Tag: nato

Oppose the Drive to War!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (13.5.25), once again rattling-on about the drive to war. We need to rise-up against warmongering, costly rearmament at the expense of health and education, militarism and the authoritarianism it promotes. Nationalism and racism – the fear of “the Other” is a prerequisite to winning the population to war and death “in the national interest’. But whose interest? Not the working class – ever.

PS. I laughed at the editor’s placement of a picture of Putin alongside my name. I have always lived by the adage, “Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism”.

All this wondrous talk of Peace is actually the opposite – it’s War Talk! The government’s Strategic Defence Review is proof enough of that. Why would we need to declare an emergency uplift in military spending, at a direct and crippling cost to welfare benefits for people with disabilities, unless we were preparing for war?
The second question is two-fold. Who is about to attack us and who are we about to attack? Talk of Russia taking-over Europe is beyond nonsense. On the one hand the western military strategists say the Russian economy is in tatters and at the same time they argue that Putin wants to invade Britain. Both arguments cannot be correct.
The hypocrisy gets worse. Our leaders and those across the West are wringing their hands at the enforced famine and mass starvation of two million Palestinians, whilst actively providing the arms and hardware with which to pound and systematically murder people across Gaza.
The stated desire for ceasefire is not what it seems. They are reconfiguring towards fresh battle lines in Europe, the Middle East and the far-East.
Labour’s so-called ‘defence’, by which they mean the promotion of war and militarism, represents an offensive ideology competing with the right-wing of the Tories and chasing the ultra-nationalism of Reform UK. Not only a ‘triple lock’ on Trident replacement, producing a new generation of outrageously expensive but illegal weapons of mass destruction, but also prioritising rearmament tied into the US ideological and military framework.
The global tensions are being ramped-up by the West. The West is worried by the fact of a multi-polar world where newly industrialised countries are strengthening and new values are being asserted, such as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, led by the states of the global South.
The West does not accept this new world and is willing to go to war to prevent it, apparently even to nuclear war.
There is no Peace in Palestine, because the UK’s F-35 exports are more important than stopping genocide. The UK placing its bombers in Diego Garcia and firing on Yemen represent preparations for war against Iran, a country whose people and economy cannot afford war.
The fragile ceasefire between India and Pakistan represents a ramping-up of more proxy hostilities, the West seeking India’s allegiance in preparation for an offensive upon China.
These battles represent new spheres of influence, changing the old certainties of Western imperialist domination. Ultimately these wars are about the assertion of power by force by competing regional elites to extract enormous personal wealth. They should be exposed and opposed.
Meanwhile the transfer of workers’ tax-money from education, health and social welfare to increase arms spending to 2.5% and then 3%+ of our Gross Domestic Product sets us on a war-footing. It provides a big boost to the British arms industry under the Big Lie of re-industrialisation.
We’re not conned by this false impression that military production can generate economic growth. The decline of manufacturing industries is separate from the arms industry, tax investment in weapons systems diverting all possible investment from the civil production and climate adaptations urgently required.
War batters the international working class, destroying our security, welfare and wellbeing. The continuation of enforced Austerity – the destruction of our social infrastructure – intensifies working class vulnerability.
The destruction of hundreds-of-thousands of jobs in education and health in order to pay for a rise of a few tens-of-thousands of jobs associated with the military should not be condoned by trade unions.
Next Saturday’s huge national demonstration will shout for Peace with Social Justice, in Palestine and everywhere. Welfare not Warfare!

We in the UK have to take Trump Seriously

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My Weekly Comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (28.2.25), delayed from its usual Tuesday slot for “technical reasons”, allowing for a Comment Column from the editor supporting more war with Russia, and then a military person writing on the need for emergency weapons production. Last week’s column was stopped by the editor, my call for peace being identified as similar to “seeking to appease Hitler” (ie Putin).
Last week I warned of Europe promoting world war three against Russia. Today my weaker and compromised column warns only of Trump, not NATO and Starmer. Bizarrely, by the evening of the 28th, Trump had been broadcast across the world bullying and condemning Zelenskyy to his face in the Oval Office.
So when Trump spoke again of World War Three I kinda feel vindicated, while wishing I’d argued harder and stuck to my guns. I should have learnt by now – don’t compromise!

