My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (9.6.26), predicting the outcry by Tory leader Badenoch, calling today for “Common Sense”! Her focus, racism experienced by white people in a predominantly white society! Another weaponisation of prejudice in the pursuit of power. No mention of institutional racism that systemically marginalises and criminalises people of colour. The culture wars continue, amplified to the extreme by an Establishment fragmented and floundering. We must keep up the pressure – no to racism, fascism and misogyny!
And yes, I know Palestine is not in the World Cup finals, but, just like FIFA, we should still fly the flag!
My unedited text below (not my chosen headline) or expand the pic to read the printed version.
World Cup: Let’s hope the Best team Wins!
Everyone’s shouting for Common Sense! Apparently, the Truth should be obvious to all. The only problem being, there is no such thing as common sense. We each have different experiences and receive the world differently. This diversity makes humanity dynamic and resilient. We’re not all the same – enjoy!
We commonly live in a class society. Deny that if you can. The stratification of the 70+ millions of us is such that the entire experience of the 20% (14 million people) at one end of the class spectrum has absolutely nothing in common with the opportunities and privileges afforded the 20% at the other end. That much is obvious the moment we walk down the street. Rolls Royces speeding past the tents of the homeless.
Fewer than one million of us, one in 70, will ever experience flight in a private jet. However much we dream of it or transport ourselves into the lives of the billionaires, the class system will not allow any level of social mobility that can possibly allow you to get that rich.
The private schools for the top 6% of society protect offspring and inheritance from seeping down let alone having any poor wretch be accepted into the multimillionaire class. We speak different languages inside broad the English vocabulary. We perceive a very different world, Britain, England dependent upon our class placement.
The England-based company director, protected by private millions of pounds in share holdings, expects returns on stock market gamblings many thousands of times greater per day than we, the majority, looking for a 10% return on a £10 bet using the smartphone bingo app. Or the 14m:1 potential of Lotto. The dice is heavily weighted. Money goes to money.
The banking investor wants maximum returns on capital, benefitting from high interest rates. The working class family whose home is mortgaged to the bank wishes for low interest rates. No commonality there.
The house-builder expects to make a hefty profit and stops building unless so assured. The large landlord wants to charge the highest rental, and does so to such a degree that we have a housing crisis. The renter wants a fair if not low rent in exchange for a well cared-for building. One side’s gain is the other’s loss.
Oxfam’s research gives evidence that the wealth gap between rich and poor in the UK is stark: just 58 billionaires in the UK hold more combined wealth than 27 million other people (39% of the population). Oxfam highlights that an estimated 14.5 million people – nearly a quarter of the UK population – live in poverty, while the richest 1% own over a fifth of the nation’s total wealth.
It makes no sense for working class people to demand that the rich get richer at our expense! What’s the sense in that? It does make sense for billionaires to tell the working class we must accept welfare cuts and higher prices in order to protect and grow their profits! That is the “Common Sense” spouted by the politicians seeking to protect the current state of things, a status quo that has overseen serious deterioration to working class living standards and expectations over the past forty years.
Nationalism is the primary vehicle for demanding common sense. After all, we all live on this Island and therefore should have something in common, shouldn’t we? It’s only common sense for us to support our military for our shared security, isn’t it? It is apparently common sense that we should ration health, education and welfare in order to put more billions into the private military-industrial arms corporations. Only sections of society benefit from military arms expenditure, by no means the majority. Surely, common sense would agree that war is not in our interests.
And there can be no common sense where racism and sexism exist in society. Racism divides on the basis of one perceived ethnicity or skin colour being superior to another, with a baseline of white supremacy. Sexism is the exercise for imposing male supremacy. White people do not commonly experience the different and detrimental looks and behaviour experienced daily by people of colour. Men do not experience levels of rape and domestic abuse that women daily receive in Britain. The prejudice that flood the senses of being Black or female in a society based upon competition and discrimination are not common to all.
Perversely, those demanding common sense usually align such an imposition with racism and religious prejudice. Their common sense is meant as common only to Christian white-skinned people. Right now, such nationalist common sense demands for us all to support England at the World Cup. We should be proud to be British as opposed to care about any of the 48 competing FIFA Nations, shouldn’t we, even when Scotland has a much better squad!
Hold on, why should we compete to be superior to the peoples of other nations and regions, when all the other countries live under the same class divisions, their working class experiencing the self-same exploitation, oppression, repression and deprivations as us? We have more in common with working class people living in Africa, South America and Asia than we have with the English billionaires holed-up in the Cotswolds.
