behave.

The histories written into religious scripts convey the lessons of humanity over time, but are nevertheless written down by human beings. Ancient scriptures are reinterpreted time and again, and subjected to the censorship or acceptance of those with the power to have them published or burnt. The stories and the rules are changed over time. Crude tenets are nuanced into everyday rules of social relations. The scribes and their editors possess immense personal power. And all personal power corrupts.

There are some material reasons for religious rules. In a world without fridges it was a good rule of thumb to not eat red meat riddled with disease. Should you be starving you may still be tempted to eat a pig or a cow, even if the King threatened you with punishment. But if it is god’s word, punishable with an after-life of eternal pain and damnation, you may rather starve to death in pursuit of life in the hereafter.

The rules laid down by god are not to be broken so lightly as the laws decreed by men. And so the church has power, political power. Most organised religion tells us we are born into a place in the social structure as ordained by god, and we should accept rather than challenge our rank in the class system. But the decrees laid down by the church change over time, determined by the prevailing social conditions. The religious edicts of a feudal society have to be turned-over as a new ruling class develops – the Capitalist mercantilists taking over political power from the landlords.

The ruling class power, its wealth and standing army, determines the rules of the church, not the other way round. Monasteries are burnt to the ground, bloody wars are waged between rival sects.

Catholic versus Protestant, Sunnis versus Shia, Hindu versus Buddhist…and within each there are challengers from the Left and the Right, doubters and zealots.

All religions involve battles for power. The power of ideas, accepted or rejected by those with the wealth and armies to enforce them. To a point where all ruling ideas are the chosen ideas of the ruling class.

It’s all about power and control on Earth, not Heaven.

People learn how to think within the confines of the society and natural world we are born into. The teaching we experience in school reflects the ruling ideology, the curriculum determined by the ruling class, the behaviours enshrined in the prevailing religious order. We try to behave and accept even when those ideas make little or no sense – do we starve or break the laws in order to survive?

It is the contradictions between what we’re told to believe and what we actually experience as the world around us that foment revolutions.

Those of us who dare to challenge the ruling class also challenge the ruling ideas, and are heavily damned should that include defying the ruling religious norms. We can be proclaimed as “ungodly”, a charge far worse than being “illegal”. Yet all beliefs change with the times.

And so there are times when the enforced religious rules no longer make sense and place the people in grave danger. They have to be defied, as does the ruling class who proclaims them. With an elite of billionaires ruling over mass poverty and requiring authoritarian compliance to the money-god, we are living in such times.

In this era of escalating warfare and climate catastrophe our priority must be to organise for human welfare not religious or political dogma. That means opposing both imperialist and religious wars threatening nuclear annihilation. It also requires we challenge the consumerism producing the climate-heating toxic emissions and throwaway plastics that are killing the Planet. These are not matters of belief but observable facts.

Christmas needs a rethink.

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Collective Freedoms Must be Fought For

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (10.12.24), keeping-up with the fast moving historic situation. Linking the global and local is a challenge, but we are all affected by international events, and should learn from them.

Collective Freedoms Must be Fought For

It is good to see so many are thinking about human rights, political agency and personal integrity. There is much debate about the future of democracy. The driving force for this anxiety is the accelerating instability at home and across the world.

The fall of the dictatorship of Assad in Syria has encouraged talk of universal rights, women’s suffrage and protections of minorities. With at least nine military forces vying for power in Syria, including the country’s working class who started the revolution in 2011, collective freedoms are going to have to be fought for.

Amnesty International’s decision, however late, that Israel’s destruction of Gaza represents genocide is another demand for protection of human rights. The bombing of schools and hospitals and entire civilian populations is against international law and has to be challenged for any of us to feel safe. Mass extermination is beyond all concepts of political balance and social justice.

The same bombing of Ukrainian towns by Russia is damned across our news media, but the hypocrisy of condemning Putin and not Netanyahu completely outrageous. If some groups of people are expendable then we are all at risk.

When the Prime Minister of South Korea declared martial law last week, placing the entire country under curfew policed by armed soldiers, workers amassed on the streets to reinstate democracy.

When the President of France imposed a Prime Minister from a minority party, ignoring the majority vote of the people, mass protest and industrial strikes defied the imposition and kicked out the usurper.

There is a class war for workers rights and agency happening parallel to the wars between nations. Economically, global Capitalism is in crisis, the poor immersed in debt.

In this accelerating war of competition for resources, there are battles between ideologies as well as armies.

We now see a fast-growing and organised global far-Right movement, winning elections across the globe from Argentina to Poland. The threat in the UK is real, the ultra-nationalists organised politically with promises of millions in funding from American billionaire Elon Musk. This year we have seen white power pogroms in which acts of attempted murder were committed against refugees, racist riots in town centres, meetings attacked and mosques firebombed.

Our government is pandering to the far-Right, Labour courting Reform UK, toughening Tory laws against protest and manipulating the Courts into the levels of sentencing they condemn when seen in Russia or China. Authoritarianism at home is another manifestation of deepening war abroad.

Behind all are the same forces operating on many fronts. Billionaires are funding propaganda aimed at scapegoating migrants and minorities, weaponising racism in order to hide their hideous wealth derived from our exploitation and oppression.

The level of disinformation paid for by wealthy elites mirrors their new investment in arms manufacturing and artificial intelligence, all aimed at distracting and confusing us into acquiescence. Wars make money for the few.

The Trade Unions have a key role in challenging the drive towards fascism and war. We need a strong anti-racist movement to defend the rights of minorities in order to advance the rights of the entire working class. And that means offering refuge to those scorched by war or climate change, alongside challenging the profiteers making billions from death and environmental destruction.

Bringing the human race together is the historic role of ordinary people, we, the majority working class. Our history proves that nothing is given to us without collective demands and organised challenge to those in power. Blame the billionaires not the refugees. We who want peace with social justice are going to have to fight for it.

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The Banks are Funding the Fascists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speak Out Against Racism and Fascism

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With the far-Right Farage ramping-up white-British supremacy at the ReformUK Conference, and the fascist “Tommy Robinson” calling for street demonstrations across Britain this weekend, including in Torquay, Devon, my weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (24.9.24) had to call for mass opposition to fascism and the rise of authoritarian governance. Strangely, it was edited to leave-out my call to get to get to London for the national demonstration on 26th October to Stand Up To Racism, but at least it was printed!

The full Comment below:

It’s Time for Mass Action Against Racism and Fascism

Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist and racist political ideology. The fascist movement organises for a centralised autocracy: militarism; forcible suppression of opposition; and a dictatorial leader of a militarised Party machine.

The fascist believes in strict social hierarchy, often portrayed in mystical terms of genetic and ancestral birthright, concocting the superiority of the land and so-called “Race” you are born into. Fascism demands a strong regimentation of society and the economy with no democratic say.

The most important ingredient of fascism is the mass movement. Fascism depends upon the building and mobilisation of street gangs and mobs ready to physically attack any and all opposition, and embed fear into the general culture and daily experience of working class communities, destroying trade unions.

Any political litmus test would show Britain to be at risk from fascist organisation, having become more deeply polarised over decades, the gap between rich and poor stretched to an extreme, the fear of “the other”, and the targeting of the non-compliant purposefully ramped-up by politicians seeking power.

The fear shuts working class people into our homes and shuts down open debate in workplaces and families.

This is why it is so vital that we do not shut up, that we do speak out, and that we show our collective opposition to racism, misogyny and authoritarianism on the streets. Right now, active anti-racism requires constant challenge to Islamaphobia and anti-semitism as well as championing the equal rights of people of colour alongside the politically identified “White” population.

We must be highly sensitised to the signs and symptoms of authoritarian governance and fascist organisation. Targeting all Muslims as “Islamist extremists” is a piece of propaganda nonsense easily exposed – the vast majority of adherents to any religion do not support the extreme-fundamentalist wing of their church. Scapegoating a tiny number of asylum-seekers as the enemy supposedly “invading” a nation of sixty-seven million people is a toxic distraction from the real causes of poverty.

The twentieth-century experiences of fascism proves the rule. Those organising for fascism first seek legitimacy and wear a mask of reason and justice, engaging with democracy in order to later smash it. They voice the growing anger against poverty and inequality in a pretence of challenge to the rich and powerful.

In fact, they only grow with the active funding and encouragement of sections of the super-rich ruling class, using the mob to smash any collective working class fight against exploitation and oppression.

And history shows that when faced with fascists on the one hand and working class socialists on the other, the property-owning comfortable middle classes will invariably side with fascism.

This is happening right now across Europe and the United States, and here in Britain.

Starmer’s meeting with Italy’s Premier Meloni last week is a signal of our political class courting the far-right. Macron’s imposition of a government of the far-right despite the Left winning the majority vote in the recent French election is another warning of the lurch of the ruling class towards fascism. The 30% vote for the fascist AfD across Eastern Germany a further example.

The drive to war, with the nationalism and militarism it transmits into civil society, is perhaps the greatest warning.

All this means we have to challenge the forces of fascism directly, nationally and internationally. Against war and racism, ultranationalism and oppression.

Trade unionists will be supporting the national demonstration in London to Stand Up To Racism and Fascism on Saturday 26th October. We will travel together from Plymouth and across the country to push back against fascism and the authoritarian powers that promote it.

Trade unionists will be supporting the national demonstration in London to Stand Up To Racism and Fascism on Saturday 26th October. We will travel together from Plymouth and across the country to push back against fascism and the authoritarian powers that promote it.

We Stood Up To Stop Fascists from Destroying Plymouth

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Fascist cadre came to Plymouth on Monday 5th August 2024 to whip-up violence against migrants and people of colour, with phrases like “Stop the Boats”, a one time slogan of the Tory Prime Minister, Richi Sunak. The reporting of the violence suggested two tribes, two sides fighting each other as if in turf warfare. I had to complain. We had called a protest with the Stand Up To Racism organisation to stop the fascists. 700 of us faced 500 of them. They threw bricks and bottles and fireworks. We shouted “Refugees Are Welcome here!” and “Fascists off Our Streets!”. My letter was challenged by the Editor of the Plymouth Herald, but published in full. I stand by the challenge against poor journalism and biased reporting.

Dear Editor

The reporting of Monday night’s violence in Plymouth represented an extraordinary level of ignorance of the facts. Your narrative was of a clash between two protest groups. It was portrayed as a clash between two tribes, both violent and in the wrong.y

In fact, the Unity Rally at the Guildhall Square, called by the Stand Up To Racism group in the City and supported by the Plymouth Trade Unions, was a statement of city pride in multiculturalism and peace. 

When told that fascist organisers were travelling to Plymouth to whip-up race hate and misogyny, we rallied to defend our rights. We stopped their intended destruction of our city centre.

Yet we are presented as two-sides of the same coin. Let’s be clear, there is no currency between social harmony and fascism. 

Militarised fascist cadre, ideologically tied to far-right groups in the USA and funded by millionaires organising a fast rise in fascist organisation across Europe and America, came into Plymouth to test our resolve. They are seeking fertile ground for fascist organisation. They include those who emulate the Nazis of the Second World War who bombed Plymouth. They present Nazi salutes and symbols in public.

The most horrific and violent aspect of their organisation is the intention to find the most righteously angry of the dispossessed youth in the poorer cities and towns, to pull together into street fighting gangs to target minority groups – essentially tho’ not only Muslims, refugees and asylum seekers.

The local young people on the Racist demonstration came from the most deprived areas of our city are easy prey for political manipulators seeking personal power and control.

Race-hate is not their only tool. The powerful millionaire actors on social media whip-up misogyny, homophobia and trans-hate, ridiculing actions to manage the very obvious climate change we are experiencing, and whipping-up nationalist fever towards world war. These are the proponents of male white nationalist supremacy. Why would the media not expose this?

And more importantly, why is the propaganda from local politicians not only saying we should not challenge the fast rise of organised racism and fascism, but actually defend our cities? It was exactly this position of politics as in the 1930’s that allowed Hitler’s Nazis come to power in Germany. Know your history.

Our politicians should be out, working tirelessly to build the social infrastructure so desperately needed to end poverty and division. 

Fortunately, more than 700 anti-racists defied political demands to “stay at home” and ensured the insurgent fascists could not smash our city centre. We should be applauded, not damned. Plymouth must not be seen as fertile ground for fascist organisation.

There is an urgent need for action against racism in our City. And to prevent the adoption of race hate by our forgotten and disposed youth we need urgent funding for housing and education, welfare and security. We need politics of hope not hate. And we must stand up to racism, as a mass and in action, or our streets will quickly become unsafe, firstly for any person of colour and then for the entire working class.

Trade unions have a proud history of fighting racism and fascism, because fascism destroys all working class organisation to ensure totalitarian control from above. We stepped-up to the plate on Monday, against violence, intimidation, racism and fascism. We will continue to do so.

Tony Staunton

President, Plymouth Trades Union

Plymouth Stand Up To Racism held a meeting on Thursday 8th August at 7pm at the Quaker House, 74 Mutley Plain, Plymouth, with 70 people attending, organising a Unity Rally the following Saturday that was attended by 200. Altogether a good start, but nearly enough activists to combat this growing threat.

The Divide and Pride

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My weekly comment in the daily Plymouth Herald (25.6.24) which cut-out all the references to the Pride LGBTQ+ links that I wrote about. My purpose was to promote Pride whilst linking the reason for both gender oppression and other oppressions as doing a job for the bosses. Perhaps the editor didn’t get it, or perhaps the subject was seen as too delicate, or perhaps even too political. I simply don’t know, but if there is such fear in mainstream publication, its worse than anything I wrote about.

Trade unions exist because of the power imbalance between business owners as employers, their managers and supervisory staff, and the the workers who produce the goods. It’s a universally experienced pyramid of power.

The tension that exists, exists because when workers combine together we can create a power equal to or greater than The Boss. When we are treated like slaves, paid subsistence and ordered to undertake gruelling and unhealthy work we can unite, stop working, go on strike and show the employer that nothing gets done without us. 

We have bargaining power because, when work stops, so does the profit for the business owner. 

Indeed the greatest threat to profit is workers united in defiance. So employers worldwide have learnt the myriad of ways to divide and rule the workforce, and indeed, our communities.

For so long as we fret over each others’ differences and seek individual superiority based upon personal characteristics, there can be not unity. Division and competition in the workforce only ever benefits the bosses and their bigoted courtiers.

The employing class uses oppression to hold down workers’ confidence to fight for our rights by dividing us each from the other. Women continue to be paid less than men for the same work, the false ideas of femininity as emotionally weaker and less able than men still fed into workplaces to stoke competition and division. Sexual and gender superiority are tools of control, encouraging violence and domestic abuse. 

Bosses also always promote nationalism, even losing profit to give workers time off to watch the national football team play in the final. Nationalism tells workers we have more in common with our bosses than we have with the same workers from another country or even an associated rival business – such jingoism is an essential prerequisite for putting us into uniforms and sending us to war. 

Racism is encouraged to boost individual self-importance and prevent unity in struggle. White skin in the workplace remains a symbol of entitlement over those of colour, said to be “different” or “other”.

The categories proposing superiority and inferiority have differing roots but are all linked. There is no hierarchy of oppression. Those seeking personal power continue to campaign to cancel human rights across the board. 

Sexual and gender superiority is heavily promoted. So to consider the demand for women’s liberation as vital whilst collaborating with the continued oppression of trans-women simply maintains the power that prejudice wields over everyone.

We each have unique characteristics. We appreciate the family and friends we love, accepting of a wide range of sexual preferences and gender identities. Whilst the ruling class continues to present only heterosexuality as “normal” if not “god given”, we love and care for our relatives and friends who are gay or lesbian, bisexual or abrosexual, aromantic or asexual, transsexual or Queer – the term reclaimed by the LGBTQ+ members who have redeemed it from its use as a homophobic put-down and excuse for violent attacks – but  non-heterosexual and straight-gender characteristics are still portrayed as outside “the norm”.

The shift in social attitudes and acceptance of differing gender identities has been fought for through generations of struggle, and continues to be challenged, especially in the workplace. Trade unions have had a key role to play in championing the right to determine and express ourselves without prejudice or oppression in the workplace. Unity is strength.

It is little wonder then, in this period of heightened political debate, that the racist, sexist, white-supremacist millionaire profiteers and business owners are pushing “anti-wokism” to win the votes from those who want to bolster themselves and the power of prejudice at the expense of others. 

Campaigns have challenged oppression and won time after time. The Capitalists learn to adapt to the general consensus, only to then create new divisions, new demons they can intimidate us with. They seek to incorporate and commodify everything we do, but will destroy anything they can’t control. A pertinent example is of the arms manufacturers who are trying to sponsor our schools and universities, campaigns and community activities. Their purpose is to normalise an inhuman culture of individual competition, social conflict and imperialist war all based upon pre-judgement of “The Other” as lesser, invalid or inhuman.

This week’s Pride celebrations, and the Pride Month of June offers a voice to all the oppressed locally and internationally, and offers a powerful wedge against prejudice in the workplace.

Trade unionists are Woke to the core! When at our best we not only fight for decent jobs but for decency in the workplace, organising always against all oppression.

Third World War is a Real threat

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My weekly column in the Plymouth Herald (16.4.24) linking the various recent quotes from Grant Shapps, Kier Starmer, Sharon Graham and Rishi Sunak but without naming them during this period of electoral party-political media purdah (space wouldn’t allow for inclusion of Biden and Netanyahu). The signs of war are with us. The plans are being laid, whilst a single error of judgement of mistake could start the conflagration now. Organise to Stop the War!

The unedited version below:

Historians can describe the signs of coming war: crisis of economy, class tensions at home, scarcity of resources, competition for land and food, pestilence and poverty forcing mass migration.

But war does not begin before they’ve built their armies. War needs advanced planning, not just of the military hardware but of the emotional commitment of the populations involved.

Politicians need to begin making carefully contrived propaganda speeches years in advance. Allying the individual citizen with national interests is a starting point.

Identifying and detailing the alien nature of ‘The Enemy” and broadcasting their atrocities is an essential prerequisite to the conscription of the population ready to fight and kill the subhuman hoards threatening all borders.

The guns and tanks, fighters and mass uniforms must be produced well in advance. New factories have to be built, paid for by a raise in the tax percentage of the Gross Domestic Profit siphoned-off for weapons in spite of any other social concerns and needs of the day.

A sense of national pride must be reestablished, especially if the nation has, to date, been internationalist and multicultural. This can take years and years. Friends who enjoy a variety of cultural lifestyles or faiths have to be set against each other. A new hierarchy of acceptable and unacceptable behaviours and beliefs must be enforced, mirroring the nations’ elite.

This takes a concerted effort that crosses all other political drives within the ruling class. There has to be governance that espouses national unity to the masses – the working class. Corporations that are in constant competition can unite in favour of the flag, even while seeking fresh profits inside a war economy.

Politicians begin public statements early on. Some of their kites fly immediately, others need to be thrown-up over and over again on the run. A likely lad, easily disposed of if scorned and derided by public opposition, has to be chosen to say, for example, “we are moving from a post-war to a pre-war world”, and “Britain needs to be prepared for war”. Now.

It’s important that the Leader of the Opposition agrees, amplifying the call that the tax-payer must “raise the UK’s defence spending to 2.5% of GDP as soon as resources allow”.

Better still, outdo the policies of the current Party of government. Emphasise the barbarity of the Enemy. Expel the anti-imperialists. Promise to extend and accelerate current development of weapons of mass destruction. Ultimate support for, say nuclear weapons, should trump all other pledges.

All tensions between employees and employers, profiteers and wage-slaves, must be eliminated, class consciousness replaced with nationalist fervour.

Most vitally, the spokespeople for the working class – the people who will be transferred into military uniforms to die for King and Country or be moved to essential military production – must be forcefully cajoled into accepting the changes and bundled into common effort for the coming conflagration.

Trade union leaders have that role to play, primarily to oppose and isolate all anti-warfare activists inside their ranks. In park until they must witchhunt “groups that look to build networks inside trade unions to undermine the defence industry. Jobs for death must replace jobs for life.

An enormous degree of top-down propaganda promoting the need for war is needed because working class people know war is no good.

There has to be a period of one-off clashes, escalating violence and heightened tension between the opposing sides in order to prove that war is essential. Alliances need to be formed and tested between nations before the global war begins.

An enormous amount of top-down propaganda promoting the need for war is required because working class people know that war is no good. The doubters have to be identified as “The Enemy Within”.

War doesn’t make life better for us. Mostly, we die. A military economy is one of shortages and rationing, the absence of welfare, long queues for medical aid or charitable distribution of food aid.

War does make big money for the arms manufacturers and their big shareholders. On all sides. It produces long-term suffering for the rest.

It is time, in fact past time, for a fresh movement against war. The signs are with us, echoing the pre-war years of 1912-14 or 1937-39. The Third World War will dwarf the 70 million deaths of the last world war. All the efforts of those who care for the future of humanity have to combine to prevent the current drive to world war.

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Why all Racism Must be Defeated

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My weekly comment column in today’s Plymouth Herald, 8.4.24, delayed by the Easter week, and shortened to fit a new layout (not by me). Here’s the longer version:

With the period of local council electioneering about to begin, a censorship of any issues deemed “political” will be placed on newspapers and public media. From next week the demand for “balance” and “impartiality” will be used to actually quash public debate in the name of fair play.

At the same time, Party people will push leaflets through our doors making all sorts of claims, with very little public space for debate. Tories and Labour will claim they’re the best for the country despite proposing much the same policies that have failed the working class for the past fifty years.

Socialists will demand investment in housing, welfare and social infrastructure, whilst environmentalists will emphasise the need for action to protect us from the extremes of weather and climate change.

Others will claim themselves “Independent” whilst inevitably espousing ideas from somewhere on the political spectrum, however partial, confused or contradictory.

But the far-right, and much of the mainstream media, will concentrate upon whipping-up racism, and especially anti-Muslim hatred, by focussing upon “terror attacks” abroad and “illegal” immigration at home. Fear and hatred of “the Other”, the “Outsider” will be the hallmark of the racist, however sweetly wrapped and smarmy-smiled.

In an election period where we should be asking why Britain has become so impoverished – from a million pot-holes to seven million waiting routine hospital treatment, 14 million of us in poverty with an income of less than 60% of the “living wage”, a housing crisis ensuring three-quarters a million of our children live in temporary accommodation and four million of our children in absolute poverty – we will be encouraged to blame asylum seekers, and by that implication, all Black people, people of colour, non-white and non-Christian.

The Race Card is being played to divert all attention from the extreme expropriation of our national resources and huge tax revenues by the super-rich executives and Corporations. We are supposed to blame each other and keep the fight inside our rotting communities. Non-white people are overwhelmingly working class, Black and White having far more in common than all the combined elements of diversity.

Racism is a way of diverting people’s attention from the causes of their problems, and finding a ‘scapegoat’ in some other group.

At root, it means making physical or cultural differences between people into a basis for treating them differently. It can involve skin colour, or language, or religion. In politics, racism is always a basis for reaction.

The conception of dividing people by race begins with the slave trade. Defining black people as an inferior race meant that plantation owners could not only justify the enslavement of the black Africans they captured, but also of their children and their children’s children.

This ideology quickly hardened into a new pretend “science” which claimed to prove Europeans’ natural superiority. In 1760, when the slave trade was at its height, a 23 volume “universal history” was published. It described Africans as being “proud, lazy, treacherous, thievish, hot and addicted to all kinds of lusts”, in truth, the accurate description of the rich White ruling classes.

The notion of a hierarchy of races suited the British ruling class as its empire expanded across the globe, violently subjugating whole peoples. Since then, the ideologies of racism have become more sophisticated but no less powerful, carefully espousing one set of values as superior to others, especially using religion as a mobilising force.

Today the far-Right are once again in Government in most European governments, and further afield. The drive for single-race, single ethnicity countries are at the core of the governments of India and Israel, violence the inevitable outcome of such inhuman concepts.

Racism has a huge and negative impact on millions of people in Britain everyday. Racism is not natural; it is not an inevitable outcome of human nature — it needs to be taught and regularly reinforced. It can therefore be challenged and defeated.

Segregation was defeated by the Civil Rights Movement, which united black and white against the racists and their laws. In Britain the anti-slavery movement was strong among workers in the cotton industry, and throughout the 20th century different forms of racism have been challenged, from Antisemitism and anti-migrant racism to Islamophobia.

The Black Lives Matter movement has been an inspiration to a whole new generation of young activists. The huge and unprecedented scale of protests for Palestinians and a ceasefire in Gaza proves that the majority of the diverse and multicultural working class here oppose the very idea that one group of people are superior to another because of their ethnicity. Racism must be challenged and defeated today, including during the local elections.