This week’s column:

We have to take Trump seriously. However you wish to caricature, disparage or mock him, Trump is at the head of a very powerful cabal, an administration that has well-formed and long-prepared plans from a coherent ideological framework.
The Trump administration has at its heart, far-right nationalism, separate from the Project for New American Century of the 1990’s. It is not a set of policies opposed to war, reference Iraq and Afghanistan, but rather focussed upon the benefit of any war to the United States plc.
Any presentation of Trump as a peacemaker must be considered in this regard – what benefits do his group within the American ruling class secure through any conflict or peace deal? This is not particularly a question of likes and dislikes, just what’s in it for the US corporations. Trumpism offers nothing to the working classes of the USA or anywhere else.
At this juncture, the acknowledgement of the third year of war in Ukraine, the Trumpian propaganda surrounding a peace deal can be falsely considered as an alliance with Putin or abandonment of Ukraine. Rather it is a negotiating platform. The USA has given more than $100billion to Ukraine to fund the war, plus Musk’s Starlink satellite communication systems and much else of the essential military infrastructure, and Trump wants to see a return on the investment.
Trump has said he wants the mineral wealth of Ukraine in return for continued provision of arms. This is not to be condoned, but is not the same as abandonment. It is possible to imagine deals that ensure new military investment. It is also possible to imagine European countries stepping-up to take-over from the USA, from much of the same motive were they able to afford it. The current economic stagnation makes rearmament a very long-term project.
Trump says his country is shielded by a beautiful ocean, the Atlantic, making Russia, a much smaller economy than the USA, of little or no threat to him. By contrast, America’s corporate core recognises China as a very present threat, economically and culturally across the world, and potentially militarily across the Pacific.
Making America Great Again means pushing back against China and its BRICS alliance. Europe will have to deal with Russia.
So where does Britain stand? It is not difficult to perceive of the UK as tThe USA’s 51st State. We are heavily dominated by US culture and military alliance despite having far fewer economic ties than would at first appear.
Prime Minister Starmer’s audience with the President this week should expose his country’s political dependence on the USA, Trump’s nationalism notwithstanding. And for this, Starmer will step-up as America’s watchdog in Europe, bragging to replace the armaments of the US with those of the UK and challenging Europe to do the same.
Starmer has already pledged an increase in UK military spending from 2.3 to 2.5% of GDP, the highest in Europe, representing an extra £3bn in the past year. The coming Strategic Defence Review will map increased investment in weaponry and soldiers towards the pie-in-the-sky “ideal” of 3% of GDP, despite high borrowing and crumbling social infrastructure.
Doing Trump’s bidding will come at a huge cost to our health service, housing stock, welfare benefits, transport systems and green energy transition. The expansion of the UK’s military-industrial complex, much already ownedd by US corporations, will not reflate our economy as a whole, just one section that is already enjoying record profits from tax-moneys.
The USA pulling-back from Ukraine will have heavy political and economic consequences for European countries, a situation to the benefit of the USA that has long wanted to curb the economic power of the continent. And politically, the accelerated rise of the far-Right here, feeding off the rise in poverty and insecurity, will encourage support for the Trumpian rhetoric, itself so two-faced in its true intention.
Some praise Trump for his transactional approach to power in a Capitalist world. His is an example of how Capitalism actually functions – as a constant competition between combatants, seeking to make offers that cannot be refused or actual hostile takeovers. Gangsters and the organised criminal gangs learnt all they know from the legitimate corporate players.
The challenge is this. If you oppose Trump you have to firstly oppose those with power in the UK who support him, and those he supports. The Trump administration is dominating a period going forward in which they can wield enormous power and impact across the world. They must be stopped.

Workers don’t Win in Imperialist Wars

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My comment column for the Plymouth Herald (18.2.25) refused for publication, considered as disloyal to the Ukrainian people in Plymouth as well as those fighting in their own country, and as a statement of appeasement on a par with the calls for Peace with Hitler before the Second World War.
I am perplexed, never feeling 100% clear and definite about any analysis I offer (I am no dogmatist) and very ready to hear criticism and rethink.
Surely the point of a comment column is to encourage discussion and debate. Why should a call for peace be censored (whether agreeable or not)? For me the drive to even more war, Europe and UK putting boots in the ground against Russia appears detrimental to the working class peoples of Europe and Russia. Specifically, socialists (that’s my world view) cannot take either side in a war between two imperialist powers. Imperialism as the assertion of capitalist exploitation worldwide is against the interests of the working classes on either side – we simply can’t win.
The Ukraine war is a challenging subject to write about and bound to upset those with an alternate view – I’m not out to upset, just debate. And on the 3rd anniversary of a ghastly inhuman war, something needs to be said. Anyway, here’s what I sent in, for you to criticise and condemn. I’m firstly posting the edited version here, the original then offered further below is more explanatory, but editing to the 600 word max is a severe test of exactitude in such matters. I would have thought to the banned edited version tolerable to the most ardent liberal, especially in consideration of what has happened since :

