Tag: racism

Fight for the Rights of All Children!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Revolt Against Inequality

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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