Tag: poverty

Arms Expenditure is a Waste of money

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald Newspaper (2.6.26), rehearsing the necessary arguments against Starmer’s forthcoming increase in immediate arms spending, again. He is under pressure to deliver more UK war-preparations ahead of the major NATO Summit in July, and has to “find the money” – that is, defy his Chancellor and demand cuts to welfare. There is an element of Whitehall tittle-tattle, but the final analysis has to be that UK will be a frontline aggressor in the West’s drive to more warfare, pushed by Trump. Meanwhile, we dissolve into worker-on-worker violence – both social and military – or organise collectively to stop the warmongers.

The unedited version below:

We need a sharp turn away from military expenditure. Arms expenditure is a waste of money. This may sound offensive to many in Plymouth, but the reality is we are as divided a set of communities as anywhere else. The retired ex-military who have settled here, and the Yardies of yesterday and today, will stake their lives upon loyalty to armed forces and the arms corporations they’ve worked for all their lives. They are not alone in feeling pride in their work.

The majority of the working class in Plymouth have not worked inside or even adjacent to the local military-industrial complex. There are more employed at our regional hospital at Derriford than inside Devonport dockyard, and twice as many again employed through the services managed by Plymouth City Council, in education, social care and environmental services.

We have in no way benefitted from Plymouth being characterised as a Naval City, and we’re not about to benefit now. Plymouth Dockyards require a healthy level of craft services, but the higher-than-average salaries are for the technicians and military personnel. They live outside and away from the City and their comparatively high incomes are spent elsewhere. 

Equally, the Dockyard companies are private, their profits also stored and spent way away – across Europe and America. Consequently, in the neighbourhoods bordering the dockyard we have one-in-three children living in poverty and across-the-board indicators of social deprivation higher than the national average. Plymouth is a poor city. The health and life-expectancy disparities between the working class living in the West of Plymouth and the white-collar professionals to the East, totally unacceptable.Our small middle class live around 14 years longer and with twenty years of better health than manual and semi-skilled workers.

Once again, our political leaders propagandise that the £4.4 billion of tax money promised to Plymouth’s military business over the next ten to fifteen years will bring us the prosperity promised to previous generations. It won’t.

We need huge investment in welfare services, our children’s education, health and social housing. That £4.4billion could serve us well, locally paying off the £1bn debt owed by Plymouth City Council and turning round the decades of cuts to essential services. It could refurbish our local housing, much of it acknowledged as poor by national standards – damp, mouldy and dilapidated. 

Instead, Starmer’s Defence Investment Plan (DIP) committing to a £18 billion per-year increase in military spending ahead of next month’s NATO Summit, includes nuclear warheads, drone swarms and missile interceptors for Britain’s armed forces. In reality, it will increase national debt and divert State expenditure away from social need and towards wholesale human destruction. Preparation for war always atrophies social spending and cuts wages across the entire economy.

For Plymouth the DIP will continue our descent into a Company Town, visibly dominated by Babcock and associates, reeking of militarism and the drive to rearmament ahead of the apparently inevitable next war. Beware a society dominated by the military security services, embedded everywhere. For example, Plymouth University is a likely sign-up as a “Defence University”, in a strategic relationship with arms companies that will deplete the college’s commitments to health and education training even further.

Compulsory conscription is advocated by the political Right, our primary Schools now being encouraged, with funding, to invite and embed military personnel into the fabric of classroom life and curriculum, the better to prepare the next generation as twenty-first century “cannon fodder” for the wars of the 2030’s.

Future wars are portrayed as robot-wars conducted by technical experts fielding underwater and low-flying drones as if in a computer game. The reality of current wars in Ukraine and the Middle East show something very different. Drones and missiles destroying civilian targets, from high-rise flats to entire towns. This is the destructive force being the sole area of investment for Plymouth. 

And at the City’s heart, the illegal mass exterminator, the weapons of mass destruction costing us at least £14billion a year and unmanageable toxic pollution. The nuclear weaponry that, if and when used will herald the end of human society as we know it. That is absolutely nothing to boast about!

When endless tax money is dedicated to warfare the truth is exposed. The money can be found. We can have a society where every child is comfortably housed, growing healthily with nutritious food and well-resourced schooling. Now that’s worth fighting for – Welfare Not Warfare!

Sod Potholes – What About Poverty?

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (28.4.26) challenging the motives of all candidates in the current Council elections. What are they doing about poverty, deprivation and the gross inequalities we live with each day.

Notable that the Editor would not print the swearword “sod”, replacing it with “Forget”, despite f and c words on our telly every evening. Apparently being angry is unacceptable.

Sod potholes, why don’t candidates address poverty in Plymouth!

Around two-thirds of Plymouth residents eligible to vote are likely not to do so in the local council election on May 7th. There is no single reason, but any class analysis will prove that the wealthy don’t bother to vote – they don’t use public services and find taxation an unjust burden they seek to evade – whilst the poor wisely recognise that politicians don’t do anything for them.

So democracy, flimsy at is, is for the middle classes. And local election campaigns tend to focus on the day-to-day niggles affecting middle-earners and the otherwise comfortably-off: pot holes, business rates and regulations affecting small businesses.

Some national issues invade local democracy, especially when racists and warmongers seek to divert issues of municipal welfare into white-nationalist xenophobia – from rearmament to fight foreigners and the damning of all people of colour through to ultra-parochial slogans demanding “Plymouth People First!”

The one thing not to be spoken of, politely or otherwise, is poverty. Much of the growing anxiety and discontent is borne of the fact that millions of us do not have sufficient income to cover essential expenses. All our politics has moved towards the extremes as we’ve become more divided and more unequal. Voting for a new bunch of multi-millionaires seeking to out-do the established lot is not going to bring any real difference to working class lives. The Status Quo is no good for most people.

Candidates should offer real and substantial change. Britain has the highest increase in child poverty in the whole of Europe, the richest 10% live an average of 20 years longer than the poorest, and in much better health. This record level of income inequality and class polarisation is visible on our streets and in our neighbourhoods. Never mind the potholes, what about the homeless?

So saying we’re going to carry on as we are shouldn’t be a political message that gains votes. It represents only a 15% strata of the comfortably-off. Meanwhile the super-rich are continuing to change society away from mutual aid and collective care in their struggle to accumulate more and more of society’s wealth.

In Plymouth, one in three of our children live in poverty, defined as being deprived of one-or-more of essential human need – nutritious food, heath care including teeth and emotional support, secure and safe housing, self-actualising education, and a loving environment promoting positive self-esteem.

Pot holes aren’t on the list. They affect car owners and cyclists. Owning a car requires expenditure of at least £50 a week for an old banger, hundreds for a new vehicle, placing them outside the affordability for at least 20% of us. Public transport is the real issue and requires massive investment if we are to have any equality of mobility.

Spending around £40million on refurbishing Armada Way is of benefit to local businesses seeking higher footfall, and property speculators wanting to make a fortune out of new city centre accommodation, but for families in Honicknowle or Southway the bus costs of getting into the city to play amongst the water features are wholly unaffordable.

What we need is £40 million spent on breakfast clubs, play parks and youth centres on our estates.

More so, we need refurbishment of our housing stock which is now, notably, the worst in all of Europe. Housing conditions are so poor that 14 million homes in England and Wales require extensive repair and retrofitting to stop water ingress and provide the insulation required to end fuel poverty. Plymouth has one of the highest rates of household damp and mould in the UK, with studies showing 36% of homes are damp, 14% with serious mould, and 25% of Plymouth households living in unhealthily cold homes.

The private landlords, a large proportion amongst our elected Councillors, certainly don’t want the housing crisis as a campaign issue. Caring for their tenants will eat into their private profits.

Trade unions have always campaigned against poverty, but the sectional self-interest of workers in specific industries often overwhelms our founding socialist principles. Jobs at the Dockyard and through the Freeport are emphasised as the growth Plymouth needs, whilst in all accounting for only 10% of our economy and doing nothing to alleviate poverty. Plymouth Devonport is one of the very poorest electoral wards in England.

Low pay is endemic, workers on the Minimum Wage often needing top-ups from Universal Credit in order pay the rent – effectively a tax-incentive for landlords to charge inflated rents.

Pay in the health service, schools and all public services has lost at least 15% real spending power since the 2008 crash. Our public services need substantial investment, not further privatisation pumping the offshore corporations’ profits.

Council spending power per person will be at least 15% lower in real terms in 2028/29 than in 2010/11. That’s more cuts and austerity policies to come this year and next. Central government must give back the money it has stolen from local authorities. Any candidate that isn’t ranting about this isn’t worth the time of day!

Now we are heading for another crash, probably the worst yet. A quarter of a million people will likely lose their jobs by the middle of next year as Britain experiences price-hikes, food inflation at 5%pa+ right now, and a recession because of nil investment and the chaos caused by the illegal war in Iran.

Should anyone knock at your door, ask them about the gross inequalities and deprivation in Plymouth and what they’re going to do about it

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We must call out racists as racists!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (28.5.25), prompted by the racist protest of 200 in Plymouth City Centre the previous Saturday, organised on a national platform by confirmed fascists, and screaming-out “Stop the Boats, Save Our Children”, meaning let asylum seekers drown, and all sexual abuse happens at the hands of Black people. Not only is the opposite the truth – 87% of sexual abuse in the UK is perpetrated by white British – but the violence implicit in their chants represents their intention to take-over our streets and communities through fear. That fear is primarily for Black people to experience, instantly recognisable and to be targeted. 

We witnessed this in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and we fought it and fascism back in the 1980’s to the point that people felt unable to make racist comments in workplaces and social events because they would always be challenged.

It would appear that the confidence of anti-racists to expose and challenge racism has gone, replaced by some ideologically nieve quest for consensus. It’s easy for white people to argue that the two sides – racists and anti-racists – have common ground and should talk instead of contest, but the question is begged – on what basis should the White protesters on each side debate with each other the terms of acceptance and treatment of Black people looking-on? Isn’t this a white-racist process of itself?

We have to listen to and ensure the involvement of people of colour in challenging racism. How can we best stand with you, and how can we best help ensure safety and respect? Why are white anti-racists prioritising talking with racist protesters over-and-above talking with Black and Muslim communities facing this rise of racist groups and protests?

Last Saturday, of the 200 in Plymouth City Centre there was no challenge to the racism from within their own ranks, meaning everyone on that far-Right protest were racist and had taken the trouble to come into the town centre in order to express their racism. These “Great British Protests”, with more planned, represent more violent gang attacks on lone people of colour in the streets, at home and at places of worship. We’ve seen it before and it’s happening again, this time worse. Never mind dialogue with the violent racists, get them off our streets!

My article in print, a pale shadow of the above:

Democracy requires a vibrant and engaged population with sufficient agency to affect society. Citizens have to act to ensure we’re heard. Passivity and silence give space for tyrants.

So, for those of us who want real democracy, we may feel pleased that Prime Minister Starmer is considering a U-turn of Winter Fuel Payments. Has he listened to the clamour of opposition? 

Scrape the surface and his back-track appears to be a sleight-of-hand. What trade unionists have labelled “Austerity Mk II” is still in place by a government voted-in on the basis of real change from the Tory years of welfare cuts and price hikes. 

Starmer’s attack on people with disabilities, some £5billion in cuts to support payments for those unable to work, remain in place. We’ll see what he has to say about the two-child cut-off for support, but overall the attack on the working class is continuing.

The public sector pay offers to teachers, health workers and civil servants are below inflation, once again. We are reminded that governments changed the measure of inflation from RPI to CPI to remove housing costs from the equation. The government’s current 3.5% CPI inflation-rate equals well-over 4% RPI, eating all of next years pay rise despite workers having already suffered years of pay cuts. No wonder there’s talk of strike action!

Schools get a below-inflation 3% budget increase needing to make yet more cuts to crumbling classrooms and jobs, and have to find that extra 1% for the pay deal. Hospitals are in an even worse position, massively underfunded and under-staffed, now facing the loss of migrant workers due to absurd and counter-productive new immigration rules.

Meanwhile there are more millionaires and billionaires lauded each week. The 2025 Rich List identifies just 50 families in the UK owning more wealth and resources than the bottom 50% of our citizens – that’s 1,000 versus 34 million people. The increased wealth of the rich comes directly from keeping wages low, evading paying taxes to the tune of £130billion each year, and raising housing, fuel and food prices over market value because governments let them do so. 

The super-rich live off our backs but tell us to blame migrants and the disabled for all our discomforts.

Last weekend in Plymouth and around the country, two poles of political organisation rallied on the streets, neither side satisfied with Starmer. But we have nothing in common. 

For the far-Right, Starmer is a socialist establishment stooge, soft on immigration and child-sex gangs, putting the two together to proclaim that Black people, and particularly Muslims, are all paedophiles. Their racism is rabid, hiding behind Union Jacks to represent the goal of Apartheid white-supremacy in Britain, and shouting for convicted fascist, Tommy Robinson.

For the counter-demonstrators demanding human rights and social justice for all, Starmer is a stooge of the billionaires, using racism to hide the rip-off ruling class and destroying the Welfare State to increase the private profits of the big corporations. His funding of war abroad, bombing of civilians in Gaza, and his anti-migrant racism has allowed fascist organisers to whip-up racist attacks, antisemitism and Islamophobia. 

The only possible common experience is of a harsh and unjust economic environment where the working class is being screwed. But the answers are polar opposites. 

We know from history that fascists use discontent to take violent control of the streets and demolish democracy. We know that trade unions encourage collective action to defend democracy and win better pay and conditions in organised workplaces. We Demand Change!

Blame the Billionaires not the migrants and asylum seekers! Fight for social justice for all!

The far-Right and Fascism are the most immediate threats

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.

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A Harsher 2025

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

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

The unedited version here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It will take a revolution.

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Fight for the Rights of All Children!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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