Perhaps Ukraine will shortly see an enforced peace after an enforced war. That will be a decision made in agreement between Washington and Moscow, not in Ukraine. The country’s past three years have been a horror of human butchery, deprivation, forced migration and environmental destruction. A war that had brewed for decades because of global imperialist ambitions for expansion and control of natural resources and human populations.
Imperialism is the international capitalist system. Today, in the face of global crisis, imperialist competition is increasing.
By 2014 the stage was set in Ukraine’s region of the Donbas, an ethnically and linguistically disputed region where those allied with Russia fought for separation for Ukraine. The West, dominated by the United States economically, politically and militarily through the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), had been siting military bases around the Russian border in neighbouring states, and Russia as a State with its own imperialist regional ambitions pushed back.
The tensions deepened, open conflicts erupted, and the forces from both sides intensified until Russia invaded on 24th February 2022.
The Ukrainian people were forced to war by much wider imperialist ambitions, as stand-ins for the NATO troops themselves. As always, Ukrainians wanted peace and stability but were divided by the very different cultural identities between the north of the country and the south east, as well as an organised far-right nationalist political grouping seeking Parliamentary domination, and a neoliberal economic drive to derive the benefits of integration with Europe and entrance to NATO – never going to happen.
The globally dominant empire of the United States of America has funded Ukraine’s military against Russia, making this a proxy war between two major powers.
Ukraine has been used for the battleground. America has put over £100billion into the Ukraine war, Europe £40billion, Britain £13 billion since February 2022. 16,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed, at least 150,000 soldiers killed in action.
Trump is refusing to pay anymore because America’s global interests lie elsewhere.
The war has raised the spectre of nuclear conflict once again, and raised State spending on the military-industrial complex across the West at the direct expense of money for health & welfare at home.
Amongst them, Prime Minister Starmer is the greatest hawk, giving another £150million only last week and boasting to increase the UK’s proportion of tax money spent on weapons, including nuclear warheads, to the highest of any country in Europe. He’s arguing for the war to continue as a rational to keep increasing the UK military tax investment towards 5% of GDP despite all economic warnings. He’s wasting our money for the sake of political posturing.
America is looking away from Europe in a strategic assessment of the growth of regional rivals such as China. Trump is no Peacemaker other than at the point of a missile, and he wants to focus upon US military operations in the Pacific. He expects Europe to resolve its own tensions, and Starmer is obeying by making the UK America’s military HQ in Europe, ready to put our troops into Ukraine. That will cost us, the UK population, dear in terms of deeper austerity and militarism. It’s not in our interests.
The lesson of Ukraine is that, even in Europe in the 21st Century, there can be devastating war, death and destruction. There is a drive to more war, funded by the arms manufacturers and the cyber-industries supported by their ultra-nationalist politicians. We’d better sue for Peace while there’s a chance. That means active opposition to imperialism whether in Ukraine or Palestine or the South China Seas. Stop the Wars, Now!

End

No picture

unedited version:

Perhaps Ukraine will see an enforced peace after an enforced war. That will be a decision made in agreement between Washington and Moscow. The past three years have been a horror of human butchery, deprivation, forced migration and environmental destruction. A war that had brewed for decades, partly from the disputed borders left unresolved at the end of the Second World War and later the collapse of the Soviet Union, but mostly because of global imperialist ambitions for expansion and control of natural resources and human populations. 

Nation states and borders are determined through conflict and redrawn out of negotiated settlements. All borders are artificial and impermanent. Rivers can be crossed, mountains spanned, the lines on maps fought over, human beings dying in their millions for a few miles of devastated environment to be transferred from one regional ruling class to another.

Imperialism is the international capitalist system. The system of capitalism at a local level sees producers and merchants compete to make money, at an international level States and allied Regions compete for market dominance on behalf of their Capitalist corporations. Today, in the face of global crisis, imperialist competition is increasing. 

