Welfare not Warfare and Militarism!

March 25, 2025 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (25.3.25), raving mad about the benefits cuts. This is an attack on the poorest and most vulnerable in society, grabbing-back cash wherever possible to fund rearmament and war. This is militarism and authoritarianism, and must be defeated. We shall protest, demonstrate, campaign and oppose.

The full script below:

Say a Big Lie loud enough, long enough and across all the media and, probably, it will become an accepted Truth. Unless challenged by a louder voice.
“There’s no money” is most easily challenged when you see the government finding huge sums – billions and billions of tax-payers pounds – for war, rearmament and militarisation of society. “There’s no money” rings hollow even to the most unthinking when the numbers of individual with billions of pounds double in their own number and become, not billionaires but multi-billionaires, flaunting their wealth and the power it brings.
Of course there’s the money, it’s just not for us, the working classes.
To build the Lie, the Government is pitching those in work against those reliant on welfare benefits, broadcasting the despicable Big Lie that people are pretending to be disabled and should be forced back into minimum wage alienated employment to ensure the economic “Growth” that clearly only benefits the super-rich.
Journalists trawl through hundreds of street vox-pops to find the one disgruntled, downbeaten sod so hopeless as to hate her disabled neighbour for getting a Personal Independence Payment (PIP) instead of her. Those who call disabled people “scrounges” are at best one-step away from an accident or illness that will render them reliant on precisely the welfare they condemn. And it won’t be there for them when they need it.
Capitalism breeds individual competition from the bottom-up.
More than 1 million people in Britain will lose their disability benefits next Spring, losing mobility, dignity, help and hope. Welfare cuts are set to be part of tomorrow’s spring statement ‘package’ which will also involve planning reform, Whitehall cuts and regulation cuts.
Starmer’s condemnation of our civil services, “doing a Musk” in slashing the departments that coordinate and provide our social infrastructure, is a far-Right populist propaganda Big Lie meant to appease the forces of reaction. It will only encourage them.
A Labour government focus on attacking the poor and the dispossessed has happened before, but not to such a level as this that would make Thatcher’s eyes water. Blame the refugees, Stop the Boats are the slogans of a false narrative that obscures the barbaric levels of disparity between the Rich and the Poor in this country. For the record, the tax-costs of refugees is a minute fraction of the costs of our Health & Welfare Services, and an even smaller fraction of the hundreds of billions of pounds due but unpaid by the richest 5% of Britains.
The welfare bill is not spiralling out of control. It is at the same level as 2013, lower than 2020. The benefits cuts will save less than £5billion by 2030 to pay for an extra £6billion going into arms production. A Wealth Tax, not the same as Income Tax, skimming 2% from the personal wealth of those super-rich owning more than £10million would pull-in £24billion to the Exchequor over the same period. The rich would hardly notice the top-slice.
But the rich try not to pay any tax. There is a loss to to our budgets of at least 30% through fraud and evasion of tax due by the rich, amounting to upwards of £130billion. Yet Reeves is sacking the civil servants who could chase the money down and replenish our coffers for health and education.
And whilst just 0.2% of welfare benefits are fraudulently claimed, less than £1billion, that is what the toady journalists seize upon, not the corruption of the rich, who want us to blame the poor to take the heat off themselves.
Britain has a low pay, long working hours culture, where those with capital are free to exploit the ordinary working person. One of the core reasons we are seeing a rise in mental distress and long-term ill-health is the impact of demeaning employment, the bullying and repetitive mindless labour of low-paid shit employment ensuring a life of subsistence, demoralising us into hopelessness.
Britain’s “free-market deregulation, already extreme compared with most countries in the world, is being enhanced to allow Landlords to extort more and get welfare tax-cash to top-up their outrageous rent hikes, employers to extort more without inspection, cashing-in on Universal Credit to pay an unliveable minimum minimum wage topped-up by the tax-payer for their maximum profit.
We, the working class, are unaffordable, we’re told. Despite being the ones that pay the taxes – the Rich simply do not – we are ineligible for any rebate. We are being heckled and smeared to compete for an ever thinner slice of a mouldering cake.
It can be different: Rent caps to ensure affordable housing for all; a £15 minimum wage to end the need to claim UC uplifts; regulations enforcing a legal obligation for landlords to keep tenancies healthy and habitable; home refits to reduce energy costs; a 2% increase in taxes on income over £80,000pa; the cancellation of the US-leased Trident nuclear weapons programme freeing-up at least £210billion for welfare.
The money’s there! But Starmer, Badenoch and Farage aren’t going to redistribute any of Britain’s wealth back to the working class who produced it. We’re going to have to fight them for it. We must challenge Austerity #2 and Militarism. Welfare not Warfare!

We Have Never Been Closer to Catastrophe

January 29, 2025January 29, 2025 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (28.1.25), back on the anti-nuclear megaphone. We’ll be holding a day of anti-nuclear protest at Devoport Dockyard on Saturday 7th June – a date for your diary. Log it now!
Meanwhile, unedited:

Tomorrow we will hear the annual assessment of the world’s atomic scientists on the level of risks we face. They will publish the 2025 “Doomsday Clock”, symbolising the current likelihood of a human-made global catastrophe. The imagery was created by nuclear physicists Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer along with biophysicist Eugene Rabinowitch in 1947 as a response to the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima, and Nagasaki towards the end of the Second World War in 1945.
The closer the clock’s “time” towards midnight represents just how immediate the accumulated and conjoined threats are to human annihilation. In 1947, as the world’s most powerful nations accelerated the race for nuclear armaments and the Cold War started to become inevitable, they startled the world by suggesting we were only 7 minutes before the end – midnight. Bang!
For the last two years the clock has stood at 90 seconds.
90 seconds. It will be difficult to identify any good news for peace and prosperity in 2025. The current clock is so close to detonation because of the entire and accumulated global facts surrounding the developments in hostilities, political conflicts, and scientific and technological advances which, each or together could cause irrevocable harm to humanity.
Today we have never been closer to catastrophe, the contemporary ingredients being nuclear warfare, climate change and unregulated Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Putting to one side the contentious but poorly understood development of AI (worthy of a statement on its own and devoid of political controls or safety features), the remaining ingredients should send shivers down our spines.
The President of the most powerful military empire the human race has ever seen is much in favour of nuclear weapons, and has declared his willingness to unleash them. President Trump is ordering the expansion of the US nuclear arsenal from a free-market ideology that welcomes proliferation – let nations have their nuclear weapons, the US will simply have bigger and better ones.
And the leading proponents, Trump and Putin (and now apparently, Starmer), as noting that the new AI assisted generation of nuclear weapons can be unstoppable and make a bigger bang. Dismissing the environment-destroying radiation that makes nuclear an illegal chemical, biological and illegal weapon of mass-destruction they conceive that their “first-use” of nuclear warhead could finish a conflict in minutes. All systems are now set to “first-use, not retaliation. But nuclear weapons were never considered deterrents – just consider how much war has taken place since 1945, and is continuing today.
The true impact of of nuclear-exchange is not Armageddon at all, but the slow and painful death of the human race. After the initial blasts and firestorms there will remain billions of survivors cast into a pain and misery of internal burns, famine and social collapse. The Judgement Day scenario is a myth – Armageddon is a slow death. But hey, who cares, nuclear weapons are a cash-rich investment opportunity right now.
Trump’s fellow billionaire oligarchs include the winners of the US tech giant corporations that modern nuclear warfare relies upon. Elon Musk, friend and financier of the far-Right organisations across the world, owns 45% of all the satellites orbiting the Earth. His Starlink system, a division of the SpaceX corporation, has around 4,500 communications satellites encircling the Earth which encompass and incorporate military systems – right now coordinating all Ukraine’s military capabilities.
White racial supremacist misogynist autocrats are in charge. Whatever could go wrong [see 1930’s, Ed.]?!
Prime Minister Starmer has enjoyed feint praise from the President in recent days, mostly because Starmer is leading Europe in increasing expenditure on military rearmament towards 5% of our annual Gross Domestic Product and in particular, a new generation of nuclear weaponry. Trump has every reason to be pleased, the UK-based Trident replacement systems being licensed and controlled from the USA, but funded by the UK tax-payer.
Some £5billion a year is going towards the UK development of all things nuclear, a further £1billion a year announced for the ailing Rolls Royce only last last week. This, at the same time as more real-income cuts to education, health and welfare benefits.
The US Air Force base at Lakenheath, Suffolk has now invested $1billion in preparations for the placement of US nuclear warheads there, placing the UK on the nuclear frontline. The B61-12 satellite guided bombs have three times the destructive power of the US atomic bomb, which killed over 200,000 people in Hiroshima in 1945.
Polling shows that 59% of the population oppose US nuclear weapons being stationed in Britain. But here’s the rub. You won’t hear a right-wing nationalist ever arguing for cuts to all-things military, nor demands for more welfare expenditure. Our home-grown far-Right, echoing Trump, wants no more action to protect the working class from the storms, fires, droughts and harvest chaos caused by climate change, let alone nuclear war. Instead Farage’s crew want us to gear-up for war – internationally against Muslims and nationally against migrants and all people of colour.
This is a recipe for disaster, speed-cooked in an air-fryer. We have to stop Trump placing US nuclear warheads at USAF Lakenheath in Suffolk or anywhere here. The 59% have to make their voice heard. Join the protests at Lakenheath 14-25th April.

Climate Catastrophe Knows No Borders

January 22, 2025 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (14.1.25), returns to the climate catastrophe given the coverage of the LÁ wildfires. The impacts of extreme weather are weekly reports on the mainstream news, yet constantly downplayed, the causes denied. How long can they keep this up?

The unedited version below.

“It won’t happen to me”, the self-protective technique that breeds denial. People elsewhere are sofa-surfing with friends because their house is flooded. “It won’t happen to me”. Neighbourhoods engulfed in flames, homes and life memories destroyed in moments by wind-whipped flames. ‘It won’t happen to me”. Climate refugee the sudden new status when the insurance company refuses to pay-up. “That’ll be other people, not me”.

The climate catastrophe knows no borders. The fires in California are happening every year now, yet the hundreds of thousands of wealthy evacuees speak of shock and awe. Those flooded-out in middle-England speak, wide-eyed, of their horrific loss, family members drowned, employment income disrupted, homes waiting for years for reparations.

Extreme weather extreme polarisation in human society. The rich can rebuild, those without serious wealth left to flounder. The media obsesses over the catastrophe hitting Hollywood celebrities, but says next to nothing of the far greater calamity that has engulfed the poor of the Carolinas following the record-breaking hurricanes, or indeed those flooded out in the same week in the South of Manchester, northern England and Wales.

The priorities of the Capitalist system are all wrong. We can spend billions on weapons of mass destruction but not have the infrastructure to put out forest fires of build flood defences. And TV news ensures both fires and floods receive far more airtime than the fires from the bombs raining down in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, nor the extreme weather flooding in the refugee camps created by the wars. In this age of catastrophe the media keeps us diverted and distracted from the reality.

Farmers report each morning of another 4cm of rain overnight, the crops destroyed weeks ago and the soil becoming unusable, devoid of substance and nutrients. Birds die in their hundreds of thousands, bees mistake the season and starve, the extreme switchback between sudden freeze and unseasonable heat tricking all plant life into false starts and destructive ends.

2024 was the hottest year in 100,000+ years. Unprecedented in modern human history, and trending hotter, faster.

The warming doesn’t necessarily make the weather sunnier but simply more extreme. We’re very wet then very cold then unseasonably hot within the same week. We are living in an historically unique era of rapid climate change, now called super-warming, all the environmental drivers accelerating beyond any accurate modelling. The authorities could be excused for being caught-out by the rapidity and chaos…were it not for the fact that all this was predicted decades ago. Not only were the true causes denied to ensure inaction, but today, the adaptations required to protect us all are not in place and probably too expensive to be rolled-out in time without a systemic change of priorities.

We’re on our own. Climate change is far more powerful than any war, but is producing more war as resources and food production are pushed to the limit. Climate change is far more disruptive than the wildest dreams the most deranged terrorist. Whilst humans have always migrated across the world, climate change is producing a scale of forced migration never before seen.

Governments and authorities pour tax money into subsiding farmers for activities that deny the fact of climate change. Governments increase military spending to eye-watering proportions and at the expense of social welfare and infrastructure. Taxes are raised to ensure subsidies to the fossil-fuel companies that are warming the atmosphere and oceans towards extinction.

Public money for transformation away from global heating emissions in time to stop social collapse is cutback and cut again and again. There’s no money at scale to address the depth of the climate crisis. Those of us who try to sound the alarm are damned as crazies or extremists, and falsely imprisoned on criminal charges that used to be used only for the most murderous villains.

Corporations invest, not on any products that can slow-down the rate of climate collapse, but on gambles about the new necessities that extreme weather will produce. The pharmaceutical companies are investing in the hope of the new pandemics and insect-borne diseases produced by the warming of the climate. Fossil fuel corporations are investing in more oil and gas fields on the basis that, well, it’s too late to worry about the coming collapse – make the cash while we can.

The ancient definition of madness is the condition where a human being is detached from reality and unable to understand or manage the world around them. It is in that sense that human society, Britain as a prime example, has descended into a collective madness. The degree of denial is the very definition of extreme disconnect. It seems the penny only drops when it’s too late – it is you who are flooded out, burned down, electricity cut-off, without staple foodstuffs, reliant on polluted water.

History has shown that social collapse, a condition of the sudden loss of all givens, takes between three and five days before the descent into dog-eat-dog survival. Prevention requires governments to have pre-prepared contingencies and effective call-up ready and in place “just in case”. Our experience of COVID-19 proved such preparation was not in place for a pandemic. This winter’s floods have proven, early-on, that the services that exist are quickly overwhelmed – rescue, medical and insurance services grossly insufficient.

When we say we need the economy shifted into a new set of priorities similar to when governments have to move into a “war-footing” we are sneered at and jeered. But not by those whose land is swamped, homes are destroyed, friends are drowned, income is ended by weather events. We should not have to wait until each of us is affected. The purpose of governments and the taxes they raise is to protect and resource. They are failing us, all of them, absolutely.

The far-Right and Fascism are the most immediate threats

January 8, 2025 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (7.1.25), raging against the far-Right. Once again, not my chosen headline. We have to call out Farage and Reform UK and stop the growth of fascism. I could go on. Build Stand Up To Racism and challenge racism in our workplaces and communities while fighting for our rights.

The unedited version below.

The fact that the repulsive Nigel Farage and his toxic Reform UK are central stage has little to do with any mass popular support. It is testimony to the fast development of support for the far-Right by the world’s powerful billionaires who have control of the mass online media, printed and TV news, and right-wing control of the British Broadcasting Corporation.

The worlds richest man, Elon Musk, is insisting that statements of white supremacy and racism are hallmarks of free speech, and he’s ready to fund politicians across the world who want to spout ultra-nationalism. Farage, pictured recently with arch-misogynist and Islamaphobe, Andrew Tate, is publicising Musk’s bile as his own, operating merely as a parrot of the Trump doctrine.

Musk’s support for the fascists’ pin-up boy, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon aka “Tommy Robinson” leaves little doubt that Musk wants Reform UK transformed into an openly fascist party akin to the AfD in Germany. Despite calling-out the UK Prime Minister as “complicit in the rape of Britain”, the self-proclaimed English nationalist Farage offers support for Musk in the hope of funding. Farage’s political gamble backfired. But in this polarised country operating in a polarised world now descending ever-deeper into strife and open conflict, there is oxygen for extreme views.

The question must be asked, where is the opposition? Starmer is going out of his way to appease Trump and court Farage. Labour Party grandees salute him rather than challenge. When Farage says “forcibly deport more refugees”, Starmer boasts he is and will do even more.

Any decent person should damn the implicit racism and shout from the rooftops that the UK depends upon migrant labour and we uphold the human rights of asylum seekers to sanctuary here. Starmer’s spineless ministers assert precisely the opposite.

Where is the challenge to the Islamaphobic bile spewing from Musk and Farage about Muslim sex-abusers? Numerous well-funded reports have repeatedly offered evidence that over 90% of child sexual exploitation is at the hands of white men, with Asian abusers proportionately lower than across the white population. Where is the Reform UK outrage about the sexual abuse inside the white Christian churches, the Royals and the “play-boy” super-rich?

Reform UK is whipping-up a racist lynch-mob mentality, when the cost of asylum-seekers reaching here in boats is a fraction of the costs to the exchequer in unpaid taxes of those who can more than afford to pay them.

We require active, vocal, constant and collective challenge to such discrimination and prejudice. Anything other than direct challenge to Farage’s racist bigotry represents acquiescence to far-Right rule in Britain and across the world.

Despite the Reform UK’s insistence on challenging the Establishment, this is an organisation in league with the Capitalist ruling class and doing their bidding, diverting attention away from the huge increases in private profit and accumulation of private wealth at the expense of mass of working people.

Farage has ten times the air-time of the Prime Minister on prime-time TV. Despite his various political organisations never having more than five elected MPs, the BBC has invited Farage onto the weekly Question Time politics show more than any other politician, his groups represented on around 24% of all the show’s broadcasts. You’d think it was Reform UK who won the landslide!

The multi-millionaire Farage is not planning to make life better for the working class. His purpose is to divide us to rule us on behalf of the super-rich, and thereby become one of them. His appeal is not to average-wage-earning workers but to the wealthier amongst the middle classes who, sensing the vulnerabilities of the Age, are reacting to all shifts away from the crumbling status quo that has benefitted them.

The far-right Reform UK is for the protecting of the well-off as the buffer for the super-rich to end joy the tax-cuts and freedoms that Farage and Trump and Musk promise. Workers, young and old, white and of colour, of any ethnicity and anyone condemned as “woke” will not receive any joy from a Farage government.

This far-right Reform UK is seeking to ignite the understandable anger of the disaffected into more street violence aimed at scapegoating minorities. The real aim is to atomise working class organisation by setting us each against the other in pursuit of unchallengeable exploitation, stabilising and engorging the landlords and business grandees through low taxes at the cost of unaffordable health services, low wages, extortionate rents and mass poverty.

This is the class base of Reform UK and the multi-millionaire Farage. We saw their like grow and take charge across Europe one hundred years ago and now they’re back.

The trade union movement back then was key to exposing their lies and breaking their popularity, challenging racism and scapegoating in the streets and in the workplaces. We have to rise-up against bigotry and division as a matter of extreme urgency.

The Left must Stand Up To Racism and campaign for the super-rich to be taxed accordingly (the loopholes, tax-evasion and subsidies plugged), the bloated Corporations forced to pay-up to fund our NHS and welfare services, for a mass-build of affordable housing with rent controls, and a proper living wage that prevents the 7million of us currently living with food insecurity and 14 million in poor housing.

The chancers and deceivers of Reform UK are offering none of that and will deliver none of this, and sadly neither will Starmer’s Labour government. It is down to us to organise for workers rights.

Small Farmers are Being Exploited by the Rich

November 27, 2024 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (26.11.24) wanting to rage against Jeremy Clarkson’s racist anti-working class smug privileges, but having to stay publishable. The reality is the propaganda emanating from the billionaire media corporations and their lackeys overwhelmed all reason and any honesty about the situation facing farmers. And much of the Left sided with the far-right landowners. A knee-jerk political illiteracy. Just because Starmer put a tax on the Rich but we don’t like Starmer, doesn’t mean we support the Rich. Starmer should and could have gone a lot further, and the nature of the inheritance tax means most of the wealthiest in society will not have to cough-up any more into the public purse for the next four year, according to Rachel Reeves in her toadying address to the CBI yesterday.

Anyway, that wouldn’t get into print. And the following was further edited-down to get in:

Farming has workers too!

Trade unionists know a lot about farming. The false divide between “city folk” and “rural communities” has been promoted ceaselessly in the media as if one of the great divides amongst the British people. It is nonsense.

The great divide is social class. The farming community is not not one homogenous mass. Far from it. The difference in lifestyle and life-chances of the agricultural worker (the majority who work on the land) and the landowners (a tiny minority) could not be more different and polarised.

Unite the Union organises inside the farming community, with tens of thousands of members who work the land. They are some of the most poorly paid and badly treated of our entire working class, subject to the most hazardous working conditions and the very highest level of industrial accidents and workplace deaths.

So when 20,000 so-called “farmers” march on parliament against paying inheritance tax, the protest raises more questions than demands.

Small farmers are living on a knife-edge. The endless rains of last winter and spring collapsed much of the early crops, reducing income to a bare minimum or even increasing crippling debt, leading many to leave and some to commit suicide.

None of this has anything to do with inheritance tax. Small farmers are pressured by falling livestock prices, or are tenant farmers who own no land and are affected by increasing land prices. Since Brexit, farmers have faced reduced subsidies, increased tariffs and falling prices for products and livestock. The savagery of the huge supermarket chains squeezing wholesale prices to maximise their record profits to the impoverishment of the small farms is immoral and detestable.

But last week the millionaire land owners and big business drew upon the plight of poorer farmers to organise against the plans for the big agro-businesses to pay the same inheritance tax as the rest of the wealthy do.

One third of land in the UK is owned by the aristocracy, with separate tax rules and regimes that charge high rents for farming and homesteads, and little or no support in return. Church and State own less than 2% between them.

Second-up are the large corporations investing in land for its tax-saving opportunities. Then come the individual multi-millionaires and billionaires. 12% of land is in the hands of 50 owners.

James Dyson is a big landowner, as is billionaire John Whittaker, chairman of the Peel Group property corporation, owning ports, huge swathes of commercial and industrial land and companies such as the Holiday Inns.

Half of the top ten are oversees holders of UK land including the ruler of Dubai, Denmark’s richest man and Italian billionaire aristocrat Count Luca Padulli, freehold owner of hundreds of thousand so properties here including apartment buildings beset with cladding risks.

The root cause of the pain of small farmers is an agricultural system dominated by big business interests, the market and profit. Small farmers are being squeezed out by a process of gentrification on an industrial scale, orchestrated not only by local avaricious landlords but by global financial giants.

Yet poorer farmers are being pushed to the front of the protests by farming organisations run in the interests of the big estates, precisely because city people can relate to the real hardship of squeezed locals in a way that we wouldn’t care about the super-rich. In fact, we would like the corporations and multi-millionaires to pay more tax.

The protest against Labour’s inheritance tax rise doesn’t hit most farmers. It’s a tax on the very rich and millionaire land owners and big businesses. They would have to pay 20 percent inheritance tax on any estate worth more than £1 million—and even then, only what exceeds one million.

Inheritance tax is not levied on the value of property up to £325,000, bringing the untaxed total to £1.325 million. And, if a farmer is married and owns the farm jointly, their spouse can pass on an additional £1.325 million tax free. Furthermore, there is a £175,000 tax-free allowance on a main residence when it’s being passed to children or grandchildren.

This amounts to just half the main rate of inheritance tax everyone else is charged. As a result, some 500 farmers – the owners not the agricultural workers and tenants – will e tax demands each year.

The demonstration was headlines and praised across our media in a way that most protests at Parliament are ridiculed or unreported. Why? Perhaps because 80% of our news media is owned by just 5 billionaire families. Bur journalists should be expected to offer a more factual account.

One fifth of the working class are self-employed, hard-pressed, working all hours subject to the dictats of their corporate suppliers and free-market forces to scrape a living. The small farmers are in the same situation. The class divide in agriculture is all-but feudal in its despotism.

It was the big landowners and agro-businesses who financed this, the first major protest against the new Labour Government, cheered-on by the anti-working class far-right organisations of Reform UK and GB News.

But it is the trade union movement who should be organising opposition to Labour over the two-child benefit cap, winter fuel cuts and worsening austerity, to tax the super-rich to pay for the help and services desperately needed by ordinary workers, including those in agriculture. The problem in all employment sectors is the system of capitalism.

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Demand Action on Fossil Fuels

November 27, 2024 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (19.11.24) seeking to highlight the criminal hypocrisy of the COP29 Climate Conference. Climate is the overarching issue of this human era, bringing together all other issues and campaigns into a Big Picture far too overwhelming for the emotional intelligence of many. The resulting “it’s too late”, “grow your own” or hair-shirts responses are understandable but hopeless. And maybe that’s what is wanted. Just do nothing.

The projections of climate collapse in the very near future are illustrated by this year’s weather events as well climate movements. At least they published the mention of the of Saturday’s events, but the Press Release was never published.

Full text below:

Let’s have a look.

In the United States, super-hurricane Milton battered Florida followed by Helen, the strongest tropical storm ever recorded, which poured more than a year’s average rainfall onto North Carolina in less than eight-hours, destroying whole towns, houses and cars swept away. Seven weeks later local people have no fresh water to drink and the regional food production has been devastated. More than 200 people died.

In Spain, more than a month’s rain fell in less than one hour last week, flooding the the cities of Malaga and Valencia for second time in a month. Thousands were evacuated, more than 200 killed, many still missing, homes, shopping malls and bridges wrecked and 100,000 cars destroyed.

The farmlands that supply not only Spain but supermarkets here in the uk were decimated. Greenhouses, machinery and packaging plants were smashed, with crops destroyed and significant damage to fruit and vegetable production into the future. The floods destroyed more than 60% of Spain’s production of oranges, alongside thousands of hectares of tomatoes, peppers, salad and vines.

Emergency and relief authorities took days to appear and could offer little, the people left to fend for themselves and protest at the lack of care. Timely warnings were not broadcast and cash-relief only offered long after the immediate devastation. And in the USA, the most wealthy nation in the history of humanity, only the wealthy who could pay received help.

Such calamity is nothing compared with the Global South. Record rainfall is happening across the world, in regions with far less economic resilience and social infrastructure than Europe and the USA. And at the same time, fires and droughts across Africa.

Extreme weather is leaving tens of millions millions displaced, millions starving and thousands dead in Nepal and Vietnam, Tibet, Peru, India, China, and Indonesia. It snowed in the Sahara desert, an event never before recorded. Glaciers are melting in the Himalayas causing uncontrollable floods in Pakistan.

Parts of the Arctic are enduring exceptionally high temperatures — up 30 to 40 degrees above normal — because of multiple intense heat domes. 2024 will be the hottest year on record, the past decade recording the hottest global temperatures too.

Everywhere there is profound changes in the weather, swinging between extremes of wet and dry, hot and cold. In Britain one-in-six people live at risk of flooding.

But the United Nations Climate Conference held last week in the oil-dependent-economy of Azerbaijan has ensured no funding for concerted action on the climate emergency, and protected the fossil industries.

The emissions of global heating gases from the burning of fossil fuels is the cause. Emissions have to be reduced, as an emergency action by all nations across the world. And many countries will need help with that, or face complete disaster. That’s why we call for climate justice.

The poor and working classes of every country should not be left to pay the severe price of climate change, caused undoubtedly from the impact burning of fossil fuels since before 1850. Yet we are targeted by climate deniers telling us to keep quiet and carry on – a strategy that hasn’t worked anywhere else.

For every climate sceptic, there are hundreds of climate scientists who studied to get to university, then specialised in aspects of natural science and finally produced report after report of the extraordinary and unprecedented changes that are destabilising our land, oceans, atmosphere and wildlife. Tens of thousands of peer-reviewed and triple-tested scientific reports on all aspects of the climate collapse and sixth Great Extinction of life on Earth – happening now.

Yet those with power are denying these facts and encouraging baseless opinions formed from mythology, superstition and dogmatism. To say these are “conspiracy theories” is not sufficient. This is far-Right wing ideological claptrap, linking climate denial alongside anti-vaccines, anti-woke ultra-nationalism, supporting climate colonialism and racist denigration of the people of colour across the global south – lives that are less valuable than white humans of the industrialised North.

Whilst the super-rich buy-up land in New Zealand, projected to be the least and last to be affected by climate collapse, they tell us there is nothing to worry about. The climate deniers are leading humanity into a deep and accelerating mass disaster.

It is as if the far-Right ideologues want to see mass environmental destruction and human carnage in order to feed off the hopelessness, despair and conditions of dog-eat-dog survival, best suited for their political ambitions. President Trump demands “drill, drill’ drill” for oil during his second term, appointing climate denier Chris Wright as energy secretary.

Prime Minster Starmer is more covert, booting tax handouts for carbon capture and storage, biofuels and nuclear power, none of which represent carbon-zero energy suppliers and altogether taking tens of billions of pounds away from investment in renewables of solar, wind and wave power.

The COP29 United Nations Climate Conference proved that the fossil-fuel companies are in control, selling more oil and gas rights in the face of disaster, chasing short-term profits at the expense of human carnage and societal collapse.

The science of climate change is not based upon opinion. It is fact. The climate deniers, funded by the oil corporations, are leading humanity into a deep and accelerating mass disaster.

We protest! Plymouth’s trades unions are supporting the Climate Summit in Plymouth this Saturday, and marching to demand action now: cut emissions by 50% by 2030, and plan for the fastest possible transition away from fossil fuels! Join us!

Trump must not be allowed to fulfil vision

November 27, 2024November 27, 2024 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (12.11.24), just touching on the outcome of the Trump election victory. Of course, there’s more to say, but at least opposition is in print early, especially in a city where our Palestine stall is often challenged by Trump-supporters eager to shout at us about the most bizarre conspiracy theories as well as overt Islamaphobia and pro-genocidal slogans. But not everything fits inside 600 words, and anyway, words aren’t enough. We need to organise to Dump Trump!

Not my headline, but “Trump must not be allowed to fulfil vision”.

So what should we do about Trump?

According to the group he has around him and the people he’s carefully placing into office, Trump’s second term as President of the wealthiest and most militarily powerful empire the human world has ever known, is about to change everything.

Everything that is, except the maintenance of Capitalism: the economic, political and social system based upon private ownership of wealth. Trump will amplify the individual, corporate and national competition for power and control of the means of production and markets in pursuit of profit.

Trump, a billionaire in cahoots with billionaires, is not about to redistribute wealth and make everyone richer. He didn’t the last time round.

Between 2017 and 2020 the USA lost 2.6million jobs. Three million more people lost access to any health insurance to total of 28 million impoverished human beings. Profits rose by 68%, nearly doubling, whilst wages increased by 8%, bumped-up mostly by manager’s salary-hikes at the expense of the low minimum wage. Home ownership increased by 2% making the property-owning middle classes feel better off, house prices rising by 27%. Rents for the poor more than doubled. His was a government of the rich for the rich and will be so again.

Trump’s 2024 election manifesto represented him as the bringer of system change. Not the eradication of poverty and exploitation – instead there shall be yet more billionaires and wealth accumulated into the non-taxable bank accounts of the 1%.

Trump’s “right-wing populist nationalist movement” (as defined by himself) will protect and work for the domination of the American White Man. They will, indeed, benefit.

Trump’s America will be racist and misogynist, supported by an ideological cadre in government and on the streets. That means scapegoating, gaslighting and flagrant misinformation as government standards.

1.5million migrants forcibly deported inside his first year of office, families torn apart, hundreds of thousands in internment camps, will cause enormous economic turmoil. These are the people who reap the harvests, pack the goods, serve at table, and cook and clean in the homes of the middle classes. Irreplaceable.

Protectionism will wreak havoc. The big import tariffs on foreign goods will ensure a significant rise in inflation, job losses and a trade war

Trump’s promise to end all action on climate, withdrawing from international agreements and to “dig, dig, dig” for more oil and gas will condemn the world to climate catastrophe. Climate Change will accelerate, causing extremes of weather that his citizens will not escape and will suffer without the State taxes available to protect or re-home them.

Trump will support the complete eradication of the State of Palestine, whilst the promised end to the current war in Ukraine will only be a prelude to much larger wars to maintain global American supremacy.

In all, Trump represents civil war at home and war abroad. Trump’s far-Right Movement is heavily funded and reaching-out across Britain and Europe and beyond. It will be a totalitarian government, holding power over all houses and the judiciary, entrancing the people with false hope and mythology in the face of deepening global crisis.

Trump must not have it his own way. And he won’t. The USA is a federal system of local governments, the blue “sanctuary states” committed to upholding the quest for equal rights and eradication of poverty.

America is not a United State. A third of all those entitled to vote, did not vote at all, the Democrats offering little or nothing. In every State there is resistance, particularly at grass roots. The struggle for Women’s rights, Black Lives, workers rights and climate action will continue. And must do so here at home, lest we all fall for Trump’s lies.

The UK is Effectively the USA’s 51st State

October 29, 2024 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Must Never Forget the Grenfell Disaster

September 12, 2024 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

Too ghastly to fully contemplate. My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (10.9.24) arguing against the general media commentary, most powerfully articulated by “left-wing” barrister and human rights campaigner, Michael Mansfield, that society no longer cares. I would observe, with triangulated evidence, that ordinary working class people do care – a lot. It is the Rich and those driven to be rich, who do not.

The unexpurgated version below:

The Word has a power. The moment the Word is printed here, a proportion of potential readers of this column will read no further. Some will drop it because of sheer prejudice. The Word conjures-up racial tensions, the Word makes those who are comfortably-off uncomfortable, the Word reminds us of the unfathomable span and depth of wealth distribution and social class status.

The Word exposes the very nature of the Capitalist system we live within. The Word is Grenfell. By this point many have logged-off, not needing to know more nor wanting to accept some truths that go to the very heart of their own situation. But the Grenfell fire must not become last week’s news and forgotten. Yet already, the mention of the word Grenfell is losing newsworthiness.

The burnt-out tower stands as the international icon of societal failure. The names of the 72 dead identify the poverty of the vast majority of Black and Asian people in Britain, condemned to living in the poorest housing conditions, unheard. The total and unchallengeable power of private corporations proves the absence of any concern for social justice in Britain, or any readiness of politicians to intervene.

A survivor, Natasha Elcock from the Grenfell United survivors’ group said the Inquiry report speaks to a lack of competence, understanding and fundamental failure to perform the most basic duties of care…“We paid the price of systematic dishonesty, institutional indifference and neglect.”

The Inquiry concluded that every single loss of life as Grenfell Tower burnt on the night of 14th June 2017 was avoidable. People did not die in an accident, they were killed. Human life was never a priority, and still isn’t. The Dagenham highrise fire two weeks ago was a copycat cladding incident, lives saved by getting them out quick, but proved that the risk remains. There will be more.

For trade unionists, workers collectively organised for our own protection, the conclusions come as no surprise. But we do balk at the assertion that no-one cares anymore. Millions of us do.

We have fought, campaigned and challenged the dangerous hazards at work and in our communities, championing calls for Health & Safety against a growing cacophony of right-wing put-downs of “nanny-Statism” and “wokism”. Sponsored by the private corporations and neoliberal think-tanks, successive governments have been lobbied and bribed to cut back on safety regulations and cut-corners at work in order to maximise shareholders dividends.

Most workers want to end their week feeling they we’ve done a good job. But the culture of fast and big profits and shareholders dividends minimise quality and care in the pursuit of cost-cutting and maximising productivity. The greed of the already wealthy has overwhelmed all industries to the point of mass demoralisation and constant danger.

It has been said that we are no longer a caring society – people don’t care anymore. That’s not true. Ordinary working class people care a great deal for people around us. Those at the top don’t care a jot, and those who want to climb that ladder learn fast that they must show they don’t care and are prepared to break the rules on behalf of the business.

There has been a growth in micro-management and quasi-military supervision across all industries, telling workers “you are not here to think, just do what you’re told.” Compassion and empathy are frowned upon. We are instructed at work not to care, not to listen, and disciplined or sacked when we question or whistleblow. The culture of carelessness has been forced from the top, promoting a lack of concern for working class communities and the pain of poverty.

The cuts to public funding of social infrastructure and welfare since the mid-1970’s has ensured that vital emergency services are threadbare in all aspects, from training through to staffing levels. Those in positions of responsibility have outsourced the risks to ensue they cannot be blamed for the consequences of their cuts.

The privatisation and deregulation of housing has ensured landlords can charge extortionate rents for squalid rooms and evict at will anyone who complains. Governments have purposefully cut the jobs that used to monitor safety and enforce the law in the name of profit and “wealth-creation”.

Grenfell is the proof: cladding companies lied and operated illegally, residents and trade unions repeatedly rang the alarm, elected councillors refused to act.

Governments ignored warnings about dangerous cladding as early as 1991 and have ever since. As with so many other disasters we can expect little or no serious resolution to this. This Inquiry is a condemnation of our political system, and the COVID Inquiry is likely to evidence an even deeper proof of corruption.

Grenfell highlights that all our public services are at a point of collapse. And we cannot rely on Starmer to deliver justice and change after Grenfell, when three of the top five landlords in Parliament are Labour MPs. Theirs is a party courting big business and private developers, desperate to show it’s a responsible manager of the corporate profit system.

And that’s the point. This was one of an endless list of tragedies caused by the system of Capitalism that always places profit as a far higher priority than the needs of the People. We should confiscate the assets of the businesses who profited from flammable cladding, and jail their owners for corporate manslaughter if not murder. All those responsible should pay for the removal of the cladding and the safe renovation all buildings affected. And as a wider project, to end these tragedies we have to organise for redistribution of wealth and system change.

We Stood Up To Stop Fascists from Destroying Plymouth

August 12, 2024 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

Fascist cadre came to Plymouth on Monday 5th August 2024 to whip-up violence against migrants and people of colour, with phrases like “Stop the Boats”, a one time slogan of the Tory Prime Minister, Richi Sunak. The reporting of the violence suggested two tribes, two sides fighting each other as if in turf warfare. I had to complain. We had called a protest with the Stand Up To Racism organisation to stop the fascists. 700 of us faced 500 of them. They threw bricks and bottles and fireworks. We shouted “Refugees Are Welcome here!” and “Fascists off Our Streets!”. My letter was challenged by the Editor of the Plymouth Herald, but published in full. I stand by the challenge against poor journalism and biased reporting.

Dear Editor

The reporting of Monday night’s violence in Plymouth represented an extraordinary level of ignorance of the facts. Your narrative was of a clash between two protest groups. It was portrayed as a clash between two tribes, both violent and in the wrong.y

In fact, the Unity Rally at the Guildhall Square, called by the Stand Up To Racism group in the City and supported by the Plymouth Trade Unions, was a statement of city pride in multiculturalism and peace.

When told that fascist organisers were travelling to Plymouth to whip-up race hate and misogyny, we rallied to defend our rights. We stopped their intended destruction of our city centre.

Yet we are presented as two-sides of the same coin. Let’s be clear, there is no currency between social harmony and fascism.

Militarised fascist cadre, ideologically tied to far-right groups in the USA and funded by millionaires organising a fast rise in fascist organisation across Europe and America, came into Plymouth to test our resolve. They are seeking fertile ground for fascist organisation. They include those who emulate the Nazis of the Second World War who bombed Plymouth. They present Nazi salutes and symbols in public.

The most horrific and violent aspect of their organisation is the intention to find the most righteously angry of the dispossessed youth in the poorer cities and towns, to pull together into street fighting gangs to target minority groups – essentially tho’ not only Muslims, refugees and asylum seekers.

The local young people on the Racist demonstration came from the most deprived areas of our city are easy prey for political manipulators seeking personal power and control.

Race-hate is not their only tool. The powerful millionaire actors on social media whip-up misogyny, homophobia and trans-hate, ridiculing actions to manage the very obvious climate change we are experiencing, and whipping-up nationalist fever towards world war. These are the proponents of male white nationalist supremacy. Why would the media not expose this?

And more importantly, why is the propaganda from local politicians not only saying we should not challenge the fast rise of organised racism and fascism, but actually defend our cities? It was exactly this position of politics as in the 1930’s that allowed Hitler’s Nazis come to power in Germany. Know your history.

Our politicians should be out, working tirelessly to build the social infrastructure so desperately needed to end poverty and division.

Fortunately, more than 700 anti-racists defied political demands to “stay at home” and ensured the insurgent fascists could not smash our city centre. We should be applauded, not damned. Plymouth must not be seen as fertile ground for fascist organisation.

There is an urgent need for action against racism in our City. And to prevent the adoption of race hate by our forgotten and disposed youth we need urgent funding for housing and education, welfare and security. We need politics of hope not hate. And we must stand up to racism, as a mass and in action, or our streets will quickly become unsafe, firstly for any person of colour and then for the entire working class.

Trade unions have a proud history of fighting racism and fascism, because fascism destroys all working class organisation to ensure totalitarian control from above. We stepped-up to the plate on Monday, against violence, intimidation, racism and fascism. We will continue to do so.

Tony Staunton

President, Plymouth Trades Union

Plymouth Stand Up To Racism held a meeting on Thursday 8th August at 7pm at the Quaker House, 74 Mutley Plain, Plymouth, with 70 people attending, organising a Unity Rally the following Saturday that was attended by 200. Altogether a good start, but nearly enough activists to combat this growing threat.

Remembering Hiroshima

August 12, 2024 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment printed in the Plymouth Herald (6.8.24) simply commemorating the dropping of nuclear bombs on human populations. It was heavily edited before publication. There was much else happening in this tense and volatile world as I wrote, but this issue must not be put to one side.

On the day of annual commemoration of the dropping of a nuclear bomb on Japan’s city of Hiroshima in 1945, the President of the United States warns of great peril today. Western countries are pulling their citizens out of the Middle East whilst sending more troops and military equipment into the Mediterranean. There are preparations for nuclear war.

Today’s remembrance of Hiroshima’s destruction by a single bomb, we remember the slow deaths of hundreds of thousands caused by nuclear radiation contaminating generations ever since and still to come. Nuclear war is not sudden death. For most it produces lingering suffering.

In 1961 the public news was full of imminent threat of nuclear war. Russia and the United States of America (USA) tensed for a nuclear stand-off, and ordinary working class families, East and West, were openly educated on the potential of nuclear war, with schools rehearsing duck & cover drills on the sound of an air raid siren.

As USA missile bases were established ever-closer to the border of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the Soviet Union decided to put their less long-distance nuclear missiles on Cuban soil, 90 miles off the Florida coast. For 13 days in October 1962 we came ever closer to nuclear war, the brinkmanship between Kennedy and Khrushchev ramping-up the tension to an agreement minutes before midnight. The US agreed to take their nuclear missiles out of sites in Turkey, on Russia’s border, and Russia agreed to dismantle nuclear sites in Cuba, some 14 miles off the coast of the United States.

Protests were worldwide during that period, the Labour Party amongst many mainstream political organisations leaping to adopt a “unilateral disarmament” policy, meaning each nation should disarm all nuclear weapons whatever other nations are doing. Unilateralism was the obvious political “deterrent” against nuclear use, since, if you ain’t got nukes, no-one can be so threatened by obliteration that they fire at you first. But which nuclear power would be the first to give them up?

Unilateralism did not sit well with the cold warmongers who continually organised for the chance to defeat all opposition and rule the entire world. The first period of imminent nuclear war gave way to a Cold War of continuous and immense military build-up between enemy states, the cost of such rearmament ensuring cuts to education health and welfare. But the threat of immediate nuclear war diminished enough to be sat only at the back of our minds as a distinct but distant possibility.

Between 1974 and 1980 the UK government produced TV and newspaper adverts, radio broadcasts and public information films on how to protect ourselves during a nuclear attack. The very famous pamphlet, “Protect and Survive” went through every home’s letterbox. The BBC made films of the aftermath of a nuclear exchange, the 2-part mini-series Threads still spinechilling today in its depiction of multiple mushroom clouds demolishing Birmingham, and the years of mass suffering amidst social collapse in the decades that followed.

CND produced “Protest & Survive” as a pamphlet detailing how human society collapses in nuclear war, and 250,000 of us marched in London in 1981 to stop the US siting their nuclear missiles in Britain. The historic women’s camp at Aldermaston went on to ensure US nuclear warheads left our island.

Now, the USA is putting new nuclear warheads at US Airforce base at Lakenheath, Suffolk, with barely any notice other than a few of us CND activists. Putin has twice threatened nuclear attack on Britain as one of the foremost nuclear armed states supplying weaponry to Ukraine, including missiles that can fire deep into Russian cities. Germany is raising its army again, with words of war in Europe.

No-one seems to be blinking an eye at all this, let alone running public education programmes on how to survive nuclear war. Will there even be a siren offering the famous “four-minute warning”.

Russia is a brazen Capitalist, nay Gangster economy with a far-Right nationalist President wielding huge powers of repression inside the country and engaging in imperialist wars abroad. There is no “Red Menace” of the 1960’s.

There is now global Capitalist competition for natural and Human Resources at a time of greater tension and multi-causational crisis than in the 1930’s. In many ways this is far more dangerous and volatile than the Cold War between conflicting ideologies of the post-war era. This is open global imperialist rivalry in the age of climate collapse and mass poverty.

We are now said to be in an imperialist pre-war era, although the hundreds of millions of humans currently caught-up in regional wars worldwide would disagree it is “pre” to anything other than world war that will engulf all humanity.

To suggest that, at least by having a so-called “British Bomb” we can be mutually assured of the enemy’s destruction even if we also all die in the process, is the most bizarre and ignorant of all nationalistic nonsense. There has never been a more urgent point in history for unilateral nuclear disarmament now, before it’s too late.

Migrant Workers Give More than they Take

August 12, 2024 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

It becomes tiring and repetitive, but the point has to be continuously repeated – migrants and refugees are not the cause of the Age of Austerity – greedy bosses, their exploitation and oppression of the working class certainly is. And they’re organising to ensure it stays that way. My weekly Comment published in the daily Plymouth Herald (23.7.24) tried to explain at least some of the reasoning why we must say “Refugees are Welcome Here!”.

Keep them out! Last Thursday’s international summit, held at Winston Churchill’s ancestral home of Blenheim Palace, focussed upon the “threat” to Europe of from the East and the Global South. In short, the leaders of 14 countries determined they should collaborate to keep refugees out of Europe.

Of course, unlike the same policies in the USA, Europe cannot simply build a long, high and militarised wall to “keep’em out!”. The geography doesn’t allow for barricades. Instead, those seeking refuge will need to be turfed out, turned around, sent back, or imprisoned in regimes so inhuman as to act as a “deterrent” to peoples whose conditions are already inhuman.

The leaders stood together to rightfully denounced the human traffickers, but focussed upon those arriving at Europe’s borders and Britain’s shores as “illegals”. Little or nothing was said about the reasons for this mass migration, or consideration of the causes rather than the effects upon their security, wealth and power.

The vast majority of people travelling northwards, in death-defying journeys of pain and fear, are escaping one of two never-ending horrors being experienced by those born in Africa and the Middle East. The first is the wars funded and armed by countries of the North, encouraged and applauded by the leaders dining at Blenheim Palace, producing extremes of wealth for the arms manufacturers and allied trades who pay the lobbying fees for their jamboree.

The second is the climate collapse engulfing entire regions of sub-Saharan Africa – some 46 countries – with tens of millions of humans marching away from their homelands, lands forever starved of water and arable land as a result of the fossil-fuelled emissions from the global North, heating the Planet towards mass extinction.

In these circumstances, humanity should be uniting to protect all. The opposite is the case. As if labelling human beings “illegal” isn’t inhuman enough, plotting to ensure they die “abroad” is despicable, outside of all the legal and moral tenets that are paraded at such grand political events.

Those of the far-Right reading this will be enraged. The white-supremacists and Capitalist entrepreneurs, driven by their quest for individual power and wealth, will be screaming at the page, arguing for a national pride that blames all Britain’s obvious social decline on Black people.

Refusing to consider the record profits and exemptions from paying tax that have seen wealth go from the poor to the rich at an accelerating rate through the past decade, they blame immigration for any and every social problem.

The fuel bills that have tripled in 4 years have seen the oil and gas companies triple their profits into tens of thousands of millions of pounds paid for by us. The water & sewage bills that used to be covered by taxes as part of public services are now being raised whilst the owners harvest tens of billions of pounds from us, in profits.

The low pay and long working hours culture that ensures at least 5 million of we, the working class, are reliant on top-ups from Universal Credit. 14 million of us live in subsistence poverty, including 4 million of our children, with 17 million homes requiring refurbishment.

These numbers alone dwarf any cost to us attached to caring for refugees and asylum seekers. In fact, the tax money we pay towards subsiding the arms manufacturers and fossil fuel companies amounts to tens of billions pounds more than the costs of immigration.

The skills shortages that are hiking costs in the service and construction industries could be solved by immigrant labour, but that solution is denied by the racist fanatics. Migrants allowed to work pay taxes, unlike the super-rich. It’s simple, working migrants produce taxes and fund commerce to a degree far higher than the initial costs of welcoming them here.

Stopping immigration will do nothing to stop the gross exploitation of working people here, will not reflate the Exchequer nor will it lower the bills. The politicians have let the racists off-the-leash and flagged migration as the key problem in order to create the cover for their continued profiteering and plundering of the public purse.

On Saturday, fascists and their racist allies are holding an anti-immigrant, white-supremacist march in London. Anti-fascists from across Britain will be joining forces to challenge their lies and hatred, supported by the national Trades Union Congress and dozens of trade unions. The rise of racism and fascism must be nipped in the bud before it swamps Britain and destroys the human rights we all require.

Housing Crisis Demands Drastic Solutions

August 12, 2024 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

As three tents appeared in our local park, signifying the development of homelessness and poverty here, I wanted to consider some of the political issues affecting any solution. This is my weekly column, published 9th July 2024, demanding the return to council housing at the start of the new Starmer Government, apparently already to the right of Thatcher.

There are tents in our parks and green spaces across Plymouth. The reason has little to do with the weather. We are witnessing the deepening problem of homelessness.

Britain has been experiencing a housing crisis for decades, the seemingly endless Era of Austerity pushing down income and pushing-up prices to create a huge deficit in affordable homes.

Surely, a roof over your head represents the most basic level of security, if not comfort. In a wealthy country it should be deemed as a right.

Instead we see tens of thousands of people experiencing forced evictions amidst skyrocketing rent increases or mortgage demands.

The laws have long been changed to give landlords and home owners tax-perks and almost absolute rights to act as they wish. The notorious Section 21 no-fault eviction law means landlords can evict tenants at 2 months notice without any explanation. Without reason.

During the pandemic, house builders – for whom house building is about investment and profit, not homes – were given tax relief and development incentives. Such private developments included almost no affordable housing or rentable accommodation, and have driven-up prices.

When general inflation went well over 20%, building materials doubled in price alongside energy, the building firms cutting costs and quality and many going bust.

Working class people face a crisis of not being able to afford rent, bills and food, whilst small landlords moan they are in a “cost of doing” crisis, unable to maintain the buildings. The Office for National Statistics reported that 43% of renters declared difficulties with paying the rent last year, with 14% unable to afford food after paying the bills, almost 4 million of us having to use charitable food banks, in 2024 an additional three-quarters of a million people using food banks in for the first time.

Building houses isn’t the problem – the question is who are they being built for? The homes that are being built are for the already wealthy, the large building cartels forcing-up prices in a market that is based upon investment to sell-on at a profit, or buy-to-rent to ensure someone also pays their mortgage and into their pension pot.

Almost 3 million council-owned homes have been sold-off across Britain since Margaret Thatcher introduced the “right-to-buy” in 1980, with 40% of these formerly affordable homes now rented out by private landlords, some councils having to rent-back the same properties at exorbitant prices in order to house homeless families.

The racists are quick to suggest these are refugees families taking the homes from white people, quick to dismiss the facts about refugees homelessness and exploitation, prison barges like the Bibby Stockholm or the asylum prisons in rotting disused army camps.

Refugees are not the cause of homelessness. The crisis has been caused by the free-market unregulated capitalist accumulation of wealth and property in the hands of a few. When rents go up and salaries stay stagnant there is a systematic transfer of wealth from those who work for a living to those who own things for a living.

The numbers can’t lie, the three-quarters of a million empty houses, mostly second-homes, the buy-up of homes for Air BnB to make a fast buck for the already wealthy, together pushing out people born in the area, and producing a generation of working class young people unable ever to afford to buy. Add to that the overpriced, poorly built apartment blocks owned by speculator hedge-funds gambling on the value in five years time irrespective of occupation all prove that Britain’s housing crisis is systemic, corrupt and immoral.

We are left too few new homes, and inappropriate house building organised to maximise profit, not meet to need.

One in five of private homes lying on flood plains and now finding insurance against water ingress either too expensive or unavailable. More are being built on vulnerable land because the land is cheap for the builders to buy.

But climate change is creating a double-crisis, not only the lack of housing but the poor housing stock here, very vulnerable to extreme weather conditions. Too hot during our increasingly short summers, far too damp in the miserably long wet spells, and too expensive to renovate without State help. An estimated 13 million homes now need to be climate-proofed in England alone.

So long as housing is seen as an investment to be capitalised upon, so prices will rise, rents will double, and tents on the streets will turn into encampments of destitution. Locals get pushed out, home ownership becomes more exclusive, banks double their profits.

Last week, the Supreme Court of the USA voted 6:3 along ideological lines to allow States to declare homelessness illegal – that is, people who are homeless will be deemed illegal and will be imprisoned, into work camps as slaves. Are we to see this here?

Homes and homelessness is the new political frontline.

What is needed is local rent controls and house price caps – in other words regulation!

A return to council housing with emergency funding of local councils. Government has to give the money it has stolen back to local councils, councils have to renown their old estates as well as build new ones. The neoliberal doctrine of private home ownership has to end, with the reintroduction of public ownership paid for by higher taxes for the wealthy landlords and corporations.

We deserve protection, but it looks like we’ll have to protect ourselves with rent strikes and mass campaigns against evictions. Homes for All!

Election will Not Alter Class-based Society

June 6, 2024 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My Comment this week in the daily Plymouth Herald (4.6.24). The rigged “balance” required of the media during an election period means I can’t get published what I’d really like to say: Farage’s Reform Party offers an embryonic fascist rally which threatens the entire working class, the Greens are a pro-Capitalist Party with a terrible anti-working class record in Europe and indeed, against trade unions when running local councils; Galloway is socially conservative with adherence to religious family values that opposes a women’s right to choose, gay marriage and trans-rights, his Workers’ Party inviting cross-class alliances with Farage and ex-UKIP candidates. Starmer is more than ready to lead us into World War Three within the duration of the next Government term (for which the imperialist ruling classes already undertaking the preparations). And anyway, putting one’s faith in bourgoisie democracy and the election of a socialist pro-working class government has been thoroughly destroyed by the ruling class offensive against Corbyn (not to mention the various corporate-funded right-wing coups against socialist reformers across the globe). The Left, historically infiltrated by chancers, turn-coat careerists, renegades, police spies and agent-provocateurs, continues to fragment just when political unease and renewed strike action in our class offers a chance to build a coherent mass organisation. The rise and falls of mass movements: Black Lives Matter; Me Too!; Climate Strikes and now Freedom for Gaza each represent missed opportunities for decisive leadership for whole-system change, linking all the issues together into an anti-Capitalist offensive. It’s no longer any good to say you’re a “socialist” without saying you’re anti-Capitalist. It is Capitalism and its current development of Imperialism that links all these movements and issues. The Capitalists will not allow you to reform their System out of existence! The only way out of this is revolution, which may well be brewing elsewhere in the world for us to jump-on and build here. One mass strike is worth ten general elections!

But none of this can be printed.

So instead, here’s the long version of the printable edition:

The candidates are about to be declared, the stage about to be set. General elections are theatres for Party activists.

People join together into political parties with reason. There are ideas that conjoin and ideas that splinter into opposition. It’s very difficult, for example, to believe in universal human rights whilst promoting racial superiority – is it okay that some people are born with more privileges and entitlements than others?

Some beliefs come together towards a whole and encompassing world view. To act upon the our formed “way of seeing” we need to join together in sufficient numbers to have impact and change the direction of social organisation towards our preferred conditions. Hence parties.

On a very superficial level, that’s what putting a cross on a piece of paper at election day represents – a personal alliance with a world view.

The current drive towards politicians “independent” of any world view is probably a short-term proposition. A non-Party “independent” may be elected because they catch the majority view on a single issue but soon get into trouble when people disagree with other views they now espouse but were not in their manifesto.

They may be elected as forthright and unbending on their stated goal, but find that, to achieve anything they will have to compromise into a coalition with others, watering down their mandate and starting to link together into a new political Party.

The rise of the “Independents” is a necessary reaction to the general sense of “they’re all the same” which has swept into the consciousness of the electorate. The lack of faith in democracy as currently organised is prevalent across the Western world whilst still being fought for in the Global South.

The point is, there are real differences in preferences for social organisation. There are Right and a Left wings of the political spectrum. Social organisation to share resources to ensure everyone’s needs and human rights are met is a world view and ambition that is the complete opposite of a belief in individual competition and personal enrichment at the expense of others.

The best example is our National Health Service, loathed by Right-wingers as a construct of “socialism” because people pay into the common purse in order to get free health care at the point of need. The privatisation of the NHS is a right-wing strategy to turn our health service into a fee-paying, for-profit capitalist enterprise run by transnational pharmaceutical companies, not the State.

Any NHS charging essentially separates those who can afford to pay from those who can’t, into a society where your right to health care is based upon your personal income and inherited wealth. To accept charging in order to lower taxes is to accept individual competition as the social norm – a world view with wider implications.

It is difficult to ride on the back of two horses running in opposite directions. There are new parties seeking to go beyond, or bring together, Right and Left, despite the inherent conflict at the core of those ideologies. This may be an honest attempt to rebuild democracy away from the current two-party system which offers no real difference in policies or outcomes. But it’s a project doomed to failure.

A white-supremacist cannot be, at the same time, anti-racist and for a multi-cultural State. Someone who believes men should have power over women is unlikely to defend the rights of LGBTQ+. Warmongers don’t vote for Peace. Anyone who believes that the majority of Muslims are extremist “Islamists” is unlikely to believe in the rights of refugees and asylum seekers. Beliefs coalesce into world views.

The inescapable fact is that we live in a polarised society based upon class, the conditions we are born into determining much of how we see the world and what we believe. We are born into a System, not of our choosing or making, where social policy either benefits the wealthy elite or it benefits the working class and the poor. Either we raise taxes to pay for social need, which requires the rich to pay-up in full, or we collapse the State and engage with a dog-eat-dog system where those without are left to perish.

History provides many examples of where this class conflict which produces trade union strikes, mass movements, protests and community campaigns, produce real social changes far more profound and more often than general elections.

So the core question to candidates should be, are you for the People (the majority of whom are working class reliant upon day-to-day income) or the Rich ruling class few who extract and exploit in order to maintain their privileges? Everything else stems from this divide. Whatever the result, we’ll still have to fight for our rights.

Support the Students for Gaza!

June 6, 2024 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly Comment in the daily Plymouth Herald (28.6.24). This week, Ireland, Spain and Norway added their names to the growing list of countries demanding a Palestinian State. The backlash from the Israeli government supported by Biden and Sunak was disgusting, suggesting these countries are on the side of terrorists, as if the genocide being continued by Israel is not terrorism.

You see, the trick is to accuse your enemy of precisely the crime you are committing. The deceit is formidable. To suggest that we who campaign for ceasefire, peace and freedom for Palestine are racist is quite a trick. The campaign for Gaza has defeat of racism at its core.

Step, for four minutes, into our boots.

Every Saturday for the past 7 months we have protested in Plymouth. Indeed, millions have combined into a single movement across the world across those months, to stop the genocide taking place in Palestine.

We are approached by people with all sorts of views. Many offer support, some money for the Medical Aid to Palestine charity, much needed now every hospital in Gaza has been bombed and demolished. Some tell of us of their links.

And some come to attack us. Only a tiny minority offer such vitriol, the vast majority agreeing that the killing of Palestinian civilians has to stop. But they offer arguments for supporting the whole scale destruction of Gaza, the killing of 37,000 civilians including 12,000 children, the shooting and bombing that has caused over 80,000 casualties, and the preventing of food, clean water or fuel that is now causing the starvation of 1.5 million crammed into tented spaces amidst the rubble without any facilities. observers close to the ground are suggesting that over 100,000 have died, many of the bodies uncountable or unidentifiable and therefore unconfirmed.

It has become obvious that the far-Right in Plymouth, and Britain, and across the world, has rallied to the Israeli cause. The contradiction is historic. It was the far-Right fascist regime of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists who perpetrated the Holocaust – the focussed and industrial organisation of extermination of more than six-and-a-half million Jews rounded-up from across Europe and systematically murdered in the cause of seeking racial purity and supremacy of the Aryan white-race, whoever they were invented to be.

Those protesting for Gaza today are the same people who have always challenged racism and fascism, exposing the horror of the Holocaust and demanding “Never Again”. We oppose antisemitism and organise to protect the rights of Jewish People alongside every other cultural and ethnic grouping. The right to follow a Faith has to be a fundamental human right.

However, the right to impose your religion on others has no basis at all. No-one can be forced to believe, only to pretend to follow a faith for survival’s sake. Only you can know what you truly believe.

Consequently, creating a nation state where the belief in one religion endows you with rights and privileges denied to others must also be unacceptable. The Israeli State has developed a constitution and set of laws for a single ethnic group to be defined as citizens, and all others to be secondary with fewer rights.

Students are revolting! Everywhere!

There are more than thirty encampments on university grounds across Britain, including in Exeter and Falmouth in our far South-West, mirroring many more in the USA and Europe. Their cause is simple – freedom for the people of Palestine.

The international demand for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and for immediate aid and reparations for the millions of Palestinians experiencing deliberate and enforced starvation has majority support.

Yet, over the weekend, more Gazan civilians were killed and injured as Israeli troops bombed makeshift camps in Rafah, a refugee city on the very western edge of Palestine, bordering Egypt.

Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, the people had been herded there in the first place at the barrel of a gun, told this was the safest place only to then be shot at and bombed from above.

There can be no excuse for this military offence. The actions of the Israeli Defence Force working to the orders of the Israeli government defy and break all international law on the conduct of war and treatment of displaced civilians.

The concerns of students and young people across the world should be heard. The International Criminal Court has demanded an immediate ceasefire, and issued an arrest warrant for the Israeli Prime Minister. The United Nations and International Court of Justice has identified acts of genocide Continuing today.

The UN says that 1200 Israelis and 37,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed including 16,000 children since October 7th last year. All hospitals in Gaza have been destroyed, and supplies of water and food prevented from reaching most, who have no shelter amidst the bombing of the entire region.

Last week, Ireland, Spain and Norway added their names to the 137 countries recognising Palestine as a country and demanding the withdrawal of Israel’s occupying forces. Palestine has the right to exist, as it did before the creation of Israel in 1948 when terrorists invaded Palestinian land, shot and forced 750,000 inhabitants to leave their homes and become refugees. This Catastrophe, The Nakba, has been now repeated and amplified through 2024.

Support for Gaza and freedom for Palestine represents a global cry for justice and human rights. Students are to the fore in taking action everywhere to stop this illegal war. It’s simple. If there is no justice for Palestine, there is no justice anywhere.

Students campaign on many issues – for affordable and decent housing here, for access to food and medical care for children across Britain, for the right of all to education. For Peace, not war. These demands cannot be limited to Britain when billions of pounds of our taxes are being spent waging war and destruction on people elsewhere. We have to protest when our own educational establishments are making money out of genocide abroad.

Israel has bombed and flattened every university in the Palestinian Territories, yet most of our universities still invest in Israeli businesses and many have direct business dealings with the Israeli military. Our students have a simple demand – Stop Arming Israel! And one-by-one, universities are divesting from Israel, heeding their students’ moral demands.

Trade unions, most of which have long supported Palestinian independence, must now act to support our youth. In Oxford, university authorities used Police to arrest peaceful protesters and uphold the university’s links with Israeli war crimes. Our response should be to defend the college encampments and demand a boycott of all military aid to Israel.

When one country is allowed to enslave another, no-one can claim to be free. Permanent ceasefire now and Freedom for Palestine! Support our Students!

Heading into Strife

June 6, 2024 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly Comment int he daily Plymouth Herald (14.5.24) seeking to expose the “disaster capitalism” manifesto of Rishi Sunak, ex-hedge fund manager who made millions out of the global financial crash of 2008. It is difficult to say “corrupt”, “gangster”, “liar” and “spiv” of a Prime Minister and get it published. Nevertheless, my hatred of Sunak and his billionaire class has to be broadcast by whatever means necessary.

The Prime Minister began this week by warning that the next five years will see fundamental changes to the way of life in Britain. What could he be speaking of?

The beleaguered Sunak predicts more will change in the next five years than in the last 30.

“I’m convinced that the next few years will be some of the most dangerous yet most transformational our country has ever known.”

It sounds more like a threat than a promise. The signs are there. Tensions inside this country and across the world are ramping-up exponentially. Governments are responsible for the highest levels of corruption and self-interest, using propaganda mechanisms of nationalism and racism to maintain social control by setting us each against the other.

All the time the politicians are managing the plundering of the tax-payers’ coffers and extracting record profits from all the necessities of life, our where-with-all being hoarded into the private off-shore bank accounts of the super-rich.

Internationally we are seeing deepening and entrenched warfare, Britain being drawn on the coat tails of the United States of America into direct engagement in Ukraine and Palestine, Africa and the South China Seas. Little wonder more tax money will be diverted to the military and away from spending on social welfare at home.

And no wonder that more millions of human beings are being forced to seek asylum, to migrate from their homelands, forced by everything from ethnic cleansing and genocides to climate collapse.

The climate emergency has turned already into catastrophe for hundreds of millions across what is politically termed the “Global South” – those regions that have seen labour and natural resources plundered for the benefit of the nations of the North. Their crisis is coming our way, fast.

The climate changes that are killing millions each year are now hitting us. In Britain, eight months of record breaking rain represents new and less predictable patterns of extremes, in temperature, precipitation, meteorological seasons and the power of extreme weather events.

The unique speed of the rise in global temperatures is causing not only food shortages but the spread of disease. The classic killers and disabling infections of hot climates, such as malaria and Lyme disease are here now, brought north by warmer conditions by mosquitos and ticks, and fungal spores.

The economic inequalities caused by harvest collapse, food shortages and transport disruption caused by both war and climate change will only produce more poverty, war and global warming.

So, sad as it is to admit, Sunak is correct. We are heading into social strife.

What is left unsaid is that this is all the doing of Sunak and his Capitalist ilk, as part of the global political class and their Corporate masters who have created all these conditions: funding wars to reap massive profits for the arms manufacturers and fossil fuel companies; denying and investing billions in propaganda campaigns against the science of climate change and effective remedies; demanding tax-billions for pharmaceutical companies to cherry-pick the most lucrative vaccine markets and disregard the rest; and the super-rich driven by avarice, ready to make a short-term profit at the expense of the future of humanity.

The single most noticeable change we will experience over the next 5 years is the intensification of authoritarianism, whatever the party of government. More punishments for strikers and protesters daring to challenge all the above and demand investment in the future of humanity. More intense political repression is inevitable, that is, unless we increase protests now to protect democracy and force the political change we need.

Right now, the students are leading the way! Show them every support! Turn up with food and water, send them money, protect them from assault. Build the Resistance!

Heat Strikes not Heat Strokes

May 7, 2024May 7, 2024 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 7, 2024May 7, 2024 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shame of Enforced Extradition from UK

April 23, 2024 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

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

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

Rwanda has a recent record of human rights abuses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Western nations refusing to break with Israeli Alliance

April 16, 2024April 16, 2024 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

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

Unexpurgated below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emotional Climate

Day-to-day reflections of the climate catastrophe

Tag: news

Welfare not Warfare and Militarism!

We Have Never Been Closer to Catastrophe

Climate Catastrophe Knows No Borders

The far-Right and Fascism are the most immediate threats

Small Farmers are Being Exploited by the Rich

Demand Action on Fossil Fuels

Trump must not be allowed to fulfil vision

The UK is Effectively the USA’s 51st State

We Must Never Forget the Grenfell Disaster

We Stood Up To Stop Fascists from Destroying Plymouth

Remembering Hiroshima

Migrant Workers Give More than they Take

Housing Crisis Demands Drastic Solutions

Election will Not Alter Class-based Society

Support the Students for Gaza!

Heading into Strife

Heat Strikes not Heat Strokes

Shame of Enforced Extradition from UK

Western nations refusing to break with Israeli Alliance