Tag: keir-starmer

message to Trump: “Hands Off Venezuela”

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column daily Plymouth Herald (6.1.26), attempting to challenge the media blanket-lie condemning Maduro as a drug-cartel boss and international criminal. The media suppression of facts is so absolute as to deny any possibility of a full response in 600 words or less. Here’s 900 words, still inadequate, but more fleshed-out than the printed edited version in the paper (which you can read by expanding the picture below). My intention is singularly to ensure there is a left voice in the local paper – to suggest it has any real influence would be nonesense, but please share if you agree.

Stop Trump – Defend Venezuela

Let’s just get this straight. It is perfectly acceptable for Trump to invade Venezuela, bomb homes and kill over 50 people, abduct the President and his wife, and install an administration run by US oil corporations. Really?
No! We are told that, because “The West” never accepted Venezuela’s government of Maduro, it is only right to overthrow it. Like Iraq, and Libya and Chilé and so many other countries.
Regime change follows the logic of unbridled Capitalism – the rule of the most powerful. Power and Control behaviours, nationalist military might and domination, plunder, wealth extraction and accumulation, colonialism and imperialism. The logic of the armed privateer, the legalised gangster.
In the specific case of Venezuela this week, we see the proclaimed right of the United States of America’s Capitalist ruling class to dominate and control the Western Hemisphere.
This is not an interpretation, it is the statement of Trump himself, quoting the doctrine first espoused by President Monroe in his Doctrine of 1823 that warned against interference in the Americas. Monroe declared that the USA owns and controls the American continents.
That means the USA has the right to the subjugation all the peoples, and the exploitation and extraction all the resources of the lands and oceans. By force. Because it can. And for so long as it can.
The people of Latin America have fought back for self determination and national liberation for centuries. From the revolution led by Simon Bolivar in 1797 Venezuelans have fought back against colonialisation from Spain, attempts by Britain and Portugal, and then Corporate domination from the USA. It is a history of the illegal seizure of assets for foreign personal gain versus the use of national resources for national social and local economic collective development.
Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, drove the Bolivarian Revolution into the 21st Century, seeking national control with an emphasis on using Venezuela’s extensive oil revenues to lift the mass of the Country’s poor out of poverty. This was a democratic socialist programme, taking control of the country’s oil assets and beginning the redistribution of the huge wealth away from the richest elite and foreign corporations and towards the country’s population, housing, education, health and social infrastructure. Nationalisation but not workers’ control of industry.
Of course, those in support of Capitalism have fought back. Capitalists hate socialism. They seek to destroy all and any semblance of it, because every social programme eats into their opportunities to hoard private wealth for themselves. Billionaires hate the very ideas of common wealth and social justice. In any class society, one groups’ profits come at great cost to the other.
The invasion of Venezuela has the purpose of the seizure of the country’s valuable natural resources by the USA. But is is also a far-Right ideological assault on democracy and socialism.
Nationalisation of oil reserves is an anathema to the Capitalist Class and their wealthy middle class beneficiaries. Oil is the most profitable of resources. It symbolises power and domination. Those who control oil control the world. That’s fine when owned by self-appointed dictators in Saudi Arabia, compliant with the western corporations, but wholly unacceptable when owned by the Venezuelan State aiming to use the revenue for the good of the People.
Venezuela, as with the rest of the countries of central and southern America, has been constantly beaten down by the military power of the United States for the past centuries. The Bolivarian Revolution was constantly weakened by attempted coups and para-military insurgencies funded and controlled by the USA. The resulting frailties of the Maduro administration was hammered for years by US and Western economic sanctions and blockades, left open to corruption and subject to powerful assaults by well-funded far-Right insurgents, and infiltration from agents of the country’s own super-rich class and Trump’s military.
Maduro’s government became beseiged, the economy in crisis and inflation rampant. The repression of dissent undermined his base. Trump’s justifications – that Maduro is the boss of a drug cartel, that his regime is undemocratic, are fake. By their own analysis the US State concludes that Venezuela is not one of the world’s major drug exporting countries.
Trump is continuing the same old practices – nothing new there. The bombing of Caracas is a naked act of imperialist aggression. Donald Trump’s declaration that “we are going to run Venezuela” sums up the arrogance of US power. This is about removing a regime that has long been a thorn in Washington’s side and seizing the largest oil reserves in the world.
By overthrowing Maduro, Trump is pointing a gun at the head of every other Latin American president, and is challenging the economic links between South America and China. Cuba may be the next target.
It is the sole right of the Venezuelan working class, with their long revolutionary history, to determine governance of Venezuela. Trump may have control of the military, but the mass of the working class support socialism in their own interests. Their fight against recolonisation by US corporations must be reinforced by a global movement of solidarity with the Venezuelan people.
Trade unions in Britain have long supported the rights of workers across South America, just as we support the struggle of the Palestinian people against Israel’s genocidal occupation. The struggles are linked and from the same source. Trump has threatened to take-over Cuba, Panama, Greenland and Canada. These threats continue and will escalate.
Keir Starmer has refused to condemn the coup, incoherently mentioning support for “international law”. He is guilty of active support for genocide in Palestine and now by his silence he makes himself complicit in the assault on Venezuela.
We must protest. Hands of Venezuela! Down with Trump’s pirate empire!