There is cultural imperialism and the fight for dominant ideology, economic imperialism using loans and corporate domination of other nations, and where these aren’t sufficient there is military imperialism: colonialism, subjugation and outright war. Now there is growing competition among the big imperialist powers and regional or “sub” imperialist ones.

By 2014 the stage was set in Ukraine’s region of the Donbas, an ethnically and linguistically disputed region  where those allied with Russia fought for separation for Ukraine. The West, dominated by the United States economically, politically and militarily through the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), had been siting military bases around the Russian border in neighbouring states and in Ukraine, and Russia as a State with its own imperialist regional ambitions pushed back. 

The tensions deepened, open conflicts erupted, and the forces from both sides intensified until Russia invaded on 24th February 2022. 

The Ukrainian people were forced to war by much wider imperialist ambitions, as stand-ins for the NATO troops themselves. As always, Ukrainians wanted peace and stability but were divided by the very different cultural identities between the north of the country and the south east, as well as an organised far-right nationalist political grouping seeking Parliamentary domination, and a neoliberal economic drive to derive the benefits of integration with Europe and entrance to NATO – never going to happen.

In any class society there is never national unity. The ruling class sends the working class to fight. There are those who benefit and profit from war, and the many more who suffer greatly.

The globally dominant empire of the United States of America has funded Ukraine’s military against Russia, making this a proxy war between the major powers. 

Ukraine has been used for the battleground. America has put over £100billion into the Ukraine war, Europe £40billion, Britain £13 billion since February 2022. 16,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed, at least 150,000 soldiers killed in action. Trump is refusing to pay anymore, not as a peacemaker but because America’s global interested lie elsewhere. 

The war has raised the spectre of nuclear conflict once again, and raised State spending on the military-industrial complex across the West at the direct expense of money for health & welfare at home. Amongst them, Prime Minister Starmer is the greatest hawk, giving another £150million last week and boasting to increase the UK’s proportion of tax money spent on weapons, including nuclear warheads, to the highest of any country in Europe. He’s arguing against all things rational  to keep increasing the UK tax investment towards 5% of GDP regardless of all strategic analysis to the contrary. He’s wasting our money for the sake of political posturing.

America is looking away from Europe in a strategic assessment of the growth of regional rivals such as China. Trump is no Peacemaker other than at the point of a missile, and he wants to focus upon US military operations in the Pacific. He expects Europe to resolve its own tensions, and Starmer is obeying by making the UK America’s military HQ in Europe, responsible for NATO planning. That will cost us, the UK population, dear in terms of deeper austerity and militarism. It’s not in our interests.

The lesson of Ukraine is that, even in Europe in the 21st Century, there can be devastating war, death and destruction. There is a drive to more war, funded by the arms manufacturers and the cyber-industries supported by their ultra-nationalist politicians. We’d better sue for Peace while there’s a chance. That means active opposition to imperialism whether in Ukraine or Palestine or the South China Seas. Stop the Wars, Now!

Step Back from the Brink – Join CND!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (3.12.24) after week of military escalation almost everywhere. The published headline is not chosen by me, and I did sign it as a national vice-Chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, not the Trades Union role. Once an artcile is submitted it is out of your control. The limited space and editing cut my original in half, so below is the full and unexpurgated text. Please do join me in Plymouth City Centre on Saturday.

Step Back from the Brink

We’re not wrong. The sense of living on the brink of historic change is shared by most. Not only can the current status quo not be sustained, it mustn’t be. Tension mounts as a consequence.

There is no debate that climate change is happening, only what should be done about it. There is no debate that our social infrastructure is dilapidated, at least for the majority of the working class, but no consensus about rebuilding it.

There is general agreement that war is spreading – and a new kind of war at that – the mass killing of civilians by huge armaments often launched by computers and targeted by drones. This is neither fantasy nor science fiction. It is the living reality threatening to engulf us all.

The nihilists muse to themselves that global conflagration is inevitable and call out to “bring it on”, as if all life, not just theirs, is worthless. The pragmatists meanwhile, sensitive to their own plight, make preparations as best they can, hoarding durable essentials before the power cuts and alarm calls. We, those seeking peace with social justice, are greeted with distain or completely overlooked when marching in our hundreds of thousands.

What do we want? Immediate de-escalation!

The escalation in Ukraine is very serious. The Biden/Starmer agreement to use missiles into Russia has escalated the tension, Russia ratifying a change in policy, deciding to use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state if that state is backed by a nuclear force (ie NATO) should it feel directly threatened.

