Here’s my weekly comment column sent to the Plymouth Herald for publication on 20th October – the same day as Nigel Farage was speaking to 300 loyal RUKs at Plymouth’s arena (which holds 2,500!), My article was sent to lawyers and declined – only the second time I’ve been cut in a full three years of weekly columns. The Herald published pages of interview with Farage, allowing his bile full publicity. The question is why? I will not fall into conspiracy theories and editorial alliances, but instead observe that local newspapers are extremely afraid of litigation, probably because of cost rather than reputational damage, used as a tool by those with power to bully and cajole. Ironically the UK press is probably more constrained than in the USA. Of course, with 85% of all media owned by billionaires, there’s little chance of either unbiased or objective investigative journalism. I have raised the simple issue of the lack of space for any commentary or statements to the Left of the Labour Party, leaving all socialist commentary and ideas strictly curtailed if not invisible. Yet socialists number in our millions here, and socialist movements across the USA and Europe are growing is scale and activity very fast. Given Britain’s political history its more than ironic, isn’t it, and a signal of an increasingly authoritarian right wing society. We must protest, and we did on the day!
I’ve added below a similar comment, probably defamatory by comparison with mine, published in London by an associate, as an example of the differences in editorial control. And a picture of our 100+ people protest outside the Farage rally. Anyway, here’s the unpublished article. See what you think.
The moment you believe that every criticism is a lie, that each alternative view is nonsense, that every allegation is false, all rational inquiry is gone. Such is the closed mind of the bigot.
The bigot is obstinate and unreasoning, laid rigid in a coffin of narrow-minded opinion, buried by intolerance.
Racism is a form of bigotry. Racism is the opinion that humans can be divided into separate races with human traits and capacities that produce inherent superiority of a particular race. Racism is an idea with no scientific fact to back it up. Politicians use racism, so-called “anti-woke” bigotry, sexism and prejudice to bolster their personal power and control.
Racism is having a renaissance, being made respectable by political groups furthering their own self-interest by spreading fear and loathing of “others”. For example, the idea that some human beings are “illegal” is broadcast so loudly that it is being stated as “fact”.
No human being is illegal. Those attacking “the illegals” are focussed upon people arriving on boats without a visa or prior agreement to enter the UK. The Law says the process is illegal, not the person.
The person risking a small boat to get into Britain is seeking asylum from conditions they faced elsewhere that, frankly, anyone with ability would seek to flee from. You would. But, unlike most other countries – States who have taken-in and accepted far more asylum seekers than has Britain – there is no legal route here for a person to claim asylum before they are in the country.
The Tories passed the Nationality and Borders Act in 2022, stating that if a person is in danger in their country of origin or residence and want the UK to grant them international protection, they can only claim asylum once they are in the UK. It is not possible to claim asylum from outside the UK. Most people in peril have no choice but to enter the UK without permission. There is no legal route.
Any reasonable human being would agree that the law should be changed in order to allow asylum seekers a “safe route” to apply. This would end the flow of boats and the business of those profiteering from human suffering and death by drowning.
Instead, the chancers and ideologues of the far-Right are using the situation they themselves have created to win power and influence and personal wealth. It is no coincidence that most of the prominent Tory MPs who pushed that law back in 2022 are now prominent members of Reform UK. They created the “enemy” around which they could organise reactionary opinion, hoping to regain the votes the Tories lost through their avarice and incompetence when in government.
These established racists have produced a false demon that they cannot easily control. The fascist gangs are on the streets. All Farage can do is up-the-racism! Farage’s party is intensifying the bigotry as it faces more competition from the fascist parties, promising the end of asylum altogether. Restore Britain, Rupert Lowe’s far-Right breakaway from Reform UK, is soaking up votes from Farage by promoting hatred of Muslims and Black people.
The racist Reform candidates displayed on ITV, screaming to deport all Asian people from Britain and training up white men to drag Muslims from their homes are competing with Restore Britain for credentials as the true British Fascists. The fascist street thugs, the Blackshirt bigots are baying for blood. They must be exposed and put down.
Nigel Farage is in-league with them, challenging for leadership of an authoritarian establishment based upon white male supremacy. He should not be welcome in Plymouth!
My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (13.10.2026), reacting off-the-cuff to Monday’s Prime Ministerial announcement of forthcoming talks with the European Union. I have no doubt its all about rearmament, but at the same time the wily Burnham is using the angst of the middle class voters to blame Austerity on Brexit, rebuilding the liberal vote for the Labour Party. The idea that Brexit is behind the current economic crisis appears almost hegemonic. Of course it didn’t help, but it’s not the source of the cost-of-living crisis nor much to do with the enormous shift of wealth from the poor to the super-rich everywhere. We really have to call out the disinformation and political sleight-of-hand.
The unedited version below (not my headline – I don’t do first-person!). Please scroll down to the bottom of the page for the subscribe button on the right-hand side!
Those of us on “The Left” who voted to “Leave” are not about to be cowed into submission. Burnham’s ploy of uniting the middle class vote behind Labour in pursuit of a fresh “Remain” campaign is cynical in the extreme. There is nothing benign or at all socialist about the European Union. Europe has never been a friend of the working class.
It is worth remembering. Some 52 percent opted for exit, on a turnout of 72 percent, higher than almost any general election. They did so in the face of opposition from three quarters of MPs, the leadership of all three of the biggest parliamentary parties — the Conservatives, Labour and the Scottish National Party — the overwhelming bulk of British industry and almost every major capitalist institution, from the Bank of England to the International Monetary Fund.
Why? Europe is, and was formed as, a Bosses Club. The European Parliament was created as the frontpiece, the cover, just as are national parliaments, for promotion of regional competition on the world stage – the advantage of Capitalist corporations in competition with Russia and China for the plunder of resources from Africa and India and South America. Sometimes in league with the USA, sometimes independently.
The European Union is a neoliberal organisation acting in the interests of European capital. It has forced the Greek people and then most of the rest into the economic stranglehold and poverty of austerity, cutting social welfare provision and pay rates in pursuit of free trade agreements to raise the rate of profit accumulated by the big corporations sitting inside its borders.
Britain would have been no better off staying inside the European Market. Oh, perhaps a few of the larger UK based companies would have benefited, but not us workers. Just look at the protests on the streets of Paris and Berlin and Madrid. In 2026 our working class youth are suffering irrespective of national borders. Youth unemployment, wages too low to live on, a raging housing crisis caused by rapacious landlords, cuts to all social provision from health and social care through to pensions. The experience of the economic crisis in Britain is precisely the same in both cause and conditions across Europe and beyond – heightened exploitation in pursuit of private profit. All the wealth we produce gets sucked-up through inflated salaries of the management and into the offshore bank accounts of the big investors and corporate executives.
At the time of the vote back in 2016, Europe was viciously enforcing neoliberalism across the continent, breaking democracy and sovereign States like Greece, and it hasn’t let-up since. In Britain the vote was, above all else, a rebellion by working class people who feel they have had their lives torn apart by the ruling elite. Two-thirds of those classified as skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers voted to leave, compared to just 43 percent among those in “intermediate” or “higher” managerial, professional or administrative roles.
And it wasn’t as simple as a vote for racism. A third of Asian and a quarter of black voters chose Leave. Large, ethnically diverse cities in the north of England voted for exit — including Sheffield, Birmingham and Bradford. Racism was obvious on the Leave side, where anti-immigrant arguments from the UK Independence Party (now Reform UK) and Conservative politicians played a prominent role, especially in the final weeks of campaigning.
In the final weeks of the Brexit campaign, xenophobia and scapegoating spewed out by the press and politicians to deflect from anger over austerity and privatisation. Many principled people voted Remain with good anti-racist reasoning. It was never a clean or clear-cut poll between opposites.
Class consciousness played a core role in the Brexit vote. This was not about the vacuous superficiality of European travel or buying a second home in the Algarve – the freedom of the wealthy few. The vote was about the pain of Austerity imposed by the collapse of the corrupt banking system in 2008-9. Wage labourers were hurting bad back then, and still are.
It’s all happening again! This time, as the world economy dives into fresh chaos, the ruling class are using racism and the threat of war as tools to suppress our discontent. Sections of the British Ruling Class were hurt badly by Brexit. The moves to “rejoin” Europe are precepts for emergency rearmament, the military-industrial complex seeking cross-border cooperation to maximise market penetration and profit. Burnham is arguing for Britain’s pride of place in the coming wars against Russia and China. And he’s using the sham of rejoining Europe to fool us all.
Instead, socialists should combine struggles against racism with struggles against the wider attacks on the working class – a major uprising against the cost-of-living crisis. Join with the mass strikes across Europe for international working class unity, not the European Union of Capitalist Profiteers! End Austerity!
My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (6.10.26), mourning the lost opportunities for a class fight against privatisation and Austerity in Britain. Look to the French! And Spanish! Today’s mass strike in France is the key element – workers remain key to wealth creation and when we down tools we have key collective power at the point of production. Simple, but so hard to achieve. Protest does work, to a limited extent and inside the confines of social democracy. Mass Strike works whatever the society. Student protests tend to lead to mass strike when workers see their children attacked by the State, coshed, shot at and their hands blown-off if not murdered. Today’s mass strike in France has already won concessions against pay cuts. In Spain the protests have forced a General Election. this is all what has to happen here – a socialist workers’ mass revolt, not a White Riot!
The edited version is printed here. Please expand the pic at the bottom to read the published article. And please subscribe to this Blog by clicking the button in the bottom right-hand corner.
In an Emergency, Break the Glass!
There is a case for violent riots. As Martin Luther King said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.” There are a lot of people unheard in the world. There is a general sense here, too, that we have very little say over our lives or concern for our needs.
Looking across at Europe right now, perhaps we, too, should be breaking glass to regain our voice. The protests in France and Spain are advisory. School students in France have taken to the streets to publicise the terrible state of schools and colleges. They have been soundly beaten by Police, shooting them with rubber bullets. In response some have resorted to violence.
It is a core human condition of basic justice that “self defence is no offence”. No government, no municipal authority, no educational body has taken any of the students long-standing grievances on board. At heart, the extreme weather this summer has brought issues to the boil. Classrooms were at over 35 degrees centigrade, impossible to learn in, and now as winter approaches, they’re down to 15C. No-one can learn in these conditions, and shouldn’t be expected to.
Nor can anyone teach properly in these dilapidated state schools. On United Nations’ (UN) World Teachers’ Day yesterday, teachers in France took strike action and stood with the students, demanding new funding and reparations to the crumbling education estate. Unions are staging a mass strike today. France has experienced the neoliberal onslaught more recently but much faster than Britain, with €46 Billion in cuts now in train. To date, French workers have fought back against privatisation and austerity in a way we have not, with huge protests and strike action. The French government weakens and falls back one step at a time, yesterday withdrawing plans to lower wages further but continueing to freeze pensions. The protests continue. All power to the working class!
In Spain, last weekend’s street violence, perpetrated by incredibly violent policing worthy of the fascist regime of General Franco, has been challenged by a mass outpouring of anger against the injustice of the housing markets. The protests have been so large that they have forced a General Election! Local people have been forced into poverty and squalor by speculators playing the market to raise the price of homes ridiculously above anything working class people can possibly afford. In response, landlords have raised rents to prices that defy value and overwhelm the wages of most.
When those with wealth are free from rules and regulations, devoid of legal or moral constraint, they run riot. It is the rich who are violently assaulting the working classes everywhere, copying each other internationally in pursuit of private wealth at the expense of the majority. This has long been the case in Britain, one of the first countries to adopt the neoliberal economic model as an experiment, imposed by the International Monetary Fund in the 1970’s.
Margaret Thatcher ensured the privatisation and eradication of our council housing stock that has led to today’s deep housing crisis. Her legacy, with plaudits from today’s annual conference of the defunct Tory Party, includes the highest number of people sleeping rough ever recorded. In England we have 135,000 households living in temporary accommodation including 176,000 children. It will take 119 Years to clear housing waiting lists. We have parasitic housing corporations charging exorbitant service charges for home maintenance never delivered.
