My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald Newspaper (2.6.26), rehearsing the necessary arguments against Starmer’s forthcoming increase in immediate arms spending, again. He is under pressure to deliver more UK war-preparations ahead of the major NATO Summit in July, and has to “find the money” – that is, defy his Chancellor and demand cuts to welfare. There is an element of Whitehall tittle-tattle, but the final analysis has to be that UK will be a frontline aggressor in the West’s drive to more warfare, pushed by Trump. Meanwhile, we dissolve into worker-on-worker violence – both social and military – or organise collectively to stop the warmongers.
The unedited version below:
We need a sharp turn away from military expenditure. Arms expenditure is a waste of money. This may sound offensive to many in Plymouth, but the reality is we are as divided a set of communities as anywhere else. The retired ex-military who have settled here, and the Yardies of yesterday and today, will stake their lives upon loyalty to armed forces and the arms corporations they’ve worked for all their lives. They are not alone in feeling pride in their work.
The majority of the working class in Plymouth have not worked inside or even adjacent to the local military-industrial complex. There are more employed at our regional hospital at Derriford than inside Devonport dockyard, and twice as many again employed through the services managed by Plymouth City Council, in education, social care and environmental services.
We have in no way benefitted from Plymouth being characterised as a Naval City, and we’re not about to benefit now. Plymouth Dockyards require a healthy level of craft services, but the higher-than-average salaries are for the technicians and military personnel. They live outside and away from the City and their comparatively high incomes are spent elsewhere.
Equally, the Dockyard companies are private, their profits also stored and spent way away – across Europe and America. Consequently, in the neighbourhoods bordering the dockyard we have one-in-three children living in poverty and across-the-board indicators of social deprivation higher than the national average. Plymouth is a poor city. The health and life-expectancy disparities between the working class living in the West of Plymouth and the white-collar professionals to the East, totally unacceptable.Our small middle class live around 14 years longer and with twenty years of better health than manual and semi-skilled workers.
Once again, our political leaders propagandise that the £4.4 billion of tax money promised to Plymouth’s military business over the next ten to fifteen years will bring us the prosperity promised to previous generations. It won’t.
We need huge investment in welfare services, our children’s education, health and social housing. That £4.4billion could serve us well, locally paying off the £1bn debt owed by Plymouth City Council and turning round the decades of cuts to essential services. It could refurbish our local housing, much of it acknowledged as poor by national standards – damp, mouldy and dilapidated.
Instead, Starmer’s Defence Investment Plan (DIP) committing to a £18 billion per-year increase in military spending ahead of next month’s NATO Summit, includes nuclear warheads, drone swarms and missile interceptors for Britain’s armed forces. In reality, it will increase national debt and divert State expenditure away from social need and towards wholesale human destruction. Preparation for war always atrophies social spending and cuts wages across the entire economy.
For Plymouth the DIP will continue our descent into a Company Town, visibly dominated by Babcock and associates, reeking of militarism and the drive to rearmament ahead of the apparently inevitable next war. Beware a society dominated by the military security services, embedded everywhere. For example, Plymouth University is a likely sign-up as a “Defence University”, in a strategic relationship with arms companies that will deplete the college’s commitments to health and education training even further.
Compulsory conscription is advocated by the political Right, our primary Schools now being encouraged, with funding, to invite and embed military personnel into the fabric of classroom life and curriculum, the better to prepare the next generation as twenty-first century “cannon fodder” for the wars of the 2030’s.
Future wars are portrayed as robot-wars conducted by technical experts fielding underwater and low-flying drones as if in a computer game. The reality of current wars in Ukraine and the Middle East show something very different. Drones and missiles destroying civilian targets, from high-rise flats to entire towns. This is the destructive force being the sole area of investment for Plymouth.
And at the City’s heart, the illegal mass exterminator, the weapons of mass destruction costing us at least £14billion a year and unmanageable toxic pollution. The nuclear weaponry that, if and when used will herald the end of human society as we know it. That is absolutely nothing to boast about!
When endless tax money is dedicated to warfare the truth is exposed. The money can be found. We can have a society where every child is comfortably housed, growing healthily with nutritious food and well-resourced schooling. Now that’s worth fighting for – Welfare Not Warfare!
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (12.5.26), tangentially addressing last week’s extreme meltdown of the political centre of politics in Britain. More than 1400 Councillors were elected for the Reform UK last Thursday, including openly racist and fascist representatives, an historic shift to the far-Right in British politics. Or at least, a shift towards the extremes, the centre ground emptied. As part of the essential campaign of opposition to the far-Right I felt it important to state what fascism represents here and now.
Below is the unedited longer version, and the pic of the much reduced published article:
Are you now, or have you ever been, a Leftie? If so, those who have usurped the national flags to impose a culture of racism and misogyny, those who want to see a million migrant workers forcibly expelled from Britain, those who protest with their children outside schools, intimidating staff and pupils alike, want you to shut up and be shut down.
The far-Right in Plymouth have broadened their focus to not only include scapegoating people of colour but also openly threatening “Lefties” and, in particular, socialists. This is not a tussle between two clubs or rival gangs – it is the current condition of general politics in our society – divided towards the poles.
The far-Right, individuals and organisations of right wing ultra-nationalists, racists and fascists, is currently stoking anti-refugee and anti-Muslim racism, throwing-in classic accusations that black men are a threat to children. They seek white male supremacy, lauding Western colonialism and campaigning to Restore Britain with the return of the military British Empire.
The Left, meanwhile, is a broad spectrum of individuals and organisations that recognise and value all of life on Earth, of diversity, democracy and human rights.
So there is a real and present divide, a gulf, between Left and Right. The Left recognise the danger of the climate crisis, oppose imperialist war, demand full rights for women and Trans people, expose and challenge genocide and ethnic cleansing, stand for the rights of the disabled and demand social welfare paid from the common wealth of taxes and corporate profits.
The Right seek self-advancement at the expense of others. Beyond their own clan they hate humanity. And humanism. The far-Right add attributes to their desired dog-eat-dog world including white-skinned, male, heterosexual cultural domination. Their end result is the defence and protection of unbridled capitalism through an autocratic totalitarian and militarised state – see fascist Italy, Spain, Germany and the Axis powers of the twentieth century. A reactionary conservative creed.
Being “on the Left”, for the Right, does not require a commitment to socialism. Anything “progressive” is deemed “woke”, a term of abuse used by the far-Right.
Not all of the Left are socialist. Many seek reforms to the harshest and sharpest edges of the global and local system of Capitalism, accepting that Capitalism is here and probably inevitable, but can be tamed and controlled. Many reforms have elements of socialism: a universal health service paid for through taxation to be free at the point of need. Subsidised public transport. Fee State education paid for from the public purse. Welfare Benefits to those who cannot fully manage on their own. Social Security ”Council” Housing, the stock owned and maintained by the local council tax payer ensuring decent and affordable housing for all (a thing of the past thanks to previous and current right-wing governments).
Capitalism can have a mixed economy containing elements of socialism just enough to sustain the working class. The Right hate the Welfare State and cannot understand why anyone should pay taxes towards anyone else’s needs. Until, it seems, they become homeless or sick or infirm and complain that the services are not there, because of immigration rather than spending cuts and privatisation.
Socialists are a left section of the Left. In essence we want a different construction of socialist society. Socialism is a society based on meeting the needs of people and the environment, not maximising the profits of the rich. It would be a radically democratic society, with ordinary people collectively running things for ourselves.
A socialist society would be one where items are produced because they are needed, rather than because they are profitable. It would mean an end to a system where millions of people struggle to make ends meet while the rich sit on piles of money. In a socialist society, the working class would collectively own big industries and services, democratically deciding what to produce and how to use the Earth’s resources.
Socialism is therefore international, recognising we each impact upon everyone else, migration and global trade being ancient human attributes that benefit and bind us together as one human race.
Fascism asserts national identity and geographic boundaries in order to accentuate individual competition and bind the people to an internal collective fear and hostility of “the outsider”, “the Alien”, “the Other”.
Fascism is the absolute power of the capitalist. Presumably, that’s why it is considered to be of the “Hard-Left” to seek an end to Capitalism. Although, the redistribution of wealth downwards away from billionaires and multi-millionaires to eradicate child poverty and unemployment should appear perfectly reasonable.
Not least, it’s increasingly obvious that the Capitalist dream of becoming super-rich is sheer mythology – a propaganda tool to tie us to the yolk of wage-slavery. The super-rich are a class apart, managing the State, the laws and social culture to maintain their power and keep all the wealth inside their families and Corporations, preventing social mobility.
Fascism gives this Capitalist ruling class absolute power inside a totalitarian State. An autocratic corporate dictatorship. The fascists pander to the super-rich in the hope of receiving crumbs from their table. In reply, the World’s billionaires, especially the techno-billionaires, are currently funding the rising fascist media and organisations here and across the world.
But why would working class people want an even harsher administration of capitalism in which we are even further atomised away from any mutual aid and self-organisation? Fascists destroy trade unions.
Why would we want to live in a hostile neighbourhood of State-snitches dobbing each other in on false accusations of proscribed relationships, unpatriotic activities or subversive thoughts? How could we condone paramilitary snatch-squads funded by the state and private corporations, smashing-in the door of our family members, friends or neighbours and stealing people away to be disappeared as “enemies of the State”?
Humans have experienced long periods of fascist society all across the world. Fascism adapts to its local conditions, but we all know what fascism looks like. So let’s be clear. That’s the end game of the fascist “Tommy Robinson” and the far-right parliamentary-wing represented by Farage’s Reform UK. Fascists lie and deceive and threaten in order to achieve absolute power. Fascism is not what anyone voted for last week. But fascism is here, now, and must be actively confronted and opposed. We will oppose Tommy Robinson in London next Saturday, and local fascists day-and-night from now on.
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 (28.4.26) challenging the motives of all candidates in the current Council elections. What are they doing about poverty, deprivation and the gross inequalities we live with each day.
Notable that the Editor would not print the swearword “sod”, replacing it with “Forget”, despite f and c words on our telly every evening. Apparently being angry is unacceptable.
Sod potholes, why don’t candidates address poverty in Plymouth!
