My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (13.10.2026), reacting off-the-cuff to Monday’s Prime Ministerial announcement of forthcoming talks with the European Union. I have no doubt its all about rearmament, but at the same time the wily Burnham is using the angst of the middle class voters to blame Austerity on Brexit, rebuilding the liberal vote for the Labour Party. The idea that Brexit is behind the current economic crisis appears almost hegemonic. Of course it didn’t help, but it’s not the source of the cost-of-living crisis nor much to do with the enormous shift of wealth from the poor to the super-rich everywhere. We really have to call out the disinformation and political sleight-of-hand.
The unedited version below (not my headline – I don’t do first-person!). Please scroll down to the bottom of the page for the subscribe button on the right-hand side!
Those of us on “The Left” who voted to “Leave” are not about to be cowed into submission. Burnham’s ploy of uniting the middle class vote behind Labour in pursuit of a fresh “Remain” campaign is cynical in the extreme. There is nothing benign or at all socialist about the European Union. Europe has never been a friend of the working class.
It is worth remembering. Some 52 percent opted for exit, on a turnout of 72 percent, higher than almost any general election. They did so in the face of opposition from three quarters of MPs, the leadership of all three of the biggest parliamentary parties — the Conservatives, Labour and the Scottish National Party — the overwhelming bulk of British industry and almost every major capitalist institution, from the Bank of England to the International Monetary Fund.
Why? Europe is, and was formed as, a Bosses Club. The European Parliament was created as the frontpiece, the cover, just as are national parliaments, for promotion of regional competition on the world stage – the advantage of Capitalist corporations in competition with Russia and China for the plunder of resources from Africa and India and South America. Sometimes in league with the USA, sometimes independently.
The European Union is a neoliberal organisation acting in the interests of European capital. It has forced the Greek people and then most of the rest into the economic stranglehold and poverty of austerity, cutting social welfare provision and pay rates in pursuit of free trade agreements to raise the rate of profit accumulated by the big corporations sitting inside its borders.
Britain would have been no better off staying inside the European Market. Oh, perhaps a few of the larger UK based companies would have benefited, but not us workers. Just look at the protests on the streets of Paris and Berlin and Madrid. In 2026 our working class youth are suffering irrespective of national borders. Youth unemployment, wages too low to live on, a raging housing crisis caused by rapacious landlords, cuts to all social provision from health and social care through to pensions. The experience of the economic crisis in Britain is precisely the same in both cause and conditions across Europe and beyond – heightened exploitation in pursuit of private profit. All the wealth we produce gets sucked-up through inflated salaries of the management and into the offshore bank accounts of the big investors and corporate executives.
At the time of the vote back in 2016, Europe was viciously enforcing neoliberalism across the continent, breaking democracy and sovereign States like Greece, and it hasn’t let-up since. In Britain the vote was, above all else, a rebellion by working class people who feel they have had their lives torn apart by the ruling elite. Two-thirds of those classified as skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers voted to leave, compared to just 43 percent among those in “intermediate” or “higher” managerial, professional or administrative roles.
And it wasn’t as simple as a vote for racism. A third of Asian and a quarter of black voters chose Leave. Large, ethnically diverse cities in the north of England voted for exit — including Sheffield, Birmingham and Bradford. Racism was obvious on the Leave side, where anti-immigrant arguments from the UK Independence Party (now Reform UK) and Conservative politicians played a prominent role, especially in the final weeks of campaigning.
In the final weeks of the Brexit campaign, xenophobia and scapegoating spewed out by the press and politicians to deflect from anger over austerity and privatisation. Many principled people voted Remain with good anti-racist reasoning. It was never a clean or clear-cut poll between opposites.
Class consciousness played a core role in the Brexit vote. This was not about the vacuous superficiality of European travel or buying a second home in the Algarve – the freedom of the wealthy few. The vote was about the pain of Austerity imposed by the collapse of the corrupt banking system in 2008-9. Wage labourers were hurting bad back then, and still are.
It’s all happening again! This time, as the world economy dives into fresh chaos, the ruling class are using racism and the threat of war as tools to suppress our discontent. Sections of the British Ruling Class were hurt badly by Brexit. The moves to “rejoin” Europe are precepts for emergency rearmament, the military-industrial complex seeking cross-border cooperation to maximise market penetration and profit. Burnham is arguing for Britain’s pride of place in the coming wars against Russia and China. And he’s using the sham of rejoining Europe to fool us all.
Instead, socialists should combine struggles against racism with struggles against the wider attacks on the working class – a major uprising against the cost-of-living crisis. Join with the mass strikes across Europe for international working class unity, not the European Union of Capitalist Profiteers! End Austerity!
My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (6.10.26), mourning the lost opportunities for a class fight against privatisation and Austerity in Britain. Look to the French! And Spanish! Today’s mass strike in France is the key element – workers remain key to wealth creation and when we down tools we have key collective power at the point of production. Simple, but so hard to achieve. Protest does work, to a limited extent and inside the confines of social democracy. Mass Strike works whatever the society. Student protests tend to lead to mass strike when workers see their children attacked by the State, coshed, shot at and their hands blown-off if not murdered. Today’s mass strike in France has already won concessions against pay cuts. In Spain the protests have forced a General Election. this is all what has to happen here – a socialist workers’ mass revolt, not a White Riot!
The edited version is printed here. Please expand the pic at the bottom to read the published article. And please subscribe to this Blog by clicking the button in the bottom right-hand corner.
In an Emergency, Break the Glass!
There is a case for violent riots. As Martin Luther King said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.” There are a lot of people unheard in the world. There is a general sense here, too, that we have very little say over our lives or concern for our needs.
Looking across at Europe right now, perhaps we, too, should be breaking glass to regain our voice. The protests in France and Spain are advisory. School students in France have taken to the streets to publicise the terrible state of schools and colleges. They have been soundly beaten by Police, shooting them with rubber bullets. In response some have resorted to violence.