I’ll Accept No Lectures from Tory Grandees

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald, coinciding with the Tory Conference to address the majority readership of the paper, damning them all! The horror of Palestine and Lebanon has pushed the Tory Conference into the background somewhat but in doing so, allowed the faithful to orate their racist xenophobia bile almost unheard by the populous. It’s worth venting against them, even if only to remind ourselves.

The unexpurgated version below:

The sheer audacity of the disgraced and deposed Tory Party in Conference to condemn Labour is a political abuse beyond hypocrisy. Not least because Starmer’s Labour is continuing most of Sunak’s plans, so what are you moaning about?

The Tory leadership have been proven and condemned for far greater crimes than anything thrown at the current Labour cabinet. Yes, crimes, because Johnson, as the British Prime Minister, alongside his amoral cohort, received fines for breaching the COVID laws he initiated! Johnson had dinner delivered to his own home during the lockdown when he told us we couldn’t. There were more offences committed at the addresses of 10 and 11 Downing Street than at any other address in the United Kingdom during that period. They were filmed at drunken parties at a time when the rest of us couldn’t attend the funerals of loved ones.

This is nothing compared with the corruption during COVID, swathes of multi-million pound contracts dished-out by politicians to the corporations they moonlighted at and their friends who hastily set-up “businesses” to take the contracts, without proper scrutiny and outside of legal procedures.

The British tax-payer “lost” billions. It is all coming-out, belatedly, in the COVID Enquiry. Were we all to be deemed equal in front of the Law, many Tory cabinet ministers should by now be in prison. The recent descriptions of “scenes from hell” across hospitals in the early pandemic record more deaths of medical staff than in any other western country.

How? Look back. The less than decent New Labour government, despite itself (remember their 2009 expenses scandal?) at least established a PPE stockpiling system in 2009. But the Tories left it to rot. In June 2019, the government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group warned that stockpiles needed replenishing. The warnings were ignored and the Tory government downgraded guidance on flu vaccine administration, hospital gowns and masks instead of comprehensively dealing with shortages.

Then came COVID, causing the UK to spend more on PPE than any other European country, yet with the highest death-toll, both overall and one of the highest per capita. Officially more than 240,000 dead and a couple of million suffering debilitating long-term organ damage (euphemistically named long-COVID) out of 26 million of us suffering the infection.

Test-and-trace app contracts were awarded to companies connected to PM Johnson’s adviser Dominic Cummings, under a programme run by the Tory peer, Baroness Dido Harding. Lives were put in danger and the virus spread further because the apps didn’t work, didn’t work properly, or were not ready in time.

Many deaths were preventable. The corruption undermined public protection. Breaking their own rules, over 70% of PPE contracts were awarded to companies without bidding (untendered), the public and professionals instructed to use the wrong masks leaving us unprotected to the infected aerosols, and tens of millions of masks unused and destroyed. The list is too long to print here, but ministers and government workers became multi-millionaires overnight. The truth will out.

In all more than £38billion of our money remains unaccounted for in expenditure during the Lockdown.

And that’s paltry compared with the consultancies scandal of HS2. According to the Stripe Property Group, spokespeople for the construction industry, the Tories wasted and lost a staggering £92,000,000,000 on the collapsed HS2 rail project.

The Tory imposed “Age of Austerity” was inflicted upon the working class because of such official gangster-capitalism. One after another we’ve been fleeced by corporate businesses protected by politicians: the LIBOR scandal of banks gambling on lending rates to the detriment of mortgage, rental and loan rates (2012); the Panama Papers exposing illegal tax-evasion and offshore tax-havens losing the exchequor trillions (2016); the lost billions from the false-promises of the Tory far-Right after Brexit; the FinCen money-laundering scandals involving over 70 UK banks (2020); the COVID scandals still ongoing. Why are we so desensitised?

The tripling of interest rates causing unaffordable rent and mortgage hikes at the hands of Prime Minister Truss, and the further deregulation under Sunak causing the trippling of fossil fuel company profits and doubling of numbers of UK-based billionaires, represent the mechanisms from which now one-in-three of our working class children live in poverty.

We are told to blame workers claiming sickness benefits (£50billion per year) and even more so, asylum seekers costing £7billion a year, whilst the corruption and tax evasion costs the tax-payers hundreds of billions each year. The legalised gangsters are above being called to account, the poorest to take the blame.

This is not to excuse the huge donations and free gifts being accepted by Starmer and other Labour government ministers. It is a lesson in the need to revolt against any more of the same. But we shall accept no lecture or pretence of truth and honesty from these corrupt and contemptible Tory grandees. The entire swamp must be drained.

Labour Voters Getting More of the Same

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald newspaper (19.9.24), in the week that the new Labour prime Minister, Keir Starmer, was exposed for taking personal gifts for himself and his wife, including tens of thousands of pounds in clothes, accommodation, holidays and an executive at the Arsenal football ground. At the same time, Starmer has withdrawn winter fuel allowances of £300 from over 10million elderly people, is spending tax-payers money on arming the Israeli genocide, more than 100 fossil fuel extraction licences whilst reneging on funds for renewable energy, and enforcing more pay cuts and Austerity measures. This is not a Government for the working class or indeed the progressive future of humanity. It is more of the same, a Tory government in red clothing (gifted by ruling class Tories), and they have to be deposed. But replaced by what?

News Flash! Our public services are in crisis. As if we didn’t know. 

Last week, Lord Darzi’s quick review of the National Health Service conveniently allowed the new Labour government to announce that the “NHS is broken”. Alongside all the other Government claims that “there is no money”, the NHS is the latest public service to be told it won’t be bailed out.

There is little surprise amongst our working class population, more than half of whom did not vote in the July General Election. ‘They’re all the same” was a common theme in every pollster report. Labour won a landslide despite their share of the vote hardly rising. People voted against the Tories, that is, for no more Austerity.

After 14 years of Tory rule our pay has been cut to a point where it is now at the ratio of spending power of 2008, 16 years ago. On average fully-time workers are over £4,000 a year worse off, given the rate of inflation. To achieve minimum subsistence levels, 5 million of us get top-ups to our wages from Universal Credit – itself a benefit designed to subsidise the rogue employers plying starvation wages.

The reduction in inflation to 3% doesn’t mean prices are going down – food prices are 30% higher than 4 years ago. Pay hasn’t gone-up that far.

So the Tory and far-right shouts that Labour has paid-off unions with “above inflation pay increases” is just their latest big lie. A 5% pay rise doesn’t touch the pay cuts of the past 15 years. One-in-five of us are living below the official (Tory) poverty line – that’s over 14million people in Britain, 2.2million of whom are pensioners.

The UK has one of the highest retirement ages in the world, the lowest State pension in Europe, some of the longest working hours for one of the lowest minimum wages, the highest energy costs, the biggest profits and the lowest taxes for the rich.

Sir Starmer offered very little and already is delivering even less. The Autumn Budget will only deliver cuts. And for the NHS this will be an acceleration of the privatisations planned by the Sunak government. Tory cries of Labour betraying the poor hang thread bare given their destruction of welfare state over the past 14 years.

Last week’s Trades Union Congress, the annual conference of Britain’s trade unions, saw elected delegates pulled by these tensions. On the one hand, a Labour government, supposedly the Party of the working class, was cause for celebration. On the other, the condition of the working class has worsened, except for a small strata of skilled workers able to improve their pay and conditions due to skills shortages.

Clearly, we’re not all in it together. The UK ranks the 9th most unequal society out of 38 richest countries. The richest 10% own half of all earth, the poorest 50% just 9%. 

The argument goes that 14 years of Tory cuts cannot be turned around overnight, or even in the 5-year span of a single Parliament. But that should not mean the continuation of Tory plans. Indeed, immediately raising taxes for the most wealthy, those who currently pay proportionally less of their income in tax than the poorest in society, would fill the alleged £22billion black hole and more.

Instead, Starmer goes further than Sunak ever dared, deleting the Winter Fuel Allowance. Universal benefits ensures that everyone is covered, helped and safe whatever their conditions. Means-testing creates a poverty trap for those who don’t quite meet the criteria, in this case, numbering into millions of elderly who will face a very challenging winter.

Trade unions are demanding a U-Turn. Indeed, we want a shift in economic power in favour of the majority. The influence of big business and the billionaires on government policy have to be swept away. But Labour is in the pockets of the lobbyists.

According to the parliamentary register of interests, Wes Sreeting, the Secretary of State for Health & Social Care, accepted donations amounting to around £175,000 from two donors with links to private healthcare firms. He has pledged to “fight the middle-class lefties who oppose expanding the use of private health providers.” 

