Tag: reformuk

UK must Not Accept the Euqivalent of US’s ICE!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (13.01.2026) making the links between ICE in the USA and the political direction of travel in the UK. It’s obvious really. If you agree, please build the largest ever anti-racist/anti-fascist protest in London on 28th March. You have time to recruit at least 10 of your colleagues and friends, through patient explanation and exposure of the implications of a far-Right government in Britain by 2029.

UK must Not Accept the Euqivalent of US’s ICE!

The media headlines were bold. “Bring ICE to Britain, says Farage” and “Trump should put Starmer on trial, says Tommy Robinson”.
The racist ultra-nationalist, Farage, multi-millionaire owner of the ReformUK brand, would wish to see hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people of colour from across Britain snatched from their homes and workplaces and forcibly expelled.
The fascist misogynistic white-supremacist, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, is so keen on national sovereignty that he would like a foreign President to reign over us, and accepts cash from fascist groups from across Europe and the USA. He wants to see millions of Black and Brown British citizens rounded-up and deported.
The violence implicit in both far-right leaders is for all to see. Britain’s far-Right are applauding the violence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Trump’s federal law enforcement agency under the Department of Homeland Security. In 2025 more than 131 people died while in ICE detention, agents filmed pepper-spraying clergy and medical staff, tear-gassing children and systematically terrorising Latino communities.
ICE is a $12BN armed paramilitary wing of the central State, empowered to carry out armed raids on schools, hospitals, courts, places of worship, weddings, funerals and workplaces. These involve raids by masked agents carrying automatic weapons who drive unmarked armoured vehicles.
ICE targets people of colour, anywhere and everywhere, regardless of their status.
ICE is a paramilitary group, intentionally recruiting from the volunteers of the organised far-Right, encouraged to pursue a racist white-supremacist ideology. Trump openly targeted the Somali community in Minneapolis, calling them “garbage”.
The video of a high court judge, a Black citizen, assaulted by ICE in a supermarket car park offers one picture of the millions of public assaults taking place across the USA with, as vice-President Vance insists, total immunity from legal challenge or charge. No rules.
Other film shows women being dragged across tarmac roads and beaten, children forcefully taken from private residencies, families crammed into wired cages without proper sanitation or drinking water. This is the imagery of a fascist state, of Hitler’s militia in 1930’s Nazi Germany, of the concentration camps across fascist Europe a century ago.
The murder in Minneapolis of Renee Good, 37-year old mother, shot three times in the head by an ICE agent, was greeted by Trump suggesting she deserved to die and labelling Renee as a ”professional agitator”. Thankfully, more than one thousand protests took place across America last weekend by those who do care, chanting “ICE is Trump’s Gestapo!” and “No justice, no peace—get Ice off our streets!”
A month earlier more than 7 million Americans marched against Trump. Opposition and challenge to the President’s federal boot-boys is rising, from elected officials and Police through to local white citizens outraged by such flagrant injustice and ready to defend multiculturalism and democracy.
The anti-racist majority in Britain today, thus far quite quiet and acquiescent, had better get out in the streets too. We have to show the far-Right that we will not accept the equivalent of ICE in the UK.
Whilst Starmer and Mahmood seek to appease the racists with tougher immigration laws and the incarceration of civil rights protesters, Farage and Yaxley-Lennon are preparing for power. They are stating their racist intentions should Farage be prime minister. Yaxley-Lennon is building his Black Shirt street squads in preparation for a far-Right government that will target and scapegoat minorities in order to divide the working class and rule by fear. Trump offers them a blueprint, and they are applauding him.
We have to get organised and get active here, now. Down with racism and fascism! Join and build https://www.togetheralliance.org.uk

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COP30 – Stop Climate Denial! Act Now!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment in the daily Plymouth Herald (4.11.25) continuing to expose the hypocrisy and corruption of tax-funding the capitalist climate chaos. The climate denial is orchestrated, massively funded and coordinated across the global capitalist ruling class. They may be raising war against each other, but they combine against any and all opposition to their acquisitive lust for accumulation of personal wealth. Little matters like climate collapse with billions of ordinary people displaced and dying cannot get in the way of this anti-human system of competition and destruction.