It is a core human condition of basic justice that “self defence is no offence”. No government, no municipal authority, no educational body has taken any of the students long-standing grievances on board. At heart, the extreme weather this summer has brought issues to the boil. Classrooms were at over 35 degrees centigrade, impossible to learn in, and now as winter approaches, they’re down to 15C. No-one can learn in these conditions, and shouldn’t be expected to.
Nor can anyone teach properly in these dilapidated state schools. On United Nations’ (UN) World Teachers’ Day yesterday, teachers in France took strike action and stood with the students, demanding new funding and reparations to the crumbling education estate. Unions are staging a mass strike today. France has experienced the neoliberal onslaught more recently but much faster than Britain, with €46 Billion in cuts now in train. To date, French workers have fought back against privatisation and austerity in a way we have not, with huge protests and strike action. The French government weakens and falls back one step at a time, yesterday withdrawing plans to lower wages further but continueing to freeze pensions. The protests continue. All power to the working class!
In Spain, last weekend’s street violence, perpetrated by incredibly violent policing worthy of the fascist regime of General Franco, has been challenged by a mass outpouring of anger against the injustice of the housing markets. The protests have been so large that they have forced a General Election! Local people have been forced into poverty and squalor by speculators playing the market to raise the price of homes ridiculously above anything working class people can possibly afford. In response, landlords have raised rents to prices that defy value and overwhelm the wages of most.
When those with wealth are free from rules and regulations, devoid of legal or moral constraint, they run riot. It is the rich who are violently assaulting the working classes everywhere, copying each other internationally in pursuit of private wealth at the expense of the majority. This has long been the case in Britain, one of the first countries to adopt the neoliberal economic model as an experiment, imposed by the International Monetary Fund in the 1970’s.
Margaret Thatcher ensured the privatisation and eradication of our council housing stock that has led to today’s deep housing crisis. Her legacy, with plaudits from today’s annual conference of the defunct Tory Party, includes the highest number of people sleeping rough ever recorded. In England we have 135,000 households living in temporary accommodation including 176,000 children. It will take 119 Years to clear housing waiting lists. We have parasitic housing corporations charging exorbitant service charges for home maintenance never delivered.
The hikes in housing costs here are unaffordable and, in their consequences, wholly illegitimate. And yet the Tories and their ex-colleagues who have fled to Reform UK, braying in their respective conferences, are promising more deregulation and more free market competition, planning to suck the very lifeblood out of working class people.
In comparison with the French and Spanish, we have just let the deep crisis across all social services happen, unopposed. We few who do shout out are bombarded by screaming Blackshirts saying the housing crisis is all the fault of migrants, the schools dilapidation caused by Black children and Muslims. These racists are the lackeys of the landlords, whipped-up by flagrant lies to secure and protect the exploitation of the property-owning elite. Fooled.
There is another way. We can fight back. Take to the streets. Demand housing regulation, legally enforced rent caps, public investment in education and social care. Learn from workers and students in France and Spain. That’s the element of rejoining Europe worthy of chasing!
My weekly Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (29th September 2026), addressing the Labour Party Conference from afar. This was written a day before Burnham’s speech which sought to rally a beleaguered Party around working class issues. I stand by what I wrote. It was pie-in-the-sky with sleight-of-hand pledges, for example, cutting the pensioners triple-lock security while promising unspecified future help with social care. No mention of the challenge of rising fascism, racism and misogyny, and whispered asides on climate change and war. Capitalism is in global polycrisis globally and this Prime Ministerial address drowned in its denial. Time will unravel the pledges and expose the deceit.
Below is my unedited draft, or please expand the picture to read the published version. I would not have chosen their headline. Here’s mine.
We need an international socialist movement
When a prime minister declares they will not be calling a general election you can be sure they’re under mounting pressure to do so. The honeymoon period, the “Burnham Bounce”, is already over. Burnham is facing a winter of crisis and chaos borne of Austerity economics, war and climate catastrophe.
Political activists, left, right and centre wanted to see the back of Starmer. Whatever your concern, he wasn’t helping. Of course, in a class society based upon extremes of wealth and deprivation, individual power and competition, you can’t please everyone all the time. But it takes a special skill to please no-one at all.
You have to choose sides and take a political position. And Burnham has.
Quietly, and with a smile that Starmer could never manage, he’s carrying-on the same old “pro-growth” Great Lie of all his predecessors. In this rapacious class society, “growth” and “re-industrialisation” can only mean more profits for the super-rich and their corporations, almost exclusively the military-industrial complex.
Labour, as always, ends up doing the jobs for the Rich that the Tories couldn’t get away with.
How? By tying the trade union leadership to its governmental coat tails. Generally, unions don’t fight a Labour Government even when their members re under terrible assault. The collective strike wave of 1978-9, labelled by Tories as the “Winter of Discontent” was an exception driven very much “from below” by workers plunged into poverty by Labour policies forcing wage restraint and welfare cuts amidst high inflation.
Overall, UK poverty was lower in 1979 than today despite a much larger economy. The rich have gotten richer, billionaires’ wealth rising five times as fast as the average earner.
The lack of TU action has allowed the far-Right to fill the vacuum of zero representation for the beleaguered working class. It’s happened time-and-again in our history. But this time the level of fascist organisation across the world funds and informs the most serious threat to democracy.
Yet Burnham is looking rightwards, seeking to compete and placate the racist bigots when he should be beating back the corrupt profiteering of the super-rich landlords and corporate executives.
Rather than taxing the super-rich and spending the money on council homes, he’s announced loans from the taxpayer for the private purchase of first homes, protecting the profits of the banks and mortgage companies.
Rather than repealing Tory laws and producing a legal and safe application route for asylum seekers, he’s using the refugees from the global south as whipping posts to outdo the neo-fascists.
