Tag: socialism

Here’s Hoping for a Happy New Year!

Tony Staunton1 Comment

My final weekly comment column of 2025 in the daily Plymouth Herald (30.12.25) inevitably rounding-up my priorities for the coming year, whilst coldly acknowledging how much more needs to be addressed. No, I haven’t mentioned Your Party, not from any lack of commitment but because this new socialist potential will only succeed by the action it takes to secure the priorities as listed below. If it is yet another organisation created of and for itself, a Party existing in order to simple exist, then it will fail. The point is to raise the socialist banner high and, most importantly, know what we’re fighting for!

Here’s hoping for a Happy New Year!

New Year, whichever and whenever it occurs for you, offers space for reflection as well as projection. The Gregorian calendar fixes ours as 1st January each year, irrespective of the position of the sun or the moon, but close enough to the winter solstice to symbolise new light and fresh beginnings.
New Year is worthy of a wish list, fresh aspirations. In a human world of significant turmoil and uncertainty, so much needs fixing that it’s difficult to prioritise. But here goes. Let’s hope in 2026:

  1. The fascist-led racist movements of Farage and Yaxley-Lennon are finally and overwhelmingly defeated by mass mobilisations of working class people outraged by racism and misogyny and challenging the false culture-wars that decry empathy as weakness;
  2. The £13billion a year UK tax-funding for illegal nuclear weapons of indiscriminate mass-destruction is ended, the cash transferred into the National Health Service to fully fund our health and welfare needs rather than warfare. Let’s also ensure an anti-racist campaign in hospitals to value the one-in-three doctors working here from oversees, and encourage our health staff to stay because we value, not abuse, them. Oh, and ensure the NHS is protected from plans to fully privatise our services – the selling of our health records to the private corporation Palantir to be roundly rejected;
  3. An emergency plan for funding to address the housing crisis, including skills apprenticeships for our unemployed young people, for good quality new build of social housing and refurbishment of our 13 million homes in need of repair and insulation, placing rent caps and legal liabilities on private landlords and taxing large landlords to fund the reparations they should have undertaken;
  4. The end of this seemingly endless period of Austerity economics, where workers wages have stagnated since the banking crisis of 2008, our real spending-power actually fallen despite our taxes bailing out the banks without any prosecutions or detriment to the bankers incomes, dividends and bonuses. End the low wage long working hours culture where employers are subsidised by our taxes to keep our wages low. Make the rich pay proportionally the same taxes as the working class instead of being allowed to hide their riches in off-shore accounts;
  5. The acceleration, depth and seriousness of the Climate Crisis is finally accepted and understood, all the lies and denial defeated and replaced by urgent action to end emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, Britain playing a lead role on the international stage to force climate action onto the US Presidency and win funding for the vital transformation of the world economy away from oil and gas and into funded renewable energy delivery North and South. Stop subsidising the oil companies who are reaping record profits from inflated prices causing our fuel poverty;
  6. Child poverty is ended, the 1 in 3 working class kids no longer deprived of some of the basics of life, and our schools refunded under state control;
  7. The genocidal racist Netanyahu is brought to trial and jailed, his far-Right government collapsed. Starmer’s Government support for Zionism and funding of arms to Israel is ended, the protesters against the persecution of Palestinians vindicated and applauded.
    There are so many more issues that must be addressed. Well, we have to live in hope. We are in a period of very fast moving human history, and nothing is impossible. The course of human history has always been determined by the mass movements of working people, not the feeble compromises of the self-promoting political class.
    Best wishes for a campaigning New Year for Peace with Social Justice!
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it’s Your Party for the Working Class! Join Now!

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My weekly comment column in today’s Plymouth Herald, unedited below or expand the photo to read the print version. Oh, and share and join Your Party!

