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

No picture

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.

May be an illustration of 1 person and text

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.

May be an illustration of map, ticket stub, blueprint and text

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.

May be an illustration of 1 person, blueprint and text

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.

May be an illustration of map and text that says "Small farmers are living ona knife-edge TRADE unionists azardous workding conditions ighestl accidents rpAa promoted ceaselesaly THOUGHT OFTHE DAY STAUNTON PRESIDENT PLYMOUTH TRADES SUNIONCOUNOL Farmers tractors protesting protestinga Nostminst stweek tminst AARONCHOWN Since Brexit, farmers have faced Individual reducine multi -millionaires and land the any estate enire badly |tarmers livestock anda drenor grandchildren. 325,000, return. homesteads, organisationso Reform Jands and GB ing opportunitles. workers Then come there main ම් chil- onb ncluding capitalism."

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!

I’ll Accept No Lectures from Tory Grandees

October 11, 2024October 16, 2024 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald, coinciding with the Tory Conference to address the majority readership of the paper, damning them all! The horror of Palestine and Lebanon has pushed the Tory Conference into the background somewhat but in doing so, allowed the faithful to orate their racist xenophobia bile almost unheard by the populous. It’s worth venting against them, even if only to remind ourselves.

The unexpurgated version below:

The sheer audacity of the disgraced and deposed Tory Party in Conference to condemn Labour is a political abuse beyond hypocrisy. Not least because Starmer’s Labour is continuing most of Sunak’s plans, so what are you moaning about?

The Tory leadership have been proven and condemned for far greater crimes than anything thrown at the current Labour cabinet. Yes, crimes, because Johnson, as the British Prime Minister, alongside his amoral cohort, received fines for breaching the COVID laws he initiated! Johnson had dinner delivered to his own home during the lockdown when he told us we couldn’t. There were more offences committed at the addresses of 10 and 11 Downing Street than at any other address in the United Kingdom during that period. They were filmed at drunken parties at a time when the rest of us couldn’t attend the funerals of loved ones.

This is nothing compared with the corruption during COVID, swathes of multi-million pound contracts dished-out by politicians to the corporations they moonlighted at and their friends who hastily set-up “businesses” to take the contracts, without proper scrutiny and outside of legal procedures.

The British tax-payer “lost” billions. It is all coming-out, belatedly, in the COVID Enquiry. Were we all to be deemed equal in front of the Law, many Tory cabinet ministers should by now be in prison. The recent descriptions of “scenes from hell” across hospitals in the early pandemic record more deaths of medical staff than in any other western country.

How? Look back. The less than decent New Labour government, despite itself (remember their 2009 expenses scandal?) at least established a PPE stockpiling system in 2009. But the Tories left it to rot. In June 2019, the government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group warned that stockpiles needed replenishing. The warnings were ignored and the Tory government downgraded guidance on flu vaccine administration, hospital gowns and masks instead of comprehensively dealing with shortages.

Then came COVID, causing the UK to spend more on PPE than any other European country, yet with the highest death-toll, both overall and one of the highest per capita. Officially more than 240,000 dead and a couple of million suffering debilitating long-term organ damage (euphemistically named long-COVID) out of 26 million of us suffering the infection.

Test-and-trace app contracts were awarded to companies connected to PM Johnson’s adviser Dominic Cummings, under a programme run by the Tory peer, Baroness Dido Harding. Lives were put in danger and the virus spread further because the apps didn’t work, didn’t work properly, or were not ready in time.

Many deaths were preventable. The corruption undermined public protection. Breaking their own rules, over 70% of PPE contracts were awarded to companies without bidding (untendered), the public and professionals instructed to use the wrong masks leaving us unprotected to the infected aerosols, and tens of millions of masks unused and destroyed. The list is too long to print here, but ministers and government workers became multi-millionaires overnight. The truth will out.

In all more than £38billion of our money remains unaccounted for in expenditure during the Lockdown.

And that’s paltry compared with the consultancies scandal of HS2. According to the Stripe Property Group, spokespeople for the construction industry, the Tories wasted and lost a staggering £92,000,000,000 on the collapsed HS2 rail project.

The Tory imposed “Age of Austerity” was inflicted upon the working class because of such official gangster-capitalism. One after another we’ve been fleeced by corporate businesses protected by politicians: the LIBOR scandal of banks gambling on lending rates to the detriment of mortgage, rental and loan rates (2012); the Panama Papers exposing illegal tax-evasion and offshore tax-havens losing the exchequor trillions (2016); the lost billions from the false-promises of the Tory far-Right after Brexit; the FinCen money-laundering scandals involving over 70 UK banks (2020); the COVID scandals still ongoing. Why are we so desensitised?

The tripling of interest rates causing unaffordable rent and mortgage hikes at the hands of Prime Minister Truss, and the further deregulation under Sunak causing the trippling of fossil fuel company profits and doubling of numbers of UK-based billionaires, represent the mechanisms from which now one-in-three of our working class children live in poverty.

We are told to blame workers claiming sickness benefits (£50billion per year) and even more so, asylum seekers costing £7billion a year, whilst the corruption and tax evasion costs the tax-payers hundreds of billions each year. The legalised gangsters are above being called to account, the poorest to take the blame.

This is not to excuse the huge donations and free gifts being accepted by Starmer and other Labour government ministers. It is a lesson in the need to revolt against any more of the same. But we shall accept no lecture or pretence of truth and honesty from these corrupt and contemptible Tory grandees. The entire swamp must be drained.

Speak Out Against Racism and Fascism

September 26, 2024September 26, 2024 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

With the far-Right Farage ramping-up white-British supremacy at the ReformUK Conference, and the fascist “Tommy Robinson” calling for street demonstrations across Britain this weekend, including in Torquay, Devon, my weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (24.9.24) had to call for mass opposition to fascism and the rise of authoritarian governance. Strangely, it was edited to leave-out my call to get to get to London for the national demonstration on 26th October to Stand Up To Racism, but at least it was printed!

The full Comment below:

It’s Time for Mass Action Against Racism and Fascism

Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist and racist political ideology. The fascist movement organises for a centralised autocracy: militarism; forcible suppression of opposition; and a dictatorial leader of a militarised Party machine.

The fascist believes in strict social hierarchy, often portrayed in mystical terms of genetic and ancestral birthright, concocting the superiority of the land and so-called “Race” you are born into. Fascism demands a strong regimentation of society and the economy with no democratic say.

The most important ingredient of fascism is the mass movement. Fascism depends upon the building and mobilisation of street gangs and mobs ready to physically attack any and all opposition, and embed fear into the general culture and daily experience of working class communities, destroying trade unions.

Any political litmus test would show Britain to be at risk from fascist organisation, having become more deeply polarised over decades, the gap between rich and poor stretched to an extreme, the fear of “the other”, and the targeting of the non-compliant purposefully ramped-up by politicians seeking power.

The fear shuts working class people into our homes and shuts down open debate in workplaces and families.

This is why it is so vital that we do not shut up, that we do speak out, and that we show our collective opposition to racism, misogyny and authoritarianism on the streets. Right now, active anti-racism requires constant challenge to Islamaphobia and anti-semitism as well as championing the equal rights of people of colour alongside the politically identified “White” population.

We must be highly sensitised to the signs and symptoms of authoritarian governance and fascist organisation. Targeting all Muslims as “Islamist extremists” is a piece of propaganda nonsense easily exposed – the vast majority of adherents to any religion do not support the extreme-fundamentalist wing of their church. Scapegoating a tiny number of asylum-seekers as the enemy supposedly “invading” a nation of sixty-seven million people is a toxic distraction from the real causes of poverty.

The twentieth-century experiences of fascism proves the rule. Those organising for fascism first seek legitimacy and wear a mask of reason and justice, engaging with democracy in order to later smash it. They voice the growing anger against poverty and inequality in a pretence of challenge to the rich and powerful.

In fact, they only grow with the active funding and encouragement of sections of the super-rich ruling class, using the mob to smash any collective working class fight against exploitation and oppression.

And history shows that when faced with fascists on the one hand and working class socialists on the other, the property-owning comfortable middle classes will invariably side with fascism.

This is happening right now across Europe and the United States, and here in Britain.

Starmer’s meeting with Italy’s Premier Meloni last week is a signal of our political class courting the far-right. Macron’s imposition of a government of the far-right despite the Left winning the majority vote in the recent French election is another warning of the lurch of the ruling class towards fascism. The 30% vote for the fascist AfD across Eastern Germany a further example.

The drive to war, with the nationalism and militarism it transmits into civil society, is perhaps the greatest warning.

All this means we have to challenge the forces of fascism directly, nationally and internationally. Against war and racism, ultranationalism and oppression.

Trade unionists will be supporting the national demonstration in London to Stand Up To Racism and Fascism on Saturday 26th October. We will travel together from Plymouth and across the country to push back against fascism and the authoritarian powers that promote it.

Labour Voters Getting More of the Same

September 26, 2024 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald newspaper (19.9.24), in the week that the new Labour prime Minister, Keir Starmer, was exposed for taking personal gifts for himself and his wife, including tens of thousands of pounds in clothes, accommodation, holidays and an executive at the Arsenal football ground. At the same time, Starmer has withdrawn winter fuel allowances of £300 from over 10million elderly people, is spending tax-payers money on arming the Israeli genocide, more than 100 fossil fuel extraction licences whilst reneging on funds for renewable energy, and enforcing more pay cuts and Austerity measures. This is not a Government for the working class or indeed the progressive future of humanity. It is more of the same, a Tory government in red clothing (gifted by ruling class Tories), and they have to be deposed. But replaced by what?

News Flash! Our public services are in crisis. As if we didn’t know.

Last week, Lord Darzi’s quick review of the National Health Service conveniently allowed the new Labour government to announce that the “NHS is broken”. Alongside all the other Government claims that “there is no money”, the NHS is the latest public service to be told it won’t be bailed out.

There is little surprise amongst our working class population, more than half of whom did not vote in the July General Election. ‘They’re all the same” was a common theme in every pollster report. Labour won a landslide despite their share of the vote hardly rising. People voted against the Tories, that is, for no more Austerity.

After 14 years of Tory rule our pay has been cut to a point where it is now at the ratio of spending power of 2008, 16 years ago. On average fully-time workers are over £4,000 a year worse off, given the rate of inflation. To achieve minimum subsistence levels, 5 million of us get top-ups to our wages from Universal Credit – itself a benefit designed to subsidise the rogue employers plying starvation wages.

The reduction in inflation to 3% doesn’t mean prices are going down – food prices are 30% higher than 4 years ago. Pay hasn’t gone-up that far.

So the Tory and far-right shouts that Labour has paid-off unions with “above inflation pay increases” is just their latest big lie. A 5% pay rise doesn’t touch the pay cuts of the past 15 years. One-in-five of us are living below the official (Tory) poverty line – that’s over 14million people in Britain, 2.2million of whom are pensioners.

The UK has one of the highest retirement ages in the world, the lowest State pension in Europe, some of the longest working hours for one of the lowest minimum wages, the highest energy costs, the biggest profits and the lowest taxes for the rich.

Sir Starmer offered very little and already is delivering even less. The Autumn Budget will only deliver cuts. And for the NHS this will be an acceleration of the privatisations planned by the Sunak government. Tory cries of Labour betraying the poor hang thread bare given their destruction of welfare state over the past 14 years.

Last week’s Trades Union Congress, the annual conference of Britain’s trade unions, saw elected delegates pulled by these tensions. On the one hand, a Labour government, supposedly the Party of the working class, was cause for celebration. On the other, the condition of the working class has worsened, except for a small strata of skilled workers able to improve their pay and conditions due to skills shortages.

Clearly, we’re not all in it together. The UK ranks the 9th most unequal society out of 38 richest countries. The richest 10% own half of all earth, the poorest 50% just 9%.

The argument goes that 14 years of Tory cuts cannot be turned around overnight, or even in the 5-year span of a single Parliament. But that should not mean the continuation of Tory plans. Indeed, immediately raising taxes for the most wealthy, those who currently pay proportionally less of their income in tax than the poorest in society, would fill the alleged £22billion black hole and more.

Instead, Starmer goes further than Sunak ever dared, deleting the Winter Fuel Allowance. Universal benefits ensures that everyone is covered, helped and safe whatever their conditions. Means-testing creates a poverty trap for those who don’t quite meet the criteria, in this case, numbering into millions of elderly who will face a very challenging winter.

Trade unions are demanding a U-Turn. Indeed, we want a shift in economic power in favour of the majority. The influence of big business and the billionaires on government policy have to be swept away. But Labour is in the pockets of the lobbyists.

According to the parliamentary register of interests, Wes Sreeting, the Secretary of State for Health & Social Care, accepted donations amounting to around £175,000 from two donors with links to private healthcare firms. He has pledged to “fight the middle-class lefties who oppose expanding the use of private health providers.”

Actually, Streeting, it’s the working class trades unions who collectively oppose private health services. The NHS is in crisis caused by the task-over by private firms making profit from our taxes, from healthcare, pharmaceuticals, health insurance companies, administration and estate management, a huge proportion being companies based in the United States of America. The hundreds of billions in private profit could be saved or spent on patients if the NHS was still a state run public Labour is set to privatise more.

The questions are begged, can we end the corporate plunder of our public services? Will trade unions fight a Labour government? Would the threat of “winter of discontent” result in the return of a Tory government, and if it did, what difference is there between the policies of these two parties fighting to serve the interests of those already privileged few?

The Trade Unions must be prepared to act independently of any government hostile to the needs and rights of the working class. Labour is not withdrawing from the Tory anti-union laws, nor their new restrictions on the right to protest. This government will fight any collective trade union challenge, imprison strike leaders and workers on picket lines.

We must campaign now for redistribution of wealth to eradicate poverty, increasing benefits and pensions, not cutting and taxing them. A 2% tax increase on citizens whose private assets are worth over £10million, surely enough for anyone, would pull-in £24billion a year to the Exchequer. More than enough to fill that questionable black hole.

If Labour is no longer the party for the working class then it’s time to build new socialist organisation in the workplaces and communities. Or suffer worse to come.

We Must Never Forget the Grenfell Disaster

September 12, 2024 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

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

The unexpurgated version below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Stood Up To Stop Fascists from Destroying Plymouth

August 12, 2024 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

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

Dear Editor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tony Staunton

President, Plymouth Trades Union

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

Migrant Workers Give More than they Take

August 12, 2024 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Surplus Humans are Not the Real Problem

August 12, 2024 Tony StauntonLeave a comment

There is an incredible depth and breadth of vitriol being published against migrants and asylum seekers right now, and a torrent of images on screen of mass human suffering. We are becoming desensitised and “used” to apocalyptic “Hollywood” movie images of people being torn apart, tortured and/or left to rot. Hence my weekly Comment in the daily Plymouth Herald (16.7.24) condemning any and all attempts to devalue even one human life.

We must not stop talking about it. Day after day we see horror on our screens. Everything from the apparent attempted assassination of a past-President to the blanket bombing of refugee camps.

We watch dramatic, high definition, cinematically enhanced moving pictures of bombs exploding into mushroom clouds and sound waves, collapsing buildings.

There are close-ups of human carcasses with dissembled body parts, their relatives’ faces offered in close-up, blooded and wide-eyed, some screaming and others offering traumatised stares. The images can be paused, rewound, captured, recreated, saved and shared. Like a Hollywood movie.

In essence, we are being daily desensitised to the suffering of humanity.

Last week’s NATO conference in Washington heard world leaders ramping-up military plans for more war, more expenditure on war, and thereby, more images of death and destruction on TV. More frightening still was the latest language, intimated on stage and spoken more precisely on the fringes. The concept and identification of “surplus humans”. The term itself has been spoken in the Israeli Cabinet recently by a self-proclaimed fascist and racist war minister, referring directly to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

Let’s think on that. Surplus humans. Surplus to what, to whom and by what criteria? When politicians demand to “send them back”, the presumption is they’re surplus to requirements. When walls are built to keep “them” out, permissions given to shoot to kill, they’re “surplus”. Militarised camps are built to warehouse and store hundreds of thousands at a time, of these surplus peoples.

A couple of hundred years ago, in 1798, Thomas Malthus published a book still referenced by the more bigoted of politicians, and poorly paraphrased to suggest “overpopulation creates poverty and misery”. Malthusianism is back in fashion. Let the forces of war and climate reduce populations “naturally”, to give the smaller human race space to live. Malthus’s arguments were thoroughly disproved on the basis that as more people exist, so more resources can be produced to alleviate poverty. Today, it is largely only the elitists who still adhere to his tracts, although, in the face of climate collapse, a range of liberal minds are now starting to repeat his nonsense, amongst them the near-god of the environment, David Attenborough.

To disprove this nonsense, is to recognise that humans have modified less than 15% of the global land surface, and settled to create homes on 10%. In the UK, 9% of the land is built-upon. There is space.

A better example still: there more food produced in the world today than there are mouths to feed. The much-overstated argument that the current human population would require 2.5 Earth’s worth of resources in order for everyone to live to the standards of USA and Europe is full of holes – firstly, Capitalism’s overproduction of Stuff, including industrial food, is not a desirable nor sustainable way forward for humanity, and secondly Capitalisms exploitation and destruction of natural resources is not a stated goal of the vast majority of humanity.

The issue, is resource (wealth) distribution. One-third of all food produced in the world is wasted. The reason is intentional – if the transport of the food to the people who need it is not profitable (often termed “economically viable”), and if the hungry people cannot pay the market price (including the surplus value known as profit), then they must exist in a condition of malnutrition and slowly starve – in their millions.

With a complete negation of any reason or rationality it is argued that the surplus food is a natural part of the System, it is the surplus mouths that are the problem. Capitalist society values only those who work to produce surplus for those who accumulate and hoard wealth. Those who do not or cannot are deemed a drain on society, an impediment to growth, surplus to requirements.

Obviously it is not people who are the problem. After all, we’re all people. As a matter of fact, the System that commodifies and puts a price on every aspect of life is the problem.

Were we to live in a system based upon human need not profit, resources could be prioritised to ensure every human has the basics of life ensured: nutrition, shelter, health care, education and community – love. And there is more than enough to go round.

Instead, adherents of the system of Capitalism are knowingly destroying the planet, descending into war, genocide and barbarism. And these acts don’t go away simply by turning off our TV. They continue to come towards us and engulf us.

We are witnessing the rapidly developing situation towards one billion climate refugees by 2035, forced to leave their homelands due to extremes of weather impossible to live under. Crop failures, permanent drought, or fires or floods that destroy arable land create both war for the diminishing resources and mass migration for survival.

These conditions, now recognised by the warrior class of NATO and every imperial power, are likely to be answered by rapid the development of more vast refugees camps, the people guarded and impoverished, incarcerating the millions forced to stay and die where they were born, surplus to requirements of the global system of Capitalism whilst the world leaders spend more than $2trillion each year on armaments.

To believe there are surplus humans is to have lost all humanity. If a society says some lives don’t matter, then one day that life is likely to be yours. Not watching the latest news will only bring this ever closer to our doors. The real news is that we’d best change the System, fast.

Emotional Climate

Day-to-day reflections of the climate catastrophe

Tag: politics

Workers don’t Win in Imperialist Wars

Trump Buying Gaza? Is he Just Flying a Kite?

We Have Never Been Closer to Catastrophe

Needs of People Must Come Before Profits

The far-Right and Fascism are the most immediate threats

A Harsher 2025

Religion is Political

Collective Freedoms Must be Fought For

Step Back from the Brink – Join CND!

Small Farmers are Being Exploited by the Rich

Trump must not be allowed to fulfil vision

The UK is Effectively the USA’s 51st State

The Banks are Funding the Fascists

I’ll Accept No Lectures from Tory Grandees

Speak Out Against Racism and Fascism

Labour Voters Getting More of the Same

We Must Never Forget the Grenfell Disaster

We Stood Up To Stop Fascists from Destroying Plymouth

Migrant Workers Give More than they Take

Surplus Humans are Not the Real Problem