Rather than publishing last year’s UK government climate national security report suppressed by Starmer, he’s briefing other governments on impending collapse of ecosystems across the world whilst opening-up Rosebank and other fossil fuel sources at home.
Rather than damning Israel’s genocide in Gaza he’s still licensing the supply of weapons made in the UK to Israel, and allowing the United States to use UK bases to wage Trump’s illegal wars in Iran and Yemen.
Through all this runs the reason why the ruling capitalist class sometimes prefer the ostensibly pro-worker Labour Government to an honestly pro-Capitalist class Tory or Reform led government. Labour can get away with more without a class war.
Labour plays the bait-and-switch approach, offers the sweetener for the bitter pill, provides a prettier fig-leaf over the latest abuse, the window-dressing hiding the back-stage offensive.
So give a small amount of extra cash to councils and communities to cover-up the massive tax-allowances to the finance corporations.
Allow Milliband wax-lyrical about green energy targets whilst continuing to subsidise and protect fossil-fuel use and the extreme profits of the oil companies.
Labour has not committed to anything called “socialist” for many generations now. Callaghan made cuts to the Welfare State much larger in one full-swoop than anything Thatcher managed. Blair privatised more of the public estate than any other prime minister ever. Starmer followed in Blair’s shadow, and worse.
Capitalists depend on our taxes to fund the modicum of social infrastructure they need for workers to be fit enough and able to travel to work. We pay for our health and social care, not them. Sometimes they accept a about Government to rebuild the modicum of social infrastructure they need for workers to be fit enough and able to travel to work. We pay for our health and social care, not them.
Burnham is not a socialist. He’s a player. And his Labour government will continue the role of administering Capitalism on behalf of the interests of the capitalist ruling class. This will result in more racism and persecution of minorities, more war, more climate chaos, more inequality and poverty.
And every Party to the Right will produce an even worse result.
The political divide is strengthening across Europe and the US with new socialist forces growing rapidly. It’s time to reassert international socialist principles and fight for workers’ rights. In Germany the far-Right has electorally taken the East whilst the big cities have shifted far to the socialist Left. In the United States the openly Democratic Socialist Party has endured the election of Mamdani in New York and is building a serious left alternative to Trump’s militarism, racism and misogyny.
Its time to reassert socialist principles and fight for workers’ rights. Declare yourself a socialist, for a system based upon meeting human need not private profit, challenging exploitation and oppression, for equality, Peace, climate action and redistribution of wealth to eradicate poverty now!
My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (22.9.26), predicting more of the Austerity ideology trying to make us pay for profits and war. The Budget looms, the call for cuts to benefits raises to a crescendo, and the organised working class has to fight or pay up. Mine has been a lifetime in the socialist and trade union movements, now long-toothed enough and battle scarred sufficiently to know the primary cause of our descent – the falsehoods spun by reformist leaders projecting two lies – the first that gradual improvements come from patient negotiations with receptive employers, and the second, that “workers won’t fight”. The truth, as shown by the Cancer Research Strikers only this week, is that workers are ready to fight with the correct leadership offering a positive and militant strategy. Very soon, workers will have to defy their nay-saying leaders and take collective action against their advice and, if necessary, the Law, in order to survive. That is the socialist perspective in the face of the poly crisis of 2026.
The unedited version below, or expand and read the picture to read the published article.
Ideas are a central element of class struggle. Our security and welfare is currently as much under attack from ideology as from war and climate. Every day we are assaulted by media predictions of global chaos, whilst “at home” we are threatened by experts telling us we, the People, are too expensive.
Wall to wall capitalist propaganda says demands we tighten our belts: cut support for low-paid workers, pensioners and the disabled. Its all Lies! The money’s there!
We, the People, are not the problem. Britain is more wealthy today than it has ever been.
Check it out. On average, Britons today have access to far more goods, services, technology, healthcare, education, housing amenities, and infrastructure than people of the 1950’s to 2000’s, the inter war years, Victorian Britain or earlier periods.
According to the Office for National Statistics, the country possesses an enormous stock of property, financial assets, physical possessions, businesses, infrastructure, and pension funds. The UK’s median net wealth sits at roughly $125,000 per adult making us the world’s 6th largest economy out 193 countries.
Britain is neither “broken” nor poor. Britain is richer than ever. But the “sense” of living here denies the statistics. Real incomes have stagnated compared with the rapid growth of the post-war decades. Wealth is distributed extremely unevenly. The richest 10% of British households hold around 43% of wealth, while the poorest half – that’s 35 million of us – hold about 9%. The rich have hoarded the overwhelming majority of the wealth created by the productivity of the working class.
We live in extremes of wealth and poverty. How? Because the neoliberal experiment that promised “Trickle down” was always a lie. It never happened. The economics of the “Free Market” sucked all the wealth from the working class, through the gross lowering of wage rates, the tripling of housing costs, and the privatisation of public services that ate-up most of the tax-payers contributions previously spent on social support and infrastructure.
Unbridled profiteering in a gangster economy. The top 5% have doubled their wealth through open and applauded extreme exploitation of the rest of us.
As the General Secretary of Unite the Union, Sharon Graham reflects, “After a decade that has seen prices rise by 40%, workers are sick of paying for crises they did not cause. Energy bills set to be the highest in three years, while the privatised profiteers rake in billions. Mortgage rates are spiking while the banks make money hand over fist.”
Couldn’t put it better myself. The problem exposes the sleight of hand. Trade unions never, never challenged neoliberalism or fought privatisation, instead bending to “follow our members” into one asset-stripping private corporation after another. Housing “externalised” from local council control, health services and social care sold off to private companies, public transport – indeed everything in public ownership – sold off to the cheapest bidder all at the expense of wages and working conditions.
Some of us always knew the dangers of privatisation. We tried to fight, and failed.