A thoroughly exceptional weekend. Historic! A point in the social and political story of Britain that will be recorded, referred back to and celebrated by generations to come.
A gaping hole in the electoral firmament has been filled. There is, at last, a political party of and for the working class, that is committed solely to improving the lives of workers, challenging and ending the wealth and power of a ruling class that is sucking the lifeblood from our labours, destroying our health and welfare.
Your Party was founded on the 30th November 2025, voted into being by a process whereby all subscribers could participate, propose organisational structures and purposes, and vote online and in conference for the establishment of a mass democratic socialist organisation.
Socialism is alive, vilified by the Capitalist media owned by billionaires, and hated by the far-Right. Socialism is the drive for a fair and just society ensuring equality and welfare for all. In essence, a collective society where each person offers their skills and labour towards the common good, and every person has their individual needs met as a result.
Socialism is not characterised by the dictatorship of an elite. Quite the opposite, socialism requires the opening-up of participation and agency for all who contribute to the common wealth. The producers, creators, thinkers and carers, empowered by a society that values every contribution from every ability. Socialism values humanity and the natural environment we inhabit.
Capitalism has developed into very much the opposite. The extraction of value from we who have to sell our efforts in exchange for a wage or welfare, the fruits of our labours lining the pockets of the landlord class, the corporate executives and bankers. A vicious, exploitative and oppressive system of class rule.
Just 50 families in Britain own and control more than half our country’s wealth. They consider themselves untouchable, exuding privilege and entitlement largely due an accident of birth. The super-rich tightly transfer their money and power through generations of family ties, heavily protected by the laws they make for themselves.
We have had almost no chance of any social mobility for generations. Britain’s economy, five times as large as in the 1950’s, all built on working class effort, has seen all the wealth trickle-up and out of the country, hoarded in off-shore accounts and preventing investment at home.
A housing crisis, a health crisis (both physical and mental), one-in-three of our children living in poverty, 60% of our elderly undeservedly isolated and impoverished. All in the pursuit of profit and power for the very elite few.
This has to be turned over. The world is in a crisis caused by capitalism. The descent into barbarism is sensed by all: the billionaire-backed rise of fascist organisation across the West; the forever wars and genocide pursued by the profiteering arms manufacturers; the climate catastrophe the result of the record profits from fossil-fuel emissions creating extreme weather events that force hundreds of millions from the homelands.
We can fight back! And we are getting organised. The Old Order is dying. Both the Tories and Labour Party have lost their base, all-but indistinguishable in their policies and vying with Reform UK to scapegoat migrants and refugees to hide their own corruption.
Workers need a collective voice of our own. The millionaires Farage and Yaxley-Lennon offer only racist and misogynist hatred, continued privatisation of services and attacks on workers rights. Starmer and Badenoch seek only to further the interests of the wealthiest. The two-Party system that has dominated Britain for two centuries is at an end.
The gap on the Left has been filled. The rise of our new socialist party has been long and painful in formation and is now speeding forward in unity of purpose. Redistribute the wealth, challenge inequality, defend and protect minorities in a society based upon meeting our needs, not the profits for the rich! It’s your party!

Climate Change is a Working Class Issue still

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (2.9.25), reflecting on the floods – of rain rather than flags! But the two are linked, the flag-waving ultra-nationalists and racists denying climate change to a person. There are polarised divisions, not to be undone by keeping quiet or being nice! We’re fighting for our children and their children … climate change is an existential threat.

Unedited below:

Those affected by floods in Plymouth through the last week have been shown sincere empathy by our entire community. Waking to leaking ceilings or sudden torrents of water pouring through our homes is a traumatic shock as well as a long-lasting costly clear-up and remedial project.
Most if not all of us seeing the media coverage have the immediate intellectual acknowledgement of climate change. We all know it now. Extremes of weather are routinely breaking records, whether temperature peaks or torrential downpours, the erratic conditions now responsible for more moorland fires, farmland droughts, basement floods, transport disruption, and uncertainty about the future.
The damage to our once-stable climate is accelerating, the various impacts of human-released carbon gases trapping heat in the atmosphere, feeding on itself and amplifying the power of nature’s dynamic forces. For more than 50 years the impact of carbon-emissions has been known and tracked and yet still the system of production adds more carbon dioxide to heat-up the world.
For those of us mopping-out our living spaces, the voice of Kemi Badenoch, leader of the beleaguered and discredited Tory Party, calling for the extraction of more, nay “all”, oil and gas from the North Sea has to feel like a direct snub to our plight, but also a call-to-arms. You see, the last Tory government accepted that there is a Climate Crisis and we have to cut emissions.
The sudden perverse rise of the conspiracy-touting far-Right in Britain has shifted the climate debate away from observable as well as scientific facts towards a fresh denial of any problem whatsoever. Not only Badenoch but Starmer is jumping to the tune of Farage and ending the drive to net-Zero by 2050 (or ever), a target of emissions reductions very attainable but wholly inadequate in itself.
It is an ideological offensive against any and all calls for curbs on unbridled, unfettered free-market corporate drive for profits. Badenoch is championing the oil and gas companies, even damning any of the false-hope new technologies like carbon-capture-and-storage currently being funded.
The claims are false – gas prices have caused the high energy prices in the UK, and more reliance on gas will not reduce our domestic bills – they’ll increase. More North Sea oil won’t help tax revenue either, oil is privatised and the corporations receive tax-breaks and subsidies and those companies export most of what they find.
Badenoch’s claims are characteristic of the corrupt lobbying for the interests of the big corporations at the expense of the beleaguered working class.
We campaigned with Insulate Britain, calling for government action on refurbishment of no less than 14 million homes in England and Wales needing urgent upgrades to protect us from the extreme weather. We were vilified in the Press, and the governments of both parties have refused to consider our evidence and experiences. Indeed, some of us were imprisoned for daring to call-out their intransigence.
Climate activists continue to be persecuted and criminalised for trying to expose the depth of the immediate and worsening catastrophe. Just look at the weakening of the so-called Gulf Stream and the very real impact on our entire ecosystem in the very near future. You want to protect our children? We have to stop emissions now! Just Stop Oil!
Climate change is a working class issue. Governments and Corporations are doing nothing to help or support the adaptations needed. Trade unions have always fought for workers rights and for the changes needed to make society better for us. We have solutions to the climate emergency. Trade unionists in the 1970’s designed and engineered the first wind turbines, heat pumps and electric public vehicles as part of the “Lucas Plan” never invested in by the Corporations finding profits much larger in the production of weapons of war.
Renewable energy production does not generate the massive size of short-term profits for the super-rich – and that’s the challenge! State investment with significant tax claw-backs from the fossil fuel industries must fund a National Climate Service that can create the millions of climate jobs needed to adapt our social infrastructure.
Plymouth Trades Union Council is working with the Plymouth Hub for Climate Justice to build the climate movement as a force to shift government and corporate policy back to Green. Climate Jobs in their millions, protection for homes and communities, integrated and accessible public transport.
The urgency is palpable. This Autumn we launch the trade union year of climate action, with a key moment of global solidarity in November when world leaders meet for the UN climate negotiations in Brazil – the COP 30. Join our protest and Climate Summit on November 25th at the Sherwell Centre.
The right-wing politicians, whether Labour, Tory and Reform UK speak only for the profits of the oil and gas industries. Only about their profits. Farage wants to scrap the already paltry regulations that protect workers and householders. Badenoch wants more emissions. Starmer has little in the way of plans for energy transition, and wants the end of green incentives for employment transition. This lot don’t listen to workers and aren’t going to help us.

We have an autumn programme of actions and events. Join us: https://plymouthhub4climate.org

For a Party of the Working Class

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (22.7.25). I found myself in the interesting position of not being able to write this as part of any official mainstream organisation. It is the rule of the Trade Union Congress that representatives can only support the Labour Party. And it is the general policy of lobby and campaign groups not to be directly associated with any political party. There’s a dilemma. A new party of the working class will need affiliates from the broad progressive movements. Campaigns will have to pin their political colours to their masts and produce a confederation tied to a set of principles not unlike organisations of the working class across Europe and beyond. It demands an ideological and constitutional change away from the cosy neutrality of post-war reformism. All that is over and gone. The need for a new working class party is the result of the end of the old order and norms.

The working class needs a new Party. The level of representation of working class interests in the UK Parliament is as low as that if the 1910’s. Multi-millionaire career politicians preside on all sides.

The working class – those of us wholly reliant on wages and/or top-up welfare benefits – number 2/3rds if the population – at least 40 million people in England & Wales. Parliamentary decisions, over spending policies and laws governing our behaviour and beliefs, are made in the interests of the super-wealthy and their corrupt capitalist system.

We, the majority, have little voice. Our political representatives have a basic salary of at least twice the average wage, and can take additional jobs kowtowing to the corporate lobbyists. They oppose the regulation of working conditions, wages, housing conditions and rents, health standards and utility costs. Their talk of freedom is of the individual right to take liberties on charges and levels of exploitation to maximise profits, not the freedom from poverty and oppression. And now, the support for Israel amidst genocide, and rearmament towards a third world war is linked with widespread funding of individual MPS by Israeli lobby groups.