Can we have some “Class Sense” please? Can we prioritise and cheer-on what’s in the interests of the majority – the working class – not seek some fake allegiance with billionaires who push nationalism and “common sense” in their property-owning class’s self-interests, not ours?
In the meantime, wouldn’t a human, caring common sense want the best team to win, or care for the underdog? It’s only a game of football after all, but, for what it’s worth, c’mon Palestine!
My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (19.5.26) keeping-up the assault of the Left against the far-Right, following the previous Saturday’s excellent Palestine Solidarity/Stand Up To Racism demonstration in London, overwhelming the much-reduced far-Right “Unite the Nation” march called by the Islamophobe, Tommy Robinson. Plymouth has a range of fascist and racist organisation competing against each other for pride of place, pretending to demand protecting of women and children from refugee men whilst, in practice, working alongside white men with convictions for abuse. The Left is also in their sights, our charge of racism having a serious effect upon their credibility and support. We must not be complacent and must increase and deepen our efforts until they are off our streets. The next counter demonstration is next Monday.
Unedited version below, or expand the pic for the published version.
Women’s liberation would benefit men. Working class men, at least. The ability of the Bosses to pay women less than men for doing the same work, having the same or even more skills but being denigrated, denied recognition and prevented from rising-up the management hierarchy, harms everyone…except the bosses. Unequal pay holds down the general pay-rate. Any excuse is used to hold down wages in order to increase profits, including ideas that women are not worth as much as men.
Women’s oppression, the consideration of women as less than men – weaker, more emotional and therefore fickle and untrustworthy – is increasing again in Britain. After a few decades of winning better women’s rights at work and at home, there’s now a push back. And misogyny is the hard end of this – male hatred of women – a political campaign for male supremacy overwhelming the online Manosphere and poisoning young men’s minds.
Sexism doesn’t make sense. If women had the same rights as men, men would be freed from the results of women’s oppression. If we broke the stereotypes assigned to gender roles we could be honest about our emotions, we could share responsibilities, mix our teams and, oh yes, increase the rate of pay for all, setting the bar at the highest common denominator, not the lowest.
Women in the UK still get paid on average of 18% below men’s pay rates for work of the same value. Trade unions still shout about this. The essential priority for campaigners for women’s rights is correctly focussed upon male coercion, sexual abuse and rape. It is estimated that up to 900,000 people across the country experience sexual assault each year, including attempted rape and penetration. Much has been done to strengthen laws against sexual violence and yet it is widespread, less than 3% of reported rapes ending up in a successful prosecution and punishment.
Predatory abusive men have little to fear. One-in-three women in the UK experience an average of 7-years of domestic abuse at the hands of their partners, statistics that hasn’t changed for the past 50 years. Around 90% of rapes are committed by people known to the victim, often by someone who the survivor previously trusted or even loved. Rapists are usually friends, colleagues, clients, neighbours, family, partners or exes.
Sexual abuse happens in every community. In England, where more than four out of five of the population are white-skinned, this means that the vast majority of sexual abusers are white men abusing white women.
Yet a new campaign group, publicised by the Plymouth Herald, is calling for action against Black men. “Women Reclaim The Streets Plymouth” (WRTSP) is claiming that our streets have been made unsafe by immigrants seeking to abuse women.
WRTSP states “We will feel safer on the Right than the Left always, with rising amounts of illegal undocumented men coming here on boats and the amounts of rapes and murders by these men We Stand (sic) together for closed borders and the illegal undocumented men send (sic) straight back.”
They have no evidence, and as such this is hate speech, a hate crime, promoting fear and racial hostility through the false claim that asylum seekers are responsible for a rising number of rapes.
They wrongly raise the threat of “stranger danger” when women and children are most likely to be abused by someone known to them. Their propaganda is placing women and children at more risk, intentionally or not, implying that family and friends are always safe.
This outcry against asylum seekers and young refugee men as rapists is being fomented by organised fascists. The misogynists who hate women also hate Black people. The ultra-nationalists framing patriotism as white-supremacy are waving flags to intimidate ethnic minorities. The men in high-viz jackets waving Union jacks with the Reclaim the Streets group outside Theatre Royal last week have amongst them thugs convicted for violence against women.
These racist groups are planning a series of local protests against refugees, starting next Monday. They threaten to hold more demonstrations outside our primary schools, claiming to “protect our children” and targeting local Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMO) as if they all house illegal refugees. Their sheer ignorance is jaw-dropping.