Now, with workers really hurting, unable to live on the sickly-sloganed “Living Wage”, we see through the empty rhetoric of union leaders and Labour politicians who have actively done little or nothing. We should have seen mass strike action against “Austerity Britain” from the very beginning, demanding socialist policies for public ownership, redistribution of wealth and the eradication of poverty.
The failure of working-class leadership is directly responsible for the rise of the far-Right. The transnational billionaires are funding Farage and the far-Right precisely because they want their wealth, power and control to continue. They want us to blame the poor and refugees. They feed on passivity and hopelessness.
Union leaders and career politicians have “sold-out” in return for cosy lives and entitlements – crumbs form the tables of the super-rich. The Autumn Budget will attack us again. We need a new trade union leadership ready for a fight, and a real agitational socialist leadership inside workplaces, organising collective protection and challenging the media lies funded by the ruling class. And a government ready to get our wealth back – tax the rich!
My two-page reflection on the General Strike 1926, published in the Plymouth Herald (30.4.26). The synopsis reflects the mood of the new book by socialist historians Judy Cox and Charlie Kimber, long term comrades, reminding the world that workers can and do fight, and workers in Britain have joined in mass dispute over and over again, including throughout my lifetime. The sell-out of the General Strike was used by Capitalist historians, including the reformist Labourites, the Webbs, to impose the cultural and political imposition against mass strike action, indeed, to undermine and criticise any and all strike action ever since. This top-down bureaucratic domination of the Labour Movement has plagued the working class ever since. I have always fought and organised for rank-and-file bottom-up collective action emanating from workplaces and working class communities. It will erupt again, the pay and job cuts and rate of gross exploitation too tense to be permanent or managed. The Workers, United, will never be Defeated!
One Hundred Years since the British General Strike
Plymouth Trades Union Council is hosting a Festival for International Workers Day in Plymouth on Saturday 2nd May at Sherwell Church, North Hill, with talks from socialist historians and a full length film on the 100th Anniversary of Britain’s General Strike 3-12th May 1926. Here, Tony Staunton, records the local events of the time.
On May 3rd 1926 four-and-a-half million workers went on strike across Britain for 9 consecutive days the longest period of a mass strike in Britain’s history. A real working class challenge to the UK government. In fact the strikes went on far longer.
The General Strike has been rewritten and dismissed by Capitalist historians. In fact it proved the real potential of working class collective power in the workplace, and the violence of the capitalist business owners ready to use their power to smash opposition.
General workers unions from the 1880’s had seen the match-girls strikes, 1910-14 huge explosion in general strikes in UK, continuing to a degree through the war, and then mass strikes at the end of the war across Europe. A new strike wave saw half of Britian on strike in 1919, including many police forces, pushing for better pay and conditions.
The British working class was the largest in the world, the First World War politicising workers, the British Empire declining and the British ruling class needing to break the growth of working class revolts. By the 1920’s, the bosses were desperate to take back control of industry from the war-time State. With coal fuelling all of industry, coal miners were at the frontline – mine owners supported by the government for privatisation and immediately imposing 50% wage cuts and longer working hours.
With one million miners in Britain, the threat of poverty wages and increased in hours was recognised as the focus for a general strike across the organised working class. Their first fight in 1921 published demands for 30% increase in wages, a 30-hour working week and nationalisation of the mines under workers’ control. It was defeated on Black Friday when the rest of the trade union movement failed to offer support.
The Labour Party was right-wing but offered a political voice to the organised working class in these circumstances. Unsurprisingly, in 1924 the first Labour Government was elected, but only just, as a minority administration which collapsed in November the same year. This had nevertheless rattled the ruling class recognising they had to break trade union and labour power and beat-back the working class especially on wages and hours
The Triple Alliance came in support of the Miners: Miners, Railways and Transport workers, pushing their own demands. The Tory government called a Royal Commission to investigate the Mining Industry, agreeing a 10% wage increase and a 8-hour working day, giving mine owners a 9-month subsidy to stop wage reductions.
This cut across class struggle and diffusing anger. It was a temporary victory, the government preparing whilst the TUC didn’t. The Miners won on Red Friday, the mine owners and government recognising they weren’t ready for the showdown to come.
The Royal Commission finally called for increased working hours and cuts to wages, ending the Government subsidies to the mine owners. On 30th June 1925 the Miners Owners announced pay cuts and increase in working hours. Tory Prime minister Stanley Baldwin announced in parliament that all workers, not just miners, would have to take wage cuts and work longer hours to put the economy back on its feet.
In 1926 the Mine owners gave a 2-week notice of 50% wage cuts. Workers knew that if the miners lost this time, the bosses would come for the rest of the working class. On 1st May 1926 a general vote of TUC special conference recorded 3.6m for a GS, 50,000 against. The TUC made no plans for action. It focussed upon respectability – “stay at home, don’t go to picket lines, tend the garden and pigeons, organise cricket matches with the police and opposition”. A non-threatening general strike! The TUC Congress voted unanimously to stand with the Miners but refused to organise defence against the policing and government.
In fact, the TUC called the strike only 2 days before with minimum preparation. It was pushed by an unofficial strike of printer workers at the Daily mail refusing to print a headline against the Miners and TUC headed “For King and Country!”. Baldwin demanded the strikes were called-off. The TUC repudiated the Daily Mail strike but the Government snubbed them.
The Government was fully prepared, with huge coal stocks and military preparations, and wanted the strike. It had imprisoned most of the leadership of the British Communist Party along with thousands of known militants, and shut down leftwing newspapers and political meetings.
The Tory Government invoked the Organisation of Maintenance and Supplies (OMS) a government-funded paramilitary strike-breaking organisation recruiting 100,000 mainly middle class volunteers – with contacts between the Tory Government, the British Union of fascists and the visible presence of the Armed Forces on the streets, not least the Navy deployed in ports visibly threatening port towns. Over 200,000 were recruited into special Police.