Around two-thirds of Plymouth residents eligible to vote are likely not to do so in the local council election on May 7th. There is no single reason, but any class analysis will prove that the wealthy don’t bother to vote – they don’t use public services and find taxation an unjust burden they seek to evade – whilst the poor wisely recognise that politicians don’t do anything for them.
So democracy, flimsy at is, is for the middle classes. And local election campaigns tend to focus on the day-to-day niggles affecting middle-earners and the otherwise comfortably-off: pot holes, business rates and regulations affecting small businesses.
Some national issues invade local democracy, especially when racists and warmongers seek to divert issues of municipal welfare into white-nationalist xenophobia – from rearmament to fight foreigners and the damning of all people of colour through to ultra-parochial slogans demanding “Plymouth People First!”
The one thing not to be spoken of, politely or otherwise, is poverty. Much of the growing anxiety and discontent is borne of the fact that millions of us do not have sufficient income to cover essential expenses. All our politics has moved towards the extremes as we’ve become more divided and more unequal. Voting for a new bunch of multi-millionaires seeking to out-do the established lot is not going to bring any real difference to working class lives. The Status Quo is no good for most people.
Candidates should offer real and substantial change. Britain has the highest increase in child poverty in the whole of Europe, the richest 10% live an average of 20 years longer than the poorest, and in much better health. This record level of income inequality and class polarisation is visible on our streets and in our neighbourhoods. Never mind the potholes, what about the homeless?
So saying we’re going to carry on as we are shouldn’t be a political message that gains votes. It represents only a 15% strata of the comfortably-off. Meanwhile the super-rich are continuing to change society away from mutual aid and collective care in their struggle to accumulate more and more of society’s wealth.
In Plymouth, one in three of our children live in poverty, defined as being deprived of one-or-more of essential human need – nutritious food, heath care including teeth and emotional support, secure and safe housing, self-actualising education, and a loving environment promoting positive self-esteem.
Pot holes aren’t on the list. They affect car owners and cyclists. Owning a car requires expenditure of at least £50 a week for an old banger, hundreds for a new vehicle, placing them outside the affordability for at least 20% of us. Public transport is the real issue and requires massive investment if we are to have any equality of mobility.
Spending around £40million on refurbishing Armada Way is of benefit to local businesses seeking higher footfall, and property speculators wanting to make a fortune out of new city centre accommodation, but for families in Honicknowle or Southway the bus costs of getting into the city to play amongst the water features are wholly unaffordable.
What we need is £40 million spent on breakfast clubs, play parks and youth centres on our estates.
More so, we need refurbishment of our housing stock which is now, notably, the worst in all of Europe. Housing conditions are so poor that 14 million homes in England and Wales require extensive repair and retrofitting to stop water ingress and provide the insulation required to end fuel poverty. Plymouth has one of the highest rates of household damp and mould in the UK, with studies showing 36% of homes are damp, 14% with serious mould, and 25% of Plymouth households living in unhealthily cold homes.
The private landlords, a large proportion amongst our elected Councillors, certainly don’t want the housing crisis as a campaign issue. Caring for their tenants will eat into their private profits.
Trade unions have always campaigned against poverty, but the sectional self-interest of workers in specific industries often overwhelms our founding socialist principles. Jobs at the Dockyard and through the Freeport are emphasised as the growth Plymouth needs, whilst in all accounting for only 10% of our economy and doing nothing to alleviate poverty. Plymouth Devonport is one of the very poorest electoral wards in England.
Low pay is endemic, workers on the Minimum Wage often needing top-ups from Universal Credit in order pay the rent – effectively a tax-incentive for landlords to charge inflated rents.
Pay in the health service, schools and all public services has lost at least 15% real spending power since the 2008 crash. Our public services need substantial investment, not further privatisation pumping the offshore corporations’ profits.
Council spending power per person will be at least 15% lower in real terms in 2028/29 than in 2010/11. That’s more cuts and austerity policies to come this year and next. Central government must give back the money it has stolen from local authorities. Any candidate that isn’t ranting about this isn’t worth the time of day!
Now we are heading for another crash, probably the worst yet. A quarter of a million people will likely lose their jobs by the middle of next year as Britain experiences price-hikes, food inflation at 5%pa+ right now, and a recession because of nil investment and the chaos caused by the illegal war in Iran.
Should anyone knock at your door, ask them about the gross inequalities and deprivation in Plymouth and what they’re going to do about it
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (21.4.26) challenging the albeit minority support for the illegal war against Iran. Trump is under huge pressure at home and globally, more threatened by oil prices than any moral upset at human death and environmental destruction. But Starmer’s hypocritical role is possibly the most astounding of all – stating that the UK does not support Trump’s war but ensuring Britain as the launchpad for the weapons of mass destruction. We have to protest!
A B-1 Bomber is filmed high in the sky over Plymouth. Its rumblings, distinct from rolling thunder, cause us to look up, to question and to assess. It is not normal, not a usual sound. Some marvel at the power represented by the technology. But the black silhouette causes many to fleetingly reflect on the distant wars that are being rehearsed overhead.
Britain is an aircraft carrier for the United States. Only those who are comfortable with this “special relationship” applaud the US bases strewn across our island and the use of the Royal Air Force for Trump’s illegal war in Iran.
At least 23 US strategic bombers are now operating from RAF Fairford, Gloucestershire, US military personnel flying missions from England in support of ongoing strikes against Iranian targets. They’re practising and refuelling over our homes, but dropping huge payloads – 2,000lb “bunker buster” bombs – on everything from schools and hospitals to ancient historical monuments and, oh yes, civilians, women and children.
Just as Blair and Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 was formally recorded as illegal under international law, so will the bombing of Iran in 2026. There are no weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear weapons in Iran. Only Israel has nuclear missiles in an otherwise nuclear-free Middle East.
Wars are deadly. And costly. Thousands dead, hundreds of thousands injured, millions homeless inside of one month’s assault. This illegal invasion is costing the US $891million each day and the global economy hundreds of billions in disruption, transport and agriculture descending into chaos. Blocks to oil supplies is already the equivalent of the daily consumption of Europe’s five largest economies combined. Petrol and gas prices are a superficial inconvenience when compared with the real and lasting costs to us all.
By the end of this week, roughly 60,000 American service members will be in or around the Middle East, the largest concentration since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Trump is calling the current pause in fighting with Iran a fragile two-week ceasefire, set to expire on Thursday April 22 after talks in Pakistan fell apart almost as soon as they began. Then what?
Only last week, Trump’s threat to destroy a civilisation, with its implied threat of nuclear war, sent a chill around the world. Trump and Netanyahu’s war has been a brutal and illegal onslaught on the people of Iran and Lebanon. It has created a humanitarian disaster and caused the destruction of infrastructure, environmental damage, and economic crisis. And the British Government is wholly implicated.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been complicit in this illegal war, allowing US planes to use British bases. The British government must break with Trump and his warmongering policies, including disallowing the stationing of US nuclear weapons at the Lakenheath USAF base in Suffolk.
British “patriots” are cheerleading the US bombers as if they’re “our own”! Their allegiance is to Trump’s Stars-and-Stripes far-Right White-supremacy, not the Union Jack, and to western capitalism, the only beneficiaries of mass slaughter being the western oil companies who have made an extra $100billion more than their usual profits in the last month, and the arms companies scurrying to increase production.
Which brings us back to Plymouth. The B-1 stratospheric rumblings are in part a propaganda exercise to pull the population behind support for rearmament and the diversion of much-needed tax funding for health and education into arms spending. The real power of that jet bomber is in tying us to the politics and economics of warfare, not welfare. Nothing at all to cheer about in a country ravaged by austerity politics and corrupt profiteering.
On Saturday we will be protesting at RAF Fairford to demand the UK stops the bombers! Kick US nuclear weapons off British soil! Fund doctors and nurses, not Nukes! Vote for Welfare not Warfare!
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (17.3.26), where in lighthearted mode I would have liked to wax lyrical about St Patrick’s Day but, in all sincerity, have to stay concentrated on War & Peace. Crucially, our anti-war protests in Plymouth have been attacked and assaulted by self-identified fascist cadre who themselves are supporting the Iranian royalists shouting in favour of Trump and Netanyahu’s illegal mass murder. The racists are supporting the immigrants, you ask? Well yes, only for so long as they support the Zionist racists in Tel Aviv and Trump’s regime. The moment Tehran falls will be the point when the Britain First fascists demand all the Iranian diaspora are sent “home”, alongside the rest of the 4million muslim Brits. Ultra-nationalism kills. Who benefits from such inhumanity?
War Benefits Nobody but the Billionaires!
Why would anyone support War? Mass murder of innocent civilians. Prices going up again. The question is begged. Why does the working class have to pay for each and every crisis?
As a secondary consequence amidst the mass murder and destruction, Trump & Israel’s illegal war against Iran has bombed refineries and blocked shipping of fuel getting to the West. Those who own the big piles and shares in the fossil fuel companies have raised the price of oil and gas.
It is always the rich who benefit. War always offers a profits bonanza for somebody. The corporations who supply the fuels and sell to us increase their charges overnight and sometimes thrice in a day.
In other words, the consumers, we at the bottom of the pile, take the hit. We pay more because those who own production and supply expect their profits to stay the same or even increase, whatever is happening in the world.
There are many reports of companies putting-up prices even before any rise in their costs, profiteers exploiting crisis if not actively creating them. To add insult to injury then, the government (of whatever hue) releases publicly owned fuel reserves paid for by the tax-payer to keep supply prices from going through the roof.
Yes, our taxes and national resources are used to subsidise the super-profits of the corporations. We fund the war through our taxes but the working class are not the beneficiaries. Our services are cut, fuel bills increase, taxes diverted from social welfare. Right now we are supposed to be placated by the understanding that prices would be even higher without the tax-subsidies to the oil corporations.
British-based BP and Shell reported combined annual profits of approximately £26.2 billion in 2024. Globally the big oil corps collectively made roughly £467 billion in profits last year. That’s a surplus over and above any business costs.
