Tag: labour

Labour feeds far-Right Racism

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly Comment in the daily Plymouth Herald (18.11.25), seriously outraged by the latest racist policy drive of the UK so-called Labour government. Writing on Sunday for a Monday morning deadline, the article could not consider the later praise heaped-upon Home Secretary Shabana Mahmoud by the Tory Badenoch and Reform UK’s Farage. Most notably the fascist Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) claimed a victory over the government, won by street protest and flag-hanging he boasted. Of course, the open racists bay for more – the more you give the more they demand – arguing for the withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights. And of course, the few Labour backbenchers raising concerns are too few and too whimpy to have any effect on the coming Commons vote. Starmer emptied-out the Labour Party of the entire Left – there’s no-one to call-out Mahmoud’s reactionary anti-human bile.

The unexpurgated original below:

Britain is NOT being torn apart by illegal immigration. We are NOT divided by migrant workers or cultural differences. This country is NOT being overwhelmed by asylum seekers or Islamic Sharia Law. Labour’s Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is completely wrong.
There IS an attempt to tear Britain apart – not by young Black men but by racist and Islamaphobic hatred. People of colour are being threatened by violent white thugs on our streets, organised and whipped-up by Nazi-Seig-heiling fascist cadre. The Union Jack and Cross of St George flags have been weaponised as public emblems of white supremacy, flying lamppost-high, hoisted on the testosterone of male dominance spewing misogyny as well as racist threats throughout our communities.
It is the far-Right that must be challenged, not those escaping war, climate devastation and famine. The flaggers follow a fascist ideology, an import from the White-nationalists of the USA and the so-called-Saxon Aryan descendants of Nazis from greater-Germany and Scandinavia. Check out the AfD in Germany or the rebranded ultra-nationalists of Denmark and France. Patriotism my arse!
Britain IS at risk of being torn apart by false propaganda of the far-Right, much of it imported and funded by white supremacists in the United States of America and Europe, including the World’s wealthiest man, Elon Musk. Mahmood, Badenoch and Farage are shifting to echo the fascists Yaxley-Lennon and Tenconi in importing Trump’s violent deportation policies. Will we soon see plain clothes thugs deputised as Border Force state agents terrorising the streets and rounding-up non-whites in workplaces and communities, caging and deporting them without appeal?
People seeking refuge and asylum from are human beings with families. Yet Labour is looking to end Article Eight of the human Rights law – the right to family life – and Article three, the right to protection from violent or degrading treatment. Asylum seekers in permanent limbo, refugee families at risk of eviction, their children whisked away from schools, deported to a country they fled with no means to survive.
Labour is looking to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights. Just what the fascists have demanded! Idiots! Fewer than two-and-a-half thousand asylum seekers have used human rights legislation in their appeal to stay. It should not be an issue.
Withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights will mean the end of the rights to family life and protection from abuse. This will make us all more vulnerable, especially children experiencing abuse from relatives – 83% of which occurs inside white families here. The withdrawal will produce no material benefits, it will only strengthen the far-right.
Mahmoud’s announcement is an official call to white racists: “it’s official – refugees are not welcome here, regard people of colour with suspicion, as cheats and “illegals”, as people who should be hounded-out of their accommodation and communities.” She thinks she’s appealing to the mass of voters to support Labour, but in fact she’s only appeasing the racists.
The history of the twentieth century proves you can’t appease fascism. This month’s Poppy Day commemorated more than half-a-million Brits who died fighting fascism in the Second World War. They would be outraged to see the flags now adopted by the far-Right they died to protect us from!
People who have lived here for up-to twenty years will, under Labour plans, be liable to be sent back to the place they fled. The threat to kick out refugees having first offered them protection is unprincipled and immoral. Mahmoud is viciously perpetuating a living condition of vulnerability, statelessness, discrimination and “otherness”. People who “look like refugees – obviously Black people – will be branded as “do not belong”, creating a caste-system of racist hierarchy.
This Labour government should be held to full account on the basis of fact and human decency. Working class people in Britain are not mean and spiteful. Our culture is inclusive and diverse, and we must keep it that way or we will live under the yolk of far-Right militarised authoritarian control.
Labour’s Mahmoud is not producing a more harmonious and stable nation at all, she is whipping-up the divisions advocated by the far-Right!
In Plymouth the fascist-led “Flag Force” racists are planning a march through the City on 6th December, terrorising people-of-colour and spouting fascist threats against humanists and whoever they consider to be “lefties”. We are all at risk from them. Their racism and misogyny must be exposed, and they must be stopped. Stand Up To Racism!

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.

Labour Dumps the Climate

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

The hypocrisy and negligence of the political class in Britain is second to none. Amongst all the travesties, from the inhumanity towards Palestinians in Gaza to the one-in-three children living in relative poverty here at home, the disassociation of politicians from the lives of the vast majority is total. The denial of Climate Chaos is just one element, but a crucial one. This is the unedited version of my weekly Comment in the daily Plymouth Herald newspaper, wholly inadequate in the face of the absurdity and corruption of Parliamentary politics today.