The hikes in housing costs here are unaffordable and, in their consequences, wholly illegitimate. And yet the Tories and their ex-colleagues who have fled to Reform UK, braying in their respective conferences, are promising more deregulation and more free market competition, planning to suck the very lifeblood out of working class people.
In comparison with the French and Spanish, we have just let the deep crisis across all social services happen, unopposed. We few who do shout out are bombarded by screaming Blackshirts saying the housing crisis is all the fault of migrants, the schools dilapidation caused by Black children and Muslims. These racists are the lackeys of the landlords, whipped-up by flagrant lies to secure and protect the exploitation of the property-owning elite. Fooled.
There is another way. We can fight back. Take to the streets. Demand housing regulation, legally enforced rent caps, public investment in education and social care. Learn from workers and students in France and Spain. That’s the element of rejoining Europe worthy of chasing!
My weekly Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (29th September 2026), addressing the Labour Party Conference from afar. This was written a day before Burnham’s speech which sought to rally a beleaguered Party around working class issues. I stand by what I wrote. It was pie-in-the-sky with sleight-of-hand pledges, for example, cutting the pensioners triple-lock security while promising unspecified future help with social care. No mention of the challenge of rising fascism, racism and misogyny, and whispered asides on climate change and war. Capitalism is in global polycrisis globally and this Prime Ministerial address drowned in its denial. Time will unravel the pledges and expose the deceit.
Below is my unedited draft, or please expand the picture to read the published version. I would not have chosen their headline. Here’s mine.
We need an international socialist movement
When a prime minister declares they will not be calling a general election you can be sure they’re under mounting pressure to do so. The honeymoon period, the “Burnham Bounce”, is already over. Burnham is facing a winter of crisis and chaos borne of Austerity economics, war and climate catastrophe.
Political activists, left, right and centre wanted to see the back of Starmer. Whatever your concern, he wasn’t helping. Of course, in a class society based upon extremes of wealth and deprivation, individual power and competition, you can’t please everyone all the time. But it takes a special skill to please no-one at all.
You have to choose sides and take a political position. And Burnham has.
Quietly, and with a smile that Starmer could never manage, he’s carrying-on the same old “pro-growth” Great Lie of all his predecessors. In this rapacious class society, “growth” and “re-industrialisation” can only mean more profits for the super-rich and their corporations, almost exclusively the military-industrial complex.
Labour, as always, ends up doing the jobs for the Rich that the Tories couldn’t get away with.
How? By tying the trade union leadership to its governmental coat tails. Generally, unions don’t fight a Labour Government even when their members re under terrible assault. The collective strike wave of 1978-9, labelled by Tories as the “Winter of Discontent” was an exception driven very much “from below” by workers plunged into poverty by Labour policies forcing wage restraint and welfare cuts amidst high inflation.
Overall, UK poverty was lower in 1979 than today despite a much larger economy. The rich have gotten richer, billionaires’ wealth rising five times as fast as the average earner.
The lack of TU action has allowed the far-Right to fill the vacuum of zero representation for the beleaguered working class. It’s happened time-and-again in our history. But this time the level of fascist organisation across the world funds and informs the most serious threat to democracy.
Yet Burnham is looking rightwards, seeking to compete and placate the racist bigots when he should be beating back the corrupt profiteering of the super-rich landlords and corporate executives.
Rather than taxing the super-rich and spending the money on council homes, he’s announced loans from the taxpayer for the private purchase of first homes, protecting the profits of the banks and mortgage companies.
Rather than repealing Tory laws and producing a legal and safe application route for asylum seekers, he’s using the refugees from the global south as whipping posts to outdo the neo-fascists.
Rather than publishing last year’s UK government climate national security report suppressed by Starmer, he’s briefing other governments on impending collapse of ecosystems across the world whilst opening-up Rosebank and other fossil fuel sources at home.
Rather than damning Israel’s genocide in Gaza he’s still licensing the supply of weapons made in the UK to Israel, and allowing the United States to use UK bases to wage Trump’s illegal wars in Iran and Yemen.
Through all this runs the reason why the ruling capitalist class sometimes prefer the ostensibly pro-worker Labour Government to an honestly pro-Capitalist class Tory or Reform led government. Labour can get away with more without a class war.
Labour plays the bait-and-switch approach, offers the sweetener for the bitter pill, provides a prettier fig-leaf over the latest abuse, the window-dressing hiding the back-stage offensive.
So give a small amount of extra cash to councils and communities to cover-up the massive tax-allowances to the finance corporations.
Allow Milliband wax-lyrical about green energy targets whilst continuing to subsidise and protect fossil-fuel use and the extreme profits of the oil companies.
Labour has not committed to anything called “socialist” for many generations now. Callaghan made cuts to the Welfare State much larger in one full-swoop than anything Thatcher managed. Blair privatised more of the public estate than any other prime minister ever. Starmer followed in Blair’s shadow, and worse.
Capitalists depend on our taxes to fund the modicum of social infrastructure they need for workers to be fit enough and able to travel to work. We pay for our health and social care, not them. Sometimes they accept a about Government to rebuild the modicum of social infrastructure they need for workers to be fit enough and able to travel to work. We pay for our health and social care, not them.
Burnham is not a socialist. He’s a player. And his Labour government will continue the role of administering Capitalism on behalf of the interests of the capitalist ruling class. This will result in more racism and persecution of minorities, more war, more climate chaos, more inequality and poverty.
And every Party to the Right will produce an even worse result.
The political divide is strengthening across Europe and the US with new socialist forces growing rapidly. It’s time to reassert international socialist principles and fight for workers’ rights. In Germany the far-Right has electorally taken the East whilst the big cities have shifted far to the socialist Left. In the United States the openly Democratic Socialist Party has endured the election of Mamdani in New York and is building a serious left alternative to Trump’s militarism, racism and misogyny.
Its time to reassert socialist principles and fight for workers’ rights. Declare yourself a socialist, for a system based upon meeting human need not private profit, challenging exploitation and oppression, for equality, Peace, climate action and redistribution of wealth to eradicate poverty now!
My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (22.9.26), predicting more of the Austerity ideology trying to make us pay for profits and war. The Budget looms, the call for cuts to benefits raises to a crescendo, and the organised working class has to fight or pay up. Mine has been a lifetime in the socialist and trade union movements, now long-toothed enough and battle scarred sufficiently to know the primary cause of our descent – the falsehoods spun by reformist leaders projecting two lies – the first that gradual improvements come from patient negotiations with receptive employers, and the second, that “workers won’t fight”. The truth, as shown by the Cancer Research Strikers only this week, is that workers are ready to fight with the correct leadership offering a positive and militant strategy. Very soon, workers will have to defy their nay-saying leaders and take collective action against their advice and, if necessary, the Law, in order to survive. That is the socialist perspective in the face of the poly crisis of 2026.
The unedited version below, or expand and read the picture to read the published article.
Ideas are a central element of class struggle. Our security and welfare is currently as much under attack from ideology as from war and climate. Every day we are assaulted by media predictions of global chaos, whilst “at home” we are threatened by experts telling us we, the People, are too expensive.
Wall to wall capitalist propaganda says demands we tighten our belts: cut support for low-paid workers, pensioners and the disabled. Its all Lies! The money’s there!
We, the People, are not the problem. Britain is more wealthy today than it has ever been.
Check it out. On average, Britons today have access to far more goods, services, technology, healthcare, education, housing amenities, and infrastructure than people of the 1950’s to 2000’s, the inter war years, Victorian Britain or earlier periods.
According to the Office for National Statistics, the country possesses an enormous stock of property, financial assets, physical possessions, businesses, infrastructure, and pension funds. The UK’s median net wealth sits at roughly $125,000 per adult making us the world’s 6th largest economy out 193 countries.
Britain is neither “broken” nor poor. Britain is richer than ever. But the “sense” of living here denies the statistics. Real incomes have stagnated compared with the rapid growth of the post-war decades. Wealth is distributed extremely unevenly. The richest 10% of British households hold around 43% of wealth, while the poorest half – that’s 35 million of us – hold about 9%. The rich have hoarded the overwhelming majority of the wealth created by the productivity of the working class.
We live in extremes of wealth and poverty. How? Because the neoliberal experiment that promised “Trickle down” was always a lie. It never happened. The economics of the “Free Market” sucked all the wealth from the working class, through the gross lowering of wage rates, the tripling of housing costs, and the privatisation of public services that ate-up most of the tax-payers contributions previously spent on social support and infrastructure.
Unbridled profiteering in a gangster economy. The top 5% have doubled their wealth through open and applauded extreme exploitation of the rest of us.
As the General Secretary of Unite the Union, Sharon Graham reflects, “After a decade that has seen prices rise by 40%, workers are sick of paying for crises they did not cause. Energy bills set to be the highest in three years, while the privatised profiteers rake in billions. Mortgage rates are spiking while the banks make money hand over fist.”
Couldn’t put it better myself. The problem exposes the sleight of hand. Trade unions never, never challenged neoliberalism or fought privatisation, instead bending to “follow our members” into one asset-stripping private corporation after another. Housing “externalised” from local council control, health services and social care sold off to private companies, public transport – indeed everything in public ownership – sold off to the cheapest bidder all at the expense of wages and working conditions.
Some of us always knew the dangers of privatisation. We tried to fight, and failed.
Now, with workers really hurting, unable to live on the sickly-sloganed “Living Wage”, we see through the empty rhetoric of union leaders and Labour politicians who have actively done little or nothing. We should have seen mass strike action against “Austerity Britain” from the very beginning, demanding socialist policies for public ownership, redistribution of wealth and the eradication of poverty.
The failure of working-class leadership is directly responsible for the rise of the far-Right. The transnational billionaires are funding Farage and the far-Right precisely because they want their wealth, power and control to continue. They want us to blame the poor and refugees. They feed on passivity and hopelessness.
Union leaders and career politicians have “sold-out” in return for cosy lives and entitlements – crumbs form the tables of the super-rich. The Autumn Budget will attack us again. We need a new trade union leadership ready for a fight, and a real agitational socialist leadership inside workplaces, organising collective protection and challenging the media lies funded by the ruling class. And a government ready to get our wealth back – tax the rich!
My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (15.9.26), emphasising the drive to war but without exaggeration. The piece underplays my personal distress at the sheer absence of any serious organised outcry against the rearmament and militarism encouraged by this, a Labour Government. I’m unsurprised given the role of Blair’s government in the illegal war against Iraq, but at least then we had a single-day demonstration of 2 million people including trade unions demanding “Stop the War!” Today, nothing. Governments in the pockets of the military-industrial complex taking billions from the taxpayer for their private profit. We’re being instructed to “prepare”. I agree – the working class needs to act for Peace before it’s too late.
The unedited version below, or expand the picture (or buy the Herald) to read the published version:
“Stock Up” warnings Worth Heeding
It’s the final countdown. “Britain will be at war with Russia by 2030”, warns Badenoch. You may take it with a pinch of salt – she’s a Tory! But when the hard-nosed Jonathan Powell, UK National Security adviser to government warns that Europe must be ready to endure “real hardship” this winter we should take note.
Immediately the question comes, what can we do? The Defence Secretary, Wes Streeting, issued an urgent warning last Friday, for households to stock-up especially with canned foods and water, and to put together an “emergency kit” of survival items.
The UK government is hurriedly producing the “Prepare Campaign”, a multi-media public information message similar to the “Protect & Survive” booklet that went through every letterbox fifty years ago, telling people how to survive a nuclear attack. Pardon me?
Citing the threats from war and extreme weather induced by climate change which together are creating food and energy shortages, this warning of rationing is of historic importance. Yet day-to-day life continues with such a sense of “business-as-usual” as to defy both warnings and material reality.
The “carry on” brigade are championed by capitalist billionaires who need consumers to keep consuming and workers to keep working to maintain the status quo which creates their corporate profits. But the government warnings are a political recognition that social chaos is around the corner. Its an “arse-covering” exercise for politicians to say “we told you but you didn’t listen – you’re on your own” when the s**t hits.
Some capitalists are fast-funding the far-Right to ensure an authoritarian government that will protect their businesses during the deepening crisis. The rush to cryptocurrencies and Artificial Intelligence Data Centres represent the panic response of short-term speculators seeking the accumulation of wealth as quickly as possible before The Big Crash that is likely to dwarf 2008-9.
The military-industrial complex are rubbing their hands with glee – war makes money for the arms manufacturers. The rest of the ruling class, transnational corporations and nation states alike, are buying gold in the recognition of the potential for wheelbarrows full of Deutschmarks. The price of gold has increased by 145% and is accelerating whilst the real and hidden levels of inflation is devaluing our currency daily. Cash is soon likely to be worthless. Hoard your jewellery!
Today, the Trades Union Congress meets at our annual conference in Brighton, representing over 6 million paying members, an with some considerable recognition of the perilous state of things for the working class. With fewer than 70,000 UK millionaires able to protect themselves, the bottom seventy percent of the UK population are devoid of any personal wealth that could fund us through a crisis.
Most are already unprotected from social upheaval, the 12 million elderly, 11 million under 18, some 17 million with a health disability, and the 5 million low-paid in work but requiring top-ups from State benefits, all face serious cuts to social support as the economy is turned towards war. Over 8 million of us are reliant on Universal Credit because wages are so low and RPI inflation which includes housing costs is rising above 5% per year. But instead of fighting for higher wages the unaffordable cost of welfare is the live debate, not the ludicrous and inhuman cost of rapid rearmament.
A vital proposition from the education trade union, UCU, is detailing the political demand for “Welfare not Warfare!” Housing, Health and Education are each already in crisis ahead of inevitable economic tremors this Winter and massive spending cuts next Spring.
Socialists want to build on our current trade unions policy of social investment in people before profits, and peace not war. The trade unions with members in the arms industries will vote for jobs, their short-termism of “jam today” placing the funding of war preparations into competition with the many more jobs in the service sectors now at risk. This will be a fierce debate but a crucial vote. Will the unions fall-in with a war economy and military governance?
For the working class, the only power we have is collective. The question at our conference is why have the union leaders done so little to explain, agitate and organise for mass action against poverty as well as war.
It is always the working class that pay for war. From the start of war we will be on our own – stock up now!Governments won’t protect us, but we are not alone while we have each other. We will need food sharing, neighbour-checking and community organisation, but most of all, right now we need collective trade union organisation and mass action to demand peace with social justice!
My weekly Comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (8.9.26), calling for mobilisation against the far-Right racists and fascists. Plymouth now has two elected Councillors representing Restore Britain. They have to be challenged. And the thugs have called a march and rally in Plymouth Hoe on Saturday 19th September – they have to be stopped! Stand Up To Racism, while you still can.
My full article below or expand the picture to read the edited version in print.
We haven’t forgotten fascism. There are routine reminders in this newspaper of the blanket bombing of Plymouth and the heroism of the fight that defeated fascism in the Second World War. Yet now we have two councillors who proclaim themselves members of a fascist party they were not elected to, sat in Plymouth’s Council House. They mimic the racist policies of Hitler and his Nazis.
Restore Britain is a fascist party. The two councillors were not voted-in as fascists but have now declared their true colours, exposing the deceit. Restore Britain is an ethno-nationalist racist party and they know it! Their call for “remigration” – a euphemism for the expulsion of all non-white people – is a racist threat illegal at Law.
The black clad thugs blocking roads in Dover and Portsmouth last weekend are intent on banning the Islamic burqa and niqab whilst themselves wearing full head coverings and masks. The Islamophobia of Restore UK and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon aka “Tommy Robinson” and his associate Daniel Thoms – aka “Danny Tommo” – are front and centre, whipping-up lies about Muslim invasion and refugees as sexual abusers.
Refugees arriving in boats are a tiny fraction at 0.29% of the population compared with the 70 million people living in Britain, and impossible to be responsible for the low level of wages or the crisis in our Housing, NHS and Education. But the powerlessness of the refugee makes them an easy scapegoat. The fascists are the real threat.
Make no mistake. The “Tommies” are out for power and control. They use fear in their political propaganda and street violence to build support for extreme responses to made-up threats. These are not people who believe in “live and let live”. They are people with pretensions that they have the right, the privilege and the entitlement to tell others how they should live and who they should be. They believe it is they who should determine our beliefs, both political and faith, the relationships we are allowed and identities that must be proscribed.
The majority of us don’t want to be ruled by a militaristic fascist State machine. But times change, the global economic darkening towards deepening war, fuel disruption and price hikes, food shortages caused by climate change and a predictable global banking crash as the AI Bubble bursts are making us fearful, seeking safety. If there is a fascist party in place with its street boot boys terrorising all opposition, the People may acquiesce.
Under fascism the working class will receive nothing but pain. The far-Right financiers and paid-for politicians will censor all talk of opposition and omit to speak of the neighbourhood atrocities perpetrated by the politically empowered criminal street gangs. It’s happening already. And the Police, already institutionally riddled with right-wing culture, will facilitate the Black Shirts just as they did for Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in the 1930’s.
The Public Order Act 1936 was designed to stop extremists like Oswald Mosleys Union of Fascists “Blackshirts”. The Act makes it illegal in the UK to wear a uniform in a public place or meeting to show support for a political organisation. Why do police mass in force and the government use all their powers to arrest and incarcerate Just Stop Oil protesters demanding climate action while a paramilitary force terrorise our towns and go home unchecked?
Why won’t authorities or journalists call it out the fascists for what they are? Name it! Because they’re scared? Because they know the fascists use brutal, illegal force and intimidation against their enemies. The entire political class is looking to appease the far-right, not condemn them. This mistaken appeasement – the idea that fascism is a passing aberration – is precisely what allowed Hitler to gain power in the 1930’s.
The far-right extremist AfD has won a majority in East Germany. They are fascists. Their success is largely due to the failure of the Left to address the economic pain experienced by the working class. Fascism is the political management of capitalism through a dictatorial leader, centralised autocracy, exclusive party organisation enforcing ultranationalist militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived interest of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
Fascism uses democracy to demolish democracy. But this is not a repeat of the twentieth century. Fascism today is a far more class-centric movement organised to sure up the ideology of Capitalism and the power of the super-rich at the expense of everyone else in a period of global economic crisis. Fascism favours the well-off middle classes but offers the working class nothing. Once the Blackshirts have smashed dissent the new fascist rulers will quash them on behalf of the transnational corporations.
The billionaire, Elon Musk, himself ready to use Hitler’s Nazi fascist salute publicly, funds both Restore’s fascist leader Rupert Lowe and the fascist Tommy Robinson. Indeed, the tech billionaires from Peter Thiel to Curtis Yarvin are widely recognised as Techno-fascists, arguing for the end of democracy in favour of a technocratic rich elite running society worldwide.
The global crisis of capitalism is seeing fascism funded as the System’s saviour. Those conned by its promises of salvation will ultimately be disappointed. But it is vital that we rise-up to ensure the defeat of fascism before it can take hold. The Trades Union Congress in the South West supports the organisations of Stand Up To Racism and the Together Alliance against the far-Right to rid our streets and political chambers of the fascist menace. Join us.
The fascists from outside the city are invading Plymouth Hoe on September 19th – they must be stopped.
My weekly Comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (1st September 2026), trying to counter the wall-to-wall right-wing media coverage of the prisons crisis, each and all focussed on the threat from criminals when there is less threat now than for decades. Of course, a separate piece would place the issue within the wider crisis of the entire public sector, detailing the politics and impact of Austerity. But on punishment versus rehabilitation alone, the issue of humanity and welfare rips large. My unabridged article below, or click on the picture to expand to read the printed version. Please subscribe to my Blog (below)
There are some very very nasty people who should not be free in any decent society. That’s why we have prisons, largely due to the absence of any community resources that can adequately manage their behaviours.
The record numbers of prisoners represents a societal demand for punishment rather than rehabilitation, not an increase in crime. Right-wing governments have demanded longer sentences whilst cutting community provision to the bone. Politicians believe voters want vengeance not welfare.
As a consequence, according to the Prison Reform Trust, over the past two decades the prison population has grown dramatically. Sentences have become longer, and the use of custody has expanded. Yet It may be of some solace that the nearly 88,000 prisoners constitute just 0.13 of the population.
Domestic burglary and vehicle-related theft have fallen dramatically. Robbery has also fallen substantially. Most of us behave.
The victims of crime are rightfully pained and mostly traumatised, the threat of repeat a constant nightmare. Many simply demand that rehabilitation of the offender is offered to ensure common safety when back in the community. The right-wing media’s Hue & Cry over early release should demand closer scrutiny. The hang’em-and-flog’em brigade want jailor’s keys thrown away. Most of us do not.
Vengeance is rarely the demand. Firstly, the majority of manslaughter does not occur at the hands of psychopaths. Killings happen due to a wide range of immediate circumstances and are not predetermined, the families of the convicted suffering for their imprisoned loved-one almost as much as the bereaved.
The majority of those convicted represent little further risk, although the Dickensian conditions of our brutal prison environments may well dehumanise them into a mindset of survival that embitters them before release.
Secondly, violent crime in Britain has decreased by 80% since the mid-1990’s, the chances of being a victim of violence today are lower than anytime in our history. You may not know this because there is a current focus on vicious criminals roaming our streets being whipped-up in a politically directed media frenzy.
There are fewer than 500 homicides a year, 499 in 2025-6 – the lowest since 1973: murder, manslaughter and infanticide representing 1 murder in every 130,000 people or fewer than 2 across the entire population of Plymouth expected in a year. All manifestations of violence have declined, according to all crime surveys and recent research by Cambridge University. Knife crime is down, decreasing as shown by admissions to hospitals for stab wounds, a fall by a third since 2019 from 5,000 to 3,800.
And 60% of those in prison have committees sexual offences or crimes against the person, none due for “enhanced early release”. 4% are people who can be described as “political prisoners”, those who have protested against elements of the system, including people of conscience opposing climate devastation or genocide and received harsh sentences.
18,000 places are taken-up by those on remand, held for long periods due to the court backlog – doubled since 2018 and the highest number in 50 years. 10,000 of those are foreign nationals on-remand, easily identifiable and instantly imprisonable by the Police, with many of those found not guilty when finally brought to trial. The racial profiling in the “justice system” is well documented.
Looking through the prism of class society, the latest study in 2021 found that people from England’s 10 most deprived local-authority areas were imprisoned at about 307 per 100,000, compared with 30 per 100,000 in the 10 least deprived areas, a roughly 10-to-1 difference. Prisoners are disproportionately likely to have experienced unemployment, homelessness, debt, unstable housing and other forms of disadvantage.
Poor and deprived people are disproportionally over-represented in prison, while multi-millionaires are vastly under-represented. That the rich commit crime cannot be questioned. We don’t need to interrogate the Epstein Files or Baroness Bone to recognise the ruling class’s range of sexual offences and domestic abuse through to grand larceny, huge tax-evasion and fraud. They are facilitated to defend themselves. We are not.
There is one law for the rich and another for the poor. The ruling class promotes and creates the fear and judgement upon thugs and “illegals” in order to divide the working class one from another and prevent us challenging the gross inequalities.
After nearly 20 years of austerity economics, the super-rich doubling their personal wealth, it is not just the prison service that is in crisis. Community provision and welfare support has been slashed. Courts are in backlog and Probation Services on their knees following failed Privatisation that sucked public money into the profits of private contractors and demolished the services, requiring expensive renationalisation..
In London, the investment in community services including youth centres and provisions has reduced knife crime. The £50k a year cost of keeping someone in prison is better spent on preventive services in the community, and restorative services including support after release from prison.
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (25.08.2026), trying to evade the censors whilst raising the issue of the Ukraine War. So many on the Left, as well as everyone else, supports Ukraine against Russia. I, too, feel for the Ukrainian working class experiencing such barbarism and powerlessness. But I find any identification of the Ukrainian State being a beleaguered victim against Russian totalitarianism so devoid of historic understanding as to be without any foundation. In short, Western governments provided Ukraine with economic, political, and military assistance, especially after 2014 and heavily after 2022. NATO expanded eastward after the Cold War and pressed hard, with NATO expansion including countries such as Poland and the Baltic states seeking membership. It was intended place NATO bases with nuclear weapons on the borders with Russia, now about to happen. This is a provocation not unlike the lead-up to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 after Turkey accepted US nuclear-capable Jupiter missiles and Russia tried similar placements. We came close to nuclear Armageddon back then. Of course, Russia was a Communist State-Capitalist regime at the time and is now an authoritarian gangster-capitalist regime, both situations representing war between rival imperialisms. Socialists do not support Russia’s full scale invasion in 2022 but can explain it. Challenging NATO does not imply support for the Russian State. This unwinable war is engaging wider forces towards terrifying scenarios. My problem is, when I try to have this discussion let alone put the facts into print I am censored. Mainstream media censors not only any criticism of Ukraine’s role as proxy for NATO in this war, but also the more simple call for Peace, ceasefire or negotiations. I’m surprised this even got into print. Whatever your analysis, the UK Prime Minister has just ramped-up the anti and pulled Britain into the conflict. Idiot!
My unedited version below, or expand the picture of the newspaper article to read the acceptable version (carefully crafted):
The years ahead are largely uncharted. There is little if any certainty. This may evoke thoughts of disruption caused by climate change or the AI technology revolution. Or the global economic debt crisis, USA’s $4TN debt, record personal debt across the UK, or inflation rising so much faster than the officially distorted CPI figures. Public services deprioritised, privatised and crumbling. And the rise of a new and heavily financed far-Right, being fast-tracked internationally.
Any talk of the future evokes a wholly different emotion from 20 years ago.
One vision dominates above all others. War.
War is in every headline every day, the Prime Minister offering blueprints for Storm Shadow SCALP missiles to Ukraine, the Russian Ambassador being recalled from Britain, and Putin threatening UK cities due to the use of British-made drones on civilian targets inside Russia.
Images of today’s war highlights, should we choose to watch them, are of civilian blood and gore, massive fireballs, collapsed homes and smoking lands. The narrative is of military expansion, widening and worsening violence, displacement and immiserisation.
The politicians and administrators who seek to create our future a first priority – rearmament. And fast. It is almost impossible to enter a war overnight. You need more guns, and as Trump has learnt, to establish the arsenals to produce more missiles than you fire. Indeed, a complete infrastructure is required as a “war economy”.
War preparations are well under way: virement of taxes from every social need to fund military hardware; state propaganda shifting from community cohesion to emergency alerts of “enemies without” and “enemies within”. We are coached to believe that the Russian hoards are set to invade, despite Russia struggling to find the soldiers required for the current front lines.
At the moment, most people in Britain don’t want anything to do with war. But this can change very quickly. Between 1911 and 1914 Britain saw the Great Unrest workers suffering not much more than the cost-of-living crisis we are experiencing today. But workers took mass strike action, and had collective confidence and consequential power back then. War did a job for the government, nationalism and patriotism defeating all calls for decent pay, conditions and services. Amongst other things, the First World War sought to crush working class resistance to raw exploitation and authoritarian governance. In fact it led to revolution.
Can we expect a similar historic period? Workers in Britain are overwhelmingly dissatisfied, disenchanted with government and fearful for the future. There is an ideological battle in full swing for hearts and minds – the rebuilding of social welfare and workers rights versus a descent into the self-sacrifice of national (and racial) supremacy through bloody warfare.
Across Europe, plans are afoot for the return of conscription. The tech propaganda encouraging the future of war imagines battles between robots from each side. It’s a nonsense! Through the four-and-a-half years of the Ukraine War, more than a million deaths prove the lie. The Nations are seeking to provide enlarged armies of human soldiers ready to die.
Volunteers applying to fight have dried-up on both sides. Snatch squads on Ukrainian streets are grabbing civilians to go to the front. The desertions and draft avoidance, and the continuing conscription of ordinary Ukrainians as cannon fodder is causing social discord. Russia is equally desperate, recruiting African mercenaries on false promises and battalions from North Korea ahead of the inevitable Autumn offensive.
Such war fatigue should offer opportunities for a negotiated peace. Instead, Europe and the UK are preparing to join in.
Germany is debating conscription and stopping young men from leaving the country for more than three months, the number of young men applying to be conscientious objectors and refuse armed military service increasing rapidly.
Britain last operated conscription of civilians into a period in the armed forces back in 1960. Ten European countries still do with others now considering its reintroduction. Various British political parties are debating the potential here, the shocking number of one million young people unemployed being an excuse for the warmonger’s arguments. General Sir Patrick Sanders is calling for a “citizen army”, reservists now on call until 65 years of age.
Russia has threatened revenge against Britain this week after Ukraine used British-made drones to target Russian oil refineries and transport networks. Britain is directly engaged in endless war over Ukraine and it makes us all a target. The war in Europe is intensifying and expanding. Lithuania and Finland are preparing to accept NATO nuclear weapons following on from Belarus’s readiness to accept Russian nukes. The stage is being set for nuclear warfare.
Germany is rearming faster than Britain, and everywhere there are signs of wider military engagement against Russia. What might the conclusion look like? Mutually Assured Destruction? Why is no-one discussing de-escalation? Why is there no planning for an end to the war, indeed no plan at all, just demands for more tax money to produce more heavy weapons, sponsored by arms manufacturers such as the MBDA multinational corporations that owns the SCALP technology? They have the government’s ear. Why is there no democratic process to ensure that the collective voices of citizens are considered, measured and accepted?
The Third World War will be even more barbaric than the First or the Second. Only the urgent quest for Peace can possibly stop it. Oppose conscription. Oppose War!
My weekly published Comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (4.8.26), responding to the previous day’s outrageous press conference staged by Reform UK detailing the use of naval warships to prevent refugees crossing the English Channel “by all means possible”. They had the audacity to invoke the European Human Rights Charter in defence of their proposed military challenge to asylum seekers, all the while pledging to delete human rights laws the moment they gain office. RUK must be stopped! Prior to their announcement I had planned to publish commemoration of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and the peril we face with continued nuclear proliferation and threats. We have a stall on Saturday 8th challenging the nuclear weapons manufacturer, Babcock, in Plymouth City Centre (Armada Way Piazza, 11-2pm). But that has to wait – the immediate challenge to the far-Right has to remain paramount. Expose the threat of fascist rule.
The full text below, or expand the pic for the published version (much the same):
There can be no such thing as an illegal human being. Our individual actions may break a nation’s laws, and different countries have different laws, making The Law different from universal human conditions. But no-one can be called “an illegal”.
Those who choose to label others as illegals are dehumanising the person and devaluing life. It suits those who seek power and privilege and status in the pecking order of class society. Creating division through proffering privilege and entitlement does a job for class rule. Identifying a group as unworthy, undeserving or illegitimate has been an overused and ancient ploy of those seeking or wielding power.
So calling refugees “illegals” has a big job to do for the far-Right everywhere. Trump deploys his power through his ICE thugs kicking down doors to seize “illegals” from their beds or workplaces. The neo-Nazi AfD in Germany organise street gangs to burn migrants homes. The far-Right nationalists, Reassemblement National, rabble-rouses for xenophobia and antisemitism. Spanish fascist groups smash-up migrant meeting places.
In Britain, Reform UK and their fascist breakaway, Restore Britain, utilises all the lessons from the far-Right across the globe to build hatred and division here, targeting Black people seeking refuge by undertaking one of the ostensible perilous sea journeys across the English Channel.
On the surface, “Stop the Boats” is a very sensible suggestion. No-one should need to risk their life to reach safety. And no-one should profit from another person’s misfortune. But the boat campaign is a cover for ultra-nationalism, white-supremacy and racism.
The call of reform UK for a “Fortress Britain”, pledging to launch ‘the biggest military operation in the Channel since World War Two’ to end migrant crossings. They picture British warships capsizing small boats and dumping survivors back on “foreign” shores. Engaging the UK military against Africans and Asians is designed to evoke a mythical and fanatical patriotism from a British Empire that was always questioned and can never exist again.
In truth, they seek power for themselves by blaming and scapegoating the most powerless and stateless of human beings for all the ills of the society.
Be clear, an immigrant is someone who has crossed a border and can still go home in safety if they choose. A refugee is someone who has crossed a border because home is no longer safe at all. Asylum seekers are simply refugees waiting for that truth to be recognised on paper.
Confusing, misnaming or bad-mouthing these categories is a purposeful and deceitful lie with the intention of “othering” the “foreigner” and people-of-colour in its broadest racist incarnation. It is the tip of the ice-berg of propaganda aimed at putting a white-supremacist government into power to protect big business and the billionaire financiers of this bile.
The people on boats are homeless and stateless. Those seeking refuge come mainly from countries where UK-based corporations have sold arms for the wars over extraction of fossil fuels or rare metals, wars that have pulverised entire regions. And they escape regions rendered no longer habitable for human communities because of the climate catastrophe scorching and deluging their lands with floods and famine. Should we expect them simply to die, presumably because we view them as lesser humans, inferior to us?
Let them in! Refugees are Welcome Here!
Britain can afford to help. Our NHS is not in crisis because of migrants – it depends upon them. Our housing is not in crisis because of migrants – rents and mortgages are too high and property speculators only invest in high short-term returns. Our water is not overpriced and rivers wholly polluted because of migration – it’s the avarice of private shareholders! Our low wages are not caused by immigration – Capitalist, large and small, always seek to pay the least to gain the most private income from their business.
Racism is whipped-up intentionally to divide the working class one from the other and prevent collective opposition to the profiteering, landlordism and exploitation of the ruling class. We should not be fooled. Trade unions will openly expose and challenge racist and fascist organisations targeting Plymouth.
My Comment column this week, printed in the daily Plymouth Herald, challenging the deceit that there is no money for Welfare. At an ailing 72 years of age I declare a personal interest – we need more money for Adult Social Care. And the money’s there! I hope you agree.
Do we care so little for ourselves? The majority of us will suffer with a chronic condition by the age of sixty-two. One in seven of us will require others to care for us full-time through our final years of life in full-on residential nursing care. Many more will need three-times a day home care with washes and toileting. It could be you!
Yet, in a State budget of £1,220 billion in 2024/25, Adult Social Care – looking after those who have difficulty looking after themselves – has an overall spend of just £35 billion, itself part of the “social protection” budget which includes housing benefit to a total of £130bn. Paltry compared with Health (£165bn), the state pension (£124bn) and debt interest (£105bn).
Prime Minister Burnham has staked his “political capital” (whatever that may be) on sorting out social care. Clearly, this can’t be done without spending more money. The narrative has already been skewed in the direction of us all having to pay more even while Britain is the 6th wealthiest of 195 countries and Britain’s richest having increased their private wealth by 65% since 2019.
That the money for social care could be found if politicians desired, is proven by the simple fact that governments can find the money whenever they need it. Take COVID, £35bn (yes, the same amount as the total for social care) spent on Lockdown inside 20 months, including the missing £10bn lost in contracts to “preferred suppliers” (political mates) in contracts for protective items never supplied.
And never mind financial rules, outside of political party pledges and manifesto commitments, this year alone, some £25bn is being added to the arms and military budget in a single fell swoop, £14bn of which is to be spent on illegal weapons of mass destruction – nuclear warheads.
We can find the money for social care easily if we want. The money for adult social care is paltry at the moment, the tiny sum excused by government pleas of poverty and indebtedness. How about changing the debt repayments, the bankers and financiers could live well on half the interest rates currently paid – a government action first applied at a time of war or social crisis. We are in a social crisis.
And a rent cap, and mortgage interest cap, preventing excessive profiteering by landlords and banks from our essential requirement of a roof over our head, would cut Housing Benefit costs significantly, the money transferred to social care. The government could replace the sacked tax inspectors to ensure the more than £60bn per year in current taxes left unpaid by evasion and fraudsters is collected. They could nearly triple the adult social care budget overnight!
A Wealth Tax, by whichever permutation you would wish to enact it, would rebalance to a limited extent the gross inequality found in Britain today. The top fifth of UK households own 63% of the country’s wealth, while the bottom fifth, including two-thirds of those needing social care support, holding together only 0.5%. The richest 10% of UK citizens possess nearly half of all the nation’s wealth.
Britain’s social care system has been broken by the neoliberal free-market brutal system of raw capitalism. Privatisation. More than 85% of adult social care operates inside the private for-profit sector of the economy, relying on an an abused migrant workforce paid minimum wages. Social care workers are the most exploited and oppressed of all our 6.2 million public service workers who together have not had a real-wage increase in the past decade despite rampant inflation caused by excess profits. Cap profits, pay the workers!
In fact, Capitalism depends upon the Family to sustain a society based upon class exploitation and private wealth. The National Care Association identifies that more than 4 million of us operate as the primary carer for adult relatives, unpaid and ill-considered, representing at least two lives plunged into poverty for every one of us in need.
Don’t accept the lies and deceit of arguments for us to pay more if we are to enjoy a comfortable old age. We already pay enough, our taxes simply falling into the wrong hands through the wrong priorities. Engage with the current “national conversation” to demand prioritising social care over private profit!
My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (14.7.26), considering the recent statement of Prime Minister Burnham apologising for Starmer’s support for genocide in Gaza. Written the same day as the Church of England Synod debates and supports a report critical of Israel and accepting the existence of Palestine and the need to actively defend Palestinian Christians. The conclusion has to be – Protest Works! The constant protest, indefatigable and massive demonstrations in London and campaigning across the UK, indeed the world, has isolated and exposed the Israeli State and Zionism to a point where it is now dangerous for politicians not to oppose Israel. But Israel and the Zionist cause has a job to do for the global system of Capitalism: the maintenance of nationalism, racism (especially Islamophobia) and the logic of imperialist competition. The mass protests must be sustained and increased, especially the direct challenges to the military-industrial corporations linked to Israel. So, to London 18th July and Elbit on the 23rd – 11am, 38 Bolingbroke Way, Bristol, BS34 6FE.
The edited version below or expand the pic for the printed edit (at least something got printed!)
They say the Lord’s Prayer in Westminster. The two Houses swear to the Christian God, and to the King, whose official title is the “Supreme Governor” of the Protestant Church of England. But we do not consider opposition to Government policies and practices as opposition to Christianity.
Britain is a secular, multi-cultural country, with less than 5% of the Nation’s 68 million citizens actively attending Christian church once a month or more. One in four British Muslims worship weekly in a Mosque, and one-in-three Jews attend a synagogue weekly. Majorities everywhere do not devote their lives to religion, and in Britain the majority are practical agnostics.
It stands to reason that being critical of “the State”; challenging Government policies and practices, isn’t the same as challenging a religion. If we condemn the Government’s stance against asylum seekers we are not condemning Christianity, indeed we may well be invoking Christian principles. If we protest against British Imperialism and Colonialism – the exploitation and colonialism subjugating peoples and nations – we are not implicating the Christian Church, necessarily.
Yet now, there is an attempt to declare that any criticism of the Israeli State is an attack on the religion of Judaism and an offence against all Jews worldwide. The Israeli State is presented as a special case, exempt from usual political rules. It is proposed that all Jews are Israelis, not British or American or Russian or Chilean Jews. Every Jew alive today is supposed to ascribe to the policies of the Israeli State. They do not!
So criticising the Israeli State is declared to be antisemitic – religious and political hatred of Jews. There is an attempt to criminalise any damning the destruction of the civilisation of Palestine and calling the extermination of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Gaza genocide, alongside the illegal mass ethnic cleansing there and across the West Bank.
The creed of the Israeli State, the non-secular Apartheid politics of a country formed for a “single Race” called the Jews, to develop separately from the rest of humanity in their own interests, is documented as “Zionism”. Zionism is a political creed not a religion even if it refers to Judaism in the same way our State refers to Christianity. There are Christian Zionists, Hindu Zionists, Buddhist Zionists.
Zionism is a political ethno-nationalist far-Right philosophy steeped in the demand for each ethnic-religious group within humanity to have its own separate “homeland”. The State of Israel represents the military-industrial and cultural centre for this racist creed. This “separate development” explains why some fascist groups in Britain are supporting Israel’s military expansionism alongside their bigoted hatred of Muslims.
Today, Nurses and Doctors and Porters working in the National Health Service in England and Wales have now been told they face the sack if they declare or show any symbols of opposition to Zionism or to the Israeli State, as if they are acting from prejudice and racial hatred. In fact, they are expressing humanist principles for the valuing and protection of all life, echoing their Hippocratic Oath. Yet now, Palestine flags, attendance at protests and even portrayals of watermelons are banned, despite trade union policies in support of Palestine.
Little wonder that the British Medical Association has voted to reject The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of anti-semitism (2016). The IHRA has been re-interpreted by police forces, the Crown Prosecution Service, the NHS, and local authorities across Britain to proscribe criticism of the actions and policies of the Israeli State or Zionism. This, despite the British State formally recognising the right of a Palestinian State to exist!
Such hypocrisy and injustice must not stand!
The overwhelming majority of governments across the world have condemned Israel’s atrocities. Spain has closed it’s embassy in Tel Aviv, the Israeli government calling the Spanish government “highly antisemitic”. Andy Burnham has declared that Starmer’s full support for Israel’s actions was wrong. He could put words to action by removing all charges against the 3,000 protesters labelled as terrorists. He could, as first act as Prime Minister, end the licences that allow the armed-drones manufactured here by the Israeli firm Elbit to be exported to Israel and used to kill civilians.
The Norwegian Football Association has donated all its income from the World Cup to Doctors Without Borders operating in Gaza, as a show of support for Palestine, The Egyptian team and fans flying the Palestinian flag. Yet these campaign statements are banned from our mainstream media. A brutal UK crackdown on our right to protest is happening right now, those standing in solidarity with Palestine bearing the brunt. We are being criminalised for daring to oppose the corrupt international war criminal, Netanyahu and his Zionist State. Throughout history, the greatest change has come from those brave enough to take to the streets. If we lose the freedom to speak out today, we lose the power to fight for anything tomorrow.
Let’s stand together to oppose Zionism and the perpetrators of genocide! Let’s defend our right to protest for Palestine, its land, its peoples and their rights. Saturday, 18th July, London and everywhere!
I have been challenged in formal complaints to the Plymouth Herald, now under legal review. The legal challenges are provided in italics. For the purpose of clarity, I offer reference points below:
a) Staunton writes that the IHRA working definition of antisemitism “has been interpreted by the NHS, police forces, the Crown Prosecution Service and local authorities across Britain to proscribe criticism of the actions and policies of the Israeli State or of Zionists.” The IHRA document itself contradicts this. Its accompanying illustrative examples state, in terms: “criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.” … the Herald has printed as fact a claim about British public institutions that is contradicted by the plain text of the document he is describing.
The issue of interpretation of the IHRA is not contested here – the complainant recognises there are conflicting interpretations, as do I in the piece. Indeed that’s the whole point. I posit that the IHRA is being used to define any criticism of the Israeli State as antisemitic. In practice, as seen by Police arrests of Palestine protesters, condemnation of the genocide has been used as “hate speech” and antisemitism. Interpretation is key here, anti-genocide protesters arrested under anti-terrorist legislation, UK citizens actively engaged in the genocide supported and free from challenge: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/london-police-refuse-investigate-british-nationals-accused-war-crimes-gaza Criticism of Israel is conferred by any support for Palestine and, indeed, opinion that the IDF assault inside Gaza is genocide. The UN has identified genocide since September 2025 (https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-committed-genocide-gaza-strip-un-commission-finds
b) Staunton describes the Israeli state as built on “separate development”, for a supposed “single Race”. Both in quotation marks. Neither attributed.
The State of Israel is indeed, a racially hierarchical State: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, informally known as the Nation-State Bill or the Nationality Bill, is an Israeli Basic Law that specifies the country’s significance to the Jewish people. It was passed by the Knesset—with 62 in favour, 55 against, and two abstentions—on 19 July 2018 and is largely symbolic and declarative in nature. “Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people”: https://www.knesset.gov.il/constitution/ConstP22_eng.htm
c) Staunton writes that nurses, doctors and porters in the NHS in England and Wales “have now been told they face the sack if they declare or show any symbols of opposition to Zionism or to the Israeli State.”
In particular, the British Medical Association with direct links to the Trades Union Congress has asked this month (its the reason I wrote the piece) for a pause in the implementation of the IHRA because of “the risk it poses to staff by the implication that criticism of Israel’s genocide is an act of antisemitism”: https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/nhs-palestine/ My comment warns of the “…attempt to criminalise any opposition…the illegal Israeli settlements and mass ethnic cleansing.” That is how I read the BMA challenge, and as a trade unionist, interpret the current employment challenges:
d) He writes that Christian nationalists, naming the US Vice President and “Tommy Robinson”, are supporting Israel “to further their bigoted hatred of Muslims”…an unsourced assertion about private motive, stated as fact rather than opinion, and it is of a piece with the rest.
Tommy Robinson keeps on saying it, eg: https://news.sky.com/story/tommy-robinson-set-to-debate-suspicion-of-islam-at-oxford-union-despite-outcry-13553595 A UK High Court case record (2019) describes Tommy Robinson as an “anti-Islam activist” and notes he referred to people in a case using inflammatory anti-Muslim language (e.g., calling defendants “Muslim child rapists”), which was part of why he received a custodial sentence. European Union A UK Parliament written-evidence document also describes associations between him (aka “Tommy Robinson”) and Islamophobia, saying it is “well-documented.” UK Parliament 4.13
Perhaps I should have written more clearly, with sources taking-up much of the space. I try to link issues in my writing, which necessarily makes the word-count technically challenging. The complainant writes correctly the exact wording of the IHRA but that is not how it is being enacted. The IHRA guidance states antisemitism includes: “Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.” I clearly do not.
Referring to the shut down of shows of support for Palestine by staff across the public sector, I specifically wrote, “…now there is an attempt (my emphasis) to declare that any criticism of the Israeli State is an attack on the religion of Judaism and an offence against all Jews worldwide. Every Jew alive today is said to subscribe to the policies of the Israeli State. They do not!” Indeed, “many British Jewish people do not associate Zionism simply with support for the existence of Israel. Research published in 2015 by City University found that 90% of British Jewish people support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state and 93% say that is forms some part of their identity as Jews, but only 59% consider themselves to be Zionists” Para 28: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmhaff/136/13605.htm
There is an enormous level of argument and controversy inside the British State about the laws and draconian impositions against the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and, specifically, the designation of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. More than 3,000 protesters have been arrested under terrorism legislation – why no outcry? (E.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp38z9lylddo )The Trades Union Congress specifically questions the designation as part of a questionable State assault on the right to protest (eg https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/09/10/trade-unions-demand-starmer-repeal-palestine-action-ban/), the issue I conclude with in the article: “This brutal crackdown on our right to protest against genocide must stop. We are being criminalised for daring to oppose the corrupt international war criminal, Netanyahu and his Zionist State.” I stand by that.
My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (7.7.26), intentionally poking a sideways jab at Nigel Farage, his £5million bung from a billionaire, alongside many other dubious “donations” much in the news right now. I was encouraged by a Vox pop 10 second interview with a working class woman on BBC radio, saying “if someone gave me £5 million I’d take it…”, as f anyone was ever going to! Farage says “nothing to see here”, and indeed, his is the tip of iceberg of corruption for which he’s neither the first nor the worst. But he’s a far-right racist bigot, and his corruption should be made an example of, even if he and his followers think there’s “nothing to see here!”. Unbridled vicious Capitalism, very visible indeed.
The unexpurgated version here or read the printed version by expanding the pic below:
One million pounds is a lot of money. £5million is a lot more. Based on current UK tax and National Insurance rules, a worker employed full-time from age 18 to 67 (a 49-year career) will finish with lifetime earnings of just over £1m if they earn the National Minimum Wage, or £1.5m if they earn the average UK median full-time salary. £1million is a working class lifetime.
The median UK household disposable income (after taxes and benefits) is approximately £37,000. Roughly 30% of UK households share an income below the minimum acceptable standard, well below the national median. Those households never see £1m in their entire lifetime.
And for those of us who earn a million or two in our lives, the fact is it mostly goes out again – we have to spend it all to survive. The lucky minority, investing in property, may accumulate a package by retirement age, much of which will be spent on our own health and social care in our final years, and what’s left may help the next generation. Working class wealth largely depends upon inheritance – it’s far harder to become wealthy and shift up a class by your own efforts.
If you’re born into wealth, it’s a doozy! An investment of £1m in the UK will earn a return interest of between £30,000 and 75,000 per year, cash, about the same or more than the average income from working. One million pounds is a lot of money. Imagine the investment income of a billionaire (a billion is a thousand millions) or a trillionaire (a million million)!
The above is an explanation of why socialists call the working class “wage slaves”. The employer-class pay us to make money for them, only for us to have to pay them back to be fed (badly), watered (hmm, water companies) and housed (poorly, overall), with little or no personal agency except for a week’s holiday if we scrimp and save. And for this we have to do as we’re told, watch what we say, and serve “The Man”.
Yet, as President Trump eulogised last week at his, albeit spartan celebration of the founding of the Great USA, the American, nee Capitalist, Dream is a back. The myth that we can all be millionaires is being sold to us again. We should aspire to millionaires, value and adore millionaires.
It’s here in the UK, too. we are expected to believe that millionaires are best placed to lead us and make decisions for us. Most strangely, the far-Right MPs who receive millions of pounds in “donations” are targeting the poorest in the country for votes and extra-parliamentary support. There is a tradition here dating back to the first working class suffrage of 1867 – the wealthy bought the votes of ordinary men with bribes or jobs or gin.
In return, MPs were bought by big businessmen seeking legal privileges and a competitive edge. Today, the proportion of multi-millionaire MPs in the House of Commons is over 50%, hidden but assessable, much higher than the population where fewer than 5% are millionaires.
When we read of a single politician, self-publicised as being “anti-Establishment”, receiving £5m from a billionaire and “millions” more from a billionaire convicted felon, his claims of being “a man of the people” must fall far short. Those who support what Trump stands for may argue that we need rich businessmen to run society because they know best how to manage “The System”
This is probably true. But why should we support this “System” that enslaves us? Britain is seen abroad as having one of the most corrupt Establishments in the world. The City of London is joked about as the western world’s laundry, cleaning wealth gained illegally – drugs, people trafficking, prostitution and illegal arms sales. As a direct consequence, the spending power of the working class in England has fallen by 20% since 2008 – when the wholesale corruption of the millionaire bankers and financiers cost us all very dearly.
MPs routinely receiving bungs weds them to corruption as the condition of the status quo. We should expose and depose every single one of them.
My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (30.06.26), having to address the mythology and lies of the government’s Defence Implementation Plan published the same day. It’s a huge document offered and fast military rearmament and the effective militarisation of society. I focus on the government lie in suggesting a doubling of military spending can relate the economy. Whilst not wanting to rely on outdated (to the point of equally mythological) Keynesianism, the very fact, across all sectors, finance investment in any sector other than armaments and soldiery creates and sustains more jobs, is a single point that demolishes the entire document. There is, of course, far more to say, such as the capitalist crisis driving war. But I’m simply answering the government foil of a headline. War doesn’t produce growth!
The unedited version below, or stretch the pic of the published article to read:
Here comes yet another dip in our welfare funding. Who said Austerity was over?
The DIP – the Defence Investment Plan, published this week – has been delayed by in-fighting between competing UK government departments and the heads of the armed forces. Tensions represent the politics of speedy rearmament versus social refurbishment.
The Generals, Admirals and Corporate Executives of the western military-industrial complex have besieged UK governments with demands to quadruple, or more, arms spending as a proportion of the wealth Britain produces each year. Strict fiscal controls mean that money has to be found by cutting government spending elsewhere. Cutting our Welfare.
The argument, aside from warmonger’s thrust for ever more war, is that rearmament produces jobs and reflates the economy. This so-called “defence Dividend” is a complete myth. Cutting investments in civilian employment in order to fund a larger military budget harms growth. And in this climate crisis, the absence of funding for fast adaptation collapses our nations security.
Military procurement creates fewer jobs than the equivalent funding for transport, health, education, social care and even libraries and museums (congrats to The Box btw!). Spending £1million on military procurement, by government’s own figures, creates 9.4 jobs. The same £1m produces 12 jobs on the railways, 13 in healthcare, 15 in education, 20 in social care and 25 when invested in cultural activities! The jobs required to adapt to new climate and extreme weather dwarf these figures, if the investment should ever be agreed.
Military spending is capital intensive, with a shrinking workforce. Jobs in the military industry have plummeted since the 1980’s despite comparatively higher spending in real terms. Much of the tax cash investment goes to overseas firms and profits for the private arms companies. The billions do not trickle down into the general economy.
There is no defence dividend! Today’s DIP will mean another £15 billion for deadly weapons of war, paid for by cuts to critical public services and investment in action to halt climate breakdown. The new Prime Minister Burnham looks set to increase military spending even higher.
Why? In part it’s the political ideology of nationalism. Some bizarre drive to “Restore Britain” as the colonial military Empire of the 19th Century. Britain is directly engaged in warfare right now, billions in armaments going to Ukraine to attack Russia, and billions more spent in support of weapons for Israel’s devastation of Palestine, Lebanon and the US war with Iran.
Ahead of next week’s NATO meeting, the UK Establishment want to show its power. There is competition for such rearmament across a fast-militarising Europe. Germany wants to be the primary military power in Europe. The US F35 jets delivered to France represent more power and influence to the French. The German rearmament is very serious, reflecting a far-Right section of the ruling class actively wanting military conflict with Russia – even arguing for the “righting the wrongs” of the outcome of the Second World War.
2026 has seen the highest amount of global conflict since the Second World War. Nuclear weapons clearly do not prevent war – they actually increase conflict. Yet the UK is investing heavily in nuclear weapons – unusable unless the intention is to destroy all human society.
Truth is, the UK’s status in NATO relies upon nuclear weapons. The value is not in weaponry but in a seat at the big boys table: the P5 dedicated diplomatic forum where the five permanent UN Security Council members meet to discuss strategic stability and nuclear doctrines. UK consequently also sits on the NATO Nuclear Planning Group (NPG), dependent upon State alignment with US military policy. Nuclear War is the sum total of the “special relationship” with the United States of America.
The illegal Iran War has cost the global economy dear. The UN calculates that at least 32million people will be plunged into poverty as a result of the war, largely through its impact on energy and fertiliser supplies. We will suffer the consequences of shortages and price hikes this Autumn and Winter.
Thankfully, the majority of the UK population do not want a war. But what does that mean? To stop war we need a show of demand for peace and against rearmament across the country.
It is clear that the warmongers are in power. We have to build a mass anti-war movement, challenging rearmament and militarism now, and placing our social welfare and climate security first and foremost!
My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (23.6.26), glad to see the back of Starmer! One thing at a time…he’s a neoliberal free market bureaucrat for the Capitalist Class, championing Israel’s genocide and Trump’s imperialism, and smashing into working class living standards and worker’s rights to accumulate more wealth and power at the top. There’s more, far more, but, in short, good riddance to the slimeball.
Burnham is quite probably to the Right of him, so there really is no alternative to collective class struggle on the streets and workplaces.
The unedited version below or enlarge the picture to read the printed version.
Starmer Only United the Nation Against Him!
“Starmer’s Toast!” runs one headline. The sixth UK Prime Minister in just ten years has only one legacy: Starmer united the entire country…against him. Of course, the historic dislike of Starmer, the most disliked Prime Minister in British history, represented a failure on all fronts. He alienated all, Left, Right and Centre.
For the far-Right, Starmer was not racist and authoritarian enough, for the Middle the global crisis stopped any progressive reforms. For the Left his appeasement of the ultra-nationalists, warmongers, Zionists and climate deniers had no link with a Labour Party based upon representation of the working class.
All of this is unlikely to be changed by the seventh Prime Minister in a decade. Tensions are heightened in this time of polycrisis. Could Starmer have done better? Certainly. But he was specifically installed as a corporate careerist managing a short-term systemic restructuring of The Party plc.
Starmer inherited the largest-ever membership numbers in an active Labour Party. His back-stabbing treachery and continuing vengeance against Corbyn and Corbynistas emptied-out the Party’s activist base at the behest of his wealthy donors, the capitalist elite benefactors of media entrepreneurs, bankers, oil and arms companies.
Trade unions funding the Labour Party were neglected and delivered far-short by comparison with Labour’s corporate whoring.
Despite the Labour Party’s complete reliance on the tens of millions in funding from the trade unions, he knocked us aside. Starmer copied and amplified many of the policies of the previous Tory governments that had bled-dry the Exchequer and handed our tax-billions across to the private sector.
He alone cannot be blamed for the crisis of housing and health services, nor the maintenance of four million working class children living in poverty. But his immediate support for the Tories’ two-child benefit cap (poor judgement) and cuts to disabilities funding provoked universal distrust from the beginning, and stayed despite U-turns.
The far-Right and Reform UK were the sole benefactors of Starmer’s bureaucratic elitism, No 10’s careerists completely cut-off from our day-to-day lives and pandering to brutal neo-fascist demands of vengeance against refugees arriving in boats, offering no safe route for asylum. These past two years have materialised an ideological and violent assault on democracy and human rights characterised best by the race-riots in Belfast that Starmer failed to call-out as terrorism.
Under Starmer, Labour sought to prove its nationalist credentials, echoing calls to restore Britain’s empire and bowing to Trump despite constant rebuffs. He committed to raising defence spending to 3.5% of GDP as the world’s third biggest spender on nuclear armaments – illegal weapons of indiscriminate mass murder – at the expense of our welfare.
Let’s be clear, Starmer slashed disability welfare; armed a genocide; arrested pensioners for protesting against genocide; allowed Trump our bases to bomb Iran; diminished rights to trial by jury; appointed a convicted child sex offender’s best pal as us ambassador; ripped up Indefinite Leave to Remain rules plunging migrants into homelessness and fear.
And, given that the climate crisis threatens every element of our social fabric, means of production, security and stability, Starmer’s readiness to cut cash for transition away from fossil fuels exemplifies the hypocrisy of a State tied to the billionaire corporations rather than our basic human requirements.
What now? We should expect more of the same. No new leader can change the general conditions. The next Labour Prime Minister, whoever, will continue the austerity assault on the majority and follow in the footsteps of Starmer’s demise. Unless directly challenged, the far-Right will continue to grow out of the disillusionment with democracy.
This epoch of instability and collapse of the old world order demands a socialist revolution, to oppose the racists and fascists, redistribute the disgusting levels of wealth from the corporations and restore working class living standards.
We should not rely upon politicians – the future is ours to create. That requires extra-parliamentary activity, for an end to war, an end to fossil-fuelled industry, and end to poverty. We have to fight for ourselves as workers, in collective activity that challenges power at the top. This means campaigning on the streets, and in our workplaces for progressive policies based upon worker’s rights and social justice.
The heat is on, and with millions of workers suffering from record temperatures this week, the immediate demand is for a top temperature after which we are not expected to work but still get paid – just like the statutory minimum temperature. That’ll make a far greater difference to worker’s lives than any new Prime Minister. Everybody out on Heat Strike this Thursday!
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald newspaper (16.6.26), exposing Starmer’s hypocrisy once again. This time, the rampant authoritarianism of banning children online. Socialists are for individual empowerment and informed choice towards full self-determination in a society based upon equality and diversity. Not regimentalism and authoritarian micro-management of behaviours. We cannot allow the infantilisation of another generation, bred to be wage slaves and cannon fodder. It does not require us to pander to AI and the Big Tech billionaires in order to uphold children’s rights – we are required to challenge the corruption of the internet in the pursuit of outrageous profits.
The unedited article below and online, the printed version able to read by buying the paper (!) or expanding the picture:
Children’s Rights are Human Rights! (not my headline, but hey)
There are few experiences more painful and devastating than that of a parent having their child die. We want every child to grow into adulthood in a society safe enough to ensure love and nurture over anxiety and pain. Child safety is a focus of any democracy, balancing individual freedom of choice with collective safeguarding from undue harm.
One contemporary example is the required wearing of seat belts during private car journeys. The change to social behaviour was managed over generations with few people objecting to the law when finally introduced in 1983, saving tens of thousands of lives, children restrained in safety belts in the rear seats since 1989. Significantly, manufacturers were instructed by law on the provision and effectiveness of seatbelts back in ’63.
This should inform the debate over banning children from social media. Behaviour change is best managed through informed choice. Children, and indeed adults, are helped to learn safe practices over time – belt up! Over time, such a culture becomes second nature. Making things illegal doesn’t infer consent – explanation and education does.
Most importantly, manufacturers should be forced to take the lead responsibility in providing safe-enough goods and services.
By definition, every law that restricts or prohibits human behaviours is an imposition by the State. All decisions about restrictions to civil liberty are political. They can be made from a position of human rights or from authoritarian control – there’s a broad spectrum between freedom and force.
New laws also reflect the times they are made in. Banning children from social media, by Law, is an extraordinarily authoritarian imposition. It is arguably the latest example of the infantilisation of the population, the paternalistic approach to social control, enforcing passivity. Children should not be taught to accept micro-management from adults – the surest way to abuse, exploitation and servitude. Children should be helped to keep themselves safe. Its called “growing-up”.
The policy headline is to save children’s lives lost to suicide following online abuse or social stigma, a proportion of the ghastly 200 suicides of under-18’s each year in the UK. Perhaps allowing children a louder voice and a receptive listening by adults would do the job better?
By comparison, the social media Tech Corporations will be cautioned to produce safeguards, tho’ their owners are unlikely to ever limit their profiteering or be prosecuted in a way that parents and over-14’s will be. There’s an imbalance to the advantage of Big Tech, these giant Corporations grossing income many times most countries each year. It is a brave Government that legislates against them. Children are a far easier target.
Anyone accessing social media today experiences the insecurity of constant advertising based upon very accurate targeting of our interests, from sports and recreation to household appliances and intimate health conditions. If Big tech knows so much about us, why can’t they be forced to behave safely? How comes its consumer rights that are restricted and not Corporate freedoms to exploit and abuse that are made subject of legal sanction?
Yesterday’s announcement by Prime Minister Starmer of a ban on children’s access to most of social media included the wonderful pledge: “I am not prepared to compromise on the safety and happiness of our children”. Yet the announcement comes ahead of, and perhaps a cover for, more government cuts to frontline services including health and social care – of which the safeguarding of children is a major component – to fund rearmament. Plymouth Child Protection services are in chronic funding crisis.
Across all age groups, children and infants living in the most deprived areas of the UK or experiencing socio-economic hardship are disproportionately at risk of mortality due to conditions completely separate from the use of social media. Four million of “our” children.
Two-thirds of the 3,200 child deaths in England and Wales occur in the first year of life. Addressing the chronic underfunding of our maternity services would be a more effective, money for Youth Centres and recreation would be more timely and vote-grabbing pledges rather than “banning children” ahead of Thursday’s historic by-election.
This is headline-grabbing hypocrisy.
If Starmer really wanted to save children’s lives, he wouldn’t have cut international aid by £6bn a year leaving millions to starve in Sudan and elsewhere. He wouldn’t be cutting the cash to address the climate crisis – the crucial safeguard for all children’s futures. Most controversially, he wouldn’t have supported the manufacture and provision of the armaments produced by UK-based Elbit Systems and others that are illegally bombing civilians and their children in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran. Nor would he condemn as terrorists and incarcerate our young people for protesting against such injustice.
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (9.6.26), predicting the outcry by Tory leader Badenoch, calling today for “Common Sense”! Her focus, racism experienced by white people in a predominantly white society! Another weaponisation of prejudice in the pursuit of power. No mention of institutional racism that systemically marginalises and criminalises people of colour. The culture wars continue, amplified to the extreme by an Establishment fragmented and floundering. We must keep up the pressure – no to racism, fascism and misogyny!
And yes, I know Palestine is not in the World Cup finals, but, just like FIFA, we should still fly the flag!
My unedited text below (not my chosen headline) or expand the pic to read the printed version.
World Cup: Let’s hope the Best team Wins!
Everyone’s shouting for Common Sense! Apparently, the Truth should be obvious to all. The only problem being, there is no such thing as common sense. We each have different experiences and receive the world differently. This diversity makes humanity dynamic and resilient. We’re not all the same – enjoy!
We commonly live in a class society. Deny that if you can. The stratification of the 70+ millions of us is such that the entire experience of the 20% (14 million people) at one end of the class spectrum has absolutely nothing in common with the opportunities and privileges afforded the 20% at the other end. That much is obvious the moment we walk down the street. Rolls Royces speeding past the tents of the homeless.
Fewer than one million of us, one in 70, will ever experience flight in a private jet. However much we dream of it or transport ourselves into the lives of the billionaires, the class system will not allow any level of social mobility that can possibly allow you to get that rich.
The private schools for the top 6% of society protect offspring and inheritance from seeping down let alone having any poor wretch be accepted into the multimillionaire class. We speak different languages inside broad the English vocabulary. We perceive a very different world, Britain, England dependent upon our class placement.
The England-based company director, protected by private millions of pounds in share holdings, expects returns on stock market gamblings many thousands of times greater per day than we, the majority, looking for a 10% return on a £10 bet using the smartphone bingo app. Or the 14m:1 potential of Lotto. The dice is heavily weighted. Money goes to money.
The banking investor wants maximum returns on capital, benefitting from high interest rates. The working class family whose home is mortgaged to the bank wishes for low interest rates. No commonality there.
The house-builder expects to make a hefty profit and stops building unless so assured. The large landlord wants to charge the highest rental, and does so to such a degree that we have a housing crisis. The renter wants a fair if not low rent in exchange for a well cared-for building. One side’s gain is the other’s loss.
Oxfam’s research gives evidence that the wealth gap between rich and poor in the UK is stark: just 58 billionaires in the UK hold more combined wealth than 27 million other people (39% of the population). Oxfam highlights that an estimated 14.5 million people – nearly a quarter of the UK population – live in poverty, while the richest 1% own over a fifth of the nation’s total wealth.
It makes no sense for working class people to demand that the rich get richer at our expense! What’s the sense in that? It does make sense for billionaires to tell the working class we must accept welfare cuts and higher prices in order to protect and grow their profits! That is the “Common Sense” spouted by the politicians seeking to protect the current state of things, a status quo that has overseen serious deterioration to working class living standards and expectations over the past forty years.
Nationalism is the primary vehicle for demanding common sense. After all, we all live on this Island and therefore should have something in common, shouldn’t we? It’s only common sense for us to support our military for our shared security, isn’t it? It is apparently common sense that we should ration health, education and welfare in order to put more billions into the private military-industrial arms corporations. Only sections of society benefit from military arms expenditure, by no means the majority. Surely, common sense would agree that war is not in our interests.
And there can be no common sense where racism and sexism exist in society. Racism divides on the basis of one perceived ethnicity or skin colour being superior to another, with a baseline of white supremacy. Sexism is the exercise for imposing male supremacy. White people do not commonly experience the different and detrimental looks and behaviour experienced daily by people of colour. Men do not experience levels of rape and domestic abuse that women daily receive in Britain. The prejudice that flood the senses of being Black or female in a society based upon competition and discrimination are not common to all.
Perversely, those demanding common sense usually align such an imposition with racism and religious prejudice. Their common sense is meant as common only to Christian white-skinned people. Right now, such nationalist common sense demands for us all to support England at the World Cup. We should be proud to be British as opposed to care about any of the 48 competing FIFA Nations, shouldn’t we, even when Scotland has a much better squad!
Hold on, why should we compete to be superior to the peoples of other nations and regions, when all the other countries live under the same class divisions, their working class experiencing the self-same exploitation, oppression, repression and deprivations as us? We have more in common with working class people living in Africa, South America and Asia than we have with the English billionaires holed-up in the Cotswolds.
Can we have some “Class Sense” please? Can we prioritise and cheer-on what’s in the interests of the majority – the working class – not seek some fake allegiance with billionaires who push nationalism and “common sense” in their property-owning class’s self-interests, not ours?
In the meantime, wouldn’t a human, caring common sense want the best team to win, or care for the underdog? It’s only a game of football after all, but, for what it’s worth, c’mon Palestine!
My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald Newspaper (2.6.26), rehearsing the necessary arguments against Starmer’s forthcoming increase in immediate arms spending, again. He is under pressure to deliver more UK war-preparations ahead of the major NATO Summit in July, and has to “find the money” – that is, defy his Chancellor and demand cuts to welfare. There is an element of Whitehall tittle-tattle, but the final analysis has to be that UK will be a frontline aggressor in the West’s drive to more warfare, pushed by Trump. Meanwhile, we dissolve into worker-on-worker violence – both social and military – or organise collectively to stop the warmongers.
The unedited version below:
We need a sharp turn away from military expenditure. Arms expenditure is a waste of money. This may sound offensive to many in Plymouth, but the reality is we are as divided a set of communities as anywhere else. The retired ex-military who have settled here, and the Yardies of yesterday and today, will stake their lives upon loyalty to armed forces and the arms corporations they’ve worked for all their lives. They are not alone in feeling pride in their work.
The majority of the working class in Plymouth have not worked inside or even adjacent to the local military-industrial complex. There are more employed at our regional hospital at Derriford than inside Devonport dockyard, and twice as many again employed through the services managed by Plymouth City Council, in education, social care and environmental services.
We have in no way benefitted from Plymouth being characterised as a Naval City, and we’re not about to benefit now. Plymouth Dockyards require a healthy level of craft services, but the higher-than-average salaries are for the technicians and military personnel. They live outside and away from the City and their comparatively high incomes are spent elsewhere.
Equally, the Dockyard companies are private, their profits also stored and spent way away – across Europe and America. Consequently, in the neighbourhoods bordering the dockyard we have one-in-three children living in poverty and across-the-board indicators of social deprivation higher than the national average. Plymouth is a poor city. The health and life-expectancy disparities between the working class living in the West of Plymouth and the white-collar professionals to the East, totally unacceptable.Our small middle class live around 14 years longer and with twenty years of better health than manual and semi-skilled workers.
Once again, our political leaders propagandise that the £4.4 billion of tax money promised to Plymouth’s military business over the next ten to fifteen years will bring us the prosperity promised to previous generations. It won’t.
We need huge investment in welfare services, our children’s education, health and social housing. That £4.4billion could serve us well, locally paying off the £1bn debt owed by Plymouth City Council and turning round the decades of cuts to essential services. It could refurbish our local housing, much of it acknowledged as poor by national standards – damp, mouldy and dilapidated.
Instead, Starmer’s Defence Investment Plan (DIP) committing to a £18 billion per-year increase in military spending ahead of next month’s NATO Summit, includes nuclear warheads, drone swarms and missile interceptors for Britain’s armed forces. In reality, it will increase national debt and divert State expenditure away from social need and towards wholesale human destruction. Preparation for war always atrophies social spending and cuts wages across the entire economy.
For Plymouth the DIP will continue our descent into a Company Town, visibly dominated by Babcock and associates, reeking of militarism and the drive to rearmament ahead of the apparently inevitable next war. Beware a society dominated by the military security services, embedded everywhere. For example, Plymouth University is a likely sign-up as a “Defence University”, in a strategic relationship with arms companies that will deplete the college’s commitments to health and education training even further.
Compulsory conscription is advocated by the political Right, our primary Schools now being encouraged, with funding, to invite and embed military personnel into the fabric of classroom life and curriculum, the better to prepare the next generation as twenty-first century “cannon fodder” for the wars of the 2030’s.
Future wars are portrayed as robot-wars conducted by technical experts fielding underwater and low-flying drones as if in a computer game. The reality of current wars in Ukraine and the Middle East show something very different. Drones and missiles destroying civilian targets, from high-rise flats to entire towns. This is the destructive force being the sole area of investment for Plymouth.
And at the City’s heart, the illegal mass exterminator, the weapons of mass destruction costing us at least £14billion a year and unmanageable toxic pollution. The nuclear weaponry that, if and when used will herald the end of human society as we know it. That is absolutely nothing to boast about!
When endless tax money is dedicated to warfare the truth is exposed. The money can be found. We can have a society where every child is comfortably housed, growing healthily with nutritious food and well-resourced schooling. Now that’s worth fighting for – Welfare Not Warfare!
My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (19.5.26) keeping-up the assault of the Left against the far-Right, following the previous Saturday’s excellent Palestine Solidarity/Stand Up To Racism demonstration in London, overwhelming the much-reduced far-Right “Unite the Nation” march called by the Islamophobe, Tommy Robinson. Plymouth has a range of fascist and racist organisation competing against each other for pride of place, pretending to demand protecting of women and children from refugee men whilst, in practice, working alongside white men with convictions for abuse. The Left is also in their sights, our charge of racism having a serious effect upon their credibility and support. We must not be complacent and must increase and deepen our efforts until they are off our streets. The next counter demonstration is next Monday.
Unedited version below, or expand the pic for the published version.
Women’s liberation would benefit men. Working class men, at least. The ability of the Bosses to pay women less than men for doing the same work, having the same or even more skills but being denigrated, denied recognition and prevented from rising-up the management hierarchy, harms everyone…except the bosses. Unequal pay holds down the general pay-rate. Any excuse is used to hold down wages in order to increase profits, including ideas that women are not worth as much as men.
Women’s oppression, the consideration of women as less than men – weaker, more emotional and therefore fickle and untrustworthy – is increasing again in Britain. After a few decades of winning better women’s rights at work and at home, there’s now a push back. And misogyny is the hard end of this – male hatred of women – a political campaign for male supremacy overwhelming the online Manosphere and poisoning young men’s minds.
Sexism doesn’t make sense. If women had the same rights as men, men would be freed from the results of women’s oppression. If we broke the stereotypes assigned to gender roles we could be honest about our emotions, we could share responsibilities, mix our teams and, oh yes, increase the rate of pay for all, setting the bar at the highest common denominator, not the lowest.
Women in the UK still get paid on average of 18% below men’s pay rates for work of the same value. Trade unions still shout about this. The essential priority for campaigners for women’s rights is correctly focussed upon male coercion, sexual abuse and rape. It is estimated that up to 900,000 people across the country experience sexual assault each year, including attempted rape and penetration. Much has been done to strengthen laws against sexual violence and yet it is widespread, less than 3% of reported rapes ending up in a successful prosecution and punishment.
Predatory abusive men have little to fear. One-in-three women in the UK experience an average of 7-years of domestic abuse at the hands of their partners, statistics that hasn’t changed for the past 50 years. Around 90% of rapes are committed by people known to the victim, often by someone who the survivor previously trusted or even loved. Rapists are usually friends, colleagues, clients, neighbours, family, partners or exes.
Sexual abuse happens in every community. In England, where more than four out of five of the population are white-skinned, this means that the vast majority of sexual abusers are white men abusing white women.
Yet a new campaign group, publicised by the Plymouth Herald, is calling for action against Black men. “Women Reclaim The Streets Plymouth” (WRTSP) is claiming that our streets have been made unsafe by immigrants seeking to abuse women.
WRTSP states “We will feel safer on the Right than the Left always, with rising amounts of illegal undocumented men coming here on boats and the amounts of rapes and murders by these men We Stand (sic) together for closed borders and the illegal undocumented men send (sic) straight back.”
They have no evidence, and as such this is hate speech, a hate crime, promoting fear and racial hostility through the false claim that asylum seekers are responsible for a rising number of rapes.
They wrongly raise the threat of “stranger danger” when women and children are most likely to be abused by someone known to them. Their propaganda is placing women and children at more risk, intentionally or not, implying that family and friends are always safe.
This outcry against asylum seekers and young refugee men as rapists is being fomented by organised fascists. The misogynists who hate women also hate Black people. The ultra-nationalists framing patriotism as white-supremacy are waving flags to intimidate ethnic minorities. The men in high-viz jackets waving Union jacks with the Reclaim the Streets group outside Theatre Royal last week have amongst them thugs convicted for violence against women.
These racist groups are planning a series of local protests against refugees, starting next Monday. They threaten to hold more demonstrations outside our primary schools, claiming to “protect our children” and targeting local Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMO) as if they all house illegal refugees. Their sheer ignorance is jaw-dropping.
Far-right organisations are springing-up across the city, competing with each other for pole position as the most racist, the most patriotic. They plan to protest outside the Plymouth Courts at a hearing of Black men of a sexual attack. Yet all six cases of serious rape and abuse of women heard in Plymouth last year had no such protests outside in the cause of keeping women and children safe – all six were white men – no protests to keep us safe from them, was there?
Women’s safety must not be a tool for racism. Women and children are at risk from low wages, insecure housing, inadequate access to support and benefits as well as sexual abuse. Women are at risk from the sexism and misogyny in our general culture. Women’s sexist oppression and abuse cannot be defeated through the racist oppression and abuse of Black men. We must counter these racist demonstrations and honestly campaign for women’s liberation.
My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (12.5.26), tangentially addressing last week’s extreme meltdown of the political centre of politics in Britain. More than 1400 Councillors were elected for the Reform UK last Thursday, including openly racist and fascist representatives, an historic shift to the far-Right in British politics. Or at least, a shift towards the extremes, the centre ground emptied. As part of the essential campaign of opposition to the far-Right I felt it important to state what fascism represents here and now.
Below is the unedited longer version, and the pic of the much reduced published article:
Are you now, or have you ever been, a Leftie? If so, those who have usurped the national flags to impose a culture of racism and misogyny, those who want to see a million migrant workers forcibly expelled from Britain, those who protest with their children outside schools, intimidating staff and pupils alike, want you to shut up and be shut down.
The far-Right in Plymouth have broadened their focus to not only include scapegoating people of colour but also openly threatening “Lefties” and, in particular, socialists. This is not a tussle between two clubs or rival gangs – it is the current condition of general politics in our society – divided towards the poles.
The far-Right, individuals and organisations of right wing ultra-nationalists, racists and fascists, is currently stoking anti-refugee and anti-Muslim racism, throwing-in classic accusations that black men are a threat to children. They seek white male supremacy, lauding Western colonialism and campaigning to Restore Britain with the return of the military British Empire.
The Left, meanwhile, is a broad spectrum of individuals and organisations that recognise and value all of life on Earth, of diversity, democracy and human rights.
So there is a real and present divide, a gulf, between Left and Right. The Left recognise the danger of the climate crisis, oppose imperialist war, demand full rights for women and Trans people, expose and challenge genocide and ethnic cleansing, stand for the rights of the disabled and demand social welfare paid from the common wealth of taxes and corporate profits.
The Right seek self-advancement at the expense of others. Beyond their own clan they hate humanity. And humanism. The far-Right add attributes to their desired dog-eat-dog world including white-skinned, male, heterosexual cultural domination. Their end result is the defence and protection of unbridled capitalism through an autocratic totalitarian and militarised state – see fascist Italy, Spain, Germany and the Axis powers of the twentieth century. A reactionary conservative creed.
Being “on the Left”, for the Right, does not require a commitment to socialism. Anything “progressive” is deemed “woke”, a term of abuse used by the far-Right.
Not all of the Left are socialist. Many seek reforms to the harshest and sharpest edges of the global and local system of Capitalism, accepting that Capitalism is here and probably inevitable, but can be tamed and controlled. Many reforms have elements of socialism: a universal health service paid for through taxation to be free at the point of need. Subsidised public transport. Fee State education paid for from the public purse. Welfare Benefits to those who cannot fully manage on their own. Social Security ”Council” Housing, the stock owned and maintained by the local council tax payer ensuring decent and affordable housing for all (a thing of the past thanks to previous and current right-wing governments).
Capitalism can have a mixed economy containing elements of socialism just enough to sustain the working class. The Right hate the Welfare State and cannot understand why anyone should pay taxes towards anyone else’s needs. Until, it seems, they become homeless or sick or infirm and complain that the services are not there, because of immigration rather than spending cuts and privatisation.
Socialists are a left section of the Left. In essence we want a different construction of socialist society. Socialism is a society based on meeting the needs of people and the environment, not maximising the profits of the rich. It would be a radically democratic society, with ordinary people collectively running things for ourselves.
A socialist society would be one where items are produced because they are needed, rather than because they are profitable. It would mean an end to a system where millions of people struggle to make ends meet while the rich sit on piles of money. In a socialist society, the working class would collectively own big industries and services, democratically deciding what to produce and how to use the Earth’s resources.
Socialism is therefore international, recognising we each impact upon everyone else, migration and global trade being ancient human attributes that benefit and bind us together as one human race.
Fascism asserts national identity and geographic boundaries in order to accentuate individual competition and bind the people to an internal collective fear and hostility of “the outsider”, “the Alien”, “the Other”.
Fascism is the absolute power of the capitalist. Presumably, that’s why it is considered to be of the “Hard-Left” to seek an end to Capitalism. Although, the redistribution of wealth downwards away from billionaires and multi-millionaires to eradicate child poverty and unemployment should appear perfectly reasonable.
Not least, it’s increasingly obvious that the Capitalist dream of becoming super-rich is sheer mythology – a propaganda tool to tie us to the yolk of wage-slavery. The super-rich are a class apart, managing the State, the laws and social culture to maintain their power and keep all the wealth inside their families and Corporations, preventing social mobility.
Fascism gives this Capitalist ruling class absolute power inside a totalitarian State. An autocratic corporate dictatorship. The fascists pander to the super-rich in the hope of receiving crumbs from their table. In reply, the World’s billionaires, especially the techno-billionaires, are currently funding the rising fascist media and organisations here and across the world.
But why would working class people want an even harsher administration of capitalism in which we are even further atomised away from any mutual aid and self-organisation? Fascists destroy trade unions.
Why would we want to live in a hostile neighbourhood of State-snitches dobbing each other in on false accusations of proscribed relationships, unpatriotic activities or subversive thoughts? How could we condone paramilitary snatch-squads funded by the state and private corporations, smashing-in the door of our family members, friends or neighbours and stealing people away to be disappeared as “enemies of the State”?
Humans have experienced long periods of fascist society all across the world. Fascism adapts to its local conditions, but we all know what fascism looks like. So let’s be clear. That’s the end game of the fascist “Tommy Robinson” and the far-right parliamentary-wing represented by Farage’s Reform UK. Fascists lie and deceive and threaten in order to achieve absolute power. Fascism is not what anyone voted for last week. But fascism is here, now, and must be actively confronted and opposed. We will oppose Tommy Robinson in London next Saturday, and local fascists day-and-night from now on.