To hell with them! Let them take the hit for a change! OECD data shows that the UK government provides an estimated £20 billion per year in financial support for fossil fuel companies which includes tax relief for producers and VAT reductions. That is tax income for our common wealth taken away from health, education, benefits and the essential climate adaptation required because of their destructive emissions!
Now we’re propping-up their war-profits by more support from taxes, just for the oil tycoons to get ever richer at our expense! You who shout-out against migrants in boats costing the tax-payer say nothing about the big corporate scroungers who are actually sucking the money out from our welfare state. Why?
The Financial Times, the Bosses own newspaper, reports that US oil groups are set to make $63bn extra profits from the war on Iran! Why do you think that’s OK? Trump, the President you choose to support to the hilt, boasts that the US is the greatest oil producer by far so, “when there’s war we make money”, adding that “bombing Iran is fun”. He’s a monster!
It’s not asylum seekers bleeding our economy dry, it’s overseas oil magnets. And in Britain, the 50 wealthiest families own half our nation’s resources, paying little or nothing into our system. Yet you blame the poorest and most desperate for all societies ills. Are you sick in the head?
Some governments have acted against this profiteering. The French have limited price rises to every-other-day, the Greek government has capped the amount the Corporations can increase prices by. Not so in Britain, because Britain was one of the first to adopt free-market neoliberal economics and, over decades has become allergic to any state intervention for price controls, rent-caps and profit restrictions.
That’s why the number of billionaires in the UK has risen from 15 in 1990 to 156 today. We keep them rich, paying our taxes to them in incentives and exclusions: Universal Credit to subsidise their high rental charges, UC again to subsidise their minimum wages paid at rates too low to survive on, and our taxes subsiding the filthy water companies to the tune of £76bn.
Don’t blame your neighbour for a crisis created by the top 1%. While our communities of every culture and skin colour struggle to keep the heating on, the super-rich have increased their wealth tenfold. Finance cuts and privatisation of our assets to make a profit from our essential needs only deepen our problems.
So why on earth are you supporting the war? There’s nothing in it for the ordinary person in the street. Demand Welfare not Warfare! Fund Peace! Tax the Rich! Stop Bombing Iran!
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!
An additional comment on an historically significant day. The end of the START Treaty on nuclear arms limitation. Please share and publicise our meeting on 17th February. We have to get organised!
START Treaty
We are very likely to hear of a nuclear explosion somewhere, soon. It is not just that Strategic Arms Reduction Talks on nuclear weapons came to an abrupt end last Thursday, it is that nuclear proliferation is part of the New World Order, deregulated, un-inspected.
The START Treaty, regulating and controlling the numbers and development of the nuclear weapons of Russia and the United States of America, has expired. Trump is not bothered. Russia has said it will keep to it, for now. This is the last remaining agreement to mutually prevent nuclear weapons testing and limit the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal – Russia and the USA own and control at least 87% of all nuclear warheads, many fired-up and ready to launch.
There has been nuclear arms controls for over 50 years, as part of the rules-based international order established after the second world war, the first treaty signed in 1963 after the horror of the Bay of Pigs crisis where US warheads sited in Turkey and retaliatory Russian nuclear missiles placed in Cuba very nearly sparked a global nuclear war.
The old cliche is that “the world stepped-back from the brink”. Well, we’re back at the brink again today. There are at least nine nuclear powers including Israel and North Korea, in a world where there are no restrictions on nuclear weapons whatsoever.
There is now no agreement that morally or legally can deter any State from developing or using nuclear weapons. Cynics may suggest that Treaties aren’t really worth the paper they’re written on, but START has certainly been raised in the midst of any and all tensions and negotiations as the basis for de-escalation in recent history.
It is now the case that the traditional axiom of “Mutually Assured Destruction” no longer applies. The UK is at the forefront of global research and development of new nuclear warheads and the infrastructure with which to launch them, focussed upon “battlefield nuclear weapons”, “low-yield” and “useable”.
The Trident replacement programme is effectively a project to prove nuclear weapons can be exploded in war and the world will not end. It represents humanity’s greatest gamble, and a Great Lie from beginning to end. The lowest yield nuclear warhead designed for battlefield use has the power and intensity of the first bomb dropped by the USA upon Hiroshima in 1945. That’s their definition of “useable”: 85,000 humans killed by one bomb, and tens of thousands more left unwell with shortened lives caused by the radiation that one explosion spread trans-generational toxic contamination.
The entire Trident launch system is owned by the United States and leased to the UK, any notion of Britain having an “independent nuclear weapon” a complete fallacy of public relations spin.
Now, Starmer, in his final days, has agreed to the Royal Air Force carrying US nuclear-armed missiles, making the UK Europe’s frontline of US offensive forces, with navy and airforce ready to fire Trump’s nuclear weapons.
Trump may agree a new nuclear treaty if it has his name on it and it includes China. But that’s not the point. The regulation and inspection of nuclear facilities has prevented accidental launch or detonation of nuclear weapons. The technology is intricate, and the litany of accidents across the nuclear industry, releasing deadly radioactive contamination into our land, air and waters, too long to list here. But inspection has prevented explosion, to our knowledge.
The Treaty and its protocols can be said to have prevented accidental nuclear war between the super-powers. Nuclear weapons are on hair-trigger standby at all times, the timing of launch and counter-launch measured in seconds rather than minutes and managed primarily by computers armed with Artificial Intelligence. To prevent the machines taking-over, there were international agreements on the human element in decision making, checks and double-checks, giving time for reflection and negotiation before the launch of Armageddon.
No need for all that woke health-and-safety nonsense now. Let’s just get on with it! The new Arms Race has been unleashed. The new nuclear countries outside of the obvious top three have no tradition of Treaty or constraint. They have never adopted the protocols for nuclear war. They have no constraints. And without START even the big players have no witness or knowledge of what their competitors are doing. No checks and balances.
The simplest solution is to not make anymore nuclear warheads and to disarm. Nuclear Weapons are already, according to the totally debunked United Nations, illegal under international law as weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction. They obliterate everything and everyone. There’s little point in firing back once the other side has launched except as an act of vengeful mass suicide.
In the meantime we have to campaign for a new Treaty as soon as possible, as some form of safeguard without any illusion in it preventing the possibility of nuclear war. The end of START opens-up fresh and immediate possibilities for nuclear escalation in Ukraine and the Middle East. In Plymouth we have the infrastructure and machinery that carries the US’s Trident nuclear warheads. This is not someone else’s problem.
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, with our world famous CND Peace Sign and seventy years of active campaigning, is at the forefront of challenging nuclear weapons. We will protest at Marham Royal Airforce Base on February 28th where the F35A Lightning II fighter jets will be loaded with US nuclear missiles, and at Lakenheath US Airforce Base on 4th April where Trump’s B-2 Spirit and B-52 Stratofortress Bombers carry B61 nuclear bombs.
At the very least let’s get US Nukes off our soil, and campaign to scrap the £210billion Trident Replacement programme in the UK. Please attend our CND meeting in Plymouth at 7pm at the Quaker Centre, 74 Mutley Plain, PL4 6LF and on Zoom, Tuesday 17th February 2026.
The Full Moon was a glorious sight on Sunday, even if witnessed through the omnipresent rain-haze that produced a lunar halo. We gaze skyward in joy and awe, reminded of the sheer wonder of life and the universe around us.
The moon, however, is a dead rock. We enjoy its reflection of sunlight, not its dark side.
Yet this week we will all be expected to enthuse to, if not exalt, the “return of mankind” to Earth’s satellite. Journalists will exaggerate the adventure in the competition to be the greatest cheerleader for the launch the Artemis II rocket carrying astronauts to have a spin round the rock.
School projects this week will entice our children to colour-in the NASA logo and parents to buy the overpriced t-shirt made in Chinese sweatshops to prove allegiance to western superiority.
The Artemis project has officially cost at least $93billion to get to this point. But the true cost is far higher. This is the latest propaganda exercise in the technological Cold War, the United States in competition with China and India to prove superiority and dominance in Space as well as on Earth. It is a military exercise, and our children should be advised of this.
The Artemis missions are promoted as part of NASA’s long-term plans to build a space station on the moon called “Lunar Gateway” run by nuclear power plants to be launched from Earth (what could possibly go wrong), where astronauts will live and work and, they suggest, prepare for missions to Mars from where life will be cut short by such high doses of radiation that the gallant heroes will never return.
It is a science fiction, a distraction from all the challenges of our world. The moon and the planets are hostile to human life, and the projected US lunar base is a hostile statement of imperialist domination, part of the Space Wars already active around our globe.
Last time around we exposed the waste of human focus, time and energy, chanting Gil Scott-Heron’s brilliant poem, “Whitey on the Moon”. He documented the poverty and medical debt, untreated ill-health, war and environmental destruction in 1970, emphasising the stark dislocation between the fit White men bouncing on the moon’s surface, the oppression and destitution of millions of Black people across the US, and the billions in absolute poverty across the Global South.
Today we’re in an even worse state. No wonder there’s efforts to force us to look away.
More than 2,000,000,000 people have no access to safe drinking water, sanitation, and handwashing – a basic human need. Get that sorted! There are 300 million people living inside the 130 active military wars, 120million war refugees, genocide in Gaza and Sudan. Stop that!
With all the high-tech SpaceX machismo fronted by the fascist billionaire, Elon Musk, how comes 28million people in the USA live without income or state support? And ICE paramilitaries murdering civilians on the streets of America? Really?
Look Up! Look Away! Enjoy childlike space fantasies instead!
They’ll tell you that humanity has benefited enormously from the science of space exploration. Which particular part of humanity are they referring to, exactly? The mobile phones that they’re now seeking to ban for children under 16? The “Teflon” frying pans, a by-product of the heat-covers to allow space capsules to return to earth safely, now found to contain toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl “forever” chemicals polluting all life on earth including every human brain? Is that progress?
Worst of all, they’re using the Artemis mission to spread complacency about the climate crisis. Look how blue the Earth appears from the moon! Everything’s fine! NO ITS NOT! Have you seen the extreme weather events across the USA, hardly reported amidst the gloss of Artemis. The floods and waterlogged pitches here, and the fires raging in Africa, Indonesia and South America are because of global heating caused by burning fossil fuels. The Gulf Stream is weakening. Don’t look away, invest in our common future not some Hollywood-inspired sci-if spectacle!
