Tag: starmer

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!

Protest to Survive!

Tony Staunton1 Comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (7.10.25), challenging the Police powers in relation to protest. In particular, whilst there is no universally agreed definition of discretion given to Police as agents of the Capitalist State machine places democracy and all of us individually in danger. We must oppose, we must protest for the right to protest.

As printed:

Protest is political. Obviously. Politics, especially the decisions governing the distribution of power and resources, is always contentious. Democracy demands we debate and argue, vigorously!
Any power seeking to curb or prevent protest is seeking to impose their preferred political position and belief. When protest is banned the cry of injustice rings loudest. Telling people they have no right to believe what they believe is symbolic of absolute power and control.
It gets more complicated. Some political beliefs and actions are seriously threatening, harmful or perilous to other groups or individuals. Lines are drawn as to the acceptable levels of risk and threat, always prioritising openness and freedom over any upset to sensibilities. Prohibition has to be the last act set against only the most devastating threat to democracy.
Current protests against the prohibition of the Palestine Action group are supported by the Quakers, a contemplative religious group encouraging peace, truth, justice, equality and simplicity. When their values are threatened they must act. Faith enters the political realm.
Successive UK governments have changed the legal definition of terrorism in order to curb opposition, now proscribing Palestine Action as a terror group despite any published evidence of fact. The current Labour government attached Palestine Action, a protest group seeking to expose genocide in Gaza, to two tiny fascist organisations in order to compel Labour MPs to vote to proscribe all three together. A dirty trick.
Those of us observing the complicity of the UK military and arms manufacturers in the genocide of Palestinian people of Gaza could only be outraged at such injustice. Many started to sit down, in silent and passive protest at the proscription, hand-writing cards stating “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action”. Thousands have been arrested for this “thought crime” of support for actions exposing a crime against humanity.
The wider context, of openly fascist organisations now being allowed to parade on our streets with mass chants of racial and religious hatred without police action offers us evidence of a level of political bias both within the Home Office and the Police Force.
It’s all too easy to expose the racist and misogynist culture ever-present in police stations and the plethora of private security firms. Every generation has seen scandals of organised fascist groups inside police and military services.
The result is political bias in policing. Look at the racist bile spewed-out by tens-of-thousands at the London protest addressed by Elon Musk and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon on 11th September, inciting hatred and violence. Police hospitalised by the violent mobs throwing bricks and bottles resulted in only 27 arrests for common assault. Conversely, aged Christians sat silently protesting an injustice are roughly man-handled, thousands arrested under terrorism legislation for exposing mass murder.
This week the Labour Government will further limit and ban the right to protest. In practice they are specifically targeting protests that are “left-wing” – protesters for equality, peace, universal human suffrage and social justice.
Meanwhile, the ultra-nationalist flag-wavers terrorising asylum seekers in dilapidated hotels are given free reign to incite and threaten. The recent burning of mosques, street rape of Muslim women by white thugs, the racist gang murder of a Muslim man are not designated as terrorist.
However more prescriptive and authoritarian Starmer’s government goes, the reactionary Tories and Reform UK will demand more restrictions and harsher punishments. Britain’s ruling class is letting the anti-democratic far-Right and fascist organisations off-the-leash here, copying the rampaging race-hate mobs on the streets across the USA.
The trade unions better mobilise quickly, because we’re the next to be targeted and broken.
There’s no time to lose. Protest to Survive.

There is nothing benign or liberating about digital ID

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (30.9.25) opposing digital ID. Its all about the direction of travel, the vision and goals of those promoting it. Placed in the current political context – the complete absence of workers control or democratic accountability of the tech providers – its a non-starter. Trade unions have to act now to stop the momentum.

The unedited version below:

Never having lived-under an authoritarian Police State it’s hard, perhaps, to recognise why we wouldn’t want to. A reading of history can help: Stalin’s Gulags; the overnight disappearances of millions across South American countries during various fascist or military regimes; Hitler’s mass killings of trades unionists, the disabled, gypsies, gays, Trans-people, socialists and finally Jews… why would anyone willingly accede to totalitarianism?
Of course, military governance rules many lands and people today. It’s one reason for clinging-on to some semblance of democracy, of individual agency. However weak and corrupted, bourgeoise parliamentary democracy is better than rule by force of arms.
Signals of authoritarian control should raise our hackles. The loss of all personal agency, subjection to discrimination and torture without any right to appeal, mass incarceration – these are all potentialities we must collectively guard against.
Little wonder that in the first 3 days after its launch, the petition to Parliament opposing Starmer’s compulsory “Digital Identity App” raised over two million signatures last weekend. There have been street protests since, and the proposal has yet to be published never-mind placed for formal debate. Unprecedented!
In our rapidly polarised society, the political centre decomposing – the old parties of Tory and Labour smelling of rot – both “Left” and “Right” appear to be opposing ID cards. The “Middle”, those who afford European holidays and enjoy privileges to be preserved at all costs, quite like the idea.
For the Left, digital ID systems will ensure centralisation of all personal details, to be utilised not for empowerment but for surveillance, censorship and political control.
At its inception, Starmer has targeted and scapegoated migrants working illegally as the rationale for “Digital ID for All”. That, of itself, is a racist act. Refugees are forced into the informal economy by laws which stop them working legally and make them survive on a pittance, exploited by unscrupulous employers. Starmer’s immediate “rationale” is obviously bullshit, pandering to racists whilst the real intention is social control in a period of mass unrest.
Starmer’s dramatic announcement is actually part of an international initiative and trend for the incorporation of transnational tech companies with each national State. Big Tech is behind the “ID2020 Alliance” lobbying for “Digital Identity for All”. The ubiquitous cameras linked to your digital ID will inform the official observer of everything about you (including your individual key-strokes), big business knowing your every desire and the State compiling your every dissent.
There are obvious links with both the drive to the domination of Artificial Intelligence over our economic and social infrastructure and the fast-tracking of militarisation of our society.
There is a UN-backed public–private initiative advocating biometric, traceable identity systems prioritising “global interoperability and integration with state services and online platforms”, run by the likes of Microsoft and Google. This is twenty-first century authoritarian control with a spin-off for corporate profits paid from our taxes!
The far-Right are in some disarray, those who oppose any State interference into personal Liberty are protesting whilst those for whom power and white supremacy is paramount are confused by the potential. Whilst he’s formally opposing digital ID its unlikely that Farage would repeal Starmer’s ID scheme were he to become Prime Minister, the opportunities to deport people-of-colour being made all too easy through 24-hour surveillance with biometric facial and iris recognition.
The comfortable middle classes console themselves that “if you do nothing wrong you have nothing to fear”. Huh! That all depends upon who’s making the laws that define illegal activities. Laws can be changed overnight by whoever comes to power. An authoritarian state will curb both your financial and personal pursuits, including your recreational peccadillos. You can easily fall foul of a fascist regime.
Total control is the true direction of travel: state surveillance which will be used primarily against ethnic minorities and radical groups, including trade unionists challenging exploitative managers. The digitally excluded, disabled people and elderly people risk being locked out from accessing essential services, whilst welfare benefits claimants and patients will have their entitlements cut-off at the press of a remote discriminatory button. There is nothing benign or liberating about digital ID. We must protest to prevent it before it starts.

Palestine Recognition is Merely Posturing

Tony Staunton1 Comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (23.9.25), reflecting upon the cardboard cut-out commitment to a Palestinian State by Starmer, the kid-starver. There has to come a point where we openly discuss the fact that there is no possibility of a two-state solution to the plight of Palestinians. Apartheid Israel, of whatever colour of political governance, will not and cannot allow for it. Racial supremacy is an anti-human scourge upon humanity and must be deposed.

The unedited version below:

It has to be a definition of hypocrisy to make a pledge you know can never happen. It is just a ploy to maintain the status quo. In this case, recognising Palestine whilst not condemning the genocide of the Palestinian people is the pinnacle of forked-tongue posturing.
It’s nothing new. In 1917 the Balfour Declaration declared its commitment to the Palestinian homeland at the same time as supporting Zionism, the European-contrived political creed of Israeli supremacy, racism and settler colonialism. Why would anyone choose to believe the pledges of the British State?
The resulting Arab revolt of 1936 against British control was violently put down by the British, Zionist militants then using terrorist force to kill Britain’s soldiers, finally taking control of a small patch of land in 1948. Ever since, Israel has forcefully expanded to occupy the land that had been independent Palestine.
The recognition of Palestine by the UK government was a promise made to the Palestinian people more than 100 years ago and repeated, recognising two countries in the region – Israel and Palestine. Under the international accord signed by Israel in 1995 all of Palestinian land occupied by Israel in 1967 was to be handed-back to Palestinian control. Instead, new settlements have been created across Palestine’s West Bank ever since, including hundreds in the last two years alone.
Israel is taking over large parts of the West Bank through military violence and murderous gangs of settlers. These actions, threatening any chance of a sovereign Palestinian State, are politically intentional and supported by the UK.
How can we believe that Starmer supports Palestinians when he refuses to act against the genocide in Gaza? Evidence published in the medical Lancet magazine last week proved that 186,000 Gazans have died since October 7th 2023, largely women and children. 90% of buildings have been destroyed. The indiscriminate blanket bombing is killing the hostages.
We see the serious expansion of settler violence in the West Bank, with the intention of the E1 construction proposal. In Gaza, the murderous clearance of Gaza City is part of the published intention to create a new Mediterranean seaside resort for the super-rich, Trump’s “Middle East Riviera”, quietly supported by the capitalists of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt and Russia all investing in “Mar-Gaza-Lago”.
Gaza is a property-speculators dream built on the crushed bones of hundreds of thousands of poor civilians, administered by a “Palestinian Authority” controlled by Israel and financed by BlackRock, J P Morgan Chase, Bank of America, not to mention finance companies across the City of London. The plan is in much the same vein as the US private contractors running the evocatively named dystopian “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” food aid sites, not to mention America’s own privatised Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “mission”.
Israel is using the methods of destruction waged upon Gaza now in the West Bank, destroying buildings and infrastructure to ethnically cleanse area E1 and close down any link between Palestine and Jerusalem, the Palestinian capital.
The annexing of the West Bank is intended to create Greater Israel, eradicating any vestige of Palestinian land and heritage. Last week, Israel’s Prime Minister, Netanyahu, repeated the claims of his self-identified fascist cabinet ministers: “The West Bank is our heritage, our land and our security”. The Israeli government says the very idea of Palestine should not be considered, and that there will never be a Palestinian state.
There is no possibility of a two-state solution. It is a foil. Israel remains a military Apartheid State with a racist constitution ensuring Israelis enjoy high levels of human and legal rights, social provision and suffrage above and over any and all other ethnic groups and nationalities inside that country.
Starmer must recognise this is illegal invasion and genocide and act accordingly. Stop selling arms to Israel. Start to prosecute and sanction Israeli ministers. Demand the end of settlements and occupation in tune with the hundreds of resolutions voted upon by the United Nations.
There is a solution – a single secular democratic state in the region where Jews and Arabs and anyone can live together. Coexistence with shared rights irrespective of religion and heritage is the only possibility. For that to happen the current Apartheid State of Israel has to be deconstituted. Impossible?
Internationally, tens of millions of people have protested on the streets in defence of Gazans and against Israel, forcing at the very least mealy-mouthed pledges from governments. Such enormous political mobilisation across nations is unprecedented.
Despite their massive propaganda machine weaponising claims of Antisemitism and funding organised race-hatred based upon Islamaphobia, Israel’s actions have made that State a pariah across the world. More than 153 out 194 nation States have condemned Israel’s actions, the United Nations identifying multiple elements of genocide, ethnic-cleansing, use of illegal weapons, assassinations, incarceration and torture. Countries are sanctioning Israel and its leaders listed as war criminals identified by international courts. Trade unionists are boycotting Israeli goods and blocking trade routes.
Palestine is the flag and campaign of all those demanding human rights, equality and decency. We know, deep down, that if international imperialism get away with mass slaughter in pursuit of corporate profits there, they can and will do it anywhere and everywhere. The political concept of “disposable people” is very real whether considering war, climate justice or fascism. Gaza tells us we are all at risk.
The anti-human Israeli government can be deposed. Palestinians don’t need the empty pledges of cynical politicians, they will survive and prosper through the accelerating actions of millions of ordinary people across the world. Plymouth is sending coachloads of us to the national demonstration in London on 11th October. Free Palestine!

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!

Welfare not Warfare and Militarism!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (25.3.25), raving mad about the benefits cuts. This is an attack on the poorest and most vulnerable in society, grabbing-back cash wherever possible to fund rearmament and war. This is militarism and authoritarianism, and must be defeated. We shall protest, demonstrate, campaign and oppose.

The full script below:

Say a Big Lie loud enough, long enough and across all the media and, probably, it will become an accepted Truth. Unless challenged by a louder voice.
“There’s no money” is most easily challenged when you see the government finding huge sums – billions and billions of tax-payers pounds – for war, rearmament and militarisation of society. “There’s no money” rings hollow even to the most unthinking when the numbers of individual with billions of pounds double in their own number and become, not billionaires but multi-billionaires, flaunting their wealth and the power it brings.
Of course there’s the money, it’s just not for us, the working classes.
To build the Lie, the Government is pitching those in work against those reliant on welfare benefits, broadcasting the despicable Big Lie that people are pretending to be disabled and should be forced back into minimum wage alienated employment to ensure the economic “Growth” that clearly only benefits the super-rich.
Journalists trawl through hundreds of street vox-pops to find the one disgruntled, downbeaten sod so hopeless as to hate her disabled neighbour for getting a Personal Independence Payment (PIP) instead of her. Those who call disabled people “scrounges” are at best one-step away from an accident or illness that will render them reliant on precisely the welfare they condemn. And it won’t be there for them when they need it.
Capitalism breeds individual competition from the bottom-up.
More than 1 million people in Britain will lose their disability benefits next Spring, losing mobility, dignity, help and hope. Welfare cuts are set to be part of tomorrow’s spring statement ‘package’ which will also involve planning reform, Whitehall cuts and regulation cuts.
Starmer’s condemnation of our civil services, “doing a Musk” in slashing the departments that coordinate and provide our social infrastructure, is a far-Right populist propaganda Big Lie meant to appease the forces of reaction. It will only encourage them.
A Labour government focus on attacking the poor and the dispossessed has happened before, but not to such a level as this that would make Thatcher’s eyes water. Blame the refugees, Stop the Boats are the slogans of a false narrative that obscures the barbaric levels of disparity between the Rich and the Poor in this country. For the record, the tax-costs of refugees is a minute fraction of the costs of our Health & Welfare Services, and an even smaller fraction of the hundreds of billions of pounds due but unpaid by the richest 5% of Britains.
The welfare bill is not spiralling out of control. It is at the same level as 2013, lower than 2020. The benefits cuts will save less than £5billion by 2030 to pay for an extra £6billion going into arms production. A Wealth Tax, not the same as Income Tax, skimming 2% from the personal wealth of those super-rich owning more than £10million would pull-in £24billion to the Exchequor over the same period. The rich would hardly notice the top-slice.
But the rich try not to pay any tax. There is a loss to to our budgets of at least 30% through fraud and evasion of tax due by the rich, amounting to upwards of £130billion. Yet Reeves is sacking the civil servants who could chase the money down and replenish our coffers for health and education.
And whilst just 0.2% of welfare benefits are fraudulently claimed, less than £1billion, that is what the toady journalists seize upon, not the corruption of the rich, who want us to blame the poor to take the heat off themselves.
Britain has a low pay, long working hours culture, where those with capital are free to exploit the ordinary working person. One of the core reasons we are seeing a rise in mental distress and long-term ill-health is the impact of demeaning employment, the bullying and repetitive mindless labour of low-paid shit employment ensuring a life of subsistence, demoralising us into hopelessness.
Britain’s “free-market deregulation, already extreme compared with most countries in the world, is being enhanced to allow Landlords to extort more and get welfare tax-cash to top-up their outrageous rent hikes, employers to extort more without inspection, cashing-in on Universal Credit to pay an unliveable minimum minimum wage topped-up by the tax-payer for their maximum profit.
We, the working class, are unaffordable, we’re told. Despite being the ones that pay the taxes – the Rich simply do not – we are ineligible for any rebate. We are being heckled and smeared to compete for an ever thinner slice of a mouldering cake.
It can be different: Rent caps to ensure affordable housing for all; a £15 minimum wage to end the need to claim UC uplifts; regulations enforcing a legal obligation for landlords to keep tenancies healthy and habitable; home refits to reduce energy costs; a 2% increase in taxes on income over £80,000pa; the cancellation of the US-leased Trident nuclear weapons programme freeing-up at least £210billion for welfare.
The money’s there! But Starmer, Badenoch and Farage aren’t going to redistribute any of Britain’s wealth back to the working class who produced it. We’re going to have to fight them for it. We must challenge Austerity #2 and Militarism. Welfare not Warfare!

We in the UK have to take Trump Seriously

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My Weekly Comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (28.2.25), delayed from its usual Tuesday slot for “technical reasons”, allowing for a Comment Column from the editor supporting more war with Russia, and then a military person writing on the need for emergency weapons production. Last week’s column was stopped by the editor, my call for peace being identified as similar to “seeking to appease Hitler” (ie Putin).
Last week I warned of Europe promoting world war three against Russia. Today my weaker and compromised column warns only of Trump, not NATO and Starmer. Bizarrely, by the evening of the 28th, Trump had been broadcast across the world bullying and condemning Zelenskyy to his face in the Oval Office.
So when Trump spoke again of World War Three I kinda feel vindicated, while wishing I’d argued harder and stuck to my guns. I should have learnt by now – don’t compromise!

