Here’s my weekly comment column sent to the Plymouth Herald for publication on 20th October – the same day as Nigel Farage was speaking to 300 loyal RUKs at Plymouth’s arena (which holds 2,500!), My article was sent to lawyers and declined – only the second time I’ve been cut in a full three years of weekly columns. The Herald published pages of interview with Farage, allowing his bile full publicity. The question is why? I will not fall into conspiracy theories and editorial alliances, but instead observe that local newspapers are extremely afraid of litigation, probably because of cost rather than reputational damage, used as a tool by those with power to bully and cajole. Ironically the UK press is probably more constrained than in the USA. Of course, with 85% of all media owned by billionaires, there’s little chance of either unbiased or objective investigative journalism. I have raised the simple issue of the lack of space for any commentary or statements to the Left of the Labour Party, leaving all socialist commentary and ideas strictly curtailed if not invisible. Yet socialists number in our millions here, and socialist movements across the USA and Europe are growing is scale and activity very fast. Given Britain’s political history its more than ironic, isn’t it, and a signal of an increasingly authoritarian right wing society. We must protest, and we did on the day!
I’ve added below a similar comment, probably defamatory by comparison with mine, published in London by an associate, as an example of the differences in editorial control. And a picture of our 100+ people protest outside the Farage rally. Anyway, here’s the unpublished article. See what you think.
The moment you believe that every criticism is a lie, that each alternative view is nonsense, that every allegation is false, all rational inquiry is gone. Such is the closed mind of the bigot.
The bigot is obstinate and unreasoning, laid rigid in a coffin of narrow-minded opinion, buried by intolerance.
Racism is a form of bigotry. Racism is the opinion that humans can be divided into separate races with human traits and capacities that produce inherent superiority of a particular race. Racism is an idea with no scientific fact to back it up. Politicians use racism, so-called “anti-woke” bigotry, sexism and prejudice to bolster their personal power and control.
Racism is having a renaissance, being made respectable by political groups furthering their own self-interest by spreading fear and loathing of “others”. For example, the idea that some human beings are “illegal” is broadcast so loudly that it is being stated as “fact”.
No human being is illegal. Those attacking “the illegals” are focussed upon people arriving on boats without a visa or prior agreement to enter the UK. The Law says the process is illegal, not the person.
The person risking a small boat to get into Britain is seeking asylum from conditions they faced elsewhere that, frankly, anyone with ability would seek to flee from. You would. But, unlike most other countries – States who have taken-in and accepted far more asylum seekers than has Britain – there is no legal route here for a person to claim asylum before they are in the country.
The Tories passed the Nationality and Borders Act in 2022, stating that if a person is in danger in their country of origin or residence and want the UK to grant them international protection, they can only claim asylum once they are in the UK. It is not possible to claim asylum from outside the UK. Most people in peril have no choice but to enter the UK without permission. There is no legal route.
Any reasonable human being would agree that the law should be changed in order to allow asylum seekers a “safe route” to apply. This would end the flow of boats and the business of those profiteering from human suffering and death by drowning.
Instead, the chancers and ideologues of the far-Right are using the situation they themselves have created to win power and influence and personal wealth. It is no coincidence that most of the prominent Tory MPs who pushed that law back in 2022 are now prominent members of Reform UK. They created the “enemy” around which they could organise reactionary opinion, hoping to regain the votes the Tories lost through their avarice and incompetence when in government.
These established racists have produced a false demon that they cannot easily control. The fascist gangs are on the streets. All Farage can do is up-the-racism! Farage’s party is intensifying the bigotry as it faces more competition from the fascist parties, promising the end of asylum altogether. Restore Britain, Rupert Lowe’s far-Right breakaway from Reform UK, is soaking up votes from Farage by promoting hatred of Muslims and Black people.
The racist Reform candidates displayed on ITV, screaming to deport all Asian people from Britain and training up white men to drag Muslims from their homes are competing with Restore Britain for credentials as the true British Fascists. The fascist street thugs, the Blackshirt bigots are baying for blood. They must be exposed and put down.
Nigel Farage is in-league with them, challenging for leadership of an authoritarian establishment based upon white male supremacy. He should not be welcome in Plymouth!
My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (6.10.26), mourning the lost opportunities for a class fight against privatisation and Austerity in Britain. Look to the French! And Spanish! Today’s mass strike in France is the key element – workers remain key to wealth creation and when we down tools we have key collective power at the point of production. Simple, but so hard to achieve. Protest does work, to a limited extent and inside the confines of social democracy. Mass Strike works whatever the society. Student protests tend to lead to mass strike when workers see their children attacked by the State, coshed, shot at and their hands blown-off if not murdered. Today’s mass strike in France has already won concessions against pay cuts. In Spain the protests have forced a General Election. this is all what has to happen here – a socialist workers’ mass revolt, not a White Riot!
The edited version is printed here. Please expand the pic at the bottom to read the published article. And please subscribe to this Blog by clicking the button in the bottom right-hand corner.
In an Emergency, Break the Glass!
There is a case for violent riots. As Martin Luther King said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.” There are a lot of people unheard in the world. There is a general sense here, too, that we have very little say over our lives or concern for our needs.
Looking across at Europe right now, perhaps we, too, should be breaking glass to regain our voice. The protests in France and Spain are advisory. School students in France have taken to the streets to publicise the terrible state of schools and colleges. They have been soundly beaten by Police, shooting them with rubber bullets. In response some have resorted to violence.
It is a core human condition of basic justice that “self defence is no offence”. No government, no municipal authority, no educational body has taken any of the students long-standing grievances on board. At heart, the extreme weather this summer has brought issues to the boil. Classrooms were at over 35 degrees centigrade, impossible to learn in, and now as winter approaches, they’re down to 15C. No-one can learn in these conditions, and shouldn’t be expected to.
Nor can anyone teach properly in these dilapidated state schools. On United Nations’ (UN) World Teachers’ Day yesterday, teachers in France took strike action and stood with the students, demanding new funding and reparations to the crumbling education estate. Unions are staging a mass strike today. France has experienced the neoliberal onslaught more recently but much faster than Britain, with €46 Billion in cuts now in train. To date, French workers have fought back against privatisation and austerity in a way we have not, with huge protests and strike action. The French government weakens and falls back one step at a time, yesterday withdrawing plans to lower wages further but continueing to freeze pensions. The protests continue. All power to the working class!
In Spain, last weekend’s street violence, perpetrated by incredibly violent policing worthy of the fascist regime of General Franco, has been challenged by a mass outpouring of anger against the injustice of the housing markets. The protests have been so large that they have forced a General Election! Local people have been forced into poverty and squalor by speculators playing the market to raise the price of homes ridiculously above anything working class people can possibly afford. In response, landlords have raised rents to prices that defy value and overwhelm the wages of most.
When those with wealth are free from rules and regulations, devoid of legal or moral constraint, they run riot. It is the rich who are violently assaulting the working classes everywhere, copying each other internationally in pursuit of private wealth at the expense of the majority. This has long been the case in Britain, one of the first countries to adopt the neoliberal economic model as an experiment, imposed by the International Monetary Fund in the 1970’s.
Margaret Thatcher ensured the privatisation and eradication of our council housing stock that has led to today’s deep housing crisis. Her legacy, with plaudits from today’s annual conference of the defunct Tory Party, includes the highest number of people sleeping rough ever recorded. In England we have 135,000 households living in temporary accommodation including 176,000 children. It will take 119 Years to clear housing waiting lists. We have parasitic housing corporations charging exorbitant service charges for home maintenance never delivered.
The hikes in housing costs here are unaffordable and, in their consequences, wholly illegitimate. And yet the Tories and their ex-colleagues who have fled to Reform UK, braying in their respective conferences, are promising more deregulation and more free market competition, planning to suck the very lifeblood out of working class people.
In comparison with the French and Spanish, we have just let the deep crisis across all social services happen, unopposed. We few who do shout out are bombarded by screaming Blackshirts saying the housing crisis is all the fault of migrants, the schools dilapidation caused by Black children and Muslims. These racists are the lackeys of the landlords, whipped-up by flagrant lies to secure and protect the exploitation of the property-owning elite. Fooled.
There is another way. We can fight back. Take to the streets. Demand housing regulation, legally enforced rent caps, public investment in education and social care. Learn from workers and students in France and Spain. That’s the element of rejoining Europe worthy of chasing!
My weekly Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (29th September 2026), addressing the Labour Party Conference from afar. This was written a day before Burnham’s speech which sought to rally a beleaguered Party around working class issues. I stand by what I wrote. It was pie-in-the-sky with sleight-of-hand pledges, for example, cutting the pensioners triple-lock security while promising unspecified future help with social care. No mention of the challenge of rising fascism, racism and misogyny, and whispered asides on climate change and war. Capitalism is in global polycrisis globally and this Prime Ministerial address drowned in its denial. Time will unravel the pledges and expose the deceit.
Below is my unedited draft, or please expand the picture to read the published version. I would not have chosen their headline. Here’s mine.
We need an international socialist movement
When a prime minister declares they will not be calling a general election you can be sure they’re under mounting pressure to do so. The honeymoon period, the “Burnham Bounce”, is already over. Burnham is facing a winter of crisis and chaos borne of Austerity economics, war and climate catastrophe.
Political activists, left, right and centre wanted to see the back of Starmer. Whatever your concern, he wasn’t helping. Of course, in a class society based upon extremes of wealth and deprivation, individual power and competition, you can’t please everyone all the time. But it takes a special skill to please no-one at all.
You have to choose sides and take a political position. And Burnham has.
Quietly, and with a smile that Starmer could never manage, he’s carrying-on the same old “pro-growth” Great Lie of all his predecessors. In this rapacious class society, “growth” and “re-industrialisation” can only mean more profits for the super-rich and their corporations, almost exclusively the military-industrial complex.
Labour, as always, ends up doing the jobs for the Rich that the Tories couldn’t get away with.
How? By tying the trade union leadership to its governmental coat tails. Generally, unions don’t fight a Labour Government even when their members re under terrible assault. The collective strike wave of 1978-9, labelled by Tories as the “Winter of Discontent” was an exception driven very much “from below” by workers plunged into poverty by Labour policies forcing wage restraint and welfare cuts amidst high inflation.
Overall, UK poverty was lower in 1979 than today despite a much larger economy. The rich have gotten richer, billionaires’ wealth rising five times as fast as the average earner.
The lack of TU action has allowed the far-Right to fill the vacuum of zero representation for the beleaguered working class. It’s happened time-and-again in our history. But this time the level of fascist organisation across the world funds and informs the most serious threat to democracy.
Yet Burnham is looking rightwards, seeking to compete and placate the racist bigots when he should be beating back the corrupt profiteering of the super-rich landlords and corporate executives.
Rather than taxing the super-rich and spending the money on council homes, he’s announced loans from the taxpayer for the private purchase of first homes, protecting the profits of the banks and mortgage companies.
Rather than repealing Tory laws and producing a legal and safe application route for asylum seekers, he’s using the refugees from the global south as whipping posts to outdo the neo-fascists.
Rather than publishing last year’s UK government climate national security report suppressed by Starmer, he’s briefing other governments on impending collapse of ecosystems across the world whilst opening-up Rosebank and other fossil fuel sources at home.
Rather than damning Israel’s genocide in Gaza he’s still licensing the supply of weapons made in the UK to Israel, and allowing the United States to use UK bases to wage Trump’s illegal wars in Iran and Yemen.
Through all this runs the reason why the ruling capitalist class sometimes prefer the ostensibly pro-worker Labour Government to an honestly pro-Capitalist class Tory or Reform led government. Labour can get away with more without a class war.
Labour plays the bait-and-switch approach, offers the sweetener for the bitter pill, provides a prettier fig-leaf over the latest abuse, the window-dressing hiding the back-stage offensive.
So give a small amount of extra cash to councils and communities to cover-up the massive tax-allowances to the finance corporations.
Allow Milliband wax-lyrical about green energy targets whilst continuing to subsidise and protect fossil-fuel use and the extreme profits of the oil companies.
Labour has not committed to anything called “socialist” for many generations now. Callaghan made cuts to the Welfare State much larger in one full-swoop than anything Thatcher managed. Blair privatised more of the public estate than any other prime minister ever. Starmer followed in Blair’s shadow, and worse.
Capitalists depend on our taxes to fund the modicum of social infrastructure they need for workers to be fit enough and able to travel to work. We pay for our health and social care, not them. Sometimes they accept a about Government to rebuild the modicum of social infrastructure they need for workers to be fit enough and able to travel to work. We pay for our health and social care, not them.
Burnham is not a socialist. He’s a player. And his Labour government will continue the role of administering Capitalism on behalf of the interests of the capitalist ruling class. This will result in more racism and persecution of minorities, more war, more climate chaos, more inequality and poverty.
And every Party to the Right will produce an even worse result.
The political divide is strengthening across Europe and the US with new socialist forces growing rapidly. It’s time to reassert international socialist principles and fight for workers’ rights. In Germany the far-Right has electorally taken the East whilst the big cities have shifted far to the socialist Left. In the United States the openly Democratic Socialist Party has endured the election of Mamdani in New York and is building a serious left alternative to Trump’s militarism, racism and misogyny.
Its time to reassert socialist principles and fight for workers’ rights. Declare yourself a socialist, for a system based upon meeting human need not private profit, challenging exploitation and oppression, for equality, Peace, climate action and redistribution of wealth to eradicate poverty now!
My weekly Comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (1st September 2026), trying to counter the wall-to-wall right-wing media coverage of the prisons crisis, each and all focussed on the threat from criminals when there is less threat now than for decades. Of course, a separate piece would place the issue within the wider crisis of the entire public sector, detailing the politics and impact of Austerity. But on punishment versus rehabilitation alone, the issue of humanity and welfare rips large. My unabridged article below, or click on the picture to expand to read the printed version. Please subscribe to my Blog (below)
There are some very very nasty people who should not be free in any decent society. That’s why we have prisons, largely due to the absence of any community resources that can adequately manage their behaviours.
The record numbers of prisoners represents a societal demand for punishment rather than rehabilitation, not an increase in crime. Right-wing governments have demanded longer sentences whilst cutting community provision to the bone. Politicians believe voters want vengeance not welfare.
As a consequence, according to the Prison Reform Trust, over the past two decades the prison population has grown dramatically. Sentences have become longer, and the use of custody has expanded. Yet It may be of some solace that the nearly 88,000 prisoners constitute just 0.13 of the population.
Domestic burglary and vehicle-related theft have fallen dramatically. Robbery has also fallen substantially. Most of us behave.
The victims of crime are rightfully pained and mostly traumatised, the threat of repeat a constant nightmare. Many simply demand that rehabilitation of the offender is offered to ensure common safety when back in the community. The right-wing media’s Hue & Cry over early release should demand closer scrutiny. The hang’em-and-flog’em brigade want jailor’s keys thrown away. Most of us do not.
Vengeance is rarely the demand. Firstly, the majority of manslaughter does not occur at the hands of psychopaths. Killings happen due to a wide range of immediate circumstances and are not predetermined, the families of the convicted suffering for their imprisoned loved-one almost as much as the bereaved.
The majority of those convicted represent little further risk, although the Dickensian conditions of our brutal prison environments may well dehumanise them into a mindset of survival that embitters them before release.
Secondly, violent crime in Britain has decreased by 80% since the mid-1990’s, the chances of being a victim of violence today are lower than anytime in our history. You may not know this because there is a current focus on vicious criminals roaming our streets being whipped-up in a politically directed media frenzy.
There are fewer than 500 homicides a year, 499 in 2025-6 – the lowest since 1973: murder, manslaughter and infanticide representing 1 murder in every 130,000 people or fewer than 2 across the entire population of Plymouth expected in a year. All manifestations of violence have declined, according to all crime surveys and recent research by Cambridge University. Knife crime is down, decreasing as shown by admissions to hospitals for stab wounds, a fall by a third since 2019 from 5,000 to 3,800.
And 60% of those in prison have committees sexual offences or crimes against the person, none due for “enhanced early release”. 4% are people who can be described as “political prisoners”, those who have protested against elements of the system, including people of conscience opposing climate devastation or genocide and received harsh sentences.
18,000 places are taken-up by those on remand, held for long periods due to the court backlog – doubled since 2018 and the highest number in 50 years. 10,000 of those are foreign nationals on-remand, easily identifiable and instantly imprisonable by the Police, with many of those found not guilty when finally brought to trial. The racial profiling in the “justice system” is well documented.
Looking through the prism of class society, the latest study in 2021 found that people from England’s 10 most deprived local-authority areas were imprisoned at about 307 per 100,000, compared with 30 per 100,000 in the 10 least deprived areas, a roughly 10-to-1 difference. Prisoners are disproportionately likely to have experienced unemployment, homelessness, debt, unstable housing and other forms of disadvantage.
Poor and deprived people are disproportionally over-represented in prison, while multi-millionaires are vastly under-represented. That the rich commit crime cannot be questioned. We don’t need to interrogate the Epstein Files or Baroness Bone to recognise the ruling class’s range of sexual offences and domestic abuse through to grand larceny, huge tax-evasion and fraud. They are facilitated to defend themselves. We are not.
There is one law for the rich and another for the poor. The ruling class promotes and creates the fear and judgement upon thugs and “illegals” in order to divide the working class one from another and prevent us challenging the gross inequalities.
After nearly 20 years of austerity economics, the super-rich doubling their personal wealth, it is not just the prison service that is in crisis. Community provision and welfare support has been slashed. Courts are in backlog and Probation Services on their knees following failed Privatisation that sucked public money into the profits of private contractors and demolished the services, requiring expensive renationalisation..
In London, the investment in community services including youth centres and provisions has reduced knife crime. The £50k a year cost of keeping someone in prison is better spent on preventive services in the community, and restorative services including support after release from prison.
My weekly published Comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (4.8.26), responding to the previous day’s outrageous press conference staged by Reform UK detailing the use of naval warships to prevent refugees crossing the English Channel “by all means possible”. They had the audacity to invoke the European Human Rights Charter in defence of their proposed military challenge to asylum seekers, all the while pledging to delete human rights laws the moment they gain office. RUK must be stopped! Prior to their announcement I had planned to publish commemoration of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and the peril we face with continued nuclear proliferation and threats. We have a stall on Saturday 8th challenging the nuclear weapons manufacturer, Babcock, in Plymouth City Centre (Armada Way Piazza, 11-2pm). But that has to wait – the immediate challenge to the far-Right has to remain paramount. Expose the threat of fascist rule.
The full text below, or expand the pic for the published version (much the same):
There can be no such thing as an illegal human being. Our individual actions may break a nation’s laws, and different countries have different laws, making The Law different from universal human conditions. But no-one can be called “an illegal”.
Those who choose to label others as illegals are dehumanising the person and devaluing life. It suits those who seek power and privilege and status in the pecking order of class society. Creating division through proffering privilege and entitlement does a job for class rule. Identifying a group as unworthy, undeserving or illegitimate has been an overused and ancient ploy of those seeking or wielding power.
So calling refugees “illegals” has a big job to do for the far-Right everywhere. Trump deploys his power through his ICE thugs kicking down doors to seize “illegals” from their beds or workplaces. The neo-Nazi AfD in Germany organise street gangs to burn migrants homes. The far-Right nationalists, Reassemblement National, rabble-rouses for xenophobia and antisemitism. Spanish fascist groups smash-up migrant meeting places.
In Britain, Reform UK and their fascist breakaway, Restore Britain, utilises all the lessons from the far-Right across the globe to build hatred and division here, targeting Black people seeking refuge by undertaking one of the ostensible perilous sea journeys across the English Channel.
On the surface, “Stop the Boats” is a very sensible suggestion. No-one should need to risk their life to reach safety. And no-one should profit from another person’s misfortune. But the boat campaign is a cover for ultra-nationalism, white-supremacy and racism.
The call of reform UK for a “Fortress Britain”, pledging to launch ‘the biggest military operation in the Channel since World War Two’ to end migrant crossings. They picture British warships capsizing small boats and dumping survivors back on “foreign” shores. Engaging the UK military against Africans and Asians is designed to evoke a mythical and fanatical patriotism from a British Empire that was always questioned and can never exist again.
In truth, they seek power for themselves by blaming and scapegoating the most powerless and stateless of human beings for all the ills of the society.
Be clear, an immigrant is someone who has crossed a border and can still go home in safety if they choose. A refugee is someone who has crossed a border because home is no longer safe at all. Asylum seekers are simply refugees waiting for that truth to be recognised on paper.
Confusing, misnaming or bad-mouthing these categories is a purposeful and deceitful lie with the intention of “othering” the “foreigner” and people-of-colour in its broadest racist incarnation. It is the tip of the ice-berg of propaganda aimed at putting a white-supremacist government into power to protect big business and the billionaire financiers of this bile.
The people on boats are homeless and stateless. Those seeking refuge come mainly from countries where UK-based corporations have sold arms for the wars over extraction of fossil fuels or rare metals, wars that have pulverised entire regions. And they escape regions rendered no longer habitable for human communities because of the climate catastrophe scorching and deluging their lands with floods and famine. Should we expect them simply to die, presumably because we view them as lesser humans, inferior to us?
Let them in! Refugees are Welcome Here!
Britain can afford to help. Our NHS is not in crisis because of migrants – it depends upon them. Our housing is not in crisis because of migrants – rents and mortgages are too high and property speculators only invest in high short-term returns. Our water is not overpriced and rivers wholly polluted because of migration – it’s the avarice of private shareholders! Our low wages are not caused by immigration – Capitalist, large and small, always seek to pay the least to gain the most private income from their business.
Racism is whipped-up intentionally to divide the working class one from the other and prevent collective opposition to the profiteering, landlordism and exploitation of the ruling class. We should not be fooled. Trade unions will openly expose and challenge racist and fascist organisations targeting Plymouth.
My Comment column this week, printed in the daily Plymouth Herald, challenging the deceit that there is no money for Welfare. At an ailing 72 years of age I declare a personal interest – we need more money for Adult Social Care. And the money’s there! I hope you agree.
Do we care so little for ourselves? The majority of us will suffer with a chronic condition by the age of sixty-two. One in seven of us will require others to care for us full-time through our final years of life in full-on residential nursing care. Many more will need three-times a day home care with washes and toileting. It could be you!
Yet, in a State budget of £1,220 billion in 2024/25, Adult Social Care – looking after those who have difficulty looking after themselves – has an overall spend of just £35 billion, itself part of the “social protection” budget which includes housing benefit to a total of £130bn. Paltry compared with Health (£165bn), the state pension (£124bn) and debt interest (£105bn).
Prime Minister Burnham has staked his “political capital” (whatever that may be) on sorting out social care. Clearly, this can’t be done without spending more money. The narrative has already been skewed in the direction of us all having to pay more even while Britain is the 6th wealthiest of 195 countries and Britain’s richest having increased their private wealth by 65% since 2019.
That the money for social care could be found if politicians desired, is proven by the simple fact that governments can find the money whenever they need it. Take COVID, £35bn (yes, the same amount as the total for social care) spent on Lockdown inside 20 months, including the missing £10bn lost in contracts to “preferred suppliers” (political mates) in contracts for protective items never supplied.
And never mind financial rules, outside of political party pledges and manifesto commitments, this year alone, some £25bn is being added to the arms and military budget in a single fell swoop, £14bn of which is to be spent on illegal weapons of mass destruction – nuclear warheads.
We can find the money for social care easily if we want. The money for adult social care is paltry at the moment, the tiny sum excused by government pleas of poverty and indebtedness. How about changing the debt repayments, the bankers and financiers could live well on half the interest rates currently paid – a government action first applied at a time of war or social crisis. We are in a social crisis.
And a rent cap, and mortgage interest cap, preventing excessive profiteering by landlords and banks from our essential requirement of a roof over our head, would cut Housing Benefit costs significantly, the money transferred to social care. The government could replace the sacked tax inspectors to ensure the more than £60bn per year in current taxes left unpaid by evasion and fraudsters is collected. They could nearly triple the adult social care budget overnight!
A Wealth Tax, by whichever permutation you would wish to enact it, would rebalance to a limited extent the gross inequality found in Britain today. The top fifth of UK households own 63% of the country’s wealth, while the bottom fifth, including two-thirds of those needing social care support, holding together only 0.5%. The richest 10% of UK citizens possess nearly half of all the nation’s wealth.
Britain’s social care system has been broken by the neoliberal free-market brutal system of raw capitalism. Privatisation. More than 85% of adult social care operates inside the private for-profit sector of the economy, relying on an an abused migrant workforce paid minimum wages. Social care workers are the most exploited and oppressed of all our 6.2 million public service workers who together have not had a real-wage increase in the past decade despite rampant inflation caused by excess profits. Cap profits, pay the workers!
In fact, Capitalism depends upon the Family to sustain a society based upon class exploitation and private wealth. The National Care Association identifies that more than 4 million of us operate as the primary carer for adult relatives, unpaid and ill-considered, representing at least two lives plunged into poverty for every one of us in need.
Don’t accept the lies and deceit of arguments for us to pay more if we are to enjoy a comfortable old age. We already pay enough, our taxes simply falling into the wrong hands through the wrong priorities. Engage with the current “national conversation” to demand prioritising social care over private profit!
My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (7.7.26), intentionally poking a sideways jab at Nigel Farage, his £5million bung from a billionaire, alongside many other dubious “donations” much in the news right now. I was encouraged by a Vox pop 10 second interview with a working class woman on BBC radio, saying “if someone gave me £5 million I’d take it…”, as f anyone was ever going to! Farage says “nothing to see here”, and indeed, his is the tip of iceberg of corruption for which he’s neither the first nor the worst. But he’s a far-right racist bigot, and his corruption should be made an example of, even if he and his followers think there’s “nothing to see here!”. Unbridled vicious Capitalism, very visible indeed.
The unexpurgated version here or read the printed version by expanding the pic below:
One million pounds is a lot of money. £5million is a lot more. Based on current UK tax and National Insurance rules, a worker employed full-time from age 18 to 67 (a 49-year career) will finish with lifetime earnings of just over £1m if they earn the National Minimum Wage, or £1.5m if they earn the average UK median full-time salary. £1million is a working class lifetime.
The median UK household disposable income (after taxes and benefits) is approximately £37,000. Roughly 30% of UK households share an income below the minimum acceptable standard, well below the national median. Those households never see £1m in their entire lifetime.
And for those of us who earn a million or two in our lives, the fact is it mostly goes out again – we have to spend it all to survive. The lucky minority, investing in property, may accumulate a package by retirement age, much of which will be spent on our own health and social care in our final years, and what’s left may help the next generation. Working class wealth largely depends upon inheritance – it’s far harder to become wealthy and shift up a class by your own efforts.
If you’re born into wealth, it’s a doozy! An investment of £1m in the UK will earn a return interest of between £30,000 and 75,000 per year, cash, about the same or more than the average income from working. One million pounds is a lot of money. Imagine the investment income of a billionaire (a billion is a thousand millions) or a trillionaire (a million million)!
The above is an explanation of why socialists call the working class “wage slaves”. The employer-class pay us to make money for them, only for us to have to pay them back to be fed (badly), watered (hmm, water companies) and housed (poorly, overall), with little or no personal agency except for a week’s holiday if we scrimp and save. And for this we have to do as we’re told, watch what we say, and serve “The Man”.
Yet, as President Trump eulogised last week at his, albeit spartan celebration of the founding of the Great USA, the American, nee Capitalist, Dream is a back. The myth that we can all be millionaires is being sold to us again. We should aspire to millionaires, value and adore millionaires.
It’s here in the UK, too. we are expected to believe that millionaires are best placed to lead us and make decisions for us. Most strangely, the far-Right MPs who receive millions of pounds in “donations” are targeting the poorest in the country for votes and extra-parliamentary support. There is a tradition here dating back to the first working class suffrage of 1867 – the wealthy bought the votes of ordinary men with bribes or jobs or gin.
In return, MPs were bought by big businessmen seeking legal privileges and a competitive edge. Today, the proportion of multi-millionaire MPs in the House of Commons is over 50%, hidden but assessable, much higher than the population where fewer than 5% are millionaires.
When we read of a single politician, self-publicised as being “anti-Establishment”, receiving £5m from a billionaire and “millions” more from a billionaire convicted felon, his claims of being “a man of the people” must fall far short. Those who support what Trump stands for may argue that we need rich businessmen to run society because they know best how to manage “The System”
This is probably true. But why should we support this “System” that enslaves us? Britain is seen abroad as having one of the most corrupt Establishments in the world. The City of London is joked about as the western world’s laundry, cleaning wealth gained illegally – drugs, people trafficking, prostitution and illegal arms sales. As a direct consequence, the spending power of the working class in England has fallen by 20% since 2008 – when the wholesale corruption of the millionaire bankers and financiers cost us all very dearly.
MPs routinely receiving bungs weds them to corruption as the condition of the status quo. We should expose and depose every single one of them.
My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (23.6.26), glad to see the back of Starmer! One thing at a time…he’s a neoliberal free market bureaucrat for the Capitalist Class, championing Israel’s genocide and Trump’s imperialism, and smashing into working class living standards and worker’s rights to accumulate more wealth and power at the top. There’s more, far more, but, in short, good riddance to the slimeball.
Burnham is quite probably to the Right of him, so there really is no alternative to collective class struggle on the streets and workplaces.
The unedited version below or enlarge the picture to read the printed version.
Starmer Only United the Nation Against Him!
“Starmer’s Toast!” runs one headline. The sixth UK Prime Minister in just ten years has only one legacy: Starmer united the entire country…against him. Of course, the historic dislike of Starmer, the most disliked Prime Minister in British history, represented a failure on all fronts. He alienated all, Left, Right and Centre.
For the far-Right, Starmer was not racist and authoritarian enough, for the Middle the global crisis stopped any progressive reforms. For the Left his appeasement of the ultra-nationalists, warmongers, Zionists and climate deniers had no link with a Labour Party based upon representation of the working class.
All of this is unlikely to be changed by the seventh Prime Minister in a decade. Tensions are heightened in this time of polycrisis. Could Starmer have done better? Certainly. But he was specifically installed as a corporate careerist managing a short-term systemic restructuring of The Party plc.
Starmer inherited the largest-ever membership numbers in an active Labour Party. His back-stabbing treachery and continuing vengeance against Corbyn and Corbynistas emptied-out the Party’s activist base at the behest of his wealthy donors, the capitalist elite benefactors of media entrepreneurs, bankers, oil and arms companies.
Trade unions funding the Labour Party were neglected and delivered far-short by comparison with Labour’s corporate whoring.
Despite the Labour Party’s complete reliance on the tens of millions in funding from the trade unions, he knocked us aside. Starmer copied and amplified many of the policies of the previous Tory governments that had bled-dry the Exchequer and handed our tax-billions across to the private sector.
He alone cannot be blamed for the crisis of housing and health services, nor the maintenance of four million working class children living in poverty. But his immediate support for the Tories’ two-child benefit cap (poor judgement) and cuts to disabilities funding provoked universal distrust from the beginning, and stayed despite U-turns.
The far-Right and Reform UK were the sole benefactors of Starmer’s bureaucratic elitism, No 10’s careerists completely cut-off from our day-to-day lives and pandering to brutal neo-fascist demands of vengeance against refugees arriving in boats, offering no safe route for asylum. These past two years have materialised an ideological and violent assault on democracy and human rights characterised best by the race-riots in Belfast that Starmer failed to call-out as terrorism.
Under Starmer, Labour sought to prove its nationalist credentials, echoing calls to restore Britain’s empire and bowing to Trump despite constant rebuffs. He committed to raising defence spending to 3.5% of GDP as the world’s third biggest spender on nuclear armaments – illegal weapons of indiscriminate mass murder – at the expense of our welfare.
Let’s be clear, Starmer slashed disability welfare; armed a genocide; arrested pensioners for protesting against genocide; allowed Trump our bases to bomb Iran; diminished rights to trial by jury; appointed a convicted child sex offender’s best pal as us ambassador; ripped up Indefinite Leave to Remain rules plunging migrants into homelessness and fear.
And, given that the climate crisis threatens every element of our social fabric, means of production, security and stability, Starmer’s readiness to cut cash for transition away from fossil fuels exemplifies the hypocrisy of a State tied to the billionaire corporations rather than our basic human requirements.
What now? We should expect more of the same. No new leader can change the general conditions. The next Labour Prime Minister, whoever, will continue the austerity assault on the majority and follow in the footsteps of Starmer’s demise. Unless directly challenged, the far-Right will continue to grow out of the disillusionment with democracy.
This epoch of instability and collapse of the old world order demands a socialist revolution, to oppose the racists and fascists, redistribute the disgusting levels of wealth from the corporations and restore working class living standards.
We should not rely upon politicians – the future is ours to create. That requires extra-parliamentary activity, for an end to war, an end to fossil-fuelled industry, and end to poverty. We have to fight for ourselves as workers, in collective activity that challenges power at the top. This means campaigning on the streets, and in our workplaces for progressive policies based upon worker’s rights and social justice.
The heat is on, and with millions of workers suffering from record temperatures this week, the immediate demand is for a top temperature after which we are not expected to work but still get paid – just like the statutory minimum temperature. That’ll make a far greater difference to worker’s lives than any new Prime Minister. Everybody out on Heat Strike this Thursday!
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!
