Tag: news

Heat Strikes not Heat Strokes

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly Comment published in the Plymouth Herald newspaper on 7th May 2024, urging the trade unions to take-up the call for maximum temperatures in workplaces, and for union reps to negotiate protections with employers. The trade unions, matching the leadership of the Labour Party, have detracted from organising on the issue of Climate Change and the impacts from the consequent extreme weather, and this has to change. Unions will have to challenge the Labour leadership ahead-of and immediately after the Party’s victory at the upcoming General Election. We must organise for that, now! PS, the weather is scorching hot today!

The ground is drying out at last. Local farmers are sowing and planting, seeking to supply us as well as compensate themselves for the over-winter losses.

We’ve had extreme levels of wet weather, already most of the average annual rainfall by the beginning of May. The soil has been too wet to work without destroying its composition, the winter crops rotting. 

This is just another example of The Change. No-one is honestly denying that Climate Change is with us, even if those wedded to fossil fuels and their private SUV’s want to argue against the cause. 

The speed and scale of change is not natural. Global warming is caused by the massive emission of gases, CO2, nitrous oxide and methane overwhelmingly produced by human methods of production, that trap heat inside the atmosphere causing land and sea to warm and expand, emitting more heat-trapping gases. 

The result is more extreme weather and the extreme shifts between weather patterns. One minute drenching down pours, the next, skin-burning heat. At a global level, deserts may be suddenly flooded, as in Dubai last week, or flood plains quickly turn to dust as in some southern states of the USA. 

The British Isles has seen the wettest winter and spring alongside it being the one of the warmest in record. The global heating creates more evaporation across the Atlantic and that produces more precipitation, rain to fall down on us. It’s going to get warmer but wetter, and most importantly, less predictable.

Nevertheless, every time the sun peers through the increasingly heavy and dark clouds, newspapers will carry front page news proclaiming “What a Scorcher!” with photographs of families lounging on beaches. Rubbish!

The majority of us will be at work, whatever the weather or time of year. And those outside will be at increasing risk of sun burn.

The extremes of weather will produce extremes of temperature, with unprecedented heights of heat waves becoming more frequent in the UK. 

High temperatures can be fatal for many elderly people, infants, disabled people and also workers exposed to heat for long periods.

The lack of health and safety regulations in the UK means that there are laws on working in the cold – minimum workplace temperatures below which you’d can stop work – but no laws on the maximum temperature. 

In recent years, because of global warming, heatwaves across the USA and Europe have led to the deaths of workers either in the outdoors or in extremely hot workplaces – building sites and kitchens are two examples, but glass sided office blocks are just as risky. 

It should be clear that the warming climate and heatwaves are trade union issues. Workers now require protection from extreme weather. 

Here’s some examples. If we are prevented from getting to work by transport disruption, or the workplace is unusable by flooding, our contracts should ensure we still get paid. If the workplace is too hot (much above 22 degrees Celsius) we should be sent home, and if we work from home, the employer should supply the air-conditioning to prevent over-heating. 

Union representatives have to be sitting with employers now to agree “conditions of service” – workplace conditions, that recognise the impacts of extreme or severe weather and protect the workforce. 

And for all the naysayers and climate deniers who consider such health and safety as woke, just look around you. A few years ago every time we had a heatwave people used to go out and sunbathe. Now, we sit in the shade under the trees, where they’re still standing, because the heat is becoming uncomfortable. 

If our employers refuse to invest in safe work conditions we should protect ourselves by joining together and refusing to suffer the discomfort. Instead of risking heat strokes, we should organise heat strikes!

If the debate isn’t based upon Class, it is Fatally Flawed

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly article for May Day in the daily Plymouth Herald newspaper (30.4.24), identifying the continuing bosses’ offensive against workers, locally and globally. I would like to openly attack and expose the role of the trade union bureaucracy in Britain and across the world, continually protecting Capitalism from open challenge, separating economics from politics in order to curb the anger and action of organised workers. But the column is offered on behalf of the Plymouth TUC, and I therefore fall upon my own sword, a victim of the contradictions inherent in fighting for Peace with Social Justice from inside the System.

It is almost as if we are not supposed to speak about class anymore. Yet, whatever social concern is being discussed has to sit within the context of class.

We live in a society and a human world based upon social class. The class we are born into determines most of our life chances and is where we will stay – there has been almost no social mobility over the last 50 years in Britain.

The working class is by far the largest. More than half the world’s population is now reliant upon the income from gainful employment. We are the people required to work for a weekly or monthly or precarious dribs-and-drabs wage. Rather than being forced to work as a slave, we are forced to sell our abilities and hope someone will give us a job as a wage-slave.

Low wages often force us to hold down number of jobs at once, all juggled between domestic care responsibilities and patchy sleep.

In the West, wages for the majority have fallen in terms of real-spending power since 2008, while corporate profits have soared. In the southern states of the USA, wage rates have fallen so far that Chinese companies are moving businesses there to exploit the working classes now cheaper than Chinese workers at home. 

Britain, racing to be the USA’s 51st State is following suit, our social infrastructure betrayed by privatisation is catching-up with the ghetto conditions and collapsed bridges of America.