So, not only the Tories but  now the Labour Party have dropped their pledges towards emissions reductions. Labour have taken away the pledge of £28 billion a year promised to protect us from global warming. 

Workers want the the investment in new infrastructure, Labour’s green industrial policy promising new jobs at a time when vacancies are falling and companies going bust, better public transport as travel costs escalate, cleaner city air to combat extreme pollution levels, and cheaper electricity, or at least affordable! 

Now it looks like the remaining funds identified will be eaten-up by the continued commitment to the absurdly expensive and wasteful nuclear power programme at the expense of all else.

Germany, meanwhile, alongside states across Europe and even the USA, is increasing investment, the country’s investment bank identifying green (non-nuclear) investment to a total of 15% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product. 

Britain needs the same level of infrastructure rebuild, if not more.

After the hottest year ever, with extreme weather shocking and destroying communities across the world, 2023 officially crossed the safe limit for global temperature increase. Yet there is no part of our political establishment prepared to take the threat of the deepening climate crisis seriously. 

Our economy, our food supply, our personal safety, indeed our freedom is at risk from the global Climate Catastrophe. We are facing disaster.

Why would politicians not act? It would appear that their prime purpose is to trumpet denial in front of the deniers. The political chase for the far-right and populist vote has become very dangerous. Tories are chasing the far-right “Reform” vote, Labour is chasing the Tory vote. The Greens have shifted rightwards to prove their commitment to a Capitalist future.

None are representative. Years of research prove that the vast majority of workers are concerned about climate change. Why wouldn’t we be? We have children and grandchildren, we enjoy the Great Outdoors, and we really value the world’s wildlife. There is huge concern for the growing level of extinction of everything from polar bears to bees, and we are more alert than ever to the threat from toxic pollution, chemicals and plastics.

Our collective problem is our own perceived lack of agency. We are continually instructed and moralised to that we should change our lifestyles, as if this is all our fault. But, whilst most of us recycle, we simply haven’t the resources to make the scale of change needed.

So when people in power instruct us to move away from car use whilst at the same time cutting back on public transport, we rightly feel put-upon and abused. 

When low-emissions zones are proposed to limit the high levels of debilitating city pollution but we are fined rather than facilitated, it is in the context of human rights that we shout-out and challenge the imposition.

When we are shouted at from a moral high-ground to buy an electric car when half our income goes out in rent and the other half in food and utilities, our personal debt racked-up by avaricious bankers and fossil fuel corporations, our blood rightly boils! 

But this is not climate denial! It is our outrage at the intentional demolition of society.

Working class families expect and demand a health service free at the point of need, an education service as-of-right for each of our children, a safe community to live in. Only the very rich care nothing for social infrastructure funded through the common purse, because they alone, the top fifteen percent. The rich are self-sufficient, protected in their accumulated wealth – they don’t need society and are contemptuous of it.

But it can also feel we are being talked down to and patronised by a middle class who at least have some agency and lifestyle choices. 

For the rest of us, our very survival requires the industries and System reliant on fossil fuels to be changed, completely, at societal level. 

The end of reliance on fossil fuels is a collective economic necessity. All the wealth, resource and technology is available now with which to save humanity and the environment, it is only the investment that is not.

We need government that organises and manages the basic needs of life. Our human drive for existence drives our demand for the infrastructure to prevent climate chaos and adapt to ensure safety from periods of extreme weather – floods, fires, droughts – as a basic human right.

The political class, overwhelmingly members of the top 5% of the wealthy, is cut-off from the lives of the vast majority of us, the working class. In this pre-election period they are second-guessing what we think, misinformed by absurdly superficial feedback from tiny chat-groups and social network 

The last thing we need is moralistic lectures from above. Essentially, we need agency.

Eleven million homes require insulation and refit away from gas and oil – that means mass funding of jobs and resources to bring our housing into the twenty-first century. We know that private landlords will not dip into their private profits in order to do this, so legislation and tax-cash is vital to force the change. We deserve warmer drier homes, but Labour has now reneged on that promise.

Public transport is not public at all, but run by private companies for their profit. We need massive public investment for an affordable and integrated transport system that gets us where we need to be when we need to be there. We need electrification of our bus and rail systems, Tory and now Labour unprepared to help.

And essentially, we urgently need complete refit of our electricity transmission system so that the renewable energy can get from where it’s made, off-and-onshore, to where it’s needed. 

That’s what Labour promised to do, against the Tory nonsense that the “private sector” will pay for it despite the negative return on any investment. 

Only a mass movement for mass investment, threatening the Vote, will force the political change needed. Only the wealthy can deny the need, even tho’ they, too, will face the social collapse as the climate system fragments. And trade unions have the collective power in workplaces to demand adaptation at an industrial level. It’s time to act!