Far-right organisations are springing-up across the city, competing with each other for pole position as the most racist, the most patriotic. They plan to protest outside the Plymouth Courts at a hearing of Black men of a sexual attack. Yet all six cases of serious rape and abuse of women heard in Plymouth last year had no such protests outside in the cause of keeping women and children safe – all six were white men – no protests to keep us safe from them, was there?
Women’s safety must not be a tool for racism. Women and children are at risk from low wages, insecure housing, inadequate access to support and benefits as well as sexual abuse. Women are at risk from the sexism and misogyny in our general culture. Women’s sexist oppression and abuse cannot be defeated through the racist oppression and abuse of Black men. We must counter these racist demonstrations and honestly campaign for women’s liberation.
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (24.3.26), obviously advertising the mass demonstration against the far-Right taking place at the weekend. The back-room complexities of fund-raising and organising coaches, and filling them with activists, remains unseen. Commercial hire is absurdly overpriced. We are in debt and need donations, if you can. But more, we need to fill the coaches and build the mass movement against fascism.
Join us in Challenging the Rise of the Far Right
Hundreds of people will be travelling from Plymouth to London on Saturday to join the national demonstration against the far-Right. The protest by the Together Alliance and accompanying festival of diversity in Trafalgar Square will be the largest assembly against race-hate and fascism in British history. The threat of fascism is very real and present. The numbers of fascist organisations in Britain have grown, and their ranks expanded, greater than the National Front in the 1970’s or the British National Party in the 1990’s. At the same time, the level of public awareness has decreased as we have been separated and isolated into private social bubbles by financial Austerity, the Covid Pandemic and the sense of vulnerability caused by wars and climate crisis. We are emotionally jostled by conspiracy theorists seeking power through spreading fear and threat. We are lied to by far-Right politicians blaming and scapegoating minorities for all society’s ills. We are confused by politicians broadcasting conflicting fake facts in the name of Truth, just to further their own influence. Our children are subjected to all this in a concentrated form of professionally produced propaganda on-line, the Incel “Manosphere” telling boys they must be ready to fight, and girls they must submit to men’s needs. The saturating levels of You Tube generated sexism and misogyny is alive in the playground and classrooms, daily observed and documented by teachers themselves, taking a collective toll on the mental health and wellbeing of all concerned. Racism, the learnt prejudgment and assumptions of people of colour or minority ethnic group, is being encouraged and organised by antisemites, white supremacists and Christian fundamentalists, the targeting of Muslims most prevalent. Powerful political forces and social dynamics are being forged to develop fascist organisation here and across the world. In the United States of America, President Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) armed street thugs are terrorising minority communities, a style of para-military State organisation that Nigel Farage of Reform UK and all to his Right are pledging to bring here the moment they achieve power, targeting a million or more people of colour for forced deportation. Yet we know it’s not migrants that have created the cost of living crisis, food and fuel poverty, our austerity has been caused by the blatant profiteering of the richest multi-millionaires on the planet. Across Europe, openly racist and Islamophobic parties including the AfD in German, with whom Britain’s Tory Party are allied, is building street organisation to assert white privilege and forcibly smash all resistance. In France the same is happening with the leadership of the ultra-nationalist and openly racist National Rally set to win the Presidency within the next year. It is not an extreme view to be concerned about these developments. It is not politically extreme to oppose racism and fascism. Opposing the far-Right is essential to personal preservation as a member of the working class. It is now essential that we counter the rise of fascism on our streets and in our workplaces. We remember the history of the twentieth century, the death and devastation caused by the fascist parties that took power in Spain, Italy and Germany. We know that the totalitarian dog-eat-dog militarised organisation of society in the interests of a small super-rich all powerful elite produces a life of fear and subjugation, threat and violence for the majority. For example, after Hitler’s fascists, the Nazis, seized power in 1933 they banned political parties, trade unions and civil society organisations. They were “razing to their foundations” the institutions of any and all working class democracy. No semblance of resistance was tolerated. Key to this was the funding and organisation by the wealthy of violent street gangs recruited from the dispossessed, to “take the streets” and destroy all opposition. This is the blueprint and the goal of the fascist organisations in Britain today. Funded and informed by USA groups including the Homeland Party, the successors to the BNP including Patriotic Alternative and Britain First are joined by the reformed UKIP group led by the self-styled fascist Nic Tenconi, and others. The Flag Force groups encouraged by the White-supremacist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) are raising the English flag and Union Jack as symbols of neighbourhood domination in order to intimidate minorities. They are mirroring the 1930’s fascist strategies in a new era of capitalist crisis, nationalism and expanding warfare. In Britain there are currently many more anti-racists than racists. We must not allow ourselves to be out-organised. When we show our strength in numbers, the bullies and dominators disappear back into the shadows. Now is the time to stop the far-Right. Challenge far-right propaganda. Counter fascist-led demonstrations. It will only get harder, the longer they are left alone to breed hate and division. Join the demonstration in London, coaches from Plymouth and across the South West: go to togetheralliance.org.uk/getting-there
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (3.3.26), damning the suggestion that bombing women liberates women, anywhere. International Women’s Day on 8th March should see a battle cry rage against Trump’s misogyny, racism, anti-Trans bile and deadly military imperialism. They’re all linked!
Bombing Iran Will Not Liberate the People!
Welfare not Warfare!
The illegal Israeli military mass-bombing of the girls’ school in Minab in the south of Iran killed at least 153 women and girls last Saturday. This cannot claim to be in the interests of the liberation of women in Iran.
The rights of Iranian people have never been on the agenda of Western powers. Women, and men in Iran have protested heroically to change their government towards women’s rights, with death their only answer. The bombing of Iran offers no solution to women’s oppression there or anywhere. War always treats women as targets.
There’s so much hypocrisy spoken about women’s rights that we should all take responsibility for calling it out. We live in a deeply sexist human world. A global system based upon individual power and control vested primarily in super-rich men. The Epstein files show how corruption and sexism are so pervasive and entrenched. Andrew represents the corruption, both financial and sexual, of unaccountable wealth. Trump symbolises white male supremacy. Women’s oppression and capitalist class society are intertwined.
The genocide in Gaza has exposed the brutality of war and the unique impact on women, famine, physical abuse and incarceration impacting menstrual health and pregnancy. We still have a long way to go to win a world free of women’s oppression.
Let’s be clear: women’s oppression encompasses all social, economic, and political spaces causing personal subjugation for simply being a woman. Its is based upon class: wealthy women whilst suffering the indignity of being considered primarily as sexual objects have sufficient agency to combat much of the oppression. They side with the class privilege of wealthy men and collude in the exploitation and oppression of other women as low-paid nannies, personal assistants and cleaners.
Most working class women’s experiences of oppression are internalised into self-blame. Interactions and relationships are all based upon sexism – the portrayal of women as objects to be used, owned and controlled permeate all aspects of women’s lives. The modern capitalist family requires women to fund the domestic budget by working as well as running the home as carer, educator, nurse, chef, bottle-washer and on-call lover.
Next weekend we celebrate International Women’s Day, March 8th, in deteriorating circumstances. The backlash against campaigns for women’s liberation is well-funded and growing. In the name of women’s rights, the far-Right now proclaim themselves the defenders of the “traditional” heterosexual family as the “natural order”, recruiting women to specific roles in political organisations, “Pink Ladies” mobilised to protest outside refugee hostels for traditional women’s roles and heterosexual family values, and to keep white children safe from Black men. Disgusting!
Farage and his Reform UK private business echoes vice President J D Vance in demanding women should have more babies, referring to Musk’s “population apocalypse” of white families in the face of migration, inter-marriage, LGBT+ parents and left-wing “wokism”. The far-Right are reawakening the fascist campaigns of last century, for “children, kitchen and Church”, opposing women’s rights and imposing a woman’s place apart from any self-determination.
International Women’s Day (IWD) has been celebrated for over 100 years, born from mass revolts of young women workers challenging exploitation and the abusive power of the Boss class. Today many companies and businesses use IWD to sell cosmetics and gimmicks to reinforce the cardboard cut-out female rather than address the issues women face.
But IWD has radical roots and is a day to remember those who have fought for women’s liberation – from the Suffragettes in the UK to the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement in Iran. The women trade unionists and the men who have joined their cause remain clear-eyed – the working class have nothing to gain from women’s oppression. Free domestic labour, tasks still primarily allocated to women, protect the profits of big business not having to pay for the child care and raising of the next generation of the workforce.
And so, women are kept down. One-in-four women in Britain suffer domestic violence and abuse, often sexual, an average for a period of 6 years of their adult life. Rape in this country is lawless, only 3% of alleged cases followed through to a conviction. Child sexual abuse is reportedly on the increase again, the vast majority of cases girls abused inside the family, the majority of families being white. Sexual abuse is not the preserve of the black male refugee but the privileged white misogynist.
The cuts to social welfare, repeated and enforced in order to divert essential funding away from our health and welfare services and into war and military spending, affect women most acutely. Women’s rights depend upon a well-funded Welfare State alongside the ideological struggle for liberation from this system enforcing roles and relationships of power-and-control.
Here in Plymouth, trade unionists are fighting the cuts to health services, including stopping the closure of Plymouth’s Sexual Abuse Referral Centre, reducing the support that women and children receive following rape and abuse. You won’t see the far-Right protesting about that except as a “drain on the tax-payer” and a symbol of the “Nanny State” they want demolished.
For socialists, the challenge to class exploitation has to have the fight against oppression at its heart. We encourage and support the struggle by women against all forms of oppression, including gender stereotyping, role-segregation and being made scapegoats blamed for the imposition of low wages, high child care costs and poor social conditions. Welfare not Warfare! On this International Women’s Day we must remember the struggles of the past and unite for social justice and women’s liberation today!
With the far-Right Farage ramping-up white-British supremacy at the ReformUK Conference, and the fascist “Tommy Robinson” calling for street demonstrations across Britain this weekend, including in Torquay, Devon, my weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (24.9.24) had to call for mass opposition to fascism and the rise of authoritarian governance. Strangely, it was edited to leave-out my call to get to get to London for the national demonstration on 26th October to Stand Up To Racism, but at least it was printed!
The full Comment below:
It’s Time for Mass Action Against Racism and Fascism
Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist and racist political ideology. The fascist movement organises for a centralised autocracy: militarism; forcible suppression of opposition; and a dictatorial leader of a militarised Party machine.
The fascist believes in strict social hierarchy, often portrayed in mystical terms of genetic and ancestral birthright, concocting the superiority of the land and so-called “Race” you are born into. Fascism demands a strong regimentation of society and the economy with no democratic say.
The most important ingredient of fascism is the mass movement. Fascism depends upon the building and mobilisation of street gangs and mobs ready to physically attack any and all opposition, and embed fear into the general culture and daily experience of working class communities, destroying trade unions.
Any political litmus test would show Britain to be at risk from fascist organisation, having become more deeply polarised over decades, the gap between rich and poor stretched to an extreme, the fear of “the other”, and the targeting of the non-compliant purposefully ramped-up by politicians seeking power.
The fear shuts working class people into our homes and shuts down open debate in workplaces and families.
This is why it is so vital that we do not shut up, that we do speak out, and that we show our collective opposition to racism, misogyny and authoritarianism on the streets. Right now, active anti-racism requires constant challenge to Islamaphobia and anti-semitism as well as championing the equal rights of people of colour alongside the politically identified “White” population.
We must be highly sensitised to the signs and symptoms of authoritarian governance and fascist organisation. Targeting all Muslims as “Islamist extremists” is a piece of propaganda nonsense easily exposed – the vast majority of adherents to any religion do not support the extreme-fundamentalist wing of their church. Scapegoating a tiny number of asylum-seekers as the enemy supposedly “invading” a nation of sixty-seven million people is a toxic distraction from the real causes of poverty.
The twentieth-century experiences of fascism proves the rule. Those organising for fascism first seek legitimacy and wear a mask of reason and justice, engaging with democracy in order to later smash it. They voice the growing anger against poverty and inequality in a pretence of challenge to the rich and powerful.
In fact, they only grow with the active funding and encouragement of sections of the super-rich ruling class, using the mob to smash any collective working class fight against exploitation and oppression.
And history shows that when faced with fascists on the one hand and working class socialists on the other, the property-owning comfortable middle classes will invariably side with fascism.
This is happening right now across Europe and the United States, and here in Britain.
Starmer’s meeting with Italy’s Premier Meloni last week is a signal of our political class courting the far-right. Macron’s imposition of a government of the far-right despite the Left winning the majority vote in the recent French election is another warning of the lurch of the ruling class towards fascism. The 30% vote for the fascist AfD across Eastern Germany a further example.
The drive to war, with the nationalism and militarism it transmits into civil society, is perhaps the greatest warning.
All this means we have to challenge the forces of fascism directly, nationally and internationally. Against war and racism, ultranationalism and oppression.
Trade unionists will be supporting the national demonstration in London to Stand Up To Racism and Fascism on Saturday 26th October. We will travel together from Plymouth and across the country to push back against fascism and the authoritarian powers that promote it.
Trade unionists will be supporting the national demonstration in London to Stand Up To Racism and Fascism on Saturday 26th October. We will travel together from Plymouth and across the country to push back against fascism and the authoritarian powers that promote it.
Emotional Climate 