Tag: news

Fight for the Rights of All Children!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Revolt Against Inequality

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Time has Come to Revolt Against Inequality!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beware, Fascism is on the Rise.

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

Beware, Fascism is on the Rise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Support for Palestine Will Be Maintained

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All this is visible daily online. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Right To Strike is Worth Fighting For!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another Year of Inaction on the Climate Disaster

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald published on 14th December 2023. The protests in Plymouth this year were small, the core of climate activists here depleted dramatically from the thousands pre-COVID lockdown. It’s hard to know why the issue has so little resonance at present, other than the cost-of-living crisis and general emotional sense of vulnerability seeing into the consciousness of the entire working class here. It’s a time for shutting the front door, keeping the outside outside and seeking some solace in the warm hearth of the holiday period (if you can afford the heating). Our climate march, joined with the local Palestine protest, managed over 120 people, whilst the Climate Summit, heavily publicised and built towards over the previous 6 months, drew 50 people – all already in the know. These are increasingly hard times, but a Movement of millions must be built quickly if we are to survive.

Why shouldn’t we be angry about the COP28 idiocy? A hugely expensive jamboree in the oil-rich Police State of UAE where 90% of the population are disallowed citizenship or human rights, protests are dangerously illegal, the government ministers and fossil fuel corporate executives packing-in 5-times the numbers of any citizen or NGO representatives, the rich flown-in on private jets to proclaim that it is the rest of us who have to tighten our belts because of the climate crisis whilst the poor remain voiceless.

Indeed, apparently, the climate catastrophe already killing millions each year and displacing millions more as climate refugees, is not the fault of greenhouse gas emissions. The President of COP28 this year, Sultan Al Jaber, head of the UAE State oil and gas company, says there is “no science” showing that we need to phase-out fossil fuels to restrict global heating to 1.5C.

After 30 years of this farce they’ve done nothing other than to protect the oil companies and their own voracious demand to get as rich as rich can be at the expense of people and planet. Yet thousands of scientific papers, peer-and-government reviewed before publication and published through the same United Nations entity, proves the precise opposite. These oil-rich billionaires should be considered as scum (a term recently judged by a UK court to be a perfectly legal derogatory term). 

The global average temperature in 2023 – the hottest year on record – actually reached 1.5C for a period. In fact, for three days it reached 2C. Whatever we do now, the changes to the earth’s climate have past tipping points that will ensure undeniable change everywhere – floods, fires, crop-failures, transport disruption and sudden extreme weather conditions displacing and killing people even here in wet-and-to-be-even-wetter England.

Unless we leave fossil fuels in the ground we have absolutely no hope of preventing climate breakdown. We are still putting more emissions into the atmosphere than we are stopping by moving to wind and solar. It doesn’t matter how many wind turbines you put up, or how many solar panels, unless you are scrapping the fossil fuel infrastructure and ensuring, through legislation, to leave coal, gas and oil in the ground, the Planet is going to boil. 

The highly effective and lethal fossil fuel lobbying, both inside the COP Conferences since 1992 and all day and night, every day and night, year-in and year-out, since the Second World War and before, has prevented most if not all effective action.

This has thwarted the simple things that need to be done. And while we sit and the years tick by, and we have so few years left now. We’re going to have to take drastic action if we’re going to avoid what could well be Earth systems collapse. This is the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced, and by design – as a result of the enormous oppressive and exploitative power of the fossil fuel industries.

And now they want the working classes of the world to pay for the clean-up, with our lives. Whilst the well-off and already entitled middle classes join the call for working class people to buy electric cars, eat pulses and wear hair-shirts, we live hand-to-mouth. One-third of Plymouth’s children are living in the poverty of damp housing, poor nutrition, rationed and paltry public transport, and charity-shop clothing, topped-up with food banks unable to meet the accelerating demands. 

Don’t you dare preach to us about buying an electric car or heat pump! Individually we haven’t the wherewithal. We challenge all moralising against the masses – individual actions are of little consequence given the scale of the challenge – it is the emissions at the point of production that have to be shut down, the rest will follow. The System has to change. 

The fossil fuel companies receive tax incentives to the tune of £11.5billion each year from the taxes we pay despite making record profits from energy bills three times the cost of 5 years ago. It is they, collectively, who should pay for this climate crisis, their billions in profits to be paid back-in to our society to immediately insulate and damp-proof our 14 million homes and decaying hospitals and schools, to renationalise and invest in decent free-to-use public transport, and train and recruit the millions of people required to change all production away from fossil fuels. 

We are in crisis right now – it’s visible. And that means we’ll have to change how we live, either by choice or necessity. But the lack of action by governments and corporation has shown we can’t rely upon them. Politicians will not legislate to stop all extraction of coal, gas and oil, and the corporations can’t transition in time, even if they wanted to. It’s the System of Capitalist exploitation – private profit -that has to be replaced or we face a torrid and barbaric future. 

Climate Conference Wake-up Call

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My weekly column published in the daily Plymouth Herald on 24th November. This is the local lead-up to our 10-days of actions and events coinciding with the COP28 United Nations Climate Conference in Dubai, UAE from next weekend. There is too much to say in less than 600 words, at a time when Climate is off the agenda and all protest actions are correctly focussed upon the genocide in Gaza. My attempt is to link the protests locally, identifying the common cause of climate collapse and genocide as Capitalism, and its most powerful presentation in the form of imperialism. the call for a joint protest march through the City centre is quite a gamble.

The TV news scenes flashed-up cars under water in Dubai following flash floods this week. The terms, “unprecedented” and “record-breaking” were spoken gravely for all the salaciousness and excitement that pulp-journalism could offer. They omitted to mention that Dubai will host the annual United Nations Climate Conference, a gathering of all interested parties next week. Corporations and their police allies will dominate the agenda.

This will be the COP28, in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, chaired by the oil magnate Sultan Al Jaber, managing director and group CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. Over the past thirty years (they missed-off a couple of meetings) the COP process have intended to agree on policies to limit global temperature rises and adapt to impacts associated with climate change. 

They’ve failed miserably, the targets constantly revised upward, and with 2023 now witnessing the first period where global temperatures reached 2degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels, the COP target being 1.5C. So much for greenwash talk. No wonder we’re protesting. 

Earlier this month, 9 women faced court charged with causing half-a-million pounds worth of criminal damage to the Canary Wharf headquarters of HSBC. None of the defendants, aged between 23 and 71, denied that, in April 2021, they used hammers and chisels to crack the windows of the Corporate headquarters and glued-on stickers reading “£80billion invested fossil fuels in the last five years” – “Just Stop Oil!”. 

The prosecution argued that, whatever their motives, there was no lawful excuse for what they did. last Thursday, the Jury disagreed, and unanimously found the women “Not Guilty”. Groups like this may be dismissed as troublemakers, but that was how people once responded to the suffragettes and those who marched in the Civil Rights Movement. 

Our attitudes may depend on how we think about Climate Change, and that will depend upon where in the World we live. After the case, one of the women, Susan, a retired community worker, said she’d spent her life caring for others. She quoted a UNICEF report detailing that weather disasters, exacerbated by climate change, permanently displaces 20,000 children from their homes every day. 

Most of us agree with Susan that our lives are inextricably linked with everyone else’s, not just inside our national boundaries but across the world. After all, the changing climate knows no national borders or separations caused by language of culture. What happens in the Antarctic has a direct bearing on weather conditions here. When people are permanently displaced by the destruction of their birthplace, happening now across the continents of Africa or Asia of South America, the countries of the North, so far less ravaged by fires and floods, and the desertification caused by high temperatures impossible to live through, feel the pressure of mass migration – Climate Refugees. We are all connected.

Scientists now observe that 2023 is the hottest year since records began. Indeed, global temperatures reached peaks not recorded in the evidence from trapped ancient gases in some half-a-million years – that is, before the dawn of our human species. That’s worth thinking about.

The UK government, alongside most across the world, is actively denying there’s a problem. Those who support them, and those who actively seek an early catastrophe, Armageddon in their lifetime, bullishly advertise and promote Climate Denial. There is a new movement, not those of us deeply concerned about the immediate threat of extreme weather to lives and livelihoods here as well as abroad. This far-Right movement has been named “Clexit”, and they, too are on the streets. Shouting out “Climate Exit”, they want complete withdrawal from all actions to limit Climate Change: the end of push towards electrification of transport; no investment in home insulation or heat pumps; more support and more money for new oil and gas fields. Let’s burn, burn, burn!

The Sunak Government has acceded. Most of even Johnson’s meagre measures to curb the emissions that cause global heating and climate collapse are being withdrawn. That’s the sub-text of this week’s Autumn Statement by the Chancellor. Where action to create new Climate Jobs and a low carbon economy can reflate and protect our economy, the domination of the oil corporations heralds ever-deeper disaster. Capitalist Business as usual in an era of fundamental change to our Planet. Absurd!

We are All Engaged in the Class War

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This is a time of polycrisis. The New Age of Catastrophe. With 130,000 killed by the war in Ukraine to date, at least 10,000 in Gaza, and 20,000 children permanently displaced by the impact of climate change each day, we can all see and feel the crisis. The tension, the need, is to keep hold of the Big Picture whilst also acting upon the local and immediate. This is my weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald printed 13th November 2023, my local chemist (a lifeline for some 3,000 people each week), is being shut down in the name of short-term profit by an offshore hedge fund consortium. This drip-drip-drip fof cuts to essential social infrastructure has to be challenged, alongside the global issues of imperialism and climate collapse.

They’re closing our local Boots the Chemist. The shop manages thousands of prescriptions each week. The pharmacist spends time with individuals, he knows us, advises when there’s no chance of a timely GP appointment, his staff offer a smile. This doorstep service ensures those with mobility challenges have local access to help. The chemists has been a central core of our personal security and sense of safety.

It’s just the latest service lost to our community. Most of us are experiencing enforced rationing as if it’s wartime.

Not only has the cost-of-living crisis cut our real-spending power – lowering wages and raising the prices of the necessities of life: shelter, food and utilities – but the human services for health and welfare have all but disappeared. The working class pay a great deal through taxation for a social infrastructure that is rapidly diminishing. In fact, 40% of gross domestic product each year goes into our State coffers as tax, and goes out again to maintain a semblance of society. Yet we feel ourselves to be getting less-and-less back from the taxes deducted from our wages and purchases. 

Our health services are in crisis, the educational standards of our children are declining by all international comparisons, the general housing stock has become both unaffordable and in need of urgent repairs, local government is going bankrupt causing care of the vulnerable to become all but unavailable. The community hubs of libraries, parks and recreational facilities, paid for from our Community Taxes, are crumbling from lack of maintenance.  

We are not in a State of War. So what is going on? 

Firstly, we live in an unequal society riven by social class. The descriptions above are not experienced by those in the top ten percent of the population with individual income above £50,000 a year or a bank stash hoarded from inherited wealth. The richest one percent of the population live lives wholly separated from the challenges most of us face daily.

Secondly, the incredible level of polarisation between rich and poor has, by and large, been funded by our taxes. This is best summed-up by even the most superficial consideration of the political creed of “Privatisation”. Tax-payers funds have been squandered on transferring all our essential services into the hands of private companies and their shareholders, started by the Labour Government of the mid-1970’s and accelerated by all from Thatcher to Sunak ever since. 

Our water was sold-off in the early 1980’s, since when £75 billion pounds has gone into shareholders private accounts whilst our rivers and coastal shores became polluted and the charges for fresh water and sewage disposal have risen to a point where many – yes many – can’t afford flush their toilet through the day. 

The privatisation of electricity and gas supplies has seen record profits, record dividends for the bosses and large stockholders, and record prices to a point where we are now expected to not heat our homes but huddle under blankets. 

Fuel prices rise and fall at the whim of producers, but at base are three times the price of five years ago and the profits are three times as high – all this with UK-based oil producers receiving at least £10.5 billion a year in subsidies from us, the tax-payers, whilst they pay next to nothing into the Exchequer. 

And that’s the third thing – profit. Britain has become an internationally low-waged, long working-hours economy. Small and even Medium Sized businesses, known as SMEs, are undoubtedly struggling, keeping wages low in order that the tax-payer donates to the wages of their workforce by paying Universal Benefit top-ups, whilst our taxes pay-out Housing Benefits, not to the tenant but to the landlord who has increased the rent to unaffordable prices, able to increase homelessness through the licence to evict without cause with two months notice. Private profit divides and rules us all. 

It’s all rotten. It is the big businesses, the transnational corporations who do not respect our national borders but demand tax-incentives – bail-outs and subsidies from our pay-ins – who are bleeding us dry. The hundreds of billions in tax relief for corporations dwarf the tax money spent on supporting the homeless or refugees who we are told to blame for our poverty.

And all the while, the corporations are looking to increase their profits and dividends at the expense of most of us. Smaller companies go to the wall, the larger ones seek to restrict services and sack staff solely in order to make ever-larger pay-outs to their owners. 

That’s why Boots the Chemist is closing our local pharmacy – private profit over human need. Our medical prescriptions deliver them millions in profits paid by us, the tax-payers. Boots, its private equity owners, Walgreens, based in Switzerland (for the tax-avoidance no doubt) made a profit of £137million last year, its boss taking home a £3,800,000 million pay cheque. Apparently that’s not enough.

It’s never enough, is it? The impact of the closure upon our community’s health will be severe, but the greed of the system of Capitalism doesn’t give a damn.

We are engaged in a war, currently one-sided – the Class War. We have to fight for a better system based upon need not profit! This week that fight demands a campaign to save our local pharmacy.

Protests are a call for Peace and basic Humanity

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald published on 7th November. The censorship of the media still in accelerating swing, with employers banning discussion of Gaza or any signs of support for Palestinians in or around the workplace (a social work colleague of mine hauled before her manager last week fo stating her support for Gaza’s on Facebook!). The protests continue to build.

What would you most associate with Remembrance Day: the commemoration of a ceasefire at the end of the most horrific of all wars to date, or endorsing and celebrating war?

The answer is remembering the joy of Peace, of course. The remembrance element of 11th November each year is the emotional engagement with the moment the war ended, the two-minutes silence at 11am offering a moment of reflection of the sheer horror of warfare and empathising with all the individual war dead and their grieving relatives.  Initially the remembrance of those killed in the First World War, Remembrance Sunday has developed over recent decades to recall and ponder all wars, the dead, the injured and the scarred emotional memory of those who survive. 

In Britain, Remembrance Sunday has the King, Prime Ministers past and present, and all sections of the military establishment march through Whitehall, London, to the Cenotaph to lay wreaths and stand silently still in commemoration of those who died for the Country. It is a yearly moment of overt nationalism and military pride.

On the 11th November there is a two minute silence, usually falling on a busy week day. This year the 11th is a Saturday. Apart from the two-minutes of silence, often drowned-out by the beeping horns and cash-til pings of commerce, nothing else happens. The remembrance is for Sunday.

So it is with the utmost hypocrisy that a section of our Government and national media choose to vilify the huge numbers of people across Britain organising for one of the largest ever demonstrations in London taking place on Saturday. The march, sprawling across the centre of London but nowhere near to the Cenotaph, will be calling, resolutely, for Peace. 

An immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and Occupied West Bank, as demanded by the United Nations but denied by the military Israeli State, is all that will be called for.

The USA and UK deny that even a pause in the War in Gaza should take place. It is, by any standard, hardly a war. The Palestinian fighters have no tanks or fighter aircraft but have been constantly bombarded for 4 weeks by the most heavily armed State across the entire Middle East, resulting in more than 10,000 Palestinians killed including 4,000 children. 

Why shouldn’t we protest to put a halt to that? Millions in Britain and across the world are currently engaged in mass vigils, meetings and protest marches calling for a ceasefire in the war on Gaza, Palestine.

Nevertheless, our Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, calls us all supporters of terrorism and calls the protests, “hate marches”. The double standard is jaw-dropping in its sheer hypocrisy. The Prime Minister has warned of disruption at the Cenotaph on Sunday, when the Ceasefire march is taking place the previous day! This is baseless scaremongering of the highest order, and should be exposed as propaganda – the government’s ideological weaponisation of Remembrance Sunday is outrageous. 

Peace protesters care for humanity. We cannot stand by and watch war crimes without shouting-out for the carnage to stop. The Government, intent upon supporting western supremacy and imperialist interests across the Middle East, what is actually the “Arab World”, will obviously stop at nothing to shut down all opposition. 

Yet the protests are building, upwards of a million people expected on the streets of London this Saturday, with coachloads travelling from across the country including from Plymouth, despite a promised Police crackdown on all of us who protest. This Government-sponsored political offensive comes from the very far-right of the political spectrum, seeking urgent legislation to outlaw protests that oppose the ideology of a single political party, soon to be ousted from office. Whilst Prime Minister Sunak calls for arrests of those defending Palestinians, he will stand at the front of a march which will, in its ranks, host a contingent of the British fascist party, the National Front. 

It would seem it is no longer fascism that is the enemy, but, ironically, freedom of association. There are growing numbers of statements from individuals at work and students in colleges threatened with discipline and even dismissal over wearing badges or carrying flags in support of the Palestinian people. School students and teachers are being instructed not to discuss the War. The danger to democracy is quite obvious.

Trade unions will defend its members against such repression.