The Government ensured a broad propaganda campaign against the strike, setting-up the daily “British Gazette” edited by Winston Churchill to organise a “scab army” of strike-breakers, facilitated but the Daily Mail and Daily Express. The editorial was that the strike is a threat to country, the monarchy, the Empire, to law and order, the family and the Christian religion.
The BBC ensured repeated appeals for scab recruitment, fake reports of mass defections from the strike. The head of the Catholic Church came out to declare that the strike was a sin against God!
In response, the “British Worker” newspaper was set up by the TUC emphasising that the strike was simply an industrial dispute, no threat to the Constitution, and arguing for restraint. TUC leadership organised against any and all semblance of rank and file organisation, and used the local trades councils to prevent or reign-in the Councils of Action (local Strike Committees for agitation and propaganda, demanding all power to the TUC General Council “for the preservation of peace and order”.
At midnight on 3rd May the country stopped. The industrial heartlands, railways and public services brought to a halt, industry came to a complete standstill. In London al 4,000 buses stood still, 9 of 2,000 trams and 15 out of 15,000 tube trains moved. Docks shut down, the volunteer strike-breaking force ineffectual, the students crashing trains and buses.
Dockers, Iron and Steel, metal and chemical workers, woodworkers, printers, building workers on strike. Shipping and shipbuilders, power workers, the Post office and telephone engineers, didn’t strike although many came out during the 9 days. Large numbers of unorganised workers joined the strike – nobody wanted to be that person seen to be on the side of the bosses.
The General Strike was heavily supported, mass pickets on 4th May stopping scabs, fierce street battles including deaths, trucks and cars and busses set alight, railway stations invaded to stop transport. Women laid babies on the road to stop scab vehicles and allow the drivers to be evicted and engines to be broken.
The General Strike unleashed working class anger at their exploitation with a popular wave of physical confrontation against the power of the State. Women’s organisations ensured infrastructure for the strike, including financial levies for universal welfare and organised groups to challenge strike-breakers.
At Millbay Docks in Plymouth there was open conflict, the Dockers struck in sympathy with miners, leading to the docks becoming a major flashpoint for clashes with police. As the strike developed, it was important to stop all business as usual. On Saturday, 8 May, Police used batons to disperse crowds near Drake Circus and Old Town Street after a No 6 tram was attacked, with several protesters arrested. A procession of around 4,000 strikers attempted to block the operation of trams by “volunteers”. This resulted in violent confrontations, with trams having windows smashed and destination boards torn off by protesters.
Battle ships were moored off Plymouth and on the Mersey, the Clyde, and other cities. Hyde Park in London was turned into a military camp. For the Tory Government, the workers had to crawl back to work humiliated. The working class must not get any idea that strikes can win.
The TUC sought talks, the government disinterested, even when the TUC leadership agreed to prevent the Miners from being part of negotiations because they were pledged not to back down. Meanwhile, Councils of Action spread across the country from the 2nd Day coordinating strike action, picketing, permits for transport and workers defence forces.
Just as the momentum was rising and more workers were joining, on 12th May the General Council of the TUC called-off the strike, without any agreement with the government or employers. They felt the situation was getting out of their control. In short, the union leaders shrank from confrontation because it imperilled their carefully built organisations. But the impact was to leave workers to the punishments meted out by the employers.
The Daily Mail headline “surrender of the revolutionaries!” Trades Councils, strike committees and all were outraged and incensed at the call back to work. It represented nothing on the ground. There were more people on strike the day after the strike was called-off, with more people who were non-unionised too! It took time to quell the fight.
The Miners carried-on the strike and were beaten. It was a defeat for the Mineworkers Federation and a major defeat for the general working class, the government and employers weeding-out all the militants and activists across industries.
Printers unions stayed on strike demanding the reinstatement of all workers. Even the strike-breakers said the end of the strike shouldn’t be a rout and a punishment. Big wage cuts and job mass sackings followed. The Bosses stated “you’ve got nothing” and forced 25-40% wage cuts – a bitter defeat of the entire working class. The rail owners sacked 45,000 workers after the GS defeat, giving the jobs to the scabs.
The betrayal of 1926 opened the way for the brutal repression of the Unemployed Movement, the 1932 Great Hunger March assaulted by Police, all leaders jailed in the 1930s and State assaults on the anti-fascist mobilisations before and after the second world war.
The Labour leaders declared general strikes should never happen again. It has pervaded debates across the labour movement ever since. The reformist historians, the Webb’s recorded that British workers aren’t revolutionary and British bosses aren’t fascist: “British culture is immunised against the continental virus of open class antagonism and political extremism”. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.
The true legacy of the General Strike is that workers can and do fight back against exploitation and repression. The worker’s history shows that we can and do stand together, and most importantly have power. There is always the question of leadership in any conflict. People do not break from forms of democracy and coordination that are handed down to them without the realistic prospect of something different. For 9 days the prospect of real change, of something better had become a reality. Those with a self-interest in the maintenance of the status quo disallowed such aspiration. Such is the lesson of the General Strike of 1926 for today.
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (10.2.26), identifying my support for the new Your Party project towards a mass socialist party in the UK. The need should be obvious – the far-Right are demolishing all notions of social justice, multiculturalism and anti-racism, women’s liberation and Trans-rights, health support including for mental distress, comprehensive education for all, accessibility and democracy. But the new Socialist Party is, probably necessarily, being borne out of strife and power-plays because that is what politics is. We’re voting for our first leadership, necessarily taking sides between between conservative and radical socialism. Following print deadlines and publication, Rob Rooney, a member of the Trotskyist Socialist Party and seasoned militant trade unionist, was debarred from his candidacy and expelled from Your Party despite being on the ballot papers. It is a signal that the election is indeed a battle, not some gentle guide towards consensus, just as have been all elections before. Without socialism to vote for, the working class will be conned and enticed by far-right lies suggesting they, at least the white working class, will be better off with an authoritarian and discriminatory government of exclusion, racism and misogyny. We cannot let that happen.