Actually, Streeting, it’s the working class trades unions who collectively oppose private health services. The NHS is in crisis caused by the task-over by private firms making profit from our taxes, from healthcare, pharmaceuticals, health insurance companies, administration and estate management, a huge proportion being companies based in the United States of America. The hundreds of billions in private profit could be saved or spent on patients if the NHS was still a state run public Labour is set to privatise more.

The questions are begged, can we end the corporate plunder of our public services? Will trade unions fight a Labour government? Would the threat of “winter of discontent” result in the return of a Tory government, and if it did, what difference is there between the policies of these two parties fighting to serve the interests of those already privileged few? 

The Trade Unions must be prepared to act independently of any government hostile to the needs and rights of the working class. Labour is not withdrawing from the Tory anti-union laws, nor their new restrictions on the right to protest. This government will fight any collective trade union challenge, imprison strike leaders and workers on picket lines.

We must campaign now for redistribution of wealth to eradicate poverty, increasing benefits and pensions, not cutting and taxing them. A 2% tax increase on citizens whose private assets are worth over £10million, surely enough for anyone, would pull-in £24billion a year to the Exchequer. More than enough to fill that questionable black hole. 

If Labour is no longer the party for the working class then it’s time to build new socialist organisation in the workplaces and communities. Or suffer worse to come.

Heading into Strife

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly Comment int he daily Plymouth Herald (14.5.24) seeking to expose the “disaster capitalism” manifesto of Rishi Sunak, ex-hedge fund manager who made millions out of the global financial crash of 2008. It is difficult to say “corrupt”, “gangster”, “liar” and “spiv” of a Prime Minister and get it published. Nevertheless, my hatred of Sunak and his billionaire class has to be broadcast by whatever means necessary.

The Prime Minister began this week by warning that the next five years will see fundamental changes to the way of life in Britain. What could he be speaking of?

The beleaguered Sunak predicts more will change in the next five years than in the last 30.

“I’m convinced that the next few years will be some of the most dangerous yet most transformational our country has ever known.”

It sounds more like a threat than a promise. The signs are there. Tensions inside this country and across the world are ramping-up exponentially. Governments are responsible for the highest levels of corruption and self-interest, using propaganda mechanisms of nationalism and racism to maintain social control by setting us each against the other. 

All the time the politicians are managing the plundering of the tax-payers’ coffers and extracting record profits from all the necessities of life, our where-with-all being hoarded into the private off-shore bank accounts of the super-rich.

Internationally we are seeing deepening and entrenched warfare, Britain being drawn on the coat tails of the United States of America into direct engagement in Ukraine and Palestine, Africa and the South China Seas. Little wonder more tax money will be diverted to the military and away from spending on social welfare at home.

And no wonder that more millions of human beings are being forced to seek asylum, to migrate from their homelands, forced by everything from ethnic cleansing and genocides to climate collapse. 

The climate emergency has turned already into catastrophe for hundreds of millions across what is politically termed the “Global South” – those regions that have seen labour and natural resources plundered for the benefit of the nations of the North. Their crisis is coming our way, fast.

The climate changes that are killing millions each year are now hitting us. In Britain, eight months of record breaking rain represents new and less predictable patterns of extremes, in temperature, precipitation, meteorological seasons and the power of extreme weather events.

The unique speed of the rise in global temperatures is causing not only food shortages but the spread of disease. The classic killers and disabling infections of hot climates, such as malaria and Lyme disease are here now, brought north by warmer conditions by mosquitos and ticks, and fungal spores. 

The economic inequalities caused by harvest collapse, food shortages and transport disruption caused by both war and climate change will only produce more poverty, war and global warming.

So, sad as it is to admit, Sunak is correct. We are heading into social strife. 

What is left unsaid is that this is all the doing of Sunak and his Capitalist ilk, as part of the global political class and their Corporate masters who have created all these conditions: funding wars to reap massive profits for the arms manufacturers and fossil fuel companies; denying and investing billions in propaganda campaigns against the science of climate change and effective remedies; demanding tax-billions for pharmaceutical companies to cherry-pick the most lucrative vaccine markets and disregard the rest; and the super-rich driven by avarice, ready to make a short-term profit at the expense of the future of humanity.

The single most noticeable change we will experience over the next 5 years is the intensification of authoritarianism, whatever the party of government. More punishments for strikers and protesters daring to challenge all the above and demand investment in the future of humanity. More intense political repression is inevitable, that is, unless we increase protests now to protect democracy and force the political change we need. 

Right now, the students are leading the way!  Show them every support! Turn up with food and water, send them money, protect them from assault. Build the Resistance!