This week’s column:

We have to take Trump seriously. However you wish to caricature, disparage or mock him, Trump is at the head of a very powerful cabal, an administration that has well-formed and long-prepared plans from a coherent ideological framework.
The Trump administration has at its heart, far-right nationalism, separate from the Project for New American Century of the 1990’s. It is not a set of policies opposed to war, reference Iraq and Afghanistan, but rather focussed upon the benefit of any war to the United States plc.
Any presentation of Trump as a peacemaker must be considered in this regard – what benefits do his group within the American ruling class secure through any conflict or peace deal? This is not particularly a question of likes and dislikes, just what’s in it for the US corporations. Trumpism offers nothing to the working classes of the USA or anywhere else.
At this juncture, the acknowledgement of the third year of war in Ukraine, the Trumpian propaganda surrounding a peace deal can be falsely considered as an alliance with Putin or abandonment of Ukraine. Rather it is a negotiating platform. The USA has given more than $100billion to Ukraine to fund the war, plus Musk’s Starlink satellite communication systems and much else of the essential military infrastructure, and Trump wants to see a return on the investment.
Trump has said he wants the mineral wealth of Ukraine in return for continued provision of arms. This is not to be condoned, but is not the same as abandonment. It is possible to imagine deals that ensure new military investment. It is also possible to imagine European countries stepping-up to take-over from the USA, from much of the same motive were they able to afford it. The current economic stagnation makes rearmament a very long-term project.
Trump says his country is shielded by a beautiful ocean, the Atlantic, making Russia, a much smaller economy than the USA, of little or no threat to him. By contrast, America’s corporate core recognises China as a very present threat, economically and culturally across the world, and potentially militarily across the Pacific.
Making America Great Again means pushing back against China and its BRICS alliance. Europe will have to deal with Russia.
So where does Britain stand? It is not difficult to perceive of the UK as tThe USA’s 51st State. We are heavily dominated by US culture and military alliance despite having far fewer economic ties than would at first appear.
Prime Minister Starmer’s audience with the President this week should expose his country’s political dependence on the USA, Trump’s nationalism notwithstanding. And for this, Starmer will step-up as America’s watchdog in Europe, bragging to replace the armaments of the US with those of the UK and challenging Europe to do the same.
Starmer has already pledged an increase in UK military spending from 2.3 to 2.5% of GDP, the highest in Europe, representing an extra £3bn in the past year. The coming Strategic Defence Review will map increased investment in weaponry and soldiers towards the pie-in-the-sky “ideal” of 3% of GDP, despite high borrowing and crumbling social infrastructure.
Doing Trump’s bidding will come at a huge cost to our health service, housing stock, welfare benefits, transport systems and green energy transition. The expansion of the UK’s military-industrial complex, much already ownedd by US corporations, will not reflate our economy as a whole, just one section that is already enjoying record profits from tax-moneys.
The USA pulling-back from Ukraine will have heavy political and economic consequences for European countries, a situation to the benefit of the USA that has long wanted to curb the economic power of the continent. And politically, the accelerated rise of the far-Right here, feeding off the rise in poverty and insecurity, will encourage support for the Trumpian rhetoric, itself so two-faced in its true intention.
Some praise Trump for his transactional approach to power in a Capitalist world. His is an example of how Capitalism actually functions – as a constant competition between combatants, seeking to make offers that cannot be refused or actual hostile takeovers. Gangsters and the organised criminal gangs learnt all they know from the legitimate corporate players.
The challenge is this. If you oppose Trump you have to firstly oppose those with power in the UK who support him, and those he supports. The Trump administration is dominating a period going forward in which they can wield enormous power and impact across the world. They must be stopped.

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.

May be an illustration of 1 person and text

Speak Out Against Racism and Fascism

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

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

The full Comment below:

It’s Time for Mass Action Against Racism and Fascism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Third World War is a Real threat

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly column in the Plymouth Herald (16.4.24) linking the various recent quotes from Grant Shapps, Kier Starmer, Sharon Graham and Rishi Sunak but without naming them during this period of electoral party-political media purdah (space wouldn’t allow for inclusion of Biden