Tag: nationalisation

We are Now Living in the Age of Extremes

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

Written while sweating, my weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (26.5.26) documenting the obvious. We are in the Year of Trade Union Climate Action, and you’d hardly know it. Last September the Trades Union Congress agreed to force transfer away from fossil fuels and demand action, not least fr a maximum workplace temperature, esp for drivers, construction workers and kitchen staff. Now even government advisers have said the same, but with no response given the employers’ hold over government. They’ll lose money if we down tools at 30C+. Actually it’s dangerous to maintain manual labour when conditions are over 20C, so we’re only asking fr the very least in health & safety. It will take mass strike action to force the issue – refuse to risk your life at work, or is that too extreme? I think not!

My unedited column below:

Hot again. Records ripped-through again. These extremes of weather are confirming the scientific truths of climate change. There’s no denying it now.

Everyone accepts that the global climate is changing rapidly, and despite some silly obfuscation from the oil and gas lobby, there’s little objection to the fact that the burning of fossil fuels is the cause. CO2 and methane emissions heat the planet.

The hostile debate today is about what is to be done. Our young people, raised through thirteen years of classroom climate projects, are resigned to a future of climate crisis and bored by the repeated warnings. We know. Watching the latest climate calamity and hearing the repeated politicians’ complacency, we’ll just have to put-up with whatever’s coming.

Adaptation is the latest language of denial. It’s going to get hotter and we face water shortages, disruption to harvests and food supplies, and fires. We’ll all need air conditioned homes and workplaces. Well, all, that is, of those of us who can afford the kit and electricity. All of only those who work for ethical employers who comply with a maximum level of heat allowed in the workplace and are prepared to invest in our safety and comfort.

Those of us without the wherewithal are going to suffer the worst of the early consequences of decades of inaction, and we are the majority – those in deprived communities, precarious employment, reliant on disability benefits (about to be slashed again if Reform UK get into government locally or nationally), and the majority of elderly people poorly resourced by the low state pension. The majority of the working class are expected to just get on with heat exhaustion, flooded homes and mouldy walls.

We need urgent action to slow the crisis, not just adapt to it. Yes, the government should be prioritising retro-fit of 14 million homes in Britain to be fit for heavy rains and scorching heatwaves. Yes, the roll-out of solar panels and heat pumps to end gas burning and reduce electricity demand is an absolute essential.

And yes, the one-in-every-five of our homes now sitting on flood plains have to be protected by massive investment in a scale of civil engineering the size of the idiotic HS2 white elephant. And yes, the fossil fuel corporations who have made their billions in private wealth out of destroying the Planet should be made to pay the price of adaptation, their profits taken into public ownership, not tax-exempted.

This heat is a killer. It’s only going to get hotter until we tip into a completely new geological epoch – coming soon. The political order of the day is “Transformation, not just Adaptation”. Human society has to be reformed before climate disaster destroys us. It is that serious whether we are prepared to confront it or not.

We need system change. All facets of the fossil-fuel infrastructure have to be replaced. Quickly.

Emissions that trap the heat in our atmosphere and oceans have to be stopped. 95% of Europe’s land area experienced above-average temperature in 2025. The geographical expanse of the continent of Europe, which includes Britain, experienced its largest wildfire season on record, with over a million hectares burned.

A “Super” El Niño is now the most likely outcome by this year’s end. The human cost could be staggering

Sea level rise is confirmed and accelerating, and is going to continue. Staggeringly high temperature anomalies of +15 to about +22 degrees C (+ 27 to + 40 degrees F) above average fare being recorded over large parts of the Arctic. What we call the “Gulf Stream” has a more than 50/50 likelihood of shutting-down this century. Anyone listening?

These figures do not capture the full costs borne by lower-income countries, uninsured communities, or the long-term setbacks to development that rarely appear in loss accounting. The people of the Global South are suffering the worst, right now, but the costs are not even recorded. India with its population of 1.48 billion, is being mass murdered by fossil fuel corporations and their political accomplices. This is at ‘just’ at 1.45°C. Most of the populated area of the globe is 6 or more degrees C above normal. That includes places where it is winter and places where it is summer.

Okay then, Capitalists, forget humanity, since you only care about your money and private property. Insurance companies record that in 2025, the Americas recorded the greatest economic losses from climate disasters of any region – US$110.6 billion, or 65.2% of the global total of US$169.7 billion lost to extreme weather last year. The Climate crisis is set to wreck your global economy.

We live in the Age of Extremes. A new Age of Catastrophe. We’re living on borrowed time. And the paid-for loyalty of politicians are tied to the oil companies, not the working class. We have to organise for climate action to save ourselves.

Screenshot
Screenshot

Workers’ control of production will require a revolution

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly Comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (15.4.25), looking at one aspect of the current crisis of British Steel. Of course we want all utilities and public services nationalised, but under what governance exactly? There’s no reason for workers to trust State Capitalism – it simply maintains the competition and exploitation at the very heart of the System. Workers’ control of production will require a revolution.