The unedited version here, or stretch the picture below to read the published article.
New Political Party will give Power to the People (the Herald editor’s rather cynical headline)
“Starmer’s Toast!” 2026 will see the fifth UK Prime Minister installed in the last five years. Who cares? They’re all the same – one elite political class all in it for themselves. This tiny cabal appear to rumble inside their own sealed bubble, most of us innocent victims of their intrigues and power plays.
Our collective cynicism, if not outright despair, is palpable. In the face of political convulsions and continued enforced austerity, and amid the continuing erosion of all facets of democracy, it can appear that universal suffrage is of the lowest priority for hard-pressed working class people.
And yet there are elections happening this week. Indeed, in trade union circles we have democratic all-member votes on various issues most weeks, from strike ballots to the election of a new General Secretary or a fresh union steward in our local workplace.
The importance of political agency for the masses, for the working class, has been a cornerstone of trade union and socialist organisation for hundreds of years. The Labour Party was formed out of the trade union bureaucracy responding to the demand for working class representation in Parliament but intentionally and woefully separating the economic from the political struggles, stamping down on extra-parliamentary activity and political strikes in particular.
Labour has failed as a direct consequence. Today’s overwhelming disengagement of working class voters, borne of repeated disappointment, is dangerous. We could soon lose what few rights and powers we still enjoy.
The elections that opened yesterday are for the Central Executive Committee of “Your Party” – the latest parliamentary formation stepping onto the UK political stage. The mass media began and continues to deride and slur the Party, referring to it only as “Corbyn’s Lot” and denigrating the contest as in-fighting between “loony lefties”. Don’t get fooled again.
Elections are contests. People stand representing different strategies and tactics towards different goals. Of course that requires rigorous arguments and taking sides. Before Your Party is dismissed due to in-fighting, just consider the all but constant warfare at the heart of the Labour lot, Badenoch’s sinking Tory ship, and Farage’s chaotic ReformUK. Truth be told, there’s ideological strife inside Polanski’s squeaky clean Greens too! It’s politics! In any case, none of them are socialist organisations.
Your Party, when announced, gathered 800,000 people interested in the formation of a new socialist party in Britain. The launch Conference in Liverpool last November voted for an outright socialist constitution for workers’ rights and the redistribution of wealth from the billionaires back to the People.
Tens of thousands of activists are engaged in meetings, debates and organisation for this new socialist party, in essence echoing the Webb’s 1918 Clause Four of the Labour Party Constitution: “for the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange…to secure for workers the full fruits of their industry and promote equitable distribution”.
But these are not the nineteen hundreds. Your Party cannot and must not try to be a Labour Party Mark2. That formation failed the working class – tried and tested over a hundred years and more, cutting the welfare state and restricting workers wages all in pursuit of supporting and maintaining the capitalist system.
We have to should focus on socialist demands including:
1 End the cost of living crisis, end austerity policies and tackle obscene levels of inequality;
2 Welfare not warfare, invest in public services, no to privatisation, kick the market out of service delivery;
3 Initiate an urgent council house building programme;
4 Renationalise water, energy and all public utilities without compensation;
5 For peace and against war. For the liberation of Palestine, against imperialist assaults in Venezuela, Greenland and the Middle East;
6 Against all forms of oppression, and specifically including trans-Rights;
7 For the abolition of anti-trade union legislation;
8 For action on the climate crisis including the end of fossil-fuels, to invest in jobs and protect our environment;
9 Defend civil liberties and the right to protest, against Starmer’s authoritarianism.
We face far more global turmoil than did our ancestors of the turbulent twenties and war-preparations of the 1930s. The economic, political and moral corruption of big corporations and their billionaire owners is greater than ever. The militarisation, rearmament and drive to greater war is fast-tracking. Most of all, the collapse of climate stability – accelerating extreme weather events destroying the fundamentals of food security – demands there can be no more “business as usual”.
In response to the obvious crisis we are living in, current parliamentary politics is dominated by the fast-tracked drive of far-right, nationalist and fascist organisation here and across the world.
Your Party will emerge from its first election period dead-at-birth if it tries to mirror the old parties of a bygone era. A pointless waste of focussed enthusiasm and finite energy. This has to be an activist party, an organisation of organisers, an insurgent mobilisation of working class power that can combat the billionaire corporations and the toxic, racist, misogynist, divisive far-Right.
This is not a project that can plan a thirty-year slow-build towards parliamentary power. There’s no time. This week’s elections have to produce a leadership that will represent and build collective working class power, immediately!
My weekly comment column in today’s Plymouth Herald, unedited below or expand the photo to read the print version. Oh, and share and join Your Party!