In challenging all this, trade unions continue to struggle to organise workplaces against exploitation, for decent wages and conditions, workers’ health and safety, and social justice in our communities.

Unions are hated by many. Middle Class property owners despise the notion of human rights that demands responsibilities and liabilities of those with towards those without. Shareholders and corporate executives want to tame or smash unions as every penny extra won for the worker is a penny less for their private profits. And successive governments have created laws limiting trade union activities to a minimum.

Tomorrow, more than one billion workers across the globe will actively celebrate International Workers Day, 1st May.

We will be celebrating the organisations of workers on every continent, combining to prevent unscrupulous employers from gross exploitation, expropriation of our skills and knowledge, profiteering from our hard labour, and oppressing us with unbridled bullying and domination.

Unionised workplaces have better workers’ rights. Unions challenge all forms of discrimination, organise against racism and sexism, for Trans Rights, for the rights of the disabled, and for peace not war. 

We negotiate to protect workers from the threats to life from the deepening climate emergency caused by the careless chaos of capitalist production at the expense of all life on earth.

There has been a backlash that we call a “bosses offensive”, driving down expectations and beating back work-life balance, our younger generations suffering a new intensity of “wage-slavery” and precarious employment, ever fearful of subsistence on treadmill of Universal Credit.

Trade unions here have fought back, and continue to do so with the support of the majority of the population, despite any and every inconvenience caused. 

There is a very crying, painful need for a working class assault against the greed and avarice of the employing class – the real ruling class of this country, pillaging all the essential services. A reunification of shoulder-to-shoulder solidarity across all industries and nations. 

A worker in Britain today has more in common with a worker in Mumbai or Beijing than with any of the politicians in Parliament, the millionaire TV celebrities or the corporate billionaires. 

We celebrate International Workers Day, and organise for peace with social justice.

Plymouth Trades Union Council is celebrating May Day with a festival on Saturday 4th May, marching with banners at midday in the city centre and rallying at the Athenaeum Theatre in the afternoon, with campaign stalls and the free showing of the Ken Loach film, “The Old Oak”.

And every day thereafter, union representatives will be there, organising with and for you. Join a Union!

Shame of Enforced Extradition from UK

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This week’s comment from me in the daily Plymouth Herald (23.4.24), hopefully timely in terms of this being the day when the Rwanda Bill becomes a law-defying law, and at least 6 people are drowned trying to reach Britain from France in small boats confronted by French coastguards. Until there is safe passage, there is no justice.

The law of forced extradition will come into play this week. In the next 12 weeks, a chosen handful, against their will and agency, may be taken to a place of departure by armed guards, and transported by plane to a country they have no links to and no rights within.

Rwanda has a recent record of human rights abuses. 

Five years ago the Rwandan police opened fire on refugees protesting. Rwandan security forces shot dead at least 12 refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo when they protested against a cut to food rations.

Authorities arrested and prosecuted over 60 of them on charges including “spreading false information with intent to create a hostile international opinion against the Rwandan state”. These same laws could be used against the people Britain now wants to pluck from south coast beaches and dump in Africa.

On 15th January this year, documents sent to MPs by home secretary James Cleverly admitted that “While Rwanda is now a relatively peaceful country, there are nevertheless issues with its human rights record around political opposition to the current regime, dissent and free speech.”

Absurdly, Four Rwandan asylum seekers were granted refugee status in the UK last year over “well-founded” fears of persecution. Rwanda is not a safe refuge.

Indeed, polls posted by Al Jazeera show widespread concern inside Rwanda about the refugees and the Treaty with Britain. The Rwandan economy is in crisis, there is mass unemployment and no jobs, and a housing crisis similar to that of the UK. 

Rwanda has not implemented all the promises it made in the Treaty with the British State, which has so far cost the tax-payer £340million, with estimates of the numbers of refugees likely to be extradited reaching a cost of over £1,500,000 per person.

The new Act breaks many other laws governing law-making! It prevents courts from considering laws which protect human rights and the safety of individuals. It is a law of political imposition, overriding justice, that is the hallmark of a totalitarian state.

The only rational way to understand this despicable law is as a part of a wider intensification of the racist ‘hostile environment’, openly admitted to and quoted by the previous Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, who now criticises the Rwanda Act as too soft!

Given that the Rwanda Law makes no sense, it can only be understood as a racist law forced through by a racist government. It is an ideological pledge to a small core-group of ultra nationalist white supremacists who will salivate over the public execution of punishments for those seeking refuge. It is not the trafficking gangs who will be exposed or deposed. After all, we live in a Free Market economy which values and celebrates entrepreneurs!

Clearly, the racists want us to blame refugees for all the ills of Britain today. Whilst the far-Right criticise social conditions in Britain they do not support State intervention and taxation to eradicate poverty. They may also attack the Establishment’s intelligentsia, but they support unbridled Capitalism. This is why the scapegoating of “outsiders”, “The Other” is their primary target, their violent hatred as seen at various hostels and hotels focussed upon migrants they deem “illegal”.

Their dominant theme seeks to prevent and make invisible the real causes of the destruction of our country’s welfare state and infrastructure, which is causing misery for millions of UK citizens. 