Stop Climate Denial – Act Now!

On Thursday 6th November, UK Prime Minister Starmer will attend the COP30 Climate Summit of world leaders in Brazil. It will be a fleeting visit. This last-minute decision is more a reaction to political competition than any commitment to reducing global heating emissions or preventing climate collapse.
The sudden almost doubling of Green Party membership following the election of Zack Polanski as “left-wing” leader could take more voters from Labour than Reform UK was able to. The majority of voters recognise climate change as a real and present danger, even if they don’t want tax rises to deal with it. Labour has to pretend to “Green” credentials even while maintaining core commitment to the future of the fossil-fuel economy and infrastructure – the industries that are destroying the Planet at speed.
From the Right, the flailing Tory Badenoch is competing with Farage to be the greatest “climate denier”, of use to Starmer in being able to argue we must not go too far or too fast.
Climate action is under attack with false claims that the cost of living crisis and job losses are caused by green policies and ‘net zero’. But the UK is facing increased heatwaves and drought, alongside more extreme floods threatening homes and farmers’ crops. The impacts of climate breakdown are already here, and are hitting hardest those who have actually done least to cause the crisis. Here in the UK, temperatures reached a previously impossible 40C record in 2022 with higher to come. Our workplaces and homes are poorly equipped to cope with these heatwaves, which cause not just stress and discomfort, but thousands of excess deaths.
But current government policy is hopelessly influenced by the corporate fossil-fuel lobby instead of concern for the safety or food security for the working class. The UK government currently provides at least £17.5 billion in fossil fuel subsidies and support per year – the highest level since 2016 despite the gross inefficiency in price, infrastructure and climate-heating emissions of the fossil-fuelled energy system compared with renewables.
Starmer’s policies will result in a slight increase in fossil fuel subsidies over this parliament compared with the previous Tory Government, totalling an estimated £87.5 billion over five years. Little wonder the world’s big banks have handed nearly $7tn (£5.6tn) in funding to the fossil fuel industry since the failed COP21 Paris Agreement of 2015 to limit carbon emissions. No major bank has yet committed to stop funding new oil and gas fields or coal capacity.
The fossil-fuel industry is too highly profitable compared with renewables for climate collapse to get in the way. The billionaire speculators gambling on the stock exchange are not going to let the government get in the way of a rise in the projected share prices of oil and gas in 2040. Yet extraction has to stop now if we are to survive.
The Labour government has pledged £22bn for projects to capture and store carbon emissions from energy, industry and hydrogen production, unproven technologies that cannot possibly contribute in time towards the scale required for reducing harmful carbon emissions. Indeed it is a Trojan horse for extending the life of planet-heating oil and gas production and an entire waste of tax money.
Reform UK has pledged to scrap all climate action just as the UK experienced its hottest summer in history with widespread drought across England. Reform UK’s Mayor of Greater Lincolnshire Dame Andrea Jenkyns says climate change does not exist, and has declared war on climate action, describing wind and solar as ‘eyesores’ whilst promoting fracking in the British countryside.
The world’s largest oil and gas companies made £437billion profit last year and are still asking for further tax subsidies for the North Sea drilling. Unite the Union identifies the average household to be paying more than £500 to energy companies profits, not services.
The UK-based oil companies pocket at least £20bn a year from the tax-payer, with an extra £2.7bn announced this year, far more than the entire cost of support for refugees and asylum seekers – but you won’t hear any complaints from the far-Right about such subsidies for the super-rich! Blame the super-poor!
As environmental tipping points are crossed and the crisis rapidly deepens, scaling up renewables, energy storage and efficient usage has to be the priority. Transformation to green energy policy is cheaper, cleaner and job-rich. Start by ending all tax reliefs for the trillion-dollar oil and gas corporations and collect the due taxes.
Continued support for the fossil fuel industry goes against the interests of working people in the UK and globally. We shall be protesting for climate action in Plymouth on Saturday 15th November, and debating all these issues at the Climate Summit in Sherwell Church Hall, North Hill, in the afternoon. Join us!

Needs of People Must Come Before Profits

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

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

The Needs of People have to Come Before Profit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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