A thoroughly exceptional weekend. Historic! A point in the social and political story of Britain that will be recorded, referred back to and celebrated by generations to come. A gaping hole in the electoral firmament has been filled. There is, at last, a political party of and for the working class, that is committed solely to improving the lives of workers, challenging and ending the wealth and power of a ruling class that is sucking the lifeblood from our labours, destroying our health and welfare. Your Party was founded on the 30th November 2025, voted into being by a process whereby all subscribers could participate, propose organisational structures and purposes, and vote online and in conference for the establishment of a mass democratic socialist organisation. Socialism is alive, vilified by the Capitalist media owned by billionaires, and hated by the far-Right. Socialism is the drive for a fair and just society ensuring equality and welfare for all. In essence, a collective society where each person offers their skills and labour towards the common good, and every person has their individual needs met as a result. Socialism is not characterised by the dictatorship of an elite. Quite the opposite, socialism requires the opening-up of participation and agency for all who contribute to the common wealth. The producers, creators, thinkers and carers, empowered by a society that values every contribution from every ability. Socialism values humanity and the natural environment we inhabit. Capitalism has developed into very much the opposite. The extraction of value from we who have to sell our efforts in exchange for a wage or welfare, the fruits of our labours lining the pockets of the landlord class, the corporate executives and bankers. A vicious, exploitative and oppressive system of class rule. Just 50 families in Britain own and control more than half our country’s wealth. They consider themselves untouchable, exuding privilege and entitlement largely due an accident of birth. The super-rich tightly transfer their money and power through generations of family ties, heavily protected by the laws they make for themselves. We have had almost no chance of any social mobility for generations. Britain’s economy, five times as large as in the 1950’s, all built on working class effort, has seen all the wealth trickle-up and out of the country, hoarded in off-shore accounts and preventing investment at home. A housing crisis, a health crisis (both physical and mental), one-in-three of our children living in poverty, 60% of our elderly undeservedly isolated and impoverished. All in the pursuit of profit and power for the very elite few. This has to be turned over. The world is in a crisis caused by capitalism. The descent into barbarism is sensed by all: the billionaire-backed rise of fascist organisation across the West; the forever wars and genocide pursued by the profiteering arms manufacturers; the climate catastrophe the result of the record profits from fossil-fuel emissions creating extreme weather events that force hundreds of millions from the homelands. We can fight back! And we are getting organised. The Old Order is dying. Both the Tories and Labour Party have lost their base, all-but indistinguishable in their policies and vying with Reform UK to scapegoat migrants and refugees to hide their own corruption. Workers need a collective voice of our own. The millionaires Farage and Yaxley-Lennon offer only racist and misogynist hatred, continued privatisation of services and attacks on workers rights. Starmer and Badenoch seek only to further the interests of the wealthiest. The two-Party system that has dominated Britain for two centuries is at an end. The gap on the Left has been filled. The rise of our new socialist party has been long and painful in formation and is now speeding forward in unity of purpose. Redistribute the wealth, challenge inequality, defend and protect minorities in a society based upon meeting our needs, not the profits for the rich! It’s your party!
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.
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.
There is an incredible depth and breadth of vitriol being published against migrants and asylum seekers right now, and a torrent of images on screen of mass human suffering. We are becoming desensitised and “used” to apocalyptic “Hollywood” movie images of people being torn apart, tortured and/or left to rot. Hence my weekly Comment in the daily Plymouth Herald (16.7.24) condemning any and all attempts to devalue even one human life.
We must not stop talking about it. Day after day we see horror on our screens. Everything from the apparent attempted assassination of a past-President to the blanket bombing of refugee camps.
We watch dramatic, high definition, cinematically enhanced moving pictures of bombs exploding into mushroom clouds and sound waves, collapsing buildings.
There are close-ups of human carcasses with dissembled body parts, their relatives’ faces offered in close-up, blooded and wide-eyed, some screaming and others offering traumatised stares. The images can be paused, rewound, captured, recreated, saved and shared. Like a Hollywood movie.
In essence, we are being daily desensitised to the suffering of humanity.
Last week’s NATO conference in Washington heard world leaders ramping-up military plans for more war, more expenditure on war, and thereby, more images of death and destruction on TV. More frightening still was the latest language, intimated on stage and spoken more precisely on the fringes. The concept and identification of “surplus humans”. The term itself has been spoken in the Israeli Cabinet recently by a self-proclaimed fascist and racist war minister, referring directly to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
Let’s think on that. Surplus humans. Surplus to what, to whom and by what criteria? When politicians demand to “send them back”, the presumption is they’re surplus to requirements. When walls are built to keep “them” out, permissions given to shoot to kill, they’re “surplus”. Militarised camps are built to warehouse and store hundreds of thousands at a time, of these surplus peoples.
A couple of hundred years ago, in 1798, Thomas Malthus published a book still referenced by the more bigoted of politicians, and poorly paraphrased to suggest “overpopulation creates poverty and misery”. Malthusianism is back in fashion. Let the forces of war and climate reduce populations “naturally”, to give the smaller human race space to live. Malthus’s arguments were thoroughly disproved on the basis that as more people exist, so more resources can be produced to alleviate poverty. Today, it is largely only the elitists who still adhere to his tracts, although, in the face of climate collapse, a range of liberal minds are now starting to repeat his nonsense, amongst them the near-god of the environment, David Attenborough.
To disprove this nonsense, is to recognise that humans have modified less than 15% of the global land surface, and settled to create homes on 10%. In the UK, 9% of the land is built-upon. There is space.
A better example still: there more food produced in the world today than there are mouths to feed. The much-overstated argument that the current human population would require 2.5 Earth’s worth of resources in order for everyone to live to the standards of USA and Europe is full of holes – firstly, Capitalism’s overproduction of Stuff, including industrial food, is not a desirable nor sustainable way forward for humanity, and secondly Capitalisms exploitation and destruction of natural resources is not a stated goal of the vast majority of humanity.
The issue, is resource (wealth) distribution. One-third of all food produced in the world is wasted. The reason is intentional – if the transport of the food to the people who need it is not profitable (often termed “economically viable”), and if the hungry people cannot pay the market price (including the surplus value known as profit), then they must exist in a condition of malnutrition and slowly starve – in their millions.
With a complete negation of any reason or rationality it is argued that the surplus food is a natural part of the System, it is the surplus mouths that are the problem. Capitalist society values only those who work to produce surplus for those who accumulate and hoard wealth. Those who do not or cannot are deemed a drain on society, an impediment to growth, surplus to requirements.
Obviously it is not people who are the problem. After all, we’re all people. As a matter of fact, the System that commodifies and puts a price on every aspect of life is the problem.
Were we to live in a system based upon human need not profit, resources could be prioritised to ensure every human has the basics of life ensured: nutrition, shelter, health care, education and community – love. And there is more than enough to go round.
Instead, adherents of the system of Capitalism are knowingly destroying the planet, descending into war, genocide and barbarism. And these acts don’t go away simply by turning off our TV. They continue to come towards us and engulf us.