Reports show Ukraine has lost 40% of the territorial gains it made in the Kursk region through the Summer. The Group of Five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, each nuclear armed – China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, and United States – recommitted to arming Ukraine and, last Tuesday, NATO concurred.

Britain’s defence secretary said last week that “if Britain’s military were asked to fight it would fight”. Britain is in no way ready for war, nor should we be. A majority of the Ukrainian population want an end to the war through peace talks, as do very large majorities of populations across Europe. The escalation is being determined by politicians in their own interests. Is Biden just looking to stop Ukrainian defeat whilst he is in office, and to what lengths will he take this?

Trump’s election is having a big impact already, with ultra-hawks in his cabinet implying that military conflict is more likely, withdrawing from nuclear agreements and focussing on Iran and China. They promise more sanctions around Iran and more economic challenges to China. Most of the real trade wars throughout history have resulted in military warfare.

Far from being a peacemaker, Trump is ready to magnify tensions in the Asian Pacific, with Starmer adding tax cash to the AUKUS nuclear pact funding nuclear capabilities in Australia, ready for war.

The ruling class of the United States of America maintain full support for Israel’s regional ambitions, the devastation of Palestine continuing, Biden continuing to arm, Trump ready to escalate the tension with Iran. The ceasefire in Lebanon is only temporary. The wars in Syria and Sudan funded as proxies for outside military powers.

Trump has favoured restarting of nuclear testing having not ratified the nuclear test treaty when last in office. The USA is looking to undertake underground nuclear testing of a new technological generation of advanced nuclear weapons, destroying any taboo against the use of nuclear weapons.

Both the USA and Russia have tested and deployed hyper-sonic rockets that can carry nuclear warheads that rise and fall too fast to be stopped. Russia used one last week, albeit without any explosives, just to show its power. These are all “first-strike” weapons, their strategic use only valuable in hitting before being hit. They are a threat, not a deterrent, demanding escalation on all sides.

Trump is not going to pull out of NATO in Europe but wants Europe to take a far greater degree of the burden of the costs and, no doubt, the impacts.

So the UK’s military spending reaches a record high outside of wartime and is planned to increase further. America’s B52 bombers are here, and their nuclear weapons will be coming to Lakenheath, Suffolk, not least because Turkey has become an unreliable ally having bought fighters from Russia. Starmer has made commitment to NATO and nuclear as a key commitment with £3bn increase in defence spending, the current £6b per year cost of the Trident nuclear weapons upgrade being a sinkhole in Britain’s military funding. No-one dare challenge the tax bill for Nuclear, however outrageous.

The proposed United Nations international study into the global impact of any nuclear exchange has now been agreed between most countries, and only voted against by the UK, Germany and Russia, saying they already know what the effects of a nuclear war would be – the countries to the fore of preparations for wider war.

The study is important. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) has commissioned enough studies to know that any nuclear exchange will kill millions and lethally contaminate entire regions with radioactivity. But the hidden fact is that millions more will survive for lengthy periods, in agony as burn casualties and sickened by cancers, struggling to find any nutritious food or potable water. Radioactive contamination is not a quick death.

The slow deaths of starvation and disease will be more common than the sudden flash of vaporisation of those caught beneath the bombs. The impact on all life, the ecology and climate, will only expedite the course of climate chaos we are already experiencing.

Another well-evidenced conclusion is that the mechanics of nuclear weaponry provides for their likely launch by accident rather than intention, especially in this era of “Artificial Intelligence” programming machines for an instant and automatic response.

Starmer’s shift to closer relationship with the nuclear-enthusiast Trump will increase his unpopularity at home. Most don’t want war, death and destruction. It is neither Namby-Pamby nor “woke” to call for Peace. Protests against war represent our collective self-interest for survival.

The safer countries in the world are those without nuclear weapons – the vast majority. Britain’s Trident Nuclear arsenal makes us the prime target.

On Saturday we will rally for a day of action for de-escalation, permanent ceasefire and Peace. Most of all, for the decommissioning of all nuclear weapons, unilaterally and internationally, before it’s too late.

We must step back from the nuclear brink.