The scale of deprivation and poverty here is far too great to be possibly caused by the numbers of asylum seekers arriving by flimsy boats or lorry chassis. 

The cost to the country of corrupt deals, tax-evasion by and unconscionable tax-handouts to the super-rich outweighs the cost of refuge 10,000,000-1. 

Shell and BP profits at over £40billion, paying less than 10% in tax despite the average worker here returning a total of nearly 40% of earnings in taxation. British Gas increased its surplus 10-fold whilst millions of us ration our heating due to fuel poverty. 

Tesco made £1.5billion profit from charging inflated prices for food whilst 2 million of us are reliant upon charitable food banks, 4 million UK children suffering poverty.

The water industries paid out £70bn to shareholders whilst overseeing degradation to a point of sewage pollution in every one of our rivers.

None of this is caused by refugees and asylum seekers, how could it be? None of these refugees are CEOs or shareholders. They have nothing. Yet the working class are told to blame and indeed hate them rather than the inhuman billionaires whose private wealth has increased by nearly 50% since 2020 by exploiting us. 

No human being can be deemed “illegal” – we are each subject to the lottery of being born somewhere unchosen. Only behaviours can be described as illegal according to law, and seeking to live isn’t a felony. Becoming super-rich off the backs of the poor is certainly a a crime, or should be.

The Rwanda Act must be repealed as part of a complete turn-around of our priorities and policies. Tax the Corporate Rich, put the welfare of all first and foremost, and ensure safe passage. Refugees are Welcome Here!

Western nations refusing to break with Israeli Alliance

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My letter in the Plymouth Herald (10.4.2024) – keep up the protests! The bank holiday week including Easter Monday found my article missing, although the Thought of the Day column was inhabited. The column I wrote for 2.4.24 later appeared as this letter giving me two shouts in one week. It just goes to show what a difference the political beliefs of a sub-editor makes!

Unexpurgated below:

After 6 months, it is not going away. Indeed, the occupation of Gaza by Israeli forces appears likely to expand into Lebanon, and possibly beyond. The destruction of the Iranian Embassy in Damascus by Israeli bombs last week cannot be understood as anything other than a provocation towards a wider war.

The plight of 2.3million Palestinians remains wholly unresolved. At least 32,000 people have been killed by Israeli troops, now enforcing famine and allowing deadly diseases to spread without medical aid, the hospitals all but destroyed.

On 7th October 130 Israeli children were killed by Palestinian fighters. Since then, 13,000 Palestinian children below teenage years have been killed, according to the United Nations aid workers who are on the ground.

There can be no moral defence of such a disproportionate response. Even the UK and USA governments are forced to publicly state that much. In truth, the Palestinians have been suffering subjugation and land grabs for 75 years and more.

So the dehumanisation of Palestinians, and, by implications, all Muslims, continues as a major global propaganda exercise. What makes Gaza stand-out amidst the endless litany of wars across the world, is the sheer weight of military might unleashed by Israel, using weapons provided by the USA and UK upon a civilian population.

The imagery is of colonisation and ethnic cleansing. Israel clearly wants the land and resources of Gaza for itself in a way the Europeans succeeded in taking the continent of North America for themselves by exterminating the native Americans – some 56 million indigenous Americans killed within 100 years of the sailing of the Mayflower.

The difference today is that the whole world can see what’s going-on, and with the knowledge of recent history, can recognise it as wrongdoing. They cannot kill 2 million in plain sight.

That is why we have seen so many people protest for a permanent ceasefire and for freedom and self-determination for the Palestinian people.

Every Saturday for the past six months, people have protested in Plymouth city centre on behalf of the Palestinians. Twice each month, national demonstrations in London have seen hundreds of thousands marching on the streets, shouting for an end to genocide.

The largest gathering was 800,000 in London alone, with hundreds of local protests adding to the noise. Millions have been actively engaged across Britain, and millions more beyond. These are the largest numbers counted on protests for peace and justice in our entire history. The majority of Britons want an immediate ceasefire.

The pressure on politicians is immense. Their problem? Israel represents the interests of the Capitalist West in the Middle East, that alliance ensuring corporate profits from oil and political control of the Arab World. And sales of armaments add to the drive, making huge profits for the super-rich.

Western governments cannot break allegiance to Israel. And that allegiance blackmails them into supporting the racist ideology of Zionism that is in charge in Tel Aviv.

At the same time, the public outrage at the broadcast injustice, the inhumanity, the genocide, is a material pressure from below that risks votes and regime change at home.

So our protests must and will continue, and grow. The immediate demand is to stop exporting arms to Israel. The demand for a permanent and immediate ceasefire is the demand for a halt to the spread of war which threatens us all.

Fight for the Rights of All Children!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (26.03.24) has been fiercely edited, perhaps because of the space needed to insert a silly advert, or, for the paranoid, to turn the message into an incomprehensible and pointless mess. Or perhaps they’re getting tired of my ravings – the reason they first accepted my weekly prose! Anyway, the latest report of 4.3 million children’s living in poverty in the UK should evoke more than a rant, we need an uprising. What a shithole the UK has descended into caused by the active and mercenary actions of successive governments on behalf of the super-rich.