We are witnessing the rapidly developing situation towards one billion climate refugees by 2035, forced to leave their homelands due to extremes of weather impossible to live under. Crop failures, permanent drought, or fires or floods that destroy arable land create both war for the diminishing resources and mass migration for survival.
These conditions, now recognised by the warrior class of NATO and every imperial power, are likely to be answered by rapid the development of more vast refugees camps, the people guarded and impoverished, incarcerating the millions forced to stay and die where they were born, surplus to requirements of the global system of Capitalism whilst the world leaders spend more than $2trillion each year on armaments.
To believe there are surplus humans is to have lost all humanity. If a society says some lives don’t matter, then one day that life is likely to be yours. Not watching the latest news will only bring this ever closer to our doors. The real news is that we’d best change the System, fast.
My Comment this week in the daily Plymouth Herald (4.6.24). The rigged “balance” required of the media during an election period means I can’t get published what I’d really like to say: Farage’s Reform Party offers an embryonic fascist rally which threatens the entire working class, the Greens are a pro-Capitalist Party with a terrible anti-working class record in Europe and indeed, against trade unions when running local councils; Galloway is socially conservative with adherence to religious family values that opposes a women’s right to choose, gay marriage and trans-rights, his Workers’ Party inviting cross-class alliances with Farage and ex-UKIP candidates. Starmer is more than ready to lead us into World War Three within the duration of the next Government term (for which the imperialist ruling classes already undertaking the preparations). And anyway, putting one’s faith in bourgoisie democracy and the election of a socialist pro-working class government has been thoroughly destroyed by the ruling class offensive against Corbyn (not to mention the various corporate-funded right-wing coups against socialist reformers across the globe). The Left, historically infiltrated by chancers, turn-coat careerists, renegades, police spies and agent-provocateurs, continues to fragment just when political unease and renewed strike action in our class offers a chance to build a coherent mass organisation. The rise and falls of mass movements: Black Lives Matter; Me Too!; Climate Strikes and now Freedom for Gaza each represent missed opportunities for decisive leadership for whole-system change, linking all the issues together into an anti-Capitalist offensive. It’s no longer any good to say you’re a “socialist” without saying you’re anti-Capitalist. It is Capitalism and its current development of Imperialism that links all these movements and issues. The Capitalists will not allow you to reform their System out of existence! The only way out of this is revolution, which may well be brewing elsewhere in the world for us to jump-on and build here. One mass strike is worth ten general elections!
But none of this can be printed.
So instead, here’s the long version of the printable edition:
The candidates are about to be declared, the stage about to be set. General elections are theatres for Party activists.
People join together into political parties with reason. There are ideas that conjoin and ideas that splinter into opposition. It’s very difficult, for example, to believe in universal human rights whilst promoting racial superiority – is it okay that some people are born with more privileges and entitlements than others?
Some beliefs come together towards a whole and encompassing world view. To act upon the our formed “way of seeing” we need to join together in sufficient numbers to have impact and change the direction of social organisation towards our preferred conditions. Hence parties.
On a very superficial level, that’s what putting a cross on a piece of paper at election day represents – a personal alliance with a world view.
The current drive towards politicians “independent” of any world view is probably a short-term proposition. A non-Party “independent” may be elected because they catch the majority view on a single issue but soon get into trouble when people disagree with other views they now espouse but were not in their manifesto.
They may be elected as forthright and unbending on their stated goal, but find that, to achieve anything they will have to compromise into a coalition with others, watering down their mandate and starting to link together into a new political Party.
The rise of the “Independents” is a necessary reaction to the general sense of “they’re all the same” which has swept into the consciousness of the electorate. The lack of faith in democracy as currently organised is prevalent across the Western world whilst still being fought for in the Global South.
The point is, there are real differences in preferences for social organisation. There are Right and a Left wings of the political spectrum. Social organisation to share resources to ensure everyone’s needs and human rights are met is a world view and ambition that is the complete opposite of a belief in individual competition and personal enrichment at the expense of others.
The best example is our National Health Service, loathed by Right-wingers as a construct of “socialism” because people pay into the common purse in order to get free health care at the point of need. The privatisation of the NHS is a right-wing strategy to turn our health service into a fee-paying, for-profit capitalist enterprise run by transnational pharmaceutical companies, not the State.
Any NHS charging essentially separates those who can afford to pay from those who can’t, into a society where your right to health care is based upon your personal income and inherited wealth. To accept charging in order to lower taxes is to accept individual competition as the social norm – a world view with wider implications.
It is difficult to ride on the back of two horses running in opposite directions. There are new parties seeking to go beyond, or bring together, Right and Left, despite the inherent conflict at the core of those ideologies. This may be an honest attempt to rebuild democracy away from the current two-party system which offers no real difference in policies or outcomes. But it’s a project doomed to failure.
A white-supremacist cannot be, at the same time, anti-racist and for a multi-cultural State. Someone who believes men should have power over women is unlikely to defend the rights of LGBTQ+. Warmongers don’t vote for Peace. Anyone who believes that the majority of Muslims are extremist “Islamists” is unlikely to believe in the rights of refugees and asylum seekers. Beliefs coalesce into world views.
The inescapable fact is that we live in a polarised society based upon class, the conditions we are born into determining much of how we see the world and what we believe. We are born into a System, not of our choosing or making, where social policy either benefits the wealthy elite or it benefits the working class and the poor. Either we raise taxes to pay for social need, which requires the rich to pay-up in full, or we collapse the State and engage with a dog-eat-dog system where those without are left to perish.
History provides many examples of where this class conflict which produces trade union strikes, mass movements, protests and community campaigns, produce real social changes far more profound and more often than general elections.
So the core question to candidates should be, are you for the People (the majority of whom are working class reliant upon day-to-day income) or the Rich ruling class few who extract and exploit in order to maintain their privileges? Everything else stems from this divide. Whatever the result, we’ll still have to fight for our rights.