May be an image of text

The UK is Effectively the USA’s 51st State

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

As usual the Editor chose the title, somewhat misplaced, for my weekly Comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (29.10.24). The article should speak for itself in a period where we face not only escalation towards global warfare but the first use of nuclear weapons between nuclear-armed States. Trump may well be elected next week and has suggested the use of “battlefield nuclear weapons”. And Harris has shown herself tough enough to do the same. Netanyahu has been urged to threaten nuclear weapons at Iran by his fascist cabinet colleagues, and Putin keeps threatening the UK with the same. I would encourage everyone to join the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and to campaign vigorously straight away.

Of all the spats and counter-accusations over this week’s Budget, mainstream commentators will hardly mention let alone question the UK’s heightened military expenditure. This government spends the highest proportion of our Gross Domestic Product of any country in Europe, and is raising that level every further. 

The current “NATO-qualified defence expenditure” is £65billion per year, due to increase to almost £100bn by 2030. Across the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, only the USA spends more than the UK as a proportion of the country’s GDP.

Some £7billion each year is spent on nuclear weapons in the UK and the nuclear industry that supports them. The old myth that this is Britain’s independent defence system has long been debunked – it is the President of the United States that is required to sanction the firing of Britain’s Trident nuclear warheads, the weapons system itself leased from the United States and dependent upon US military infrastructure. 

Rather than being “independent”, in military terms the UK is effectively America’s 51st State and has been so ever since the Second World War. The “special relationship” that Prime Minister Starmer maintains will continue whoever wins the US presidential election next week and will ensure the UK puppets US imperialist intentions. 

Last week, without any debate in Parliament, the government effectively made the UK/USA Mutual Defence Agreement permanent, securing a secretive Treaty with the US that “allows” the UK to have nuclear weapons. 

As tensions multiply in both Europe and the Middle East, Starmer and his ministers appear keen to prove full support for escalation towards global war. The USA has spent $60billion on the war in Ukraine since February 2022, and is set to spend the same amount again, perpetuating that war. The UK has paid across £13billion in lethal weaponry and military assistance, with Starmer promising another £1billion a week ahead of the Budget.

Meanwhile the government supports the bombing of Gaza, Lebanon and Iran. The UK has suspended only 30 of 350 military export licences to Israel this year, ensuring the continued supply chain for the operation of F-35 aircraft that are illegally strafing and bombing civilians in Gaza and Lebanon right now – the UK complicit in serious violations of international law. 

A budget that shut down all arms exports to Israel would reap more than enough cash to maintain the Winter Fuel Allowance for everyone. 

As the spectre of world war becomes more ominous, rather than suing for peace, for ceasefires, for negotiations and compromise, the USA and UK are ramping-up the tax expenditure, the fire-power and propaganda towards conflagration. This is not “Defence Expenditure”, it is an offensive strategy economically, politically and morally indefensible.

Into the mix comes the USA plans to base hundreds of its nuclear weapons and bombers at Lakenheath in Suffolk. Placing the UK as a primary nuclear target, the first to be hit, Lakenheath, Faslane and of course, Plymouth’s Devonport nuclear dockyard, a centre for the Trident first-strike nuclear submarine infrastructure.

Once again, tens of thousands peacemakers will be protesting on Saturday – in London for a ceasefire in Palestine and Lebanon, and at Lakenheath to stop the US nuclear weapons deployment there. We want Welfare not Warfare, green jobs not bombs, 

Spending billions ramping up new weaponry that ensures the other military nations ramp-up their munitions is just an endless spiral of waste and destruction. If Britain were to represent the quest for peace, disarm our nuclear weapons and stop pursuing the wars of others, we would not only lose the label of “target” but have thousands of millions of pounds to spend on social infrastructure and welfare. 

We Have to Stop the Drive to Global War

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly Comment column for the daily Plymouth Herald newspaper, published on 30th January 2024. Thankfully, the following Saturday, 3rd February was to see more than 200,000 marching through central London for Palestine and against wider warfare, just as the US and UK dropped hundreds of bombs and missiles on Yemen and sites in Northern Syria. The protests were amplified by local events in Plymouth and across the country (and beyond of course) was to further pressurise western leaders, with the calls for “restraint” by Israel’s government becoming louder the more the street marches grew. But it will take far more, as the increasing bombing of Gaza in and around Ramallah prove all to horrifically.

The narrative has changed suddenly.

We are heading for World War Three and need to prepare society.