The anti-Vietnam War, pro-human rights protests and international workers’ strikes of the early seventies forced government to return to the issues of home. The space programme was stopped because it was a complete waste of finite resources. It still is.
My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (20.1.26) raving mad about the billionaire jamboree in Switzerland courting Trump and his cronies. It’s deadly serious, this carve-up of the world and it’s people’s for the wealth and power of a tiny minority. It’s why I want a revolution!
The unedited version here, or enlarge the picture for the original.
Those of us seeking to further the interests of working class people should keep a close eye on what the ruling classes are doing. Once every year, the world’s billionaires and their toady hangers-on meet together, parking record numbers of private jets on the tarmac outside Davos, Switzerland. The World Economic Forum. They’re there now. Trump is attending, with the largest and richest-ever “Team USA” following-on as the Emperor’s entourage. The great pretender, Nigel Farage is also there, pretending to be part of the elite he derided only last year as a “gathering of the globalists”. He wants to offer his services. Let’s breathe for a moment. In a world of nearly nine billion human beings, fewer than 60,000 people own and control most wealth in the world. 0.001% of the world’s population control three times as much wealth as the 4,000,000,000 bottom half of humanity. They’re coming together at the Swiss Alps resort to discuss how to further carve-up the world’s wealth between themselves. Their deliberations have more power and impact on every one of us than all the fluff and nonsense of every parliament. The People’s democracies have very little influence upon the real decisions made inside the corporate boardrooms across the continents. Fifteen of the world’s richest exploiters are American. Musk has a personal wealth of $682billion (a billion is a thousand million), Bezos only $260BN, nine of the ten richest making their money in the technology business. Clearly we pay far too much for tech. But they have problems. The world’s economy is in a deep crisis of debt and inequality. The climate crisis is documented, with dire medium-term economic consequences. So the rich aren’t investing in anything that doesn’t make a short-term hefty profit. Most of that private accumulation comes from gambling on projected future prices in an era of catastrophe. The immediate task is to raise prices to us as high as possible whilst cutting the wage and welfare bills to the lowest. And so the Bosses compete against each other for ownership of lands and workers. The big corporations have real power but this is no world conspiracy – they’re all in competition against each other, undermining all planning and subject to the anarchy of the Capitalist System. When they come together at Davos they smile and shake hands, laughing all the time with a knife ready behind their backs, doing deals and hostile takeovers. They hold their pet politicians in tow ready to change laws to keep their scams legal. Posturing over regional influence, possession and wealth extraction, such as over Greenland, is happening alongside who can afford the $1BN to sit on Trump’s “Board of Peace” with war criminals Blair and Rubio. Carving-up the Middle East and carving-out the Palestinians, profiteering from genocide, is symbolic of the rabid clawing for power and resources. The certainties of global “rules-based order” has broken down and the Nations attached to the big corporations are preparing for “geoeconomic confrontation”. War! This week they will headline a “Spirit of Dialogue” whilst bitterly negotiating their competing interests over Venezuela, Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, Taiwan, Iran and Greenland. Davos replaces the United Nations for a week. They will not let democracy stand in their way. As a band of warring brothers, a giant corrupt cartel, the Capitalist’s common enemy is us. The Rich fear the potential power of the working class. The Mass Strike and revolution from below is their greatest foe. The Big Bosses work together to keep us in our place. In this fevered era of instability they are turning away from democracy and towards autocracy, ready to allow military conflict and fascism to prevent revolt and protect their wealth and power. The billionaires are living in a bubble, and they know it. The absurd scale of $trillions of cryptocurrency investment in Artificial Intelligence cannot be sustained and will crash, hurting a few of them but destroying entire social economies and hundreds of millions of our jobs and lives. Investment in arms manufacture and the military suck tax cash out of social welfare. The rent and mortgage rate increases – the cause of the international housing crisis – is mirroring the investment bubble that led to the global financial crash of 2008 for which we’re all still paying. Enforced austerity is intensifying discontent. Workers’ real spending-power is lower today than it was in 2008. The spending-power of the average full-time worker is 25% less than in late 2021. Their corruption screwed us for decades. It’s gonna happen again, but worse. The super-rich know all this. Their champagne-fuelled seminars in Davos may publicly play-down the scale of the global crisis, but in the back rooms the real wheeler-dealers are drawing-up the blueprints for a refreshed Bosses offensive, ever-intensifying the exploitation of the working classes, by force. They will continue the accelerating descent into war and barbarism. The super-rich must be stopped by the collective power of the international working class!
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (13.01.2026) making the links between ICE in the USA and the political direction of travel in the UK. It’s obvious really. If you agree, please build the largest ever anti-racist/anti-fascist protest in London on 28th March. You have time to recruit at least 10 of your colleagues and friends, through patient explanation and exposure of the implications of a far-Right government in Britain by 2029.
UK must Not Accept the Euqivalent of US’s ICE!
The media headlines were bold. “Bring ICE to Britain, says Farage” and “Trump should put Starmer on trial, says Tommy Robinson”. The racist ultra-nationalist, Farage, multi-millionaire owner of the ReformUK brand, would wish to see hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people of colour from across Britain snatched from their homes and workplaces and forcibly expelled. The fascist misogynistic white-supremacist, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, is so keen on national sovereignty that he would like a foreign President to reign over us, and accepts cash from fascist groups from across Europe and the USA. He wants to see millions of Black and Brown British citizens rounded-up and deported. The violence implicit in both far-right leaders is for all to see. Britain’s far-Right are applauding the violence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Trump’s federal law enforcement agency under the Department of Homeland Security. In 2025 more than 131 people died while in ICE detention, agents filmed pepper-spraying clergy and medical staff, tear-gassing children and systematically terrorising Latino communities. ICE is a $12BN armed paramilitary wing of the central State, empowered to carry out armed raids on schools, hospitals, courts, places of worship, weddings, funerals and workplaces. These involve raids by masked agents carrying automatic weapons who drive unmarked armoured vehicles. ICE targets people of colour, anywhere and everywhere, regardless of their status. ICE is a paramilitary group, intentionally recruiting from the volunteers of the organised far-Right, encouraged to pursue a racist white-supremacist ideology. Trump openly targeted the Somali community in Minneapolis, calling them “garbage”. The video of a high court judge, a Black citizen, assaulted by ICE in a supermarket car park offers one picture of the millions of public assaults taking place across the USA with, as vice-President Vance insists, total immunity from legal challenge or charge. No rules. Other film shows women being dragged across tarmac roads and beaten, children forcefully taken from private residencies, families crammed into wired cages without proper sanitation or drinking water. This is the imagery of a fascist state, of Hitler’s militia in 1930’s Nazi Germany, of the concentration camps across fascist Europe a century ago. The murder in Minneapolis of Renee Good, 37-year old mother, shot three times in the head by an ICE agent, was greeted by Trump suggesting she deserved to die and labelling Renee as a ”professional agitator”. Thankfully, more than one thousand protests took place across America last weekend by those who do care, chanting “ICE is Trump’s Gestapo!” and “No justice, no peace—get Ice off our streets!” A month earlier more than 7 million Americans marched against Trump. Opposition and challenge to the President’s federal boot-boys is rising, from elected officials and Police through to local white citizens outraged by such flagrant injustice and ready to defend multiculturalism and democracy. The anti-racist majority in Britain today, thus far quite quiet and acquiescent, had better get out in the streets too. We have to show the far-Right that we will not accept the equivalent of ICE in the UK. Whilst Starmer and Mahmood seek to appease the racists with tougher immigration laws and the incarceration of civil rights protesters, Farage and Yaxley-Lennon are preparing for power. They are stating their racist intentions should Farage be prime minister. Yaxley-Lennon is building his Black Shirt street squads in preparation for a far-Right government that will target and scapegoat minorities in order to divide the working class and rule by fear. Trump offers them a blueprint, and they are applauding him. We have to get organised and get active here, now. Down with racism and fascism! Join and build https://www.togetheralliance.org.uk
My weekly comment column daily Plymouth Herald (6.1.26), attempting to challenge the media blanket-lie condemning Maduro as a drug-cartel boss and international criminal. The media suppression of facts is so absolute as to deny any possibility of a full response in 600 words or less. Here’s 900 words, still inadequate, but more fleshed-out than the printed edited version in the paper (which you can read by expanding the picture below). My intention is singularly to ensure there is a left voice in the local paper – to suggest it has any real influence would be nonesense, but please share if you agree.
Stop Trump – Defend Venezuela
Let’s just get this straight. It is perfectly acceptable for Trump to invade Venezuela, bomb homes and kill over 50 people, abduct the President and his wife, and install an administration run by US oil corporations. Really? No! We are told that, because “The West” never accepted Venezuela’s government of Maduro, it is only right to overthrow it. Like Iraq, and Libya and Chilé and so many other countries. Regime change follows the logic of unbridled Capitalism – the rule of the most powerful. Power and Control behaviours, nationalist military might and domination, plunder, wealth extraction and accumulation, colonialism and imperialism. The logic of the armed privateer, the legalised gangster. In the specific case of Venezuela this week, we see the proclaimed right of the United States of America’s Capitalist ruling class to dominate and control the Western Hemisphere. This is not an interpretation, it is the statement of Trump himself, quoting the doctrine first espoused by President Monroe in his Doctrine of 1823 that warned against interference in the Americas. Monroe declared that the USA owns and controls the American continents. That means the USA has the right to the subjugation all the peoples, and the exploitation and extraction all the resources of the lands and oceans. By force. Because it can. And for so long as it can. The people of Latin America have fought back for self determination and national liberation for centuries. From the revolution led by Simon Bolivar in 1797 Venezuelans have fought back against colonialisation from Spain, attempts by Britain and Portugal, and then Corporate domination from the USA. It is a history of the illegal seizure of assets for foreign personal gain versus the use of national resources for national social and local economic collective development. Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, drove the Bolivarian Revolution into the 21st Century, seeking national control with an emphasis on using Venezuela’s extensive oil revenues to lift the mass of the Country’s poor out of poverty. This was a democratic socialist programme, taking control of the country’s oil assets and beginning the redistribution of the huge wealth away from the richest elite and foreign corporations and towards the country’s population, housing, education, health and social infrastructure. Nationalisation but not workers’ control of industry. Of course, those in support of Capitalism have fought back. Capitalists hate socialism. They seek to destroy all and any semblance of it, because every social programme eats into their opportunities to hoard private wealth for themselves. Billionaires hate the very ideas of common wealth and social justice. In any class society, one groups’ profits come at great cost to the other. The invasion of Venezuela has the purpose of the seizure of the country’s valuable natural resources by the USA. But is is also a far-Right ideological assault on democracy and socialism. Nationalisation of oil reserves is an anathema to the Capitalist Class and their wealthy middle class beneficiaries. Oil is the most profitable of resources. It symbolises power and domination. Those who control oil control the world. That’s fine when owned by self-appointed dictators in Saudi Arabia, compliant with the western corporations, but wholly unacceptable when owned by the Venezuelan State aiming to use the revenue for the good of the People. Venezuela, as with the rest of the countries of central and southern America, has been constantly beaten down by the military power of the United States for the past centuries. The Bolivarian Revolution was constantly weakened by attempted coups and para-military insurgencies funded and controlled by the USA. The resulting frailties of the Maduro administration was hammered for years by US and Western economic sanctions and blockades, left open to corruption and subject to powerful assaults by well-funded far-Right insurgents, and infiltration from agents of the country’s own super-rich class and Trump’s military. Maduro’s government became beseiged, the economy in crisis and inflation rampant. The repression of dissent undermined his base. Trump’s justifications – that Maduro is the boss of a drug cartel, that his regime is undemocratic, are fake. By their own analysis the US State concludes that Venezuela is not one of the world’s major drug exporting countries. Trump is continuing the same old practices – nothing new there. The bombing of Caracas is a naked act of imperialist aggression. Donald Trump’s declaration that “we are going to run Venezuela” sums up the arrogance of US power. This is about removing a regime that has long been a thorn in Washington’s side and seizing the largest oil reserves in the world. By overthrowing Maduro, Trump is pointing a gun at the head of every other Latin American president, and is challenging the economic links between South America and China. Cuba may be the next target. It is the sole right of the Venezuelan working class, with their long revolutionary history, to determine governance of Venezuela. Trump may have control of the military, but the mass of the working class support socialism in their own interests. Their fight against recolonisation by US corporations must be reinforced by a global movement of solidarity with the Venezuelan people. Trade unions in Britain have long supported the rights of workers across South America, just as we support the struggle of the Palestinian people against Israel’s genocidal occupation. The struggles are linked and from the same source. Trump has threatened to take-over Cuba, Panama, Greenland and Canada. These threats continue and will escalate. Keir Starmer has refused to condemn the coup, incoherently mentioning support for “international law”. He is guilty of active support for genocide in Palestine and now by his silence he makes himself complicit in the assault on Venezuela. We must protest. Hands of Venezuela! Down with Trump’s pirate empire!
My final weekly comment column of 2025 in the daily Plymouth Herald (30.12.25) inevitably rounding-up my priorities for the coming year, whilst coldly acknowledging how much more needs to be addressed. No, I haven’t mentioned Your Party, not from any lack of commitment but because this new socialist potential will only succeed by the action it takes to secure the priorities as listed below. If it is yet another organisation created of and for itself, a Party existing in order to simple exist, then it will fail. The point is to raise the socialist banner high and, most importantly, know what we’re fighting for!
Here’s hoping for a Happy New Year!
New Year, whichever and whenever it occurs for you, offers space for reflection as well as projection. The Gregorian calendar fixes ours as 1st January each year, irrespective of the position of the sun or the moon, but close enough to the winter solstice to symbolise new light and fresh beginnings. New Year is worthy of a wish list, fresh aspirations. In a human world of significant turmoil and uncertainty, so much needs fixing that it’s difficult to prioritise. But here goes. Let’s hope in 2026:
The fascist-led racist movements of Farage and Yaxley-Lennon are finally and overwhelmingly defeated by mass mobilisations of working class people outraged by racism and misogyny and challenging the false culture-wars that decry empathy as weakness;
The £13billion a year UK tax-funding for illegal nuclear weapons of indiscriminate mass-destruction is ended, the cash transferred into the National Health Service to fully fund our health and welfare needs rather than warfare. Let’s also ensure an anti-racist campaign in hospitals to value the one-in-three doctors working here from oversees, and encourage our health staff to stay because we value, not abuse, them. Oh, and ensure the NHS is protected from plans to fully privatise our services – the selling of our health records to the private corporation Palantir to be roundly rejected;
An emergency plan for funding to address the housing crisis, including skills apprenticeships for our unemployed young people, for good quality new build of social housing and refurbishment of our 13 million homes in need of repair and insulation, placing rent caps and legal liabilities on private landlords and taxing large landlords to fund the reparations they should have undertaken;
The end of this seemingly endless period of Austerity economics, where workers wages have stagnated since the banking crisis of 2008, our real spending-power actually fallen despite our taxes bailing out the banks without any prosecutions or detriment to the bankers incomes, dividends and bonuses. End the low wage long working hours culture where employers are subsidised by our taxes to keep our wages low. Make the rich pay proportionally the same taxes as the working class instead of being allowed to hide their riches in off-shore accounts;
The acceleration, depth and seriousness of the Climate Crisis is finally accepted and understood, all the lies and denial defeated and replaced by urgent action to end emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, Britain playing a lead role on the international stage to force climate action onto the US Presidency and win funding for the vital transformation of the world economy away from oil and gas and into funded renewable energy delivery North and South. Stop subsidising the oil companies who are reaping record profits from inflated prices causing our fuel poverty;
Child poverty is ended, the 1 in 3 working class kids no longer deprived of some of the basics of life, and our schools refunded under state control;
The genocidal racist Netanyahu is brought to trial and jailed, his far-Right government collapsed. Starmer’s Government support for Zionism and funding of arms to Israel is ended, the protesters against the persecution of Palestinians vindicated and applauded. There are so many more issues that must be addressed. Well, we have to live in hope. We are in a period of very fast moving human history, and nothing is impossible. The course of human history has always been determined by the mass movements of working people, not the feeble compromises of the self-promoting political class. Best wishes for a campaigning New Year for Peace with Social Justice!
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (9.12.25), almost incandescent with anger at the amount of apolitical claptrap being spouted about “finding common ground” with the flag-waving, hate-spouting racists. I’m being told I should “listen to the other side” and “respect the opinions of others”. I refuse! After 50+ years of political activity I know very well what a fascist is, thank you. I know humanity is capable of such a vast spectrum of beliefs and actions that you cannot have common cause with them all. There is a left and a right of the political spectrum, and always has been. And it’s not me but the fascists who will be the first and last to shut you up and shut you down. They must not only be opposed, ardently and collectively, but they must be defeated.
Unedited:
Another racist march through Plymouth last Saturday, and more threatened. A small and bedraggled and of fewer than 60 paraded huge union jacks and flags of St George around the Barbican and Frankfort Gate with clear intent. To use Britain’s national flags as weapons to intimidate all people of colour. They wish for Britain to be a white-supremacist Apartheid State, those of colour to be subjugated as second or third-class citizens or forcibly deported in their millions. They spout absurd assertions that Britain has been taken-over by Muslims or Black power. They scream “save our kids” to present the lie that migrants en-masse are sex-abusers, without any evidence and when the vast majority of child sexual abuse occurs in white families, because Britain is an 85% white-skinned population. They demand “stop the boats” when the total costs of offering asylum to those suffering is a fraction of one-percent of the country’s gross domestic product, and Britain is fuelling the wars and climate chaos from which they’re escaping. Those who called the demonstration publicised their rallying cry across the entire South West from Bristol to Truro for extremists to converge upon Plymouth. A few of the most mouthy on the day have been seen demonstrating outside a hotel where traumatised people who are totally innocent and have every right to be here. They brandish emblems of “Britain First”, a fascist organisation formed out of the failed British National Party in 2011 and allied with fascists across Europe such as Germany’s AfD, supported by Donald Trump. Members of Patriotic Alternative, a white-supremacist hate-group have also been involved. Flag Force Plymouth, the ones hanging flags from lampposts to intimidate and claim communities as ruled by them, are directly allied to these far-right and neo-nazi groups. The question has to be asked, by what right do they have freedom to march in Plymouth or anywhere else, spouting racial hatred and misogyny? Police data, publicly available, shows that over 40% of the far-Right protesters arrested in the last year had previous offences of violence against women or had been reported for domestic abuse. Perhaps their calls for justice for women and girls are another example of the actual perpetrators hiding in plain sight. Thankfully, the people wanting to expose the lies of the far-Right turned-out on Saturday, as we always do, to swamp the fascist-led flag-usurpers, trade unionists and human-rights protesters outnumbering them three-to-one. But the vast majority of decent Plymothians should be up-in-arms against the far-Right, not just a dedicated few. The media and government are broadcasting much of the same racist mythology, with one aim in mind. To distract and desert attention from the crisis of low pay and high prices, poor housing and the fragmentation of health and social care services. “Blame the Boat people” just doesn’t work. Asylum seekers are not the landlords hiking unaffordable rents, refugees are not the directors and shareholders of the banks extorting our cash through high interest rates, and do not own the energy companies creating our fuel poverty. Black migrant workers are the ones propping-up our caring services despite the efforts of Starmer’s government to expel them. Now, trade unions and campaign groups have formed a fresh alliance to challenge the lies and hatred. The Together-Alliance against the far-Right is uniting the country, from civil organisations through to celebrities, Friends of the Earth to Paloma Faith and Lenny Henry, to Stand Up To Racism. Join us and defeat hatred. http://www.togetheralliance.org.uk
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (25.11.25) – the eve of the Autumn Budget. Tax the Rich! Enough said. We protested at the budget eve lobby of Luke Pollard MP Armed Forces Minister in the afternoon at Frankfort Gate, demanding Wages not Weapons, Books not Bombs, Welfare not Warfare! Tell Rachel Reeves to Tax the Rich properly (not my headline but good enough). The unexpurgated version below, or expand to read the printed article.
Oh no! The Bosses are threatening to go on strike! They may even leave the country! What ever will we do? Why is it OK for the rich to hold us to ransom but not the poor when we down tools and strike because we can’t live on the official minimum wage? It is one of those basic truths that the owners of big businesses don’t create wealth. Workers make the goods and products and provide the services. Bosses simply reap the profits because they own the businesses, usually on the inherited wealth from their ancestors who stole it in the first place. The threat, made-up by the right-wing press, is that the rich are going to be taxed more in tomorrow’s Budget. In response the super-rich might leave the country. Oh no they won’t! They’re having too good a time in Britain, at our expense. British billionaires make an additional £35million every day by doing nothing more gambling on the stock exchange! Their wealth has more than doubled since 2010 when together they were worth £250,000,000,000. Now they’re “worth” £620billion, half the entire annual tax-spend of £1.2trillion. The 5- richest families in Britain own more than 50% of the population – 34 million people. Their super-wealth means price hikes for us, the tax cuts and accountant-managed tax-evasion for them costing the Exchequer and our social infrastructure at least £36billion. There’s the mythical spending-gap filled twice over! Tax the Rich, Make Them Pay! For workers, the average cost of living has risen overall by more than 25% since the Pandemic. Our incomes haven’t. But Reeves is set to tax the elderly, 60% of whom have no real private wealth. Of course, some do, but working class pensioners don’t have huge incomes. Landlords do (some of them are pensioners), big shareholders do (some of then are pensioners), the directors of the private water companies and utilities do (some of them are pensioners). It’s all about class, not age! Start with taxing the super-rich properly. The British based banks have been making a billion pounds surplus to costs every week of 2025. That’s one-thousand-million pounds every week, £143million private profit every day for the past 337 days (and back before that). That’s a 14% increase in profits made on the backs of the debt and overpriced interest payments of working class people, underpaid and overcharged across Britain. Our bank accounts and insurance contracts are protection rackets continually making us offers we can’t refuse. Banking is business that we can’t do without because of the salary and mortgage systems. They have us over a barrel and should be nationalised as public services, not private corporations. The rich shareholders are laughing all the way… You might think that a Labour Chancellor would not only raise the surcharges on the banks’ bulging vaults – Barclays, Lloyds and Nat West – to ensure they pay taxes commensurate with the rates we pay, but heavily cap their charges and profit margins to stop this level of corrupt exploitation. Yet the Banks’ total tax bill was less than 24% last year, lower than the average wage earners’ and piddly compared with Germany or Japan’s 32%. And they’ve wasted so much. £100billion on HS2 nowhere, £36billion on a test-and-trace that didn’t work. The rich pocketed our dough. Tax the rich! But no. Labour, once up on a time branded as the “workers’ party”, is a friend of the financiers, the hedge-funders, the asset-strippers and the speculators. The profits for the arms manufacturers and those trading in war are going up exponentially – all arms are funded by the tax payer. We pay Them! Stop funding war from our taxes! War is always paid for by the very poorest in society, from the tents of our homeless on our streets because of cuts to welfare expenditure to the deaths of millions of civilians across the world. The rising tax-spend for arms funding to over £76bn, 40% of it for illegal nuclear weapons of mass-destruction, is a confidence trick. And the nuclear levy to build Sizewell C won’t produce cheap electricity or energy security. It’s another speculators scam, the price-hikes passed on to we the choiceless consumers. We desperately need honest Climate Jobs to address the very real Climate Emergency, not unproven high-profit techno-fixes. Stop paying the £10.5BN a year to fossil fuel companies making huge profits out of energy prices the highest in Europe! And never mind stealth taxes, create a land tax now and sort out the incredible inequalities of the Council Tax. Overall, the richest 10% pay far far less tax than the middle 60%. With tax evasion and business subsidies, a cleaner may well be paying more as a proportion of their income than the owner of the office block they’re dusting, and more than the multi-millionaire directors of the businesses in the offices. The free-Market “trickle down” economics does exactly the opposite – money flows upwards for the super-rich to hoard. It’s socialism in reverse – wealth from the many to the few. Tax the Rich! And stop the lies. The companies paying the minimum wage are subsidised by the tax-payer to do so – we pay to raise the pay of the poor through Universal Credit effectively allowing the Boss to pay less wages…and less tax! Raise the Minimum Wage to £15ph to cut the benefits bill! The Rich always blame the working class for our suffering. We are expected to self-loathe: “pensioners are a burden”; “migrants are scoungers”; “the sick are scammers”. Don’t believe the mass media – all of which is owned by billionaires! We want our taxes to be used as intended – to pay for our social infrastructure, not subside the Rich. Jobs for our one-million unemployed young people, food for our four million children in poverty, help and support for our eight million under-resourced elderly, cash for the privately-plundered NHS! The simple fact is that the Boss Class are liars, scammers, scroungers and a burden on us all. We’d be far better off without them, in the hundreds of billions! Tax the Rich!
My weekly Comment in the daily Plymouth Herald (18.11.25), seriously outraged by the latest racist policy drive of the UK so-called Labour government. Writing on Sunday for a Monday morning deadline, the article could not consider the later praise heaped-upon Home Secretary Shabana Mahmoud by the Tory Badenoch and Reform UK’s Farage. Most notably the fascist Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) claimed a victory over the government, won by street protest and flag-hanging he boasted. Of course, the open racists bay for more – the more you give the more they demand – arguing for the withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights. And of course, the few Labour backbenchers raising concerns are too few and too whimpy to have any effect on the coming Commons vote. Starmer emptied-out the Labour Party of the entire Left – there’s no-one to call-out Mahmoud’s reactionary anti-human bile.
The unexpurgated original below:
Britain is NOT being torn apart by illegal immigration. We are NOT divided by migrant workers or cultural differences. This country is NOT being overwhelmed by asylum seekers or Islamic Sharia Law. Labour’s Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is completely wrong. There IS an attempt to tear Britain apart – not by young Black men but by racist and Islamaphobic hatred. People of colour are being threatened by violent white thugs on our streets, organised and whipped-up by Nazi-Seig-heiling fascist cadre. The Union Jack and Cross of St George flags have been weaponised as public emblems of white supremacy, flying lamppost-high, hoisted on the testosterone of male dominance spewing misogyny as well as racist threats throughout our communities. It is the far-Right that must be challenged, not those escaping war, climate devastation and famine. The flaggers follow a fascist ideology, an import from the White-nationalists of the USA and the so-called-Saxon Aryan descendants of Nazis from greater-Germany and Scandinavia. Check out the AfD in Germany or the rebranded ultra-nationalists of Denmark and France. Patriotism my arse! Britain IS at risk of being torn apart by false propaganda of the far-Right, much of it imported and funded by white supremacists in the United States of America and Europe, including the World’s wealthiest man, Elon Musk. Mahmood, Badenoch and Farage are shifting to echo the fascists Yaxley-Lennon and Tenconi in importing Trump’s violent deportation policies. Will we soon see plain clothes thugs deputised as Border Force state agents terrorising the streets and rounding-up non-whites in workplaces and communities, caging and deporting them without appeal? People seeking refuge and asylum from are human beings with families. Yet Labour is looking to end Article Eight of the human Rights law – the right to family life – and Article three, the right to protection from violent or degrading treatment. Asylum seekers in permanent limbo, refugee families at risk of eviction, their children whisked away from schools, deported to a country they fled with no means to survive. Labour is looking to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights. Just what the fascists have demanded! Idiots! Fewer than two-and-a-half thousand asylum seekers have used human rights legislation in their appeal to stay. It should not be an issue. Withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights will mean the end of the rights to family life and protection from abuse. This will make us all more vulnerable, especially children experiencing abuse from relatives – 83% of which occurs inside white families here. The withdrawal will produce no material benefits, it will only strengthen the far-right. Mahmoud’s announcement is an official call to white racists: “it’s official – refugees are not welcome here, regard people of colour with suspicion, as cheats and “illegals”, as people who should be hounded-out of their accommodation and communities.” She thinks she’s appealing to the mass of voters to support Labour, but in fact she’s only appeasing the racists. The history of the twentieth century proves you can’t appease fascism. This month’s Poppy Day commemorated more than half-a-million Brits who died fighting fascism in the Second World War. They would be outraged to see the flags now adopted by the far-Right they died to protect us from! People who have lived here for up-to twenty years will, under Labour plans, be liable to be sent back to the place they fled. The threat to kick out refugees having first offered them protection is unprincipled and immoral. Mahmoud is viciously perpetuating a living condition of vulnerability, statelessness, discrimination and “otherness”. People who “look like refugees – obviously Black people – will be branded as “do not belong”, creating a caste-system of racist hierarchy. This Labour government should be held to full account on the basis of fact and human decency. Working class people in Britain are not mean and spiteful. Our culture is inclusive and diverse, and we must keep it that way or we will live under the yolk of far-Right militarised authoritarian control. Labour’s Mahmoud is not producing a more harmonious and stable nation at all, she is whipping-up the divisions advocated by the far-Right! In Plymouth the fascist-led “Flag Force” racists are planning a march through the City on 6th December, terrorising people-of-colour and spouting fascist threats against humanists and whoever they consider to be “lefties”. We are all at risk from them. Their racism and misogyny must be exposed, and they must be stopped. Stand Up To Racism!
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (28.10.25), beginning a few weeks of focus on elements of the climate catastrophe and how it effects working class people on a daily basis. It’s probably all been said before, but as fossil fuel corporate executives and their pet politicians gather in Brazil for the COP climate conference, it’s worth reflecting upon why we’re in this dire state. Of course, as usual, the Paper chooses the headline, sufficient but way off point:
Nutritional food is a Right for All
Food prices are going-up, supermarkets crying poverty. Ahead of next month’s government Budget, the powerful food industry is lobbying MP’s demanding protection from increases in taxes or workers’ rights. Supermarkets have the power and influence to bully and bribe government ministers to do their bidding. Sixty-five percent of our food shopping takes place in the top five supermarkets. They dominate our choices, our diet and the price of food. Annual food price inflation was at over 20% only two years ago, prices continuing to rise at over 5%, with butter prices up by 19% and milk over 12%. Add-on the so-closed “shrinkflation” of paying more for smaller sized packs and there’s only one result. High profits! Lidl has tripled its profits in the last year. Tescos is expecting the highest profits at over £3,000,000,000 (£3bn) this year! That’s three-thousand million pounds surplus over-and-above the costs of running the business! Food prices are rising to increase their rate of profit and still they are crying poverty! They attempt to hide their greed and extortion by blaming the government. The big five set prices amongst themselves that bear little relation to the actual costs of production. £1 for an apple? You must be joking! They grow on trees! Supermarkets are attacking increases in the minimum wage despite the fact that their employees cannot live on the minimum wage, have to apply for state help with welfare benefits to subsidise their wages (actually subsiding the employer paying low wages), and needing two or more jobs or massive overtime working to afford housing, heating and the very food they stack and serve. The top directors and shareholders are making a killing. Tesco’s chairman’s “salary” doubled to more than £9.6 million last year. With pension rights and other dividends his personal income is way over £10m a year. Sainsbury’s boss got a 20% increase adding £1m a year to his £5+m annual salary. No-one deserve such income, especially when their private wealth comes from the artificially hiked prices we pay for the essentials we need. The corporate bosses are attacking any potential higher taxation, saying they have to cut jobs to pay for increases in national insurance contributions, the increases which are needed to keep pace with the inflation that they are in part responsible for! They threaten us with job losses whilst arguing for Budget cuts to the State pensions, education and hospitals. The supermarkets limit their tax liabilities to the minimum with off-shore arrangements and transnational corporate status, yet shout through TV-ad megaphones to build public support against increases to proper taxation of their high profits. The profits go into the pockets of wealthy shareholders themselves playing fast-and-loose with their private tax liabilities. They’re scamming us. Tax the Rich! Supermarkets see the highest profit margins from the highly processed “cheap” foodstuffs, mass produced in low-wage factories. The production risks, transport costs and limited life of fresh food makes it far less profitable and are therefore discouraged by high pricing agreed between the supermarket cartel, ready meals encouraged in heavy advertising and clever “bargain” pricing. These industrially produced chemical “foodstuffs” barely contain any real nutrition. Farmers, already plagued by extreme and unpredictable weather events caused by the deepening climate crisis are complaining of bullying and extortionate demands forced upon them by take-it-or-leave-it supermarket contractors. Migrant workers are subjected to horrific working practices and vulnerable to modern slavery to minimise the wholesale costs of fruit and vegetables and maximise the profits of this big corporations. And the drive to minimise costs in order to maximise share prices is seeing agricultural land polluted by short-term chemical fixes, destroying the soil’s natural processes for replenishment, creating deserts in the regions we rely heavily upon for the import of food, and forcing human mass migration. We are facing global food shortages as a result. Don’t cry for the supermarket bosses, and don’t believe their propaganda. Their entire system of food production and distribution is unsustainable, deeply destructive and highly exploitative of both the natural environment and of the working classes here and across the world. We have to organise for a fundamental transformation of food production. We should revolt against their profiteering, challenge their shareholder’s demands for never-ending growth in profit margins, and not only tax them properly but cap the profits and dividends they are allowed to reap. Nutritional food should be human right for all, not a source of massive private wealth for a privileged few at our expense.
My weekly Comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (21.10.25), asking the obvious, stirring-up dissent in this city dominated by the Navy and the Trident Nuclear dockyard. The point is to raise the issues for the environmental movement here ahead of COP30. There is an acquiescence to new nuclear power which has to be challenged. With 600 words its impossible to deal with the arguments against both nuclear power and nuclear weapons together, but a longer article does. That’s why the published version is below, followed by the longer version if you have the time and commitment! No to Nuclear Power! Teachers not Trident! Nurses not Nukes! Welfare not Warfare! ☮️
Watch the movie – House of Dynamite – Netflix from Friday!
The threat of nuclear war doesn’t seem to hit hit the top ten on anyone’s worry-list these days. Nuclear radiation is all around us, from Radon gas to reactor-emissions. The new, overpriced and polluting nuclear power plants are supposed to save us from climate disaster. Why should we worry? Understand one thing. The nuclear industry is a single corporate industry uniting the technologies and infrastructure for producing both nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Weapons manufacture utilises the staff and resources required for nuclear power. Indeed, because nuclear power is so expensive and unprofitable, requiring massive tax-subsidies and ridiculously overpriced electricity charges, it wouldn’t exist without the nuclear weapons industry. If you oppose nuclear weapons you’re bound to also oppose nuclear power. You can’t have the one without the other. Why is the UK producing nuclear weapons? Shouldn’t we decommission them all, now? They are illegal weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction, condemned under international law and banned by 150 countries. They don’t stop nuclear war, they encourage it – when the US and UK produce new generations of nuclear warheads and carrier missiles, they require Russia and China to do the same, and more. In response to the bombings from USA and Israel, Iran has now withdrawn from any nuclear agreements. In response to the threat of deploying US Tomahawk nuclear-armed missiles to Ukraine, Russia is deploying intermediate-range nuclear-armed missiles. The stage is set. Trump is pushing NATO to be nuclear-war-ready – the nuclear exchanges will fly first into Europe, not the USA. There has been a “bonfire of nuclear treaties”, destroying the old nuclear order. We are in new and uncharted nuclear territory. Last month, Plymouth MP and “Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry”, Luke Pollard told us, “you all know that we are not at war, but nor are we at peace any longer.” Britain is one of 191 countries signed-up to the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) agreeing not to expand the nuclear arsenals, yet is building a complete new nuclear weapons system at the cost to the tax-payer of £13bn a year, breaking all Treaties that have sought to limit and disarm. To rearm, the UK will shift from £62bn now to £74bn by 2027, working towards 5% of GDP to be spent on military with a heavy reliance in nuclear weaponry. The total nuclear bill of £210bn should instead be spent on our deteriorating social infrastructure, schools, hospitals and welfare benefits. We have entered a new arms race as part of European rearmament, with much reliance upon nuclear weapons. We remain under the ever-darkening shadow of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). The latest book by Annie Jacobsen, “Nuclear War, a Scenario”, half novel, half scientific manual, offers an in-depth account of modern nuclear weaponry, its proliferation and risks. It’s a “must read”, not only for peaceniks and environmentalists, but for everyone. It proves how much at risk we are of nuclear war by accident if not design, triggered by unregulated, poorly-programmed and hackable Artificial Intelligence. Now it has been adapted into a film – “House of Dynamite” available on Netflix from Friday 24th October, which exposes the issues and vulnerabilities of the current deployment of nuclear weapons. Please watch it, and then join us to stop Trump placing US nuclear weapons on UK soil at Lakenheath, stop Starmer buying Trump’s air-launched B61-12 tactical nuclear missiles for use with F35A fighters stationed at Marham, and stop spending £205bn on new Trident nuclear weapons launched from the Vanguard and Dreadnought submarines destined to be serviced in Devonport, Plymouth. Join the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and say No to Nukes! http://www.CNDUK.org
_——————- The threat of nuclear radiation doesn’t hit the top twenty on anyone’s worry-list these days. We’re mostly surviving despite it. Indeed, X-Rays of our lungs and organs are routine, despite releasing the ionising radiation and radioactive particles can cause cancer by damaging DNA. We want the medical diagnosis. How many tumours are caused by radiation damage is not known. The fact of the damage is well proven, not least from the aftermath of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the meltdowns at Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear power stations. Radiation makes people sick. More locally, the naturally occurring radon gas, formed by decaying uranium found in rocks, is now the subject of controversy at Dartmoor prison – closed-down simply because of radioactive contamination. Radon is a leading cause of cancer in the UK and jail staff supported by their trade union, alongside up to 300 prisoners and former inmates, are seeking a legal challenge over their potential exposure to the gas. Uranium is the hard-to-refine ore essential to the production of nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. Plymouth is built upon the same radioactive rock and radon is a recognised threat inside our buildings. That may have been one of the criteria for Plymouth being the chosen centre for nuclear vessels and the Trident nuclear weapons-carrying submarines. Just add some more nuclear radiation to the already-present radioactive cluster, who would notice? In hindsight that wasn’t so clever. It costs the Ministry of Defence more than £30million each year to keep the 13 rotting hulks of nuclear subs from emitting the deadly pollution into our City. In any case, how would we know what radiation levels are attributable to the Devonport nuclear dockyard? We know that radiation is dangerous and causes sickness and death. However you look at it, nuclear energy is not “clean energy” as currently described by Starmer’s government. And nuclear power is not a renewable. It produces radioactive waste. In every plan for new nuclear power plants, large or small, there is no costing for the “clean-up” and storage of radioactive waste some of which takes hundreds and even thousands of years to decay to a safe level. We’ll have to just live with it, you say, and anyway “they” will solve the waste problem (whoever they are), eventually. Campaigners against the Sellafield new nuclear build are demanding that the Chancellor of Exchequer adds the cost of radioactive waste storage to the already astronomical cost of the nuclear power plant – the technology now completely outdated and redundant because of the rise of real renewables – energy production from solar, wind and wave power. The private corporations profiting from nuclear will never accept liability – the multi-billion cost of clean-up forever a liability for the tax-payer. Understand one thing. The nuclear industry is a single corporate industry uniting the technologies and infrastructure for producing both nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Weapons manufacture needs the staff and resources in place because of the much larger scale of resources required for nuclear power. Indeed, because nuclear power is so expensive and unprofitable without massive tax-subsidies and the overpriced charges to the consumer, it wouldn’t exist without the nuclear weapons industry. If you oppose nuclear weapons you’re bound to oppose nuclear power. You can’t have the one without the other. So why nuclear weapons? Surely we should decommission them all, now? They are illegal weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction, the subject of international law and banned by 148 countries. They don’t stop nuclear war, they encourage it – when the US and UK produce new generations of nuclear warheads and carrier missiles, they require Russia and China to do the same, and more. In response to the bombings from USA and Israel, Iran has now withdrawn from any nuclear agreements. In response to the potential use of US Tomahawk missiles, Russia has once again said it will deploy intermediate-range nuclear-armed missiles. Trump is pushing NATO to nuclear-readiness – the nuclear exchanges will fly first into Europe, not the USA. There has been a “bonfire of nuclear treaties”, destroying the old nuclear order. We are in new and uncharted nuclear territory. Last month, Plymouth MP and “Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry”, Luke Pollard told us, “you all know that we are not at war, but nor are we at peace any longer.” Britain is a signatory to the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty agreeing not to expand the nuclear arsenals, yet is building a complete new nuclear weapons system at the cost to the tax-payer of £13bn a year, breaking all Treaties that have sought to limit and disarm. To rearm, the UK will shift from £62bn now to £74bn by 2027, working towards 5% of GDP to be spent on military with a heavy reliance in nuclear weaponry. All this at a huge cost to our deteriorating social infrastructure, schools, hospitals and welfare benefits. We have entered a new arms race as part of the European rearmament drive, with much focus being on nuclear weapons. We remain under the ever-darkening shadow of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). The latest book by Annie Jacobsen, “Nuclear War, a Scenario”, half novel, half scientific manual, offers an in-depth account of modern nuclear weaponry, its proliferation and risks. It’s a “must read”, not only for peaceniks and environmentalists, but for everyone. It proves how much at risk we are of nuclear war by accident if not design, aided and abetted by unregulated, poorly-programmed and unmanageable Artificial Intelligence. Now it has been adapted into a film – “House of Dynamite” a “must see”! Opening on Netflix this Friday evening, 24th October, it exposes the issues and vulnerabilities of the current development and placement of nuclear weapons. Please watch it, and then pledge to join us to stop Trump placing US nuclear weapons on UK soil at Lakenheath, and stop Starmer buying Trump’s air-launched B61-12 tactical nuclear missiles for use with F35A fighters stationed at Marham, and from spending £205bn on new Trident nuclear weapons launched from the Vanguard and Dreadnought subs destined to be serviced in Devonport, Plymouth. Join the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and say No to Nukes!