Here’s my unedited text, for what it’s worth:

Children’s Rights have always been controversial in Britain. The Victorian slogans of “spare the rod and spoil the child”, coupled with “children should be seen and not heard”, have echoed into today’s culture. We’re not supposed to care for other people’s kids, those living in comfort encouraged not to consider those living without.

Collectively, working class children are taught compliance from an early age, and individualistic competition by the time of secondary education, from Gladiators on a Saturday night to competition for college places by sixteen years of age.

There is competition for resources, and the playing field is far from level. Last week’s government publication of statistics on absolute poverty should shock everyone. The moral code that Every Child Matters has long since disappeared from our discourse. Developmental milestones are more delayed the more resources are limited or inaccessible. If children later receive enough food for basic nutrition they may catch-up with development norms, but otherwise they will suffer lifelong restricted abilities and poor health throughout their lives.

300,000 more UK children fell into absolute poverty in 2022-23 in the UK, registering soaring levels of hunger and food bank use. 4.3 million children here are living in poverty, 7 out of 10 of them in a household where one parent works, the level of housing costs, low pay and absurdly insufficient welfare benefits trapping families into debt and deprivation. At least 900,000 children in poverty in England miss out on free school meals.

Latest official reports show that 14 million of us are living in poverty – one in 5 of the population – far too many to be falsely explained by Victorian concepts of laziness and fecklessness. Due to the social barriers, imposed by institutional racism not innate ability, 47% of children from black and minority ethnic groups are in poverty compared with 24% of white children. 

Here in Plymouth UK, the life expectancy of a working class child born in Plymouth’s Devonport is 14 years shorter than a child born to professionals in Plympton on the opposite side of the City. To be born poor is to be born to suffer, even if the society has all the resources to ensure every child has everything they need. It doesn’t have to be like this, privilege is produced by the political system we are born into. 

Children are human beings who have yet to develop sufficiently to care for themselves. By nature, no one child is more important than another, all are dependent upon adults for years and years of love and nurture. Provision of care is therefore a universal birthright, and their society should be judged according to the level of provision of their care.

Societies based upon class privilege and fixed social stratification systemically confer greater rights on those born with inherited entitlements. And in a world of hierarchies based upon not only wealth but skin colour and ethnicity, babies suffer or benefit from the social status conferred upon their parents and families. 

Protecting personal wealth from the demand for redistribution in order that everyone can eat requires a culture of superiority, the dehumanisation of the poor as less-deserving and individually responsible for their plight.

Poverty is conferred onto the poor by those in power. We have more than enough resources for poverty to be eradicated overnight. Just consider the current profits from fossil fuels and banks, primarily responsible for the increase in the poor working classes struggling with housing costs and debt. 

This systemic injustice is exercised to the greatest extreme in war. Those with compassion are currently rightly exercised and stirred to protest by the treatment of children in Palestine’s Gaza. The killing of 13,000 children and contrived starvation of the rest in Gaza is genocide and must be called out and stopped, with those responsible facing punishment to ensure others don’t try out. We shall be marching for the children of Gaza next Saturday, for food convoys, permanent ceasefire and rights for all Palestinians.

This is not a question of supporting one group of children at the expense of another. The way we see the treatment of one child impacts on the way we treat all children. Here at home, we have to build the campaign for justice for children here too, for free nutritious school meals, for affordable nursery and childcare facilities, for liveable welfare benefits and wages. It is systemic change that is required, for massive redistribution of resources for peace and social justice. Every child matters!

Revolt Against Inequality

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Published in the daily Plymouth Herald (12.3.24) soon after the Communities Secretary, Michael Gove (a far-Right racist) made his Statement to the House of Commons redefining “extremism” to target Muslim organisations that are charitable and promote peace. The obvious whipping-up of racism in front of national elections all-but back-fired as various civil liberties organisations challenged the attack as “ideological”. Nevertheless the Tories were always only speaking to their core voter base, and whipping-up the far-right extremists into more street violence. Whether they are a central purpose or a sideline, the divisions created inside the working class have to be challenged and defeated, otherwise we all perish.

We live in the most extreme of societies. In a country of 67 million human beings, the UK hosts 177 billionaires, their mutual wealth growing by £35billion to almost £1trillion last year, their numbers swelling from profits made during the COVID epidemic. The richest 10 of them own as much as the poorest 5 million of us.

One billion is one-thousand-million. To count to one million, at a rate of one number each second without pause or sleep, would take 12 days. To count to one billion would take 32 years. 

There is no comparison between millionaires and billionaires. To own a billion pounds is to live an extreme existence, above and outside of society. And most UK billionaires are multi-billionaires. Jim Ratcliffe, of the steel company Ineos is worth £30billion, his company extracting billions in surpluses from the huge increases in charges for oil and gas. 

Household appliance manufacturer, James Dyson has £23billion, the ultra-landlord Duke of Westminster £10billion – £9billion of it inherited without paying a penny in tax. Not to mention Charlie Boy, “Basher Bill” and the rest of “The Firm” living off our backs.

Together they make their money from exploiting the workers at home and abroad, extracting the surplus between the wages they pay us and the price they charge us for the goods produced by us. 