The UK’s Defence Secretary, Grant Shapps, warned last week that we are moving “from a post-war to a pre-war world”. Debates this week, or rather lack of any democratic debates inside the formalities of Parliament, suggest the UK will increase overt military support for Israel in Gaza despite the International Court of Justice investigation into genocide there. 

And Prime Minister Sunak is falling over himself to support President Biden’s retaliatory actions after three American troops were killed and dozens more injured in an overnight drone strike in Northeast Jordan. There is no questioning as to what US troops and bases are doing there.

With United States military bases and routine intervention growing across the Middle East, the focus is upon Islam as a threat and Iran as the primary enemy, allegedly funding every nation state and group that is challenging western domination. The charge comes with little evidence, Iran experiencing a crisis economy that suggests they can’t afford war, and the denying complicity. But the links between States across the Arab world are certainly made stronger in the face of US imperialist domination of their homelands and resources.

Wall to wall, we are being fed fear and focus upon the enemy abroad, the “them” who are determined to destroy the “us”. Despite escalating climate chaos, economic crisis and corrosion of our social infrastructure at home, we are being asked to accept the unifying threat from “outsiders” – whoever we choose to believe them to be. 

Internationally, beleaguered ruling classes are driving for war, perhaps in a desperate attempt to survive the general and global crisis of Capitalism, reminiscent of the 1930’s.

In Europe, the German government is moving to end the curbs on its military activities since the Second World War, on the premise that Russian troops could march westwards from Belarus, despite Russia’s economy at a condition impossible to fund military expansion by even a tenth of the level the West is already spending. Indeed, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has exposed the war as an extension of the escalating tension between East and West, the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) accelerating fast, nations queuing-up to join the West’s military alliance which has both global and offensive capabilities.

Following this month’s general election in Taiwan, the mainstream western media is hyping the potential for China to invade the island and the need for increased US presence in the South China Seas.

North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un has tested more missiles and pledged to build more nuclear weapons, simply mirroring the Western expansion in nuclear weapons which appear, at least, to be the required marker for the level of ultimate military power that ensures national security. 

But there comes a point where nuclear weapons become useable, and we appear to be very near. The so-called “nuclear deterrent” said to prevent use becomes an obvious target when the threat becomes too great. At such a point they need to be used before anyone else does. 

Populations have to be won to the reasonableness of firing-up nuclear warheads, the threat against us needing to be understood as imminent and beyond reasonable doubt. But how do you know – remember the lies of Iraq’s WMDs? The latest pre-war propaganda exercise is now in full swing, once again full of lies. 

So in all current commentary about the threat from the “East”, twentieth century imagery of the threat of “communism” is being regurgitated despite the USSR being demolished thirty years ago  (Putin’s Russia being a privatised capitalist State) and China now challenging the USA as the world’s most successful economy inside global capitalism. They don’t need to invade anywhere. 

We are being whipped-up to prepare for war when we need to be whipped-up to protest for Peace.

The BBC has broadcast warnings of the increased potential for the use of nuclear weapons in any of these flashpoints, peppering radio and TV news reports of the renewed tensions and the potential for global war. America is preparing to place its nuclear weapons at Lakenheath, Suffolk, their long-wished-for retaliation for the women’s protests in the 1980’s which forced US nukes out of Greenham Common and off UK shores. It puts the UK on the nuclear front-line, a proxy target to shield the USA.

Perhaps the most bizarre pro-war propaganda exercise was last Monday’s Radio 4 Women’s Hour programme which began with a convincing statement from a current RAF Group Captain explaining that the next global war is “inevitable”, human history showing these cycles repeat themselves, whatever. Women had better prepare. 

On the back of all this, ultra-nationalists and xenophobes in the UK get airtime and oxygen for the call for Britain to return to conscription, euphemistically dressed-up as “National Service”, as the essential preparation of our young working class to be ready for call-up as cannon-fodder, able to use arms and fit enough to manage battleground conditions.

Our ruling class is ramping-up the drive to war. Central to this is separating out nation from nation, strengthening and militarising borders, and damning as “wish-washy liberal” any suggestion that international co-operation, heaven forfend “International Aid”, “International Law”, negotiations and ceasefires should be the most urgent response to the rising tension.

Right now the Hawks have it at Government level. They are in turn sponsored by the military-industrial complex of corporations selling arms to all sides and reaping the massive profits from the growing human carnage. 

We have to counter the propaganda and lies flooding into popular consciousness. Challenge the warmongers, Stop the War! 

Tony Staunton, Plymouth Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament