Workers’ control of production will require a revolution

April 15, 2025 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly Comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (15.4.25), looking at one aspect of the current crisis of British Steel. Of course we want all utilities and public services nationalised, but under what governance exactly? There’s no reason for workers to trust State Capitalism – it simply maintains the competition and exploitation at the very heart of the System. Workers’ control of production will require a revolution.

The full unedited article here:

To eliminate poverty every essential product should be managed not for profit but for human need. Those needs are determined by the daily requirements for survival.
Every human being needs nutritious food, warm and dry shelter, protective clothing, love and nurturing, and education that ensures we learn how to look after ourselves and others. Socialism is the idea of a society that meets those needs for everyone – collective ownership of the means of production.
In a society of 67million human beings our needs have to be produced at scale. So we need mass production of food and housing and wherewithal, which in turn means we need large quantities of nutrients and bricks and materials, including steel for transport and buildings.
It becomes clear that these materials should be regarded as essential, not luxury items that we may also want but not need.

It stands to reason that all essential production should be considered as part of public services, socially organised. Private businesses do not operate according to social need, but rather for short-term private profit.
The fact that British Steel plc was privatised by Thatcher in 1988 and fleeced for shareholder profits ever since is a case in point. Steel is an essential social resource. If the Steel industry was publicly owned and controlled, the steel would be produced at cost, environmental concerns regulated and climate damage addressed, jobs valued, and the products – from building construction to railway lines – locally supplied.
As it is, British Steel has been a cash cow for private investors – shareholders seeking a maximum return on their money – for decades. Along the way they’ve sucked dry the blast-furnaces in Port Talbot and Llanwern, steel making in Teesside and the electric arc furnace in Rotherham.
The current crisis of the Scunthorpe steel plant is the latest example. The Dutch Corus Group bought BS in 1999, sold to Indian-registered company Tata Steel in 2010 who sold it in 2016 to Greybull Capital LLP for £1 in 2016, sucking-out its cash equity before going into insolvency in 2019.
Greybull is one of those predatory capitalist cowboy-firms buying vulnerable companies cheap and sucking them dry at the cost of thousands of jobs and livelihoods, including the Monarch Airline company.
The Chinese capitalist conglomerate Jingye bought British Steel from Greybull in 2020 promising huge investments, wanting a Made-in-Britain badge in the steel it supplies at market rates. The UK Governments pledged £3.2billion to support the UK’s steel industry, with more to come in the next few months.
Surely, throwing billions of tax-payers money at private companies makes no sense. Why couldn’t we just buy it for £1 and own and control it as an essential asset? Indeed, why did the State ever sell it off?
The answer is not economic but ideological. Successive governments, Tory, Tory/LibDem and Labour have all fully committed to the political philosophy of neoliberalism: free-market Capitalism – the opposite of socialism. First sponsored by President Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the belief is that the neoliberal State should not own anything that can make a profit for a private business.
Under this ideology, only when essential businesses go to the wall should the State intervene to bail out and protect shareholders for as limited time as possible. Hence the creeping privatisation of the NHS, and absurd ups-and-downs of the rail and bus industries, their profits wholly underwritten by our taxes. Socialism always and only for the super-rich, profits guarantee from the common wealth.
Now, as a Labour Government takes over the management of British Steel wielding statutory powers over the still privatised business, there are calls for renationalisation.
There are many forms and purposes of nationalisation. Capitalism required it for the reconstruction of industry after the Second World War. Indeed, Hitler’s fascist government, and Mussolini’s Italian fascist State utilised nationalisation as a tool of totalitarian control. It is not, of itself, a cure for poverty, unemployment, exploitation or oppression.
Trade unions like nationalisation of a certain kind. Democratic public ownership and control, with workers full engagement allows security of production and jobs despite market turbulence, able to deliver the goods for need not profit. Socialists demand workers’ control of industry.
In successive polls, at least 65% of the electorate like the idea of returning our services to public ownership – including water, energy, transport, the NHS and Royal Mail. Nationalism is seen as better than corporate ownership.
Starmer’s Labour government, like Blair’s before him, hates nationalisation, only ever doing so to protect the business owners for as short a time as possible. The Tories, now all-but defunct, agree. The millionaire Nigel Farage, executive director of Reform 2025 Ltd, the business behind the political party, Reform UK, bizarrely demands full nationalisation without compensation to the Chinese owners – at face-value a full-on socialist demand.
Bizarre because Reform UK is a thoroughly neoliberal organisation on the side of big business, seeking the smallest State possible with policies for privatisation of the NHS and against workers’ rights and State regulation. The arch-Nationalist Farage may pretend to be a friend of the working class ahead of the May elections, but there is nothing socialist about Reform UK.
The end of steel production here should not be an opportunity for false promises. The long-term failure of businesses to invest at all amongst the general industrial decline across the UK is a vindication of all of us who have warned against and opposed neo-liberalism from the start. This decaying corpse of a failed political creed represents a serious crisis for jobs and cost-of-living that demands we take control, in the collective interests of the working class not the careless greedy bosses.

Trump’s Tariffs will not Help the Working Class

April 9, 2025 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (8.4.25), following a weekend campaign stall which heard many local people saying they “like Trump”. In general, nationalist sentiments and comments were the majority. Socialists really do need to heed this shift to the right, and argue back. I can’t offer any deep economic analysis and would never predict the global impact of Trump’s tariffs, but one thing’s for sure. The working class is going to pay a heavy price, everywhere.

What have tariffs to do with us?

In Truth there is no such thing as the “National Interest”. We are not one nation, not because of any differences in skin colour or ethnicity, but because of social class. The richest 20% of British citizens live totally separate and different lives from the poorest 20%. In general their bonuses come from our losses.
Tax cuts for the rich do not benefit the poor in any way. Surplus personal wealth tends to be spent on luxuries, the larger amounts squirrelled away in off-shore tax-free bank accounts. In Britain the luxuries mostly come from overseas, the luxury holidays generally happen overseas, the upper-middle and super-rich upper class investing in cheap labour overseas. The working class hardly ever see the real wealth of our Nation.
Trump’s tariffs are portrayed as his attempt to pull production back to the United States of America in order to revitalise their endebted economy and improve the condition of the poorest. He has no such intention, and in any case, tariffs don’t do that. Trump’s taxes on imports to the USA will fuel price rises, maintaining or even increasing inflation at home and abroad.
The tariffs will damage any capitalist’s confidence in investing, anywhere. Last week’s sudden record losses on stock markets worldwide are evidence of this. The retaliation of other countries with large economies, imposing tariffs on US goods will replicate the inflationary pressures worldwide.
The UK’s economy is stagnant already. Before Trump, for the poorest 50% of people in the UK, prices kept going up and our spending power decline. The tariffs will ensure this continues. The outlook is stagflation.
We are already suffering disgusting inequality and poverty levels. Low wages, precarious work, 6 million households in fuel poverty, 4 million children in poverty. To judge where you sit in the hierarchy of rich v poor, just consider that Britain’s median hourly wage is around £37,000 per year before tax, roughly the same as in 2006. Most wage-rates have been pulled down by wage-compression resulting in the top 10% of salaries averaging £73k, the poorest 10% less than £23k. Standard Universal Credit per adult £5kpa. State pensioner a maximum of 12kpa. Of course the super-rich aren’t in these stats – they’re the directors and executives and property owners – not the workers – averaging £200kpa before bonuses and dividends. Where do you sit?
The top 10% of households hold 43% of the country’s wealth while the bottom 50% of us (33 million citizens) share just 9%. The 170 UK multi-billionaires own £700billion between them, their collective income rising over £30bn in the last year. We never see their money.
America’s gap between rich and poor is even more extreme. Trump’s primary motive in enforcing tariffs is to get more dollars into the USA’s federal budget to be able to further cut the rate of tax for the wealthiest in America. Damn the poor, the social infrastructure and welfare services. Why any working class person would still wish to support Trump beggars belief.
We have lived the fact that the rich having more cash doesn’t trickle down to the poor, quite the opposite. The poor pay substantially more of our disposable income on essentials with little or nothing for luxuries, the prices of which will now skyrocket.
Trump’s tariffs will make the price of essentials increase. Here in the UK. The world’s smallest countries are being hit so hard they will be plunged into even more abject poverty (the current jokes about penguins are not really funny). The big economies responding with tariffs of their own will cost their working class a double-whammy.
Trump’s administration isn’t benign. His people know the history of trade wars. They’re not stupid. Tariffs deepen economic competition and lead to military competition. Trade wars lead to world wars. The USA has a military budget that dwarfs the rest of the world’s combined. And wars make huge money for the arms manufacturers at the expense of everyone else.
Little wonder Starmer’s government and those across the world are now preaching rearmament and militarism. Nationalism is being drummed into our working class mindset as a prelude to war. And wars always make the working classes much poorer, economically, socially and emotionally. Surely, war is not in our interest. And neither is Trump.
More than one million people protested across the USA last weekend, against Trump’s offensive. The working class here must challenge Trump’s poverty policies here, too. Welfare not Warfare!

D-I-Y Life and Death

April 2, 2025April 2, 2025 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (1.4.25), stating the bloody obvious against a barrage of media lies. The NHS has been purposefully demolished by the lobbyists for pharmaceutical big business and private medical profiteers. Imagine people’s health as the source of your wealth. Or rather, personal profiteering from people’s suffering. Who does that? They need challenging, up-front, in their faces.

Full article below:

The National Health Service has long been the focus of political struggle, indeed, ideological warfare. It has represented an island of Socialism in the ocean of Capitalism.
Socialism, a system of human organisation where you give to society what you can afford and get back what you need, is the opposite of individual competition, exploitation of others for your own private wealth, and survival of the fittest.
To have free access to health care at the time of need, paid from the community purse, is a hallmark of collective care and mutuality. Everyone benefits from this universal right.
The political arguments over its future stem from the immense polarisation between rich and poor in our very unequal society. Do you think that wealthy people deserve to get better healthcare than everyone else? If you’re rich you may say so, living in conditions of privilege compared with the majority of humanity, and believing you are entitled to special treatment given you wealth and status.
But most of us think the National Health Service is there to ensure that everyone is treated the same and have their health needs met. We don’t think people should have to pay to see a doctor, and we are scared and appalled by the American healthcare system where treatments cost tens of thousands and medicines are priced according to market demand, costing many times more than in the UK. In the US you pay into a very expensive health insurance, or only receive minimal emergency help in acute need.
Most of us feel very protective of the National Health Service because we know on which side our bread is buttered. UK healthcare is the envy of the American working class despite being in enforced financial crisis. Successive UK governments have held back proportionate funding to create a crisis for which they’ve diagnosed privatisation as the cure. It is, in fact, the cancer eating away the health system’s organs.
The drip-drip take-over has seen ophthalmology, dentistry and podiatry farmed-out to private business ensuring we pay an ever increasing amount for the care in addition to the taxes for healthcare in the first place. Much else of the NHS is divided between the routine treatments and the acute high-cost surgical interventions. The private companies take a cut for their shareholders on the profitable areas of healthcare and pass-over the expensive non-profitable interventions to the public services for the tax-payer to shoulder.
It should be simple to conclude that all services should be inside the NHS, the less-expensive services balancing the budget rather than feeding the private companies. It should be common sense that national control of the private drug companies is essential for the NHS to determine the price of pills rather than the pharmaceutical companies. Get rid of the profiteers and the NHS will cost the tax-payer less.
Last month, Starmer’s privatising government abolished the NHS. There was little fuss. Yesterday they announced a greater role for Chemists – the pharmacies entirely owned by private corporations. The extra £3billion of tax-money to private businesses comes after the closure of thousands of chemist shops, their owners complaining they are not making enough profit from NHS contracts and want to raise the cost of medicines.
It ushers-in the Do-It-Yourself healthcare that tens-of-millions of Americans are condemned to. And it means access to GPs will be further rationed and our universal healthcare finally ended.
Politicians are lobbying for health companies and personally cashing-in on the profits, at our expense. Tory and Labour ministers past and present, including Cameron, Starmer, Streeting and Cooper have declared receipt of huge personal donations from health corporations, with no accountability as to what “favours” are required in return.
The multi-millionaire Nigel Farage, courtier of the privateer, President Donald Trump, has repeatedly stated, “I think we’re going to have to move to an insurance-based healthcare system”. Reform UK is lobbying on behalf of the US pharmaceutical and healthcare companies for the complete take-over of our health services.
Already, because of privatisation, our kids have terrible teeth, our grannies have no nursing care, our taxes are flowing into the coffers of drug companies and charlatan health-and-social-care providers. As always, the poor and the struggling are underwriting the capital wealth and lifestyles of the super rich. The burden falls on the poor.
There’ll be a hell of a lot of people who will die prematurely and in pain as a result of any more restrictions on healthcare and access at the point of need. Perhaps that’s why the government is fast-tracking assisted-dying. Once working class lives are deemed unprofitable we are invalid.

Welfare not Warfare and Militarism!

March 25, 2025 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

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

The full script below:

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

Continued Support for Palestinians is Essential

March 19, 2025 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (18.3.25), identifying the end of the fragile ceasefire in Gaza. I had to cut it right down to 600 words for the print, and still there’s more to say than in the full 900 words I offer here. Burning refugees alive in their fragile tents overnight is beyond barbarism, in many ways beyond words. All we can do is protest and expose our government. Stop Arming Israel!

Last Saturday saw fifty thousand people march to London’s seat of government, Whitehall, on the 25th national demonstration demanding a permanent ceasefire and reparations for the people of Palestine. Millions have marched here, across Britain and indeed the world since Israel invaded the Gaza Strip, home to over two million Palestinians, reducing it to rubble after October 7th 2023.
On that day, Hamas fighters had broken-out of the open-air prison of Gaza and reportedly killed or captured over 1,000 Israelis in nearby territory, land recognised by the United Nations as Palestine and illegally occupied by Israel. 17 months later, at least 50,000 (that’s 50 times the horror of 7.10.23) Gazans are dead, at least 200,000 horrifically injured as living casualties, and one-million-eight-hundred-thousand human beings displaced, homeless, unable to leave and facing disease and starvation.
The disproportionate killing and suffering inflicted by one side on another, happening whether in Gaza or anywhere in the world, should warrant outrage and protest. Trade unions here and everywhere have long recognised the injustice of the treatment of Palestinians since 1948 as immoral and illegitimate.
As part of the trade union quest for social justice we have always exposed and challenged crimes against humanity, our purpose being the political struggle for human rights and equality.
Trade Unions have consistently said Never Again to challenge anti-semitism, remembering and organising against any repeat of the industrial murder of at least six-million Jewish people by Hitler’s fascists in the Second World War.
At the same time, following the formation of Israel by European Jews migrating to the Middle East after the War, we have witnessed this colonisation as the ethnic clearance of Palestinian lands by military force, called in Arabic the Nakba or “catastrophe” ,and we have lobbied for a just solution.
It’s possible to do both. We can commemorate both Holocaust Memorial Day and the Nakba as crimes against humanity. The targeting and mass killing of a specific ethnic group, forcibly removing a people from their homelands or murdering them en masse is unconscionable – racist, predatory and barbaric. For the sake of all, this is not the way humanity should proceed.
Palestine Solidarity groups have been long established across Britain, supported by trade unions. We have never been under greater attack than today. There was a time when almost every Labour Party member supported Palestine but now their Party of Government is shutting down all criticism of the Israeli military. The right to protest for Palestine is being curtailed , Police instructed by politicians to close down the spaces.
At street stalls there is more challenge, supporters of the actions of the Israeli government claiming Palestinians (and indeed Arabs) to be less than human and supporting their “extermination”, up to and including slogans of “nuke ‘em all’. Fascist groups in the UK, caught in the political cleft stick of hatred for both Jews and Muslims, favour Israel at this juncture as if it is a war between Black and White. We observe that the fascist hatred of Jews has not gone away, their theories of a global Jewish conspiracy still everywhere across the Internet.
It is not by accident that Israel has been created at a focal point of geopolitical and financial power, a crossroads of global networks, the precisely constructed centre of the Middle East, funded by Europe and the United States to maintain the power of western imperialism in the Arab World and into the East. Little wonder that Trump, Starmer and the EU states support Israel’s actions and seek to shut-down active criticism. It is about western power and control.
Whilst we, the humanists and socialists of the international workers’ movement, care about and campaign for human rights across the West and in Russia, China, Yemen, India, Sudan, Syria, the Congo and many other examples of human suppression, Palestine overarches all other injustices. The Palestine protests sum-up the international working class struggle against exploitation and oppression.
Some attend the demonstrations for the sense of international solidarity with the oppressed, some argue from a moral wish for peace and reconciliation there and everywhere, some attend as a statement against imperialist domination of peoples and regions. Palestinian protesters amount to a tiny proportion of our mass mostly because there are so few in the UK and they are rarely granted asylum under British law, despite the facts.
Jews across the world are also protesting against the military actions of Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Israeli Defence Forces. Hundreds are occupying Trump Tower in New York demanding the release of Palestinian protester Mahmoud Khalil, a US resident and student now incarcerated and threatened with deportation for peacefully speaking-out for Palestinian rights.
And in Palestine itself the situation is deteriorating faster than ever: the ceasefire talks cancelled; the Israelis once again blocking food aid, cutting of all electricity and therefore essential water and medical services; ethnically cleansing the Palestinian West Bank as now part of “Greater Israel evicting more than 40,000 from their homes; reports of torture and rape of civilians by IDS soldiers; and shooting and bombing civilians crouched amongst the rubble every day.
The size and scale of opposition to the actions of the Israeli State have never been larger nor more profound. The great majority of the world’s countries and people’s support the Palestinians. Historically, those with power always explain their massacres in terms of righteousness. The continuation of that support, especially here in the West, breeds hope, both for the Palestinians and for peace with social justice.

Imperialist War only Helps the Rich to Get Richer

March 12, 2025 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (11.3.25), attempting to steer clear of censorship by not mentioning Ukraine or Gaza whilst opposing imperialist war (my original, printed below, did the mention but didn’t get away with it). The pro-war liberals and socialists appear to be confused by the Trump demand for Peace, as if you can’t oppose Trump and Putin and Imperialism. Choosing sides means being with the international working class always, with the bosses never, and consistently against Imperialism as the most powerful form of Capitalism. I haven’t got away with writing that yet!

The original:

The times they are a’changing.
The accelerating shift towards the domination of far-Right political leadership is happening because the global system of Capitalism is in crisis. Regions are scrabbling for resources. Competition is acute.
At such times, as in the 1910’s and the 1930’s, the vulnerable sections of the world’s ruling class turn away from the pleasantries of democracy and towards totalitarian control. Authoritarianism is growing everywhere seeking to make popular the politics of the far-Right.
At best, and only during times of relative prosperity, parliamentary democracy offers a chimera of popular suffrage – the ‘right to vote” symbolising a symbolic engagement of every citizen with the real forces of the Boss Class that rule over our lives and futures. In truth we have little say.
The “mixed-economy” of the 1950’s and ‘60’s allowed the social infrastructure to be rebuilt from the ruins of the Second World War, State taxes claiming 95% of each £ for the highest earners, raising the cash for social (council) housing, health, education, care of children and the elderly and vulnerable, and our nationally owned utilities.
But once the certainty of a working class healthy and educated enough to meet modern employment needs was established, the Capitalists decided to reclaim their profit rates by reducing the amount of tax they pay, at least by half, and organise to get most of the rest back in State-paid allowances to their private businesses. They returned to laissez-faire neo-liberal free-market economics.
The working classes are left to pay for our own services. Today, the super-rich and billionaires pay hardly anything into the common purse whilst getting subsidised by us. They are insatiable and in no way satisfied by the enormous increase in their private wealth and power since the 1970’s.
Most of the huge transnational corporate monopolies are now simply too big to fail, receiving routine tax-bail-outs whilst increasing levels of unrepayable debt.
They are too vulnerable to global tensions to spend their hoards of money. There’s little or no investment from the billions of billions in profits into maintaining the social infrastructure that their businesses need society to provide. If the bosses had to pay for the welfare of their workforce they’d make little profit. Instead, with the global growth of the working class, they don’t need a full pool of locally educated and healthy workers when they can trawl the world for cheap and able labour.
So our Western infrastructure is crumbling, the USA and UK being some of the worst examples. The Capitalists want sure-fired short-term high-yield returns on any investments they make. Public health, public housing, public education (just about anything publicly owned) doesn’t make big profits.
Many essential services and utilities aren’t profitable except through a one-time asset-stripping robbery. Transition of energy supplies to renewables doesn’t make the scale of profits from oil.
So what does make big short term profit apart from fossil fuels (oh, and mind-numbing drugs to manage the alienation of wage-slavery)? War.
A bullet or bomb can only explode once and has to be replaced. There’s no multi-use for munitions. The price of munitions is determined by the market – the more wars, the more demand, the higher the profit. The military-industrial complex cherry-picks for high-return investment, leaving the tax-payer to pay for the true costs of militarisation. High-tech, big bangs and nuclear capabilities make the biggest killing.
As an aside, the destruction of huge areas of infrastructure, let’s say Gaza or the Donbas region of Ukraine, the higher the value of the land and real-estate for fresh private investment. The decaying old infrastructure, now collapsed, can be purloined, owned and rebuilt with high profit margins. The prime land is worth investing in again.
Little wonder there is now a drive to war. It’s not so much about freedom for the People as freedom for the corporations to rejuvenate their portfolios and profit margins. They need to free-up the congested and aging markets to kick-start a fresh round of exploitation of people and natural resources. Wars kick-start a fresh round of plunder of people and natural resources.
Even then, it is the tax-payer who is expected to make the investment in building a new military, not the billionaires. Ruling classes and their tame politicians identify enemies, whip-up nationalism, glory in militarism, start the looting of land, minerals and the cheap labour of the battered survivors.
Politicians make a song and dance about security and justice, whipping-up fear and racism in their drive for compliance, whilst mostly it’s about competition between corporate states for market domination. That’s the definition of imperialism.
War is built-in to the Capitalist System. And always it’s the working class who are conscripted, either through financial imperative or legal requirement, to fight and be shot or die, whilst the profiteers rake-in the cash from wholesale destruction. We pay the price.
Be cautious of any enthusiasm for rearmament. In the immediate, the billions spent on war come at the price of cuts to the essential services we all need. Wars destroy our social infrastructure. Wars come at terrible cost to the survivors, our quality of life shattered, our memories polluted with images of horror, our relationships distorted, all supposedly in the name of our national interest.
The workers of the world never benefit from war. We must invest in Peace. Welfare not Warfare!

We in the UK have to take Trump Seriously

March 4, 2025March 4, 2025 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My Weekly Comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (28.2.25), delayed from its usual Tuesday slot for “technical reasons”, allowing for a Comment Column from the editor supporting more war with Russia, and then a military person writing on the need for emergency weapons production. Last week’s column was stopped by the editor, my call for peace being identified as similar to “seeking to appease Hitler” (ie Putin).
Last week I warned of Europe promoting world war three against Russia. Today my weaker and compromised column warns only of Trump, not NATO and Starmer. Bizarrely, by the evening of the 28th, Trump had been broadcast across the world bullying and condemning Zelenskyy to his face in the Oval Office.
So when Trump spoke again of World War Three I kinda feel vindicated, while wishing I’d argued harder and stuck to my guns. I should have learnt by now – don’t compromise!

This week’s column:

We have to take Trump seriously. However you wish to caricature, disparage or mock him, Trump is at the head of a very powerful cabal, an administration that has well-formed and long-prepared plans from a coherent ideological framework.
The Trump administration has at its heart, far-right nationalism, separate from the Project for New American Century of the 1990’s. It is not a set of policies opposed to war, reference Iraq and Afghanistan, but rather focussed upon the benefit of any war to the United States plc.
Any presentation of Trump as a peacemaker must be considered in this regard – what benefits do his group within the American ruling class secure through any conflict or peace deal? This is not particularly a question of likes and dislikes, just what’s in it for the US corporations. Trumpism offers nothing to the working classes of the USA or anywhere else.
At this juncture, the acknowledgement of the third year of war in Ukraine, the Trumpian propaganda surrounding a peace deal can be falsely considered as an alliance with Putin or abandonment of Ukraine. Rather it is a negotiating platform. The USA has given more than $100billion to Ukraine to fund the war, plus Musk’s Starlink satellite communication systems and much else of the essential military infrastructure, and Trump wants to see a return on the investment.
Trump has said he wants the mineral wealth of Ukraine in return for continued provision of arms. This is not to be condoned, but is not the same as abandonment. It is possible to imagine deals that ensure new military investment. It is also possible to imagine European countries stepping-up to take-over from the USA, from much of the same motive were they able to afford it. The current economic stagnation makes rearmament a very long-term project.
Trump says his country is shielded by a beautiful ocean, the Atlantic, making Russia, a much smaller economy than the USA, of little or no threat to him. By contrast, America’s corporate core recognises China as a very present threat, economically and culturally across the world, and potentially militarily across the Pacific.
Making America Great Again means pushing back against China and its BRICS alliance. Europe will have to deal with Russia.
So where does Britain stand? It is not difficult to perceive of the UK as tThe USA’s 51st State. We are heavily dominated by US culture and military alliance despite having far fewer economic ties than would at first appear.
Prime Minister Starmer’s audience with the President this week should expose his country’s political dependence on the USA, Trump’s nationalism notwithstanding. And for this, Starmer will step-up as America’s watchdog in Europe, bragging to replace the armaments of the US with those of the UK and challenging Europe to do the same.
Starmer has already pledged an increase in UK military spending from 2.3 to 2.5% of GDP, the highest in Europe, representing an extra £3bn in the past year. The coming Strategic Defence Review will map increased investment in weaponry and soldiers towards the pie-in-the-sky “ideal” of 3% of GDP, despite high borrowing and crumbling social infrastructure.
Doing Trump’s bidding will come at a huge cost to our health service, housing stock, welfare benefits, transport systems and green energy transition. The expansion of the UK’s military-industrial complex, much already ownedd by US corporations, will not reflate our economy as a whole, just one section that is already enjoying record profits from tax-moneys.
The USA pulling-back from Ukraine will have heavy political and economic consequences for European countries, a situation to the benefit of the USA that has long wanted to curb the economic power of the continent. And politically, the accelerated rise of the far-Right here, feeding off the rise in poverty and insecurity, will encourage support for the Trumpian rhetoric, itself so two-faced in its true intention.
Some praise Trump for his transactional approach to power in a Capitalist world. His is an example of how Capitalism actually functions – as a constant competition between combatants, seeking to make offers that cannot be refused or actual hostile takeovers. Gangsters and the organised criminal gangs learnt all they know from the legitimate corporate players.
The challenge is this. If you oppose Trump you have to firstly oppose those with power in the UK who support him, and those he supports. The Trump administration is dominating a period going forward in which they can wield enormous power and impact across the world. They must be stopped.

Workers don’t Win in Imperialist Wars

March 4, 2025 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My comment column for the Plymouth Herald (18.2.25) refused for publication, considered as disloyal to the Ukrainian people in Plymouth as well as those fighting in their own country, and as a statement of appeasement on a par with the calls for Peace with Hitler before the Second World War.
I am perplexed, never feeling 100% clear and definite about any analysis I offer (I am no dogmatist) and very ready to hear criticism and rethink.
Surely the point of a comment column is to encourage discussion and debate. Why should a call for peace be censored (whether agreeable or not)? For me the drive to even more war, Europe and UK putting boots in the ground against Russia appears detrimental to the working class peoples of Europe and Russia. Specifically, socialists (that’s my world view) cannot take either side in a war between two imperialist powers. Imperialism as the assertion of capitalist exploitation worldwide is against the interests of the working classes on either side – we simply can’t win.
The Ukraine war is a challenging subject to write about and bound to upset those with an alternate view – I’m not out to upset, just debate. And on the 3rd anniversary of a ghastly inhuman war, something needs to be said. Anyway, here’s what I sent in, for you to criticise and condemn. I’m firstly posting the edited version here, the original then offered further below is more explanatory, but editing to the 600 word max is a severe test of exactitude in such matters. I would have thought to the banned edited version tolerable to the most ardent liberal, especially in consideration of what has happened since :

Perhaps Ukraine will shortly see an enforced peace after an enforced war. That will be a decision made in agreement between Washington and Moscow, not in Ukraine. The country’s past three years have been a horror of human butchery, deprivation, forced migration and environmental destruction. A war that had brewed for decades because of global imperialist ambitions for expansion and control of natural resources and human populations.
Imperialism is the international capitalist system. Today, in the face of global crisis, imperialist competition is increasing.
By 2014 the stage was set in Ukraine’s region of the Donbas, an ethnically and linguistically disputed region where those allied with Russia fought for separation for Ukraine. The West, dominated by the United States economically, politically and militarily through the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), had been siting military bases around the Russian border in neighbouring states, and Russia as a State with its own imperialist regional ambitions pushed back.
The tensions deepened, open conflicts erupted, and the forces from both sides intensified until Russia invaded on 24th February 2022.
The Ukrainian people were forced to war by much wider imperialist ambitions, as stand-ins for the NATO troops themselves. As always, Ukrainians wanted peace and stability but were divided by the very different cultural identities between the north of the country and the south east, as well as an organised far-right nationalist political grouping seeking Parliamentary domination, and a neoliberal economic drive to derive the benefits of integration with Europe and entrance to NATO – never going to happen.
The globally dominant empire of the United States of America has funded Ukraine’s military against Russia, making this a proxy war between two major powers.
Ukraine has been used for the battleground. America has put over £100billion into the Ukraine war, Europe £40billion, Britain £13 billion since February 2022. 16,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed, at least 150,000 soldiers killed in action.
Trump is refusing to pay anymore because America’s global interests lie elsewhere.
The war has raised the spectre of nuclear conflict once again, and raised State spending on the military-industrial complex across the West at the direct expense of money for health & welfare at home.
Amongst them, Prime Minister Starmer is the greatest hawk, giving another £150million only last week and boasting to increase the UK’s proportion of tax money spent on weapons, including nuclear warheads, to the highest of any country in Europe. He’s arguing for the war to continue as a rational to keep increasing the UK military tax investment towards 5% of GDP despite all economic warnings. He’s wasting our money for the sake of political posturing.
America is looking away from Europe in a strategic assessment of the growth of regional rivals such as China. Trump is no Peacemaker other than at the point of a missile, and he wants to focus upon US military operations in the Pacific. He expects Europe to resolve its own tensions, and Starmer is obeying by making the UK America’s military HQ in Europe, ready to put our troops into Ukraine. That will cost us, the UK population, dear in terms of deeper austerity and militarism. It’s not in our interests.
The lesson of Ukraine is that, even in Europe in the 21st Century, there can be devastating war, death and destruction. There is a drive to more war, funded by the arms manufacturers and the cyber-industries supported by their ultra-nationalist politicians. We’d better sue for Peace while there’s a chance. That means active opposition to imperialism whether in Ukraine or Palestine or the South China Seas. Stop the Wars, Now!

End

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unedited version:

Perhaps Ukraine will see an enforced peace after an enforced war. That will be a decision made in agreement between Washington and Moscow. The past three years have been a horror of human butchery, deprivation, forced migration and environmental destruction. A war that had brewed for decades, partly from the disputed borders left unresolved at the end of the Second World War and later the collapse of the Soviet Union, but mostly because of global imperialist ambitions for expansion and control of natural resources and human populations.

Nation states and borders are determined through conflict and redrawn out of negotiated settlements. All borders are artificial and impermanent. Rivers can be crossed, mountains spanned, the lines on maps fought over, human beings dying in their millions for a few miles of devastated environment to be transferred from one regional ruling class to another.

Imperialism is the international capitalist system. The system of capitalism at a local level sees producers and merchants compete to make money, at an international level States and allied Regions compete for market dominance on behalf of their Capitalist corporations. Today, in the face of global crisis, imperialist competition is increasing.

There is cultural imperialism and the fight for dominant ideology, economic imperialism using loans and corporate domination of other nations, and where these aren’t sufficient there is military imperialism: colonialism, subjugation and outright war. Now there is growing competition among the big imperialist powers and regional or “sub” imperialist ones.

By 2014 the stage was set in Ukraine’s region of the Donbas, an ethnically and linguistically disputed region where those allied with Russia fought for separation for Ukraine. The West, dominated by the United States economically, politically and militarily through the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), had been siting military bases around the Russian border in neighbouring states and in Ukraine, and Russia as a State with its own imperialist regional ambitions pushed back.

The tensions deepened, open conflicts erupted, and the forces from both sides intensified until Russia invaded on 24th February 2022.

The Ukrainian people were forced to war by much wider imperialist ambitions, as stand-ins for the NATO troops themselves. As always, Ukrainians wanted peace and stability but were divided by the very different cultural identities between the north of the country and the south east, as well as an organised far-right nationalist political grouping seeking Parliamentary domination, and a neoliberal economic drive to derive the benefits of integration with Europe and entrance to NATO – never going to happen.

In any class society there is never national unity. The ruling class sends the working class to fight. There are those who benefit and profit from war, and the many more who suffer greatly.

The globally dominant empire of the United States of America has funded Ukraine’s military against Russia, making this a proxy war between the major powers.

Ukraine has been used for the battleground. America has put over £100billion into the Ukraine war, Europe £40billion, Britain £13 billion since February 2022. 16,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed, at least 150,000 soldiers killed in action. Trump is refusing to pay anymore, not as a peacemaker but because America’s global interested lie elsewhere.

The war has raised the spectre of nuclear conflict once again, and raised State spending on the military-industrial complex across the West at the direct expense of money for health & welfare at home. Amongst them, Prime Minister Starmer is the greatest hawk, giving another £150million last week and boasting to increase the UK’s proportion of tax money spent on weapons, including nuclear warheads, to the highest of any country in Europe. He’s arguing against all things rational to keep increasing the UK tax investment towards 5% of GDP regardless of all strategic analysis to the contrary. He’s wasting our money for the sake of political posturing.

America is looking away from Europe in a strategic assessment of the growth of regional rivals such as China. Trump is no Peacemaker other than at the point of a missile, and he wants to focus upon US military operations in the Pacific. He expects Europe to resolve its own tensions, and Starmer is obeying by making the UK America’s military HQ in Europe, responsible for NATO planning. That will cost us, the UK population, dear in terms of deeper austerity and militarism. It’s not in our interests.

The lesson of Ukraine is that, even in Europe in the 21st Century, there can be devastating war, death and destruction. There is a drive to more war, funded by the arms manufacturers and the cyber-industries supported by their ultra-nationalist politicians. We’d better sue for Peace while there’s a chance. That means active opposition to imperialism whether in Ukraine or Palestine or the South China Seas. Stop the Wars, Now!

Trump Buying Gaza? Is he Just Flying a Kite?

February 12, 2025February 12, 2025 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (11.2.25).

The unedited version here, or just widen the picture to read the printed version below.

Flying a kite is supposed to be therapeutic, especially in windy weather. The coloured cloth, swaying ducking and diving makes us chuckle, imagining we’re riding on its back.
Flying a kite is also used as an analogy in politics, meaning to test a proposal in order to see which way the wind blows.
When the world’s most powerful (if most bankrupted) property developer says he’s going to purchase Gaza we all need to understand it as a ploy – he’s flying a kite.
Two-thirds of the residential Palestinian territory of Gaza, home to 2.2million human beings, has been bombed to the ground, leading to President Trump putting-in a bid for ownership and land clearance, exactly as any unprincipled land speculator would do. But who is he proposing to buy it all from?
Our Victorian era saw factory owners ensure such pitiful wages as to render residential areas into slums, then change their caps to announce themselves as Landlords, turfing-out the poor people they had produced in order to clear the estate and rebuild to make money both from the stolen capital and the increased revenue.
Today this continues in Britain in the street-by-street “gentrification”, privatising the people’s Council Housing and speculating on property prices. Across the world the clearance of entire estates is recognised as ethnic cleansing.
The puppet-men of western parliaments have responded to Trump’s proposal with guffaws rather than outright condemnation, in awe at the height and speed and light of Trump’s kite display. Secretly, of course, being of the same ilk, they wish they’d had the guts to suggest it. They believe in the unethical and unprincipled system of Capitalism.
Gaza is a bomb site. It is, as Trump says, full of unexplored ordnance as well as the rotting corpses of tens of thousands of women and children, as inseparable from the collapsed concrete rubble as is the human dust of those burnt to death in the Grenfell Tower horror – also caused by property speculators.
Officially the body parts of around 50,000 humans can be offered as proof of mass killing of Gazans by the American bombs and bullets supplied to the Israeli Defence Forces. The missing, unaccounted for or deceased due to starvation and disease raise the number towards 200,000, two-thirds of whom were women or children.
This is why we follow the United Nations International Court of Justice in identifying all this as the indicators of Genocide – illegal under the Geneva Convention and the laws of so many States, including our own. Such levels of one-sided murder and maiming also explain why President Trump’s Disunited States of America has withdrawn itself from all matters of international community and international law, and exempted themselves from accountability at home.
Every predatory Capitalist will tell you. State laws get in the way of making money.
Most if not all laws protecting human rights have been fought for and won only by collective campaigning and open fights for them over generations – mainly by the world’s working classes. The working day, women’s rights, health & safety, housing and medical care are not offered freely by those who have wealth and power. We have campaigned and fought, and many died, in pursuit of our human rights.
And every time we take our newly-won comforts for granted, the predators creep-up to take them from us again. In Britain we have returned to a low-waged, long-working hours dog-eat-dog crumbling terrain.
In Gaza, and now planned for the much larger Palestinian region of the West Bank, the final solution for dealing with Gazans as “surplus humanity” (the term used by a self-proclaimed fascist and racist war minister in the Israeli Knesset) is to have them “clear out”.
It’s a class thing. For the ruling class, we the masses are there to produce more wealth for them. If we don’t we’re in the way. Surplus. An impediment to growth and prosperity.
For Trump, clearing Gaza is worth a try, for him and his peers to make $$$billions from the process of land-clearance that made America “great” in the first place – the murder of millions of native Americans already living there, and the slave-labour of the millions imported to build the new estate.
Unless we challenge Imperialism, the international height of Capitalist exploitation, we too will be enslaved. If Gazans are deemed surplus today you can rest assured it’ll be you soon after.
That’s why the fight for human rights for Palestinians, and the right of Gazans to stay and prosper in their homeland funded by reparations for the genocide they’ve endured, is a fight for the entire global working class. In this regard, we are all Palestinians.
Any self-respecting politician who claims to care for the working classes has to be held by this standard. Are you a true tribune of the oppressed? Do you care for and fight for those born at a disadvantage? To each and every Labour politician the question is asked. Do you recognise Palestine?
We will March again on Saturday 15th February – join us.

We Have Never Been Closer to Catastrophe

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

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

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

Needs of People Must Come Before Profits

January 22, 2025January 22, 2025 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (21.1.25). Damning Trump from the Left is made easy by his overt racism and denial of climate breakdown. But linking his true intent to that of other governments and especially our own is the vital task. What does Trump mean to Britain? How do we respond? His is a decaying Capitalism in crisis, taking us all down into its feverish hallucinations and bitter violence. Ours must be the struggle for socialist revolution.

The Needs of People have to Come Before Profit

There’s just so much happening, its enough to cause brain-freeze. There are periods in history where nothing appears to happen, and there are times of rapid change.

History repeats the pattern when the central power can no longer hold the reins. This year, governments are collapsing into inner conflict across most free-market capitalist countries.

The way forward is up-for-grabs: will it be corporate-led authoritarianism or socialism – collectively organised across the working class? More imprisonment of protesters and persecution of minorities? Top-down repression or bottom-up liberation?

The genocide in Gaza represents absolute repression: an overwhelming power of one side seeking to negate any possibility of self defence and self-determination for the other. Our challenge for a just and lasting ceasefire and reparations for Palestinians represent a wider call for worldwide social justice.

Trump and his maverick oligarchs represent extreme systemic inequality: the domination of the super-rich, society organised for the sole purpose of accumulating more wealth into the pockets of the ruling class.

Trump is no peacemaker, and neither is Starmer or Macron or Meloni or whoever is the Chancellor of Germany this week. Capitalism is based upon competition, on the international stage between alliances of countries seeking military and imperialist regional domination.

Trump is not seeking peace in the Middle East, just profits for his corporate interests based in America. He’s hardly interested in wars in Europe other than to see European countries pay for them.

Russia’s gangster-capitalist economy is of little threat to the USA. But State-Capitalist China is growing fast enough to overtake the USA and represents a threat to the wealth and power of Trump’s cohort. The new American President has pledged to build-up to war with China, ramping-up nuclear warheads and military spending at the expense of an already devastated social infrastructure at home.

What’s the alternative? Trump is not in power for the vast majority of US citizens – the working class. He’s there for his adopted class of the super-rich. He’s brazened in his approach. Opposition to Trump needs to be brazened in response.

Socialism is defined as social and economic planning organised to meet the needs of everyone, a social system where we all offer to the collective society what we can in terms of effort, labour and commitment in return for our individual needs to be provided for. A lifestyle of mutual cooperation not individual competition.

Majorities in this country still hold to socialist principles. The National Health Service is based on socialist ideals of paying into a common purse in order to receive health care whenever we need it. Services are falling apart because, over decades the Capitalists have encroached to privatise and make money out of our basic needs.

Most workers want and need cheap public transport services, coordinated and convenient – socialised. Most workers want well-funded universal education for our children. But the Capitalists have privatised it all, over-pricing and hollowing-out services for profit not need.

Public services have been defamed as if representing incompetence and bloated waste, when all the time that’s precisely what has been created by privatisation. The level of ideological propaganda and disinformation spewed-out by the Trumpists and their acolytes in the UK has overwhelmed fact and reason.

And so, Starmer as the leader of a Labour Party supposed to have socialist origins is instead pandering to Trumpism, raising military spending at the expense of welfare benefits and workers spending-power, and funding more privatisation for the domination of US corporations, pharmaceuticals and insurance companies.

We need fresh international socialist organisation championing the needs of the working class and campaigning across the UK and everywhere.

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The far-Right and Fascism are the most immediate threats

January 8, 2025 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

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

The unedited version below.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Harsher 2025

January 8, 2025 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

Wishing everyone a Happy New Year, and hoping for some mass revolt in 2025, here’s my last weekly comment column of 2024, in the daily Plymouth Herald (31.12.24). This has been a ghastly year, both in terms of personal health and global suffering, Gaza needing to remain at the forefront of our minds. And the local issues, the degradation of our services and of any accountable democratic framework, have to be challenged. I remain focussed on the greatest twin perils of climate catastrophe and nuclear warfare, but the cause of all remains the Capitalsit System, which has to be overthrown.

The unedited version here:

On the eve of a new year, hope lies with those campaigning for Peace with Social Justice. That is not the manifesto of any of our main political parties, hellbent on war and racial hatred.

Starmer’s Labour is organising for a 5% reduction in spending in all government departments, cheered-on by the Tories and only Trumped by Reform UK demanding more cuts, their propaganda financed by billionaires. The lesser parties can say what they wish, but they have no clout.

Only the people, assembled, en masse on the streets and in collective action across workplaces have the power to improve our collective future.

We are facing a harsher year ahead, Austerity Mark Two now declared. It’s not what the People voted for, but democracy and civil infrastructure are now in deficit if not bankrupted. The National Health Service in hoc to private US-based corporations, our education system scavenged by hedge-fund consortia, our housing ravaged by short-term profiteers investing in squalid tenements and over-inflated market rates.

One-in-three of our children are living in poverty, going to bed each night without having access to at least one of the essential components of healthy development. At least one-in-three of our older people live impoverished lives of isolation and loneliness. One-in-four women are suffering domestic violence, the pressures of this alienated existence creating the conditions for us to turn against each other in the quest for some power and control over the inner sense of powerlessness.

The working class is the majority. Those of us who, should we suddenly spend a year or more without employment income, suddenly dependent upon £80 a week welfare benefits, the mortgage or expensive rent no longer paid, would face homelessness or insecure dank accommodation, subsistence diets and a depressed monotone reality. We are at least three-quarters of the UK population, living with serious vulnerability.

There is more that unites us than divides. We may enjoy different recreational pursuits, cultural preferences and dietary habits, but we go to work to earn the crust and pursue our dreams. We experience the treadmill of the workplace, the middle-managers forced from above to demand ever more, the workforce driven into a self-defensive regime to protect ourselves from bullying. overwork and hopelessness.

The UK is the 7th largest economy out of 196 countries. Our gross domestic product is 4 times the size of the 1970s. We should all be on 3 day weeks with an income twice it’s current size, or more. Where’s all the money gone?

The world has 7 times the wealth compared with 1970. The average person is only 8% wealthier, the richest 0.01% are 4000% richer: Elon Musk was worth $2billion in 2012 (much of it inherited), in 2024 that had increased to $447bn; Jeff Bezos $18bn 2012 to $249bn in 2024; Zuckerberg $44bn in 2012, $224bn in 2024. The world’s wealth has poured upwards, not trickled down at all.

Our taxes have been sucked into corporations through the process of privatisation, producing big holes in our health, welfare and education funding. And more taxes have gone to the now-endless wars being pursued by the military-industrial complex of private arms companies making obscene profits alongside the transnational oil and gas corporations.

Starmer wants UK tax expenditure on the military to go up to 5% of GDP, hence the 5% cuts to everything else. Our welfare is being sucked dry by war and private greed. And now, no-one is predicting that life will get any better – the changes to climate are observably accelerating at such a rate that it is undeniable, only the causes and solutions argued about. We face local and global food shortages in the near future.

We need a radical transformation to survive. From any social analysis it is clear that the rich are too rich and the distribution of wealth in society too extreme. No-one needs or deserves a billion pounds or dollars. In fact, anything more than £5million must be an inexcusable amount of surplus personal wealth, spent only on a life of wasteful privileges and extreme extravagance at the expense of tens of thousands if not millions of others. We have to put human need before private profit, a cap on wealth and a profound level of redistribution to meet human needs in this new harsher world.

It will take a revolution.

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Religion is Political

December 29, 2024 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (24.12.24) getting over-philosophical (it’s the time of year) and challenging all orthodoxies. No more Business as Usual (if we want to survive). Seasons Greetings, the unexpurgated version below:

We are constantly warned of extremism. Not only the terrorism of car-driving, gun-toting or axe-wielding fanatics but the social orators of various fundamentalisms, political as well as religious.

We are taught to see those who haven’t been raised to our orthodoxies as potential threats.

We are told to be cautious of those who wear the symbols and emblems of a religious group or engage in mass rituals. A society with a regime that requires specific behaviours of all citizens, stopping all they would normally do in order to respect a specific religious date, is to be frowned upon as an example of anything from forced indoctrination through to mass hysteria. Oops, there goes Christmas!

All religion stems from the primordial human need to understand why we are here as well as why we die. The apparent impossibility of answering those questions opens the door to an all-but infinite number of explanations. Events and situations that are unconscionable are explained by the wisdom of god or gods who do know that which we cannot know.

Religion offers hope amidst the pains of living, and a heart in a heartless world. Faith allows acceptance of fallibility, the inhuman actions of human beings, the unreasoned and unreasonable.

Because Faith seeks to define acceptable behaviour, it is deeply political. Politics is, after all, about how people live together and behave towards each other. And so, as religions develop and grow they become organised and led, by leaders, enrobed and ordained with the word of god, to tell people how to behave.

The histories written into religious scripts convey the lessons of humanity over time, but are nevertheless written down by human beings. Ancient scriptures are reinterpreted time and again, and subjected to the censorship or acceptance of those with the power to have them published or burnt. The stories and the rules are changed over time. Crude tenets are nuanced into everyday rules of social relations. The scribes and their editors possess immense personal power. And all personal power corrupts.

There are some material reasons for religious rules. In a world without fridges it was a good rule of thumb to not eat red meat riddled with disease. Should you be starving you may still be tempted to eat a pig or a cow, even if the King threatened you with punishment. But if it is god’s word, punishable with an after-life of eternal pain and damnation, you may rather starve to death in pursuit of life in the hereafter.

The rules laid down by god are not to be broken so lightly as the laws decreed by men. And so the church has power, political power. Most organised religion tells us we are born into a place in the social structure as ordained by god, and we should accept rather than challenge our rank in the class system. But the decrees laid down by the church change over time, determined by the prevailing social conditions. The religious edicts of a feudal society have to be turned-over as a new ruling class develops – the Capitalist mercantilists taking over political power from the landlords.

The ruling class power, its wealth and standing army, determines the rules of the church, not the other way round. Monasteries are burnt to the ground, bloody wars are waged between rival sects.

Catholic versus Protestant, Sunnis versus Shia, Hindu versus Buddhist…and within each there are challengers from the Left and the Right, doubters and zealots.

All religions involve battles for power. The power of ideas, accepted or rejected by those with the wealth and armies to enforce them. To a point where all ruling ideas are the chosen ideas of the ruling class.

It’s all about power and control on Earth, not Heaven.

People learn how to think within the confines of the society and natural world we are born into. The teaching we experience in school reflects the ruling ideology, the curriculum determined by the ruling class, the behaviours enshrined in the prevailing religious order. We try to behave and accept even when those ideas make little or no sense – do we starve or break the laws in order to survive?

It is the contradictions between what we’re told to believe and what we actually experience as the world around us that foment revolutions.

Those of us who dare to challenge the ruling class also challenge the ruling ideas, and are heavily damned should that include defying the ruling religious norms. We can be proclaimed as “ungodly”, a charge far worse than being “illegal”. Yet all beliefs change with the times.

And so there are times when the enforced religious rules no longer make sense and place the people in grave danger. They have to be defied, as does the ruling class who proclaims them. With an elite of billionaires ruling over mass poverty and requiring authoritarian compliance to the money-god, we are living in such times.

In this era of escalating warfare and climate catastrophe our priority must be to organise for human welfare not religious or political dogma. That means opposing both imperialist and religious wars threatening nuclear annihilation. It also requires we challenge the consumerism producing the climate-heating toxic emissions and throwaway plastics that are killing the Planet. These are not matters of belief but observable facts.

Christmas needs a rethink.

Collective Freedoms Must be Fought For

December 17, 2024 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (10.12.24), keeping-up with the fast moving historic situation. Linking the global and local is a challenge, but we are all affected by international events, and should learn from them.

Collective Freedoms Must be Fought For

It is good to see so many are thinking about human rights, political agency and personal integrity. There is much debate about the future of democracy. The driving force for this anxiety is the accelerating instability at home and across the world.

The fall of the dictatorship of Assad in Syria has encouraged talk of universal rights, women’s suffrage and protections of minorities. With at least nine military forces vying for power in Syria, including the country’s working class who started the revolution in 2011, collective freedoms are going to have to be fought for.

Amnesty International’s decision, however late, that Israel’s destruction of Gaza represents genocide is another demand for protection of human rights. The bombing of schools and hospitals and entire civilian populations is against international law and has to be challenged for any of us to feel safe. Mass extermination is beyond all concepts of political balance and social justice.

The same bombing of Ukrainian towns by Russia is damned across our news media, but the hypocrisy of condemning Putin and not Netanyahu completely outrageous. If some groups of people are expendable then we are all at risk.

When the Prime Minister of South Korea declared martial law last week, placing the entire country under curfew policed by armed soldiers, workers amassed on the streets to reinstate democracy.

When the President of France imposed a Prime Minister from a minority party, ignoring the majority vote of the people, mass protest and industrial strikes defied the imposition and kicked out the usurper.

There is a class war for workers rights and agency happening parallel to the wars between nations. Economically, global Capitalism is in crisis, the poor immersed in debt.

In this accelerating war of competition for resources, there are battles between ideologies as well as armies.

We now see a fast-growing and organised global far-Right movement, winning elections across the globe from Argentina to Poland. The threat in the UK is real, the ultra-nationalists organised politically with promises of millions in funding from American billionaire Elon Musk. This year we have seen white power pogroms in which acts of attempted murder were committed against refugees, racist riots in town centres, meetings attacked and mosques firebombed.

Our government is pandering to the far-Right, Labour courting Reform UK, toughening Tory laws against protest and manipulating the Courts into the levels of sentencing they condemn when seen in Russia or China. Authoritarianism at home is another manifestation of deepening war abroad.

Behind all are the same forces operating on many fronts. Billionaires are funding propaganda aimed at scapegoating migrants and minorities, weaponising racism in order to hide their hideous wealth derived from our exploitation and oppression.

The level of disinformation paid for by wealthy elites mirrors their new investment in arms manufacturing and artificial intelligence, all aimed at distracting and confusing us into acquiescence. Wars make money for the few.

The Trade Unions have a key role in challenging the drive towards fascism and war. We need a strong anti-racist movement to defend the rights of minorities in order to advance the rights of the entire working class. And that means offering refuge to those scorched by war or climate change, alongside challenging the profiteers making billions from death and environmental destruction.

Bringing the human race together is the historic role of ordinary people, we, the majority working class. Our history proves that nothing is given to us without collective demands and organised challenge to those in power. Blame the billionaires not the refugees. We who want peace with social justice are going to have to fight for it.

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Step Back from the Brink – Join CND!

December 17, 2024 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (3.12.24) after week of military escalation almost everywhere. The published headline is not chosen by me, and I did sign it as a national vice-Chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, not the Trades Union role. Once an artcile is submitted it is out of your control. The limited space and editing cut my original in half, so below is the full and unexpurgated text. Please do join me in Plymouth City Centre on Saturday.

Step Back from the Brink

We’re not wrong. The sense of living on the brink of historic change is shared by most. Not only can the current status quo not be sustained, it mustn’t be. Tension mounts as a consequence.

There is no debate that climate change is happening, only what should be done about it. There is no debate that our social infrastructure is dilapidated, at least for the majority of the working class, but no consensus about rebuilding it.

There is general agreement that war is spreading – and a new kind of war at that – the mass killing of civilians by huge armaments often launched by computers and targeted by drones. This is neither fantasy nor science fiction. It is the living reality threatening to engulf us all.

The nihilists muse to themselves that global conflagration is inevitable and call out to “bring it on”, as if all life, not just theirs, is worthless. The pragmatists meanwhile, sensitive to their own plight, make preparations as best they can, hoarding durable essentials before the power cuts and alarm calls. We, those seeking peace with social justice, are greeted with distain or completely overlooked when marching in our hundreds of thousands.

What do we want? Immediate de-escalation!

The escalation in Ukraine is very serious. The Biden/Starmer agreement to use missiles into Russia has escalated the tension, Russia ratifying a change in policy, deciding to use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state if that state is backed by a nuclear force (ie NATO) should it feel directly threatened.

Reports show Ukraine has lost 40% of the territorial gains it made in the Kursk region through the Summer. The Group of Five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, each nuclear armed – China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, and United States – recommitted to arming Ukraine and, last Tuesday, NATO concurred.

Britain’s defence secretary said last week that “if Britain’s military were asked to fight it would fight”. Britain is in no way ready for war, nor should we be. A majority of the Ukrainian population want an end to the war through peace talks, as do very large majorities of populations across Europe. The escalation is being determined by politicians in their own interests. Is Biden just looking to stop Ukrainian defeat whilst he is in office, and to what lengths will he take this?

Trump’s election is having a big impact already, with ultra-hawks in his cabinet implying that military conflict is more likely, withdrawing from nuclear agreements and focussing on Iran and China. They promise more sanctions around Iran and more economic challenges to China. Most of the real trade wars throughout history have resulted in military warfare.

Far from being a peacemaker, Trump is ready to magnify tensions in the Asian Pacific, with Starmer adding tax cash to the AUKUS nuclear pact funding nuclear capabilities in Australia, ready for war.

The ruling class of the United States of America maintain full support for Israel’s regional ambitions, the devastation of Palestine continuing, Biden continuing to arm, Trump ready to escalate the tension with Iran. The ceasefire in Lebanon is only temporary. The wars in Syria and Sudan funded as proxies for outside military powers.

Trump has favoured restarting of nuclear testing having not ratified the nuclear test treaty when last in office. The USA is looking to undertake underground nuclear testing of a new technological generation of advanced nuclear weapons, destroying any taboo against the use of nuclear weapons.

Both the USA and Russia have tested and deployed hyper-sonic rockets that can carry nuclear warheads that rise and fall too fast to be stopped. Russia used one last week, albeit without any explosives, just to show its power. These are all “first-strike” weapons, their strategic use only valuable in hitting before being hit. They are a threat, not a deterrent, demanding escalation on all sides.

Trump is not going to pull out of NATO in Europe but wants Europe to take a far greater degree of the burden of the costs and, no doubt, the impacts.

So the UK’s military spending reaches a record high outside of wartime and is planned to increase further. America’s B52 bombers are here, and their nuclear weapons will be coming to Lakenheath, Suffolk, not least because Turkey has become an unreliable ally having bought fighters from Russia. Starmer has made commitment to NATO and nuclear as a key commitment with £3bn increase in defence spending, the current £6b per year cost of the Trident nuclear weapons upgrade being a sinkhole in Britain’s military funding. No-one dare challenge the tax bill for Nuclear, however outrageous.

The proposed United Nations international study into the global impact of any nuclear exchange has now been agreed between most countries, and only voted against by the UK, Germany and Russia, saying they already know what the effects of a nuclear war would be – the countries to the fore of preparations for wider war.

The study is important. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) has commissioned enough studies to know that any nuclear exchange will kill millions and lethally contaminate entire regions with radioactivity. But the hidden fact is that millions more will survive for lengthy periods, in agony as burn casualties and sickened by cancers, struggling to find any nutritious food or potable water. Radioactive contamination is not a quick death.

The slow deaths of starvation and disease will be more common than the sudden flash of vaporisation of those caught beneath the bombs. The impact on all life, the ecology and climate, will only expedite the course of climate chaos we are already experiencing.

Another well-evidenced conclusion is that the mechanics of nuclear weaponry provides for their likely launch by accident rather than intention, especially in this era of “Artificial Intelligence” programming machines for an instant and automatic response.

Starmer’s shift to closer relationship with the nuclear-enthusiast Trump will increase his unpopularity at home. Most don’t want war, death and destruction. It is neither Namby-Pamby nor “woke” to call for Peace. Protests against war represent our collective self-interest for survival.

The safer countries in the world are those without nuclear weapons – the vast majority. Britain’s Trident Nuclear arsenal makes us the prime target.

On Saturday we will rally for a day of action for de-escalation, permanent ceasefire and Peace. Most of all, for the decommissioning of all nuclear weapons, unilaterally and internationally, before it’s too late.

We must step back from the nuclear brink.

Small Farmers are Being Exploited by the Rich

November 27, 2024 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

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

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

Farming has workers too!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Trump must not be allowed to fulfil vision

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

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

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

So what should we do about Trump?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The UK is Effectively the USA’s 51st State

October 29, 2024 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Banks are Funding the Fascists

October 29, 2024 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (22.10.24). The huge upsurge in organised racist protests have to be challenged on the streets, and in print, especially when this local newspaper prints so many letters from the far-Right. This was published before the national demonstration in London called by the fascist Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) who was imprisoned the day before it took place. The united front group, Stand Up To Racism correctly called a counter-protest, and two rallied at either end of Whitehall, London on 26th October: the racist anti-muslim march numbered over 25,000 brandishing giant Union Jacks and flags of Israel. The anti-racists saw 26 trade union banners, 13 General Secretaries and 3 MPs speak to upwards of 20,000. This is a warning from history. The fascists are well funded and better organised, and all those interested in democracy, freedom, multiculturalism, diversity and human rights had better step-up and take back our streets and workplaces. Or it will be, suddenly, too late. Fascists have called a regional South West demonstration on 30th November in Torquay and we are all required to mobilise to stop them.

There is almost universal agreement that the big banks and corporations wield too much power over humanity and are motivated by greed. The service or product they offer is secondary to the gross salaries of their owners and executives and the huge shareholder payouts. Theirs is the drive for a never-ending growth in profits, exploiting workers with productivity demands and low wages, exploiting the consumer with higher prices for low-quality goods, and evading their tax liabilities.

The Forbes Rich List identifies around one-hundred large, transnational corporations that own just about everything, globally. The brand names we know are often subsidiaries or larger conglomerates with internal economies larger than entire countries. This reality is cited by economists as “monopoly capitalism”, consortia or cartels of individuals using inherited wealth to become wealthier and more powerful, scheming to beat all competition and corner markets, locally and globally.

The largest companies are headed by the world’s richest billionaires, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates being household names. There are 12 people who are worth more than £100,000,000,000, their fortunes growing by $220 billion in the past 6 months. 700 individuals are responsible for half the world’s wealth, their assets multiplying with nothing trickling down.

It is observable to all that the gap between rich and poor is obscene and unsustainable. And so the human world is descending into wars between the contending owners of wealth, and rising tensions inside each country between the classes competing for the right to life, liberty and social justice.

The United States of America holds the lease on the wealthiest and most powerful, the global economy remaining US-centric. Corporate power infects all of life, the natural world and the way we live. These corporations dominate not only our working lives but our media, our education systems, our environment, our diets, health and recreation. The actions of industry, why and how we produce things, is determined not by need but by profit margins. We see destruction everywhere as a direct consequence of this systemic dysfunction. If society were a family, we would require restraint of such predatory, gaslighting, sociopathic domination, the perpetrator judged to be breaking basic laws of acceptable behaviour.

The deepening debate, nay, the conflict, is about how to overcome this tyranny.

Working people and our trade unions have long sought reforms for a greater share and more say – redistribution of wealth and power. It is becoming clear that no reforms are likely or even possible. The rich won’t have it.

To prevent us organising for a better society, they not only strengthen their laws against our protestations, but fund and encourage an ideology that says this state of affairs is natural and unchangeable. Theirs is the law of “survival of the fittest” by which is inferred the meanest, most violent, most self-centred should run the world.

Onto this stage has come the far-Right, rising once again across the western world and beyond, being organised into fascist parties and pretending to be in opposition to the billionaires but all the time working in their interests.

Fascism does not represent any sort of freedom or hope. Fascism is not anti-capitalist, just anti-democracy. It is the totalitarian domination of elite power, liquidating any inkling of human rights, equality or social justice. Fascism divides and scapegoats in order to destroy all sense of self-determination and personal freedom. Its main tools are hatred, spreading race-hate and misogyny and the promise of male-white-supremacy for the chosen few. Fascism is organising here, now.

We have seen fascism rise and be overthrown by mass mobilisations and at huge human cost through the twentieth century. We must learn the lessons of history, rise again and demonstrate our determination, in our millions – Never Again!

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Tag: politics