These self-interested politicians hold the Houses. 

Starmer’s Labour (and Blair’s before that) place growth in profitability way above the eradication of deprivation. The highest utility costs in the western world and poorest State pension, attacks on the paltry incomes of people with disabilities, blaming migrant labour despite their gross levels of cheap labour and servitude for the middle classes – that’s not a party for workers.

The Tories, from Thatcher to Cameron, Johnson to Sunak, mercilessly plundered the British Exchequor to enrich and engorge the billionaire class at the expense of every public service and all the essential needs of workers, whilst cutting their own tax liabilities to a minimum. 

The Liberals, yellow Tories now useless, devoid of that one chance at coalition given the lessons of when they threw working class students into decades of severe debt, capped redundancy pay, privatised Royal Mail (look how that worked-out for jobs and public services) and forced through cuts to health and welfare to expedite the new Age of Austerity. Not on our side.

And Reform UK, another Party of and for the Establishment, lead and funded by multi-millionaires and supported by rabid right wing billionaires based in the USA and Russia. For Farage’s patriotism read representation of the ultra wealthy, tax cuts for the rich, full privatisation of the NHS with further cuts to the new dilapidated public services, and spend tax money on war instead whilst destroying democracy and dividing working class communities through rampant racism.

As for the Greens, their broad church approach suggests workers and socialists are included yet, in practice, when running a Council in Britain or part of a coalition in Europe, they act purely on behalf of capitalism and attack workers on strike, reneging even on environmental promises.

None of these Parties represent or even care about working people. In our fragmented and polarised society, those with money are looking after themselves and their own at the expense of the many.

A Party of and for the working class would ensure class principles of collective organisation and solidarity, challenging the vast inequalities so apparent across the UK today. Taking hold of the resources of the world’s 6th richest economy, a government placing need above profit could redistribute our wealth to benefit the vast majority. 

In this world of plenty there should be no poverty, and therefore no billionaires. The super-rich can be legally bound to pay their taxes, to cap their prices, and to produce for the common good. The principles of working class solidarity would end Austerity, fight racism and welcome refugees, oppose oppression of minorities, fund welfare instead of warfare and militarisation of society, and take urgent action on climate change.

This is no dream world. The proposal for a new working class Party is on the table, and across the country, enthusiasm for these policies has already found electoral support at or above voting preferences identifying Labour, the current party of Government.

Everywhere, workers are demanding change – real change. In the absence of a progressive left-wing party, workers are turning to Reform UK as a protest vote despite its obvious contradictions. But this acceptance of racism and division is the greatest threat to our future safety and security.

The unity of the working class has to be created by the working class, organised and combined. 

Whilst Corbyn and Sultana have broadcast the call for a new Party it is up to ordinary workers of all communities and occupations to make it happen and decide its purpose and policies. 

A working class party, interpreting and realising the socialist call in the 21st Century, is now an urgent necessity: a society formed from the efforts each person according to their abilities and providing to each according to their needs. It’s time!

Workers’ control of production will require a revolution

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

The full unedited article here:

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

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

Speak Out Against Racism and Fascism

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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.

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.

Election will Not Alter Class-based Society

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My Comment this week in the daily Plymouth Herald (4.6.24). The rigged “balance” required of the media during an election period means I can’t get published what I’d really like to say: Farage’s Reform Party offers an embryonic fascist rally which threatens the entire working class, the Greens are a pro-Capitalist Party with a terrible anti-working class record in Europe and indeed, against trade unions when running local councils; Galloway is socially conservative with adherence to religious family values that opposes a women’s right to choose, gay marriage and trans-rights, his Workers’ Party inviting cross-class alliances with Farage and ex-UKIP  candidates. Starmer is more than ready to lead us into World War Three within the duration of the next Government term (for which the imperialist ruling classes already undertaking the preparations). And anyway, putting one’s faith in bourgoisie democracy and the election of a socialist pro-working class government has been thoroughly destroyed by the ruling class offensive against Corbyn (not to mention the various corporate-funded right-wing coups against socialist reformers across the globe). The Left, historically infiltrated by chancers, turn-coat careerists, renegades, police spies and agent-provocateurs, continues to fragment just when political unease and renewed strike action in our class offers a chance to build a coherent mass organisation. The rise and falls of mass movements: Black Lives Matter; Me Too!; Climate Strikes and now Freedom for Gaza each represent missed opportunities for decisive leadership for whole-system change, linking all the issues together into an anti-Capitalist offensive. It’s no longer any good to say you’re a “socialist” without saying you’re anti-Capitalist. It is Capitalism and its current development of Imperialism that links all these movements and issues. The Capitalists will not allow you to reform their System out of existence! The only way out of this is revolution, which may well be brewing elsewhere in the world for us to jump-on and build here. One mass strike is worth ten general elections!