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (30.9.25) opposing digital ID. Its all about the direction of travel, the vision and goals of those promoting it. Placed in the current political context – the complete absence of workers control or democratic accountability of the tech providers – its a non-starter. Trade unions have to act now to stop the momentum.
The unedited version below:
Never having lived-under an authoritarian Police State it’s hard, perhaps, to recognise why we wouldn’t want to. A reading of history can help: Stalin’s Gulags; the overnight disappearances of millions across South American countries during various fascist or military regimes; Hitler’s mass killings of trades unionists, the disabled, gypsies, gays, Trans-people, socialists and finally Jews… why would anyone willingly accede to totalitarianism? Of course, military governance rules many lands and people today. It’s one reason for clinging-on to some semblance of democracy, of individual agency. However weak and corrupted, bourgeoise parliamentary democracy is better than rule by force of arms. Signals of authoritarian control should raise our hackles. The loss of all personal agency, subjection to discrimination and torture without any right to appeal, mass incarceration – these are all potentialities we must collectively guard against. Little wonder that in the first 3 days after its launch, the petition to Parliament opposing Starmer’s compulsory “Digital Identity App” raised over two million signatures last weekend. There have been street protests since, and the proposal has yet to be published never-mind placed for formal debate. Unprecedented! In our rapidly polarised society, the political centre decomposing – the old parties of Tory and Labour smelling of rot – both “Left” and “Right” appear to be opposing ID cards. The “Middle”, those who afford European holidays and enjoy privileges to be preserved at all costs, quite like the idea. For the Left, digital ID systems will ensure centralisation of all personal details, to be utilised not for empowerment but for surveillance, censorship and political control. At its inception, Starmer has targeted and scapegoated migrants working illegally as the rationale for “Digital ID for All”. That, of itself, is a racist act. Refugees are forced into the informal economy by laws which stop them working legally and make them survive on a pittance, exploited by unscrupulous employers. Starmer’s immediate “rationale” is obviously bullshit, pandering to racists whilst the real intention is social control in a period of mass unrest. Starmer’s dramatic announcement is actually part of an international initiative and trend for the incorporation of transnational tech companies with each national State. Big Tech is behind the “ID2020 Alliance” lobbying for “Digital Identity for All”. The ubiquitous cameras linked to your digital ID will inform the official observer of everything about you (including your individual key-strokes), big business knowing your every desire and the State compiling your every dissent. There are obvious links with both the drive to the domination of Artificial Intelligence over our economic and social infrastructure and the fast-tracking of militarisation of our society. There is a UN-backed public–private initiative advocating biometric, traceable identity systems prioritising “global interoperability and integration with state services and online platforms”, run by the likes of Microsoft and Google. This is twenty-first century authoritarian control with a spin-off for corporate profits paid from our taxes! The far-Right are in some disarray, those who oppose any State interference into personal Liberty are protesting whilst those for whom power and white supremacy is paramount are confused by the potential. Whilst he’s formally opposing digital ID its unlikely that Farage would repeal Starmer’s ID scheme were he to become Prime Minister, the opportunities to deport people-of-colour being made all too easy through 24-hour surveillance with biometric facial and iris recognition. The comfortable middle classes console themselves that “if you do nothing wrong you have nothing to fear”. Huh! That all depends upon who’s making the laws that define illegal activities. Laws can be changed overnight by whoever comes to power. An authoritarian state will curb both your financial and personal pursuits, including your recreational peccadillos. You can easily fall foul of a fascist regime. Total control is the true direction of travel: state surveillance which will be used primarily against ethnic minorities and radical groups, including trade unionists challenging exploitative managers. The digitally excluded, disabled people and elderly people risk being locked out from accessing essential services, whilst welfare benefits claimants and patients will have their entitlements cut-off at the press of a remote discriminatory button. There is nothing benign or liberating about digital ID. We must protest to prevent it before it starts.
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (16.9.25), listing a few of the policies of President Trump, representing a clear and present danger to the working class of USA, and indeed, everywhere. The speed of change must be disorientating for most of us but we have to catch-up. Fascism is off-the-leash and has to be challenged.
Trump falsely blamed the “radical left” last week, following the political assassination of his ally, Charlie Kirk. Trump’s was a far-Right call to arms by the holder of the most powerful position in the world, reverberating everywhere. He will no longer tolerate the protests against genocide in Gaza, for action on Climate and for Peace not War.
In fact the assassination of Kirk had nothing to do with the Left but did create a martyr to rally behind. History is littered with such acts. The Left tends not to have skilled marksmen nor to advocate individual acts of terrorism. We know that assassinations produce exactly this reaction of state clampdowns and reprisals.
Socialists and trade unionists organise for a collective response to exploitation and oppression, knowing that individuals cannot wield the level of power needed to live with agency and free choice. We know that a society based upon powerful hierarchies ensures the tyranny of a ruling class controlling the lower ranks, profiting from all our toil.
The “radical Left”, as Trump describes us, organises against exploitation and oppression. In very real terms, we want the end of poverty through redistribution of the product of our working lives – working for each others needs not the avarice and hoarding of multi-millionaires and billionaires. That’s obviously why the rich hate us so much that they call us dangerous subversives, we are challenging the system that they create and run for their own advantage. We deny their right to exploit us.
Trump’s State visit to the UK today will see parliamentary democrats celebrate the global leader of the far-Right , a Labour Prime Minister dancing to the tunes of a billionaire organising for totalitarian power and control.
Trump’s defence of the far-Right racist misogynist, Charlie Kirk illustrates his true intent very well. Kirk’s speeches were racist and hate-filled, the 31-year-old evangelical firebrand of the far-Right publicly arguing that Black pilots were incompetent compared with white-skinned pilots, Gays should be stoned. He opposed all gun control, abortion, denied trans-rights, denied the climate emergency, condemned Martin Luther King Jnr and the Civil Rights Movements, Black Lives Matter and the Me Too women’s movements. The misogynist Kirk promoted Christian nationalism, advanced COVID-19 misinformation and was a proponent of the white-supremacist’s Great Replacement conspiracy theory.
Trump’s represents the drive to dictatorship, seeking domination at home as well as abroad. Democracy will not be allowed to get in the way of his global protection racket, his tariffed numbers game. Trump is threatening to jail judges who rule against him, ending the separation of legislators from the judiciary, a key safeguard for checks and balances.
US military spending is at an all time high under Trump: $1trillion a year announced in April, ten times that of any other country, for new nuclear weapons systems as well as expansion of “homeland security”, despite increasingly severe poverty of tens of millions of Americans and a faltering economy.
Trump as Commander in Chief has ordered the US Army to swear-in four executives from the technology industries as Lieutenant Colonels, politicising the chain-of-command: Shayam Sankar, the CTO of Palantir (Peter Thiel’s company), Andrew Bosworth, the CTO of Meta (Mark Zuckerberg’s company) and OpenAI’s chief product officer Kevin Weil and former chief research officer Bob McGrew, (the company belonging to Sam Altman.)
The definition of fascism includes the maintenance of capitalism but through the melding together of the big corporations and the State. It’s happening, the billionaires taking charge, employing street gangs to exert terror.
Consider the conditions now engulfing America. Armed and masked men in plain clothing are beating and arresting people of colour in most American cities now, sub-contractors of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency deporting record numbers of migrants in a multicultural country built upon immigration and colonisation. This is a fundamental change to the Constitution.
Of course there is organised opposition and resistance to Trump’s continent-wide militarisation of American society. But not nearly enough, the fear palpable on the streets and in workplaces, trade unions weakened and disorganised in response.
Why is Starmer courting this far-Right autocrat? Why is Starmer enacting the same policies here? And why are so-called “English Patriots” supporting the domination of Britain by a foreign military power?
The lessons for the UK should be obvious. In defence of democracy Trump should have no place here, let alone the accolades of a State Visit. In defence of worker’s rights British trade unions should protest his appearance. In defence of equality, human rights and social justice we should take to the streets and expose Trump’s racism, violence and corruption. Only fools want the UK to become the 51st State of Trump’s Amerikkka.
Emotional Climate 