The full unedited article here:

To eliminate poverty every essential product should be managed not for profit but for human need. Those needs are determined by the daily requirements for survival.
Every human being needs nutritious food, warm and dry shelter, protective clothing, love and nurturing, and education that ensures we learn how to look after ourselves and others. Socialism is the idea of a society that meets those needs for everyone – collective ownership of the means of production.
In a society of 67million human beings our needs have to be produced at scale. So we need mass production of food and housing and wherewithal, which in turn means we need large quantities of nutrients and bricks and materials, including steel for transport and buildings.
It becomes clear that these materials should be regarded as essential, not luxury items that we may also want but not need.

It stands to reason that all essential production should be considered as part of public services, socially organised. Private businesses do not operate according to social need, but rather for short-term private profit.
The fact that British Steel plc was privatised by Thatcher in 1988 and fleeced for shareholder profits ever since is a case in point. Steel is an essential social resource. If the Steel industry was publicly owned and controlled, the steel would be produced at cost, environmental concerns regulated and climate damage addressed, jobs valued, and the products – from building construction to railway lines – locally supplied.
As it is, British Steel has been a cash cow for private investors – shareholders seeking a maximum return on their money – for decades. Along the way they’ve sucked dry the blast-furnaces in Port Talbot and Llanwern, steel making in Teesside and the electric arc furnace in Rotherham.
The current crisis of the Scunthorpe steel plant is the latest example. The Dutch Corus Group bought BS in 1999, sold to Indian-registered company Tata Steel in 2010 who sold it in 2016 to Greybull Capital LLP for £1 in 2016, sucking-out its cash equity before going into insolvency in 2019.
Greybull is one of those predatory capitalist cowboy-firms buying vulnerable companies cheap and sucking them dry at the cost of thousands of jobs and livelihoods, including the Monarch Airline company.
The Chinese capitalist conglomerate Jingye bought British Steel from Greybull in 2020 promising huge investments, wanting a Made-in-Britain badge in the steel it supplies at market rates. The UK Governments pledged £3.2billion to support the UK’s steel industry, with more to come in the next few months.
Surely, throwing billions of tax-payers money at private companies makes no sense. Why couldn’t we just buy it for £1 and own and control it as an essential asset? Indeed, why did the State ever sell it off?
The answer is not economic but ideological. Successive governments, Tory, Tory/LibDem and Labour have all fully committed to the political philosophy of neoliberalism: free-market Capitalism – the opposite of socialism. First sponsored by President Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the belief is that the neoliberal State should not own anything that can make a profit for a private business.
Under this ideology, only when essential businesses go to the wall should the State intervene to bail out and protect shareholders for as limited time as possible. Hence the creeping privatisation of the NHS, and absurd ups-and-downs of the rail and bus industries, their profits wholly underwritten by our taxes. Socialism always and only for the super-rich, profits guarantee from the common wealth.
Now, as a Labour Government takes over the management of British Steel wielding statutory powers over the still privatised business, there are calls for renationalisation.
There are many forms and purposes of nationalisation. Capitalism required it for the reconstruction of industry after the Second World War. Indeed, Hitler’s fascist government, and Mussolini’s Italian fascist State utilised nationalisation as a tool of totalitarian control. It is not, of itself, a cure for poverty, unemployment, exploitation or oppression.
Trade unions like nationalisation of a certain kind. Democratic public ownership and control, with workers full engagement allows security of production and jobs despite market turbulence, able to deliver the goods for need not profit. Socialists demand workers’ control of industry.
In successive polls, at least 65% of the electorate like the idea of returning our services to public ownership – including water, energy, transport, the NHS and Royal Mail. Nationalism is seen as better than corporate ownership.
Starmer’s Labour government, like Blair’s before him, hates nationalisation, only ever doing so to protect the business owners for as short a time as possible. The Tories, now all-but defunct, agree. The millionaire Nigel Farage, executive director of Reform 2025 Ltd, the business behind the political party, Reform UK, bizarrely demands full nationalisation without compensation to the Chinese owners – at face-value a full-on socialist demand.
Bizarre because Reform UK is a thoroughly neoliberal organisation on the side of big business, seeking the smallest State possible with policies for privatisation of the NHS and against workers’ rights and State regulation. The arch-Nationalist Farage may pretend to be a friend of the working class ahead of the May elections, but there is nothing socialist about Reform UK.
The end of steel production here should not be an opportunity for false promises. The long-term failure of businesses to invest at all amongst the general industrial decline across the UK is a vindication of all of us who have warned against and opposed neo-liberalism from the start. This decaying corpse of a failed political creed represents a serious crisis for jobs and cost-of-living that demands we take control, in the collective interests of the working class not the careless greedy bosses.