But none of this can be printed.

So instead, here’s the long version of the printable edition:

The candidates are about to be declared, the stage about to be set. General elections are theatres for Party activists.

People join together into political parties with reason. There are ideas that conjoin and ideas that splinter into opposition. It’s very difficult, for example, to believe in universal human rights whilst promoting racial superiority – is it okay that some people are born with more privileges and entitlements than others?

Some beliefs come together towards a whole and encompassing world view.  To act upon the our formed “way of seeing” we need to join together in sufficient numbers to have impact and change the direction of social organisation towards our preferred conditions. Hence parties.

On a very superficial level, that’s what putting a cross on a piece of paper at election day represents – a personal alliance with a world view.

The current drive towards politicians “independent” of any world view is probably a short-term proposition. A non-Party “independent” may be elected because they catch the majority view on a single issue but soon get into trouble when people disagree with other views they now espouse but were not in their manifesto. 

They may be elected as forthright and unbending on their stated goal, but find that, to achieve anything they will have to compromise into a coalition with others, watering down their mandate and starting to link together into a new political Party. 

The rise of the “Independents” is a necessary reaction to the general sense of “they’re all the same” which has swept into the consciousness of the electorate. The lack of faith in democracy as currently organised is prevalent across the Western world whilst still being fought for in the Global South. 

The point is, there are real differences in preferences for social organisation. There are Right and a Left wings of the political spectrum. Social organisation to share resources to ensure everyone’s needs and human rights are met is a world view and ambition that is the complete opposite of a belief in individual competition and personal enrichment at the expense of others. 

The best example is our National Health Service, loathed by Right-wingers as a construct of “socialism” because people pay into the common purse in order to get free health care at the point of need. The privatisation of the NHS is a right-wing strategy to turn our health service into a fee-paying, for-profit capitalist enterprise run by transnational pharmaceutical companies, not the State.

Any NHS charging essentially separates those who can afford to pay from those who can’t, into a society where your right to health care is based upon your personal income and inherited wealth. To accept charging in order to lower taxes is to accept individual competition as the social norm – a world view with wider implications.

It is difficult to ride on the back of two horses running in opposite directions. There are new parties seeking to go beyond, or bring together, Right and Left, despite the inherent conflict at the core of those ideologies. This may be an honest attempt to rebuild democracy away from the current two-party system which offers no real difference in policies or outcomes. But it’s a project doomed to failure.

A white-supremacist cannot be, at the same time, anti-racist and for a multi-cultural State. Someone who believes men should have power over women is unlikely to defend the rights of LGBTQ+. Warmongers don’t vote for Peace. Anyone who believes that the majority of Muslims are extremist “Islamists” is unlikely to believe in the rights of refugees and asylum seekers. Beliefs coalesce into world views.

The inescapable fact is that we live in a polarised society based upon class, the conditions we are born into determining much of how we see the world and what we believe. We are born into a System, not of our choosing or making, where social policy either benefits the wealthy elite or it benefits the working class and the poor. Either we raise taxes to pay for social need, which requires the rich to pay-up in full, or we collapse the State and engage with a dog-eat-dog system where those without are left to perish. 

History provides many examples of where this class conflict which produces trade union strikes, mass movements, protests and community campaigns, produce real social changes far more profound and more often than general elections. 

So the core question to candidates should be, are you for the People (the majority of whom are working class reliant upon day-to-day income) or the Rich ruling class few who extract and exploit in order to maintain their privileges? Everything else stems from this divide. Whatever the result, we’ll still have to fight for our rights.