The three named here have wealth and power beyond our imagination through over-charging us for the essential heating, housing and hygiene we have to purchase. This is the case for all the 700 billionaires in the world, together owning more than nearly two-thirds of the World’s wealth. 700 versus 8,000,000,000 people – now that’s extreme!

You only get that rich through ruthless competition, destruction of challengers, the most extreme exploitation of the natural environment and mass of the world’s working class. Death and immiserisation on an industrial scale.

No-one needs the wealth of a billionaire. It is the most extreme travesty, producing a cruel lottery of birth that determines entitlement or poverty for life. 

The vast majority of us live our entire lives on a total income of a minuscule fraction of theirs to a point where the ruling class have no idea of our day to day experiences. Such extreme division is of no positive benefit to society, completely undermining democracy and human rights.

The Corporate executives – the Capitalist class – lobby and buy-off the politicians to do their bidding. The current outrage about the racist and misogynistic outbursts of Frank Hester, OBE, who donated £10million to the Tory Party is a single case in point. Hester is sole owner of a £1billion company granted £400million of NHS and prison contracts in the last 8 years. An extreme return on investment.

Yet, with typical hypocrisy, the UK government now seeks to label those who challenge such extremism as the real extremists. The new rules propose that anyone who challenges the current status quo is a potential threat to the Nation. We who expose the lies, who condemn the warmongering, who demand investment in social welfare – we are extremists allied with terrorists!

Are we extremists when we openly condemn the corruption that has seen at least £40billion of tax-payers money pocketed by private individuals through the COVID pandemic? Is it a threat to the Nation when we challenge the allocation of multi-billion contracts for the NHS to members of politician’s families?

Is it extreme to expose the multi-faceted scandal of record profits from fossil fuels whilst 12 million of us live in fuel poverty, 2 million of us are reliant on food banks, and 1 in 3 of our children suffer poor nutrition?  Are we supporting terrorism when we show that their industries endanger the future of all humanity by warming and polluting the Planet?

Even when they promise to “level-up” they prove themselves liars – less than 10% of infrastructure commitments met. The rich don’t want to spend our tax money on us. 

Is it extreme to challenge the enormous growth in the profits from sales of weapons to countries openly committing genocide, enforced migration and ethnic cleansing? 

The latest announcements by Sunak and Gove seeking to curtail democratic rights and workers’ voices are not policies promoting fairness and open society. And the Labour Opposition has supported the policy but argues it doesn’t go far enough!

 The real extremists are labelling all those opposing them as extremists! These are the policies of the real extremists in government,  seeking to maintain the corrupt privilege and power of their class by shutting down any and all challenge.

They have played the “race card” in front of the General Election, falsely labelling all Muslims as terrorists and promoting racism in an ideological offensive aimed at dividing the working class and distracting us from the real cause of our woes – the greed and violence of the ruling class.

This is class warfare. The ultimate aim of the ruling class is to atomise the working class, preventing any and all protest or collective action. We have to fight to stop them. Those truly in support of democracy, free speech, human rights and social justice must oppose this latest declaration of their supremacy over our rightful legitimacy of Faith and ethnicity, of skin colour, of gender identity, and of collective organisation including the trade union right to strike. If that labels us as extremists, so be it.

The Time has Come to Revolt Against Inequality!

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My weekly Comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (12.3.24) saying less than enough about the vile and cynical use of Parliament by the super-rich to continually fund their lifestyles on the backs of mass poverty. Their propensity for exploitation has no bounds, their audacity to extract billions of taxes paid by us to ensure the services we need only to be pocketed into offshore personal accounts is beyond criminal – extortion and corruption do not explain it well enough. The gangsters are in charge of the World.

The idea of One Nation is absurd. We live in a class society, layers upon layers of strata, of groupings, based upon wealth and power. Britain’s Capitalist class is one of the very richest in the world, and three times as rich as 15 years ago.

This is why we have political groups, Parties, purporting to represent the interests of each of the competing classes. Democracy is meant to replace open conflict by representing the tensions through debate in Parliament and local Councils, right down to neighbourhood forums

These structures are weaker now, wielding less representation of the people and demanding less accountability of those with power than anytime in the last eighty years. The adoption of free market economics, replacing the post-war mixed economy with overt competition and privatisation, has led all Parliamentary parties to value growth in profitability over social infrastructure. That’s the basis of the common political sense that “they’re all the same”. Politicians all subscribe to neoliberalism.

There are a range of very good reasons as to why most people have little faith in politicians. In recent years it has become apparent that government policies are more based upon the influence from corporate lobby groups than the People. 

It is the owners of big business who are actually in control, Parliament no longer offering even a mediating role between the needs of the bosses and the needs of the workers. 

Protection of corporate profits is now the observable purpose of government, the success rate proven by the record profits of the biggest lobbyists – banks, fossil fuels, supermarkets and arms manufacturers.

The end result is more akin to a nation of citizens and slaves than universal suffrage. The wealth is so accumulated into primarily the top 1% and minimally to the next 30%, that the bottom 70% of those in the UK have a a sliding scale of disposable income, no chance of accumulating real wealth, and a diminishing say in society. The bottom 50% (over 30 million of us), are without any honest representation or wherewithal independent of our week-by-week wage.

Last week’s budget was a stark illustration of this. A government preaching to its core supporters, giving away more tax money to the super-rich whilst trickling some crumbs to its voter-base, the formal opposition party barely disagreeing with that general political approach.

The result. Political spin and bluster on the one hand, more unending Austerity on the other.

The headline cut of another 2p in the £ off National Insurance will benefit higher earners the most: someone on £50,000 a year will save £1,310 — five times more than a worker on £20,000 and 15 times more than somebody on £15,000. It will cost the Treasury an extra £10 billion a year that could have been earmarked for State schools and the National Health Service.

But the frozen tax thresholds will actually mean those on a salary io £25,000 a year will take home £20 less a month. The tax allowance freeze disproportionately impacts the poorest workers because a larger proportion our income being taxed, our wages being low and insufficient. Similarly, pensioners with a small employment pension (they’re mostly very small) will pay more tax.

The pre-election government propaganda was a complete lie, the Chancellor shouting “Lower Taxes” pretending to help hard working people whilst actually giving handouts for bosses and the rich. Hunt increased the VAT tax threshold for small businesses from £80,000 to £90,000 and reduced the higher tax rate on property capital gains—the amount you make from selling property—from 28 percent to 24 percent.

This means more money for bosses and for rich people with big houses at the expense of all the essential services that the working classes rely upon.

The Budget announced huge public spending cuts – £20 billion in cuts by 2028, according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies. Health & Education will see 1% above inflation increases, not matching the increase in need. Public transport, universities and councils will all see devastating new austerity measures, on top of the past fourteen years of Austerity.

Successive governments have stolen, yes, held back and clawed back, some 65% of council funding compared with twenty years ago. Local services – essential services – have been slashed, those that can make a profit sold-off, the rest devastated or demolished completely. 

We have local Councils going bankrupt and forced to raise taxes, a health crisis, a housing crisis, a crisis of our children’s nutrition and mental health, a cost-of-living crisis engineered to maximise the living standards of the richest.

Working class people are not stupid. We see and understand what’s happening. And we know when we’re being lied to. In advance of the general election, few believe it will result in the fundamental changes needed for improvements to the conditions of the mass of the working class. In historical periods of such lack of trust in our leaders there is usually revolt, sparked by the experiences of inequality and injustice. Now is that time.

Beware, Fascism is on the Rise.

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (27.2.24) trying to say too much in too little space. But the point is made, I hope, that the political games at Westminster about Gaza are intended to divide and rule us, at a time when polls and protests suggest more than two-thirds of the UK population want a Ceasefire. The unedited version is below:

Beware, Fascism is on the Rise.

For those of us concerned for the advancement of human rights and social justice, last week’s chaos in the Commons offered many warnings.

Parliament was supposed to debate a motion about the destruction of Gaza and deaths of at least 30,000 civilians, including no fewer than 12,000 children under the age of 14, all trapped without means of escape.

By the weekend we could all be excused for believing that the debate had actually been about the mortal threat to MPs at the hands of extremists and terrorists inside the UK. The original motion, tabled by the Scottish nationalists, deploring the very apparent “collective punishment” of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli State and calling for an immediate Ceasefire had been cancelled-out by self-interested politicking.

The shenanigans in the House of Commons saw both Tory and Scottish MPs walk out in disgust, leaving a Labour amendment to be voted for, unanimously by the Labour benches, declaring there should be a humanitarian ceasefire (without explanation of what that may look like), no military assault on Rafah, release of all hostages and immediate humanitarian relief.

There’s no sign of that happening amidst growing reports of hundreds of thousands now suffering malnutrition in a collective condition of enforced starvation. Instead, the UK’s Prime Minister accused the Speaker of the House of Commons to have “sided with terrorists”. 

The Tory Party had stood with Israel’s right to self-defence in opposition to the Scottish motion. The Labour Party had carefully manipulated the proposed debate to prevent the UK agreeing to an immediate Ceasefire, effectively condoning the continuation of the killing of civilians. 

It was later revealed that Keir Starmer spoke to the President of Israel, Isaac Herzog, before drawing-up Labour’s amendment, whilst the Speaker of the House, Lyndsey Hoyle recently visited Israel and that his father, Doug Hoyle, helped found Labour Friends of Israel. The complicity is obvious to all. Hoyle helped Starmer to block a vote on the humanitarian SNP motion, depriving the public of any voice.

Criticism of the policies and actions of the Israeli State is not a criticism or attack on Jews. Support for Palestinian rights – equal to the human rights of everyone else – is not anti-semitic. The level of active protests across Britain, numbering into millions of people on our streets since the 7th October proves beyond doubt that the majority opinion in Britain is of horror and outrage at the level of death and destruction in Gaza. Once again, Parliament has not represented The People, not just in Scotland but across the entirety of Britain, including England.

It is astounding, even in comparison with all the morally bankrupt political games of the past few years, that a debate on human rights – civilians should not be intentionally bombed in their thousands under any circumstances – has been used to introduce yet more laws against our freedoms and suffrage. 

This is political gaslighting: the psychological manipulation of the electorate, repeatedly challenging our understanding and perception of reality, seeking to confuse and create uncertainty, creating a passivity, giving-in to the perpetrators of the abuse.

Gaslighting can be a very effective tool for the abuser to control an individual. It’s done slowly so the victim writes-off the event as a one-off or oddity and doesn’t realize they are being controlled and manipulated.

Just as politicians impose ever-greater authority over us, they claim they are the victims. New laws are proposed for lawful assembly and protest to be further curtailed this week specially to protect MPs from us, adding to the most extreme laws against strike action and protest already enacted in the last year. Those supporting war abroad are also using it to force tighter social controls at home.

This is important. Democracy here is in chaos and being undermined daily. Authoritarianism is being advanced and ramped-up through a mix of gaslighting, warmongering and racism. Ministerial statements minimising the impact of war whilst dehumanising entire populations are used to promote the UK production and sale of ever-more deadly arms to dictatorships, warlords and gangsters on all sides.

The ramping-up of Islamaphobia by back-benchers such as Lee Anderson, Liz Truss and Suella Braverman calling for “direct action” against refugees, minorities and the Left – that is, those of us protesting for human rights – and praising the likes of Tommy Robinson, sees them empowering the home-grown fascist thugs to go on the attack, not only with their vile on-line threats and abuse but with violence on the streets. They are building a new Party of the Far-Right, of which Reform UK is seeking to become the mass vehicle. 

For the record, the majority of those here protesting for a ceasefire in Gaza are White working class anti-racists, not least because we know that racism divides and weakens us.  Our  protests for Freedom for Palestine need to be ramped-up. Those moved into action by the horror must recognise that this is not only a call for a ceasefire and international social justice but also human rights at home. 

In these volatile times it is not difficult to imagine Britain falling into a totalitarian state. All that is needed is for working class people to be convinced of imminent risk and attack from a “foreign force” alongside personal risk from the “enemy within”. This falsehood, this “Great Lie”, is being enacted. Now.

Support for Palestine Will Be Maintained

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly Comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald, published on 6th February 2024, ranting again about the genocide in Gaza. This 100+ days of rabid slaughter and wanton destruction exposes the true face of western imperialism, and the level of institutional hegemony sustained by the military-industrial complex, apparently unassailable. So confident are our masters that we can put into print almost anything, we can protest in our millions, yet they do as they please, and they bomb with pleasure. The Movement must grow.

Almost absent from news media has been the prolonged and immense amount of protest for Palestine. The numbers are enormous.

Last Saturday more than 200,000 marched from the BBC to Downing Street in London, demanding coverage of the call for a ceasefire in Gaza and the end of financial and military support to Israel  from the British Government.

The numbers in London were fewer than the November march of 800,000 largely because of the simultaneous numbers of local protests in most towns and cites, including Plymouth.

This time, a large array of of trade union banners were brandished and trade union General Secretaries spoke at the rally. Their call was for a workplace day of action on Wednesday 7th February, with students and workers showing their solidarity with stoppages, lunchtime walkouts and open air meetings. There will be such a lunchtime protest at Plymouth University.

The horror of the last 100+ days of the War on Gaza is observable through social media and on the Al Jazeera news channel, so transparently opposite to all coverage on BBC, ITV and Ch4 News as to question the ideological bent of editors on all media.

Much of the mortal statistics cannot be denied simply because of the video imagery. To see the entire North of Gaza flattened by aerial and ground bombardment makes any challenge to the numbers said to be dead and injured quite incredible. High Tech weaponry and high explosives against defenceless and homeless civilians.

67,000 Palestinians injured and 35,000 killed including at least 30,000 civilians: 15,000 children and 7,000 women, 700 healthcare professionals killed. Two million people displaced, more than two-hundred thousand homes collapsed, three hundred schools destroyed, twenty six hospitals bombed. Cultural centres, universities and mosques completely destroyed in an effort to eradicate any trace of the heritage and culture of Palestine completely.

Perhaps of the most immediate concern, the denial of food, clean water, sanitation and medicines is now resulting in hundreds of thousand of the entrapped two million human beings suffering all the deadly illnesses that sit alongside disease, malnutrition and starvation. 

All this is visible daily online. 

Quite openly, Israeli government ministers state their aim of permanently occupying the entire area and ending Gaza as a Palestinian homeland.

It should be of little wonder that the International Court of Justice has opened an inquiry into the charge of “genocide” against the Israeli State military and government. Probably of more surprise is the United States demanding Israel stop the killing and displacement in Palestine’s West Bank, albeit at the same time as supplying more military aid to the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF).

The hypocrisy and duplicity of the United States and United Kingdom, continually blocking any negotiated permanent ceasefire should be investigated as part of the crime of genocide. 

It is impossible for anyone to suggest this is a two-sided war. The scenes of suffering in Gaza are indescribable. The withdrawal of US/UK/German aid the the UN relief agency UNWRA on the challenged basis that a handful out of their hundreds of thousands of local staff may or may not have worked with Hamas is now so questionable and unconscionable that many countries are increasing their funding for UNWRA, including Span, Portugal, Ireland and Scotland.

Why is this so poorly reported? And why is our political class supporting and funding this horror so enthusiastically? The answer is a toxic mix of political opportunism, support for the power of western imperialism to impose economic and military control across the rest of the world, and protection of the profits of the oil corporations and arms manufacturers over-and-above any humanitarian considerations.

The question of social justice is always paramount for trade unionists, focussed as we are upon challenging oppression and exploitation, at home and abroad. There are undoubtedly those who seek to condemn the entire Palestinian people as deserving of this fate, but the vast majority recognise the suffering of fellow human beings as a cause for care and compassion.

Justice for the Palestinian people will require more than compassion. We need to challenge the corporations here who fund the Israeli military either by investments or the selling of Israeli goods. To end the mass killing we have to challenge the Israeli State as a settler-colonialist endeavour based upon forcing Palestinians out of their homelands. And we have to expose the political creed of Zionism as a wholly abhorrent racist ideology wholly separate from Judaism and the human rights of Jewish people. It s not antisemitic to challenge Zionism.

The protests will not end until there is a permanent ceasefire, and that means challenging support for Israel in workplaces and colleges. We need to increase the mass pressure for a ceasefire. We’ll be marching again locally every Saturday, and nationally on the 17th. The campaign will not end without justice for the Palestinian people – Freedom for Palestine!

The Right To Strike is Worth Fighting For!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

After a break, my weekly Comment published in the daily Plymouth Herald on 26th January 2024 offered an advert for the national demonstration called by Britain’s national trade union federation, the Trades Union Congress (TUC), on the following Saturday. There had been little advertising either inside the trade union movement or the national media, despite the issue. The government has passed new legislation effectively banning strike action. Public services, including education, transport and health care are subject to legal prosecution where any strike action does not maintain “minimum service levels, for example, 40% of train service or 80% of health care. It renders redundant the power of the strike action. What would be the point? This is easily the harshest anti-union law since the time of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980’s. Nevertheless, this has been the TUC’s only action on the issue. The demonstration widened a local demonstration originally called to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the campaign for recognition of trade unions at the GCHQ spy headquarters in Cheltenham (the most conservative and heavily vetted of all civil service staff), so that the national trade union bureaucracy could be seen to have “done something” whilst doing the least possible. In the end, over 5,000 activists marched proudly despite the poor organisation, and friendly reports also included the non-plussed but supportive comments of by-standers who couldn’t work out what the march was for. The spineless and weak response of the national leadership to this terrible attack on basic human rights should be a cause for outrage.

Tens of thousands of trade unionists will be marching in Cheltenham this Saturday. We are outraged. The cause should be of deep concern to all, even if hardly mentioned in the mainstream media. 

The UK’s Government for the Bosses has created a law that can force people to work against their will. The introduction of the Minimum Service Levels Act effectively undermines the “Right to Strike” – the right to withdraw our labour in collective pursuit of decent pay and treatment at work. 

Workers, such as train drivers or nurses, can be forced by law to go into work whilst being trade union members called into strike action. To defy the Law is to face immediate dismissal and potential prosecution.

To be forced into work is nothing less than slavery. More importantly, it is the end of the democratic human right be a member of trade union. 

After at least fifteen laws restricting and threatening trade union organisation made by successive Conservative governments from the 1980’s onwards, this is the most authoritarian and undemocratic of them all.

Little wonder that the Labour Party has promised to repeal the Act should it become the next government, but we are sceptical unless huge pressure is exhibited by mass protest from below – Blair and Brown did not repeal even one of Thatcher’s anti-union laws.

Indeed, Tony Blair boasted that Britain has the most strict employment laws limiting strike action anywhere across Western Europe. 

Nevertheless, in the wake of last year’s largest levels of strike action in 30 years, strikes continue.

Last week’s national strike by doctors was the longest in the history of the NHS, and more is planned. Doctors have lost over 25% of real pay in the last decade, the majority earning less than tradespeople. They are also profoundly angered by the dilapidation of the NHS they observe everyday.

Next week the train driver’s union, ASLEF, begins the next round of rail strikes, fighting not only for an inflation-rate of pay rise but also against plans for unsafe working conditions. Under this new law, the union is to be held responsible for ensuring a minimum 40% of services are maintained, neutering almost all impact of strike action. 

Teachers in schools and colleges are once again considering strike action, the conditions of our education system quite the worst in three generations. 

All these workers and more are identified by the new law and can be forced into work, all their collective power undermined by maintaining minimum services. Rather than protect the sick, the students’ quality of education or the travelling public, this new Law will simply create even more chaos and disruption. It has to be challenged and defied. 

The attacks on working class conditions and our right to collective organisation are being ramped-up in front of the General Election, asking the question, “which side are you on?”. 

What power have we as workers got, except to join together and stand in defiance of exploitation, oppression and injustice? The right to strike is immutable, and worth fighting for. 

The Trades Union Congress has called the demonstration in Cheltenham in recognition of the 40th Anniversary of the GCHQ strikes against the banning of trade union organisation in that government security agency. Workers were bribed into non-union status and those who refused, sacked. Their union rights were restored in 1997 after a long campaign. 

The lesson must be that we have to fight to win, not only by marching in our thousands on Saturday but taking the fight to the heart of government, by refusing to abide by this unjust law. 

Coaches from Plymouth are organised by the Unite trade union and others. Contact your union for a seat now, and join a union wherever you work.