Tag: inequality

We Need an International Socialist Movement

Tony Staunton1 Comment

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!

Arms Expenditure is a Waste of money

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

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!

Sod Potholes – What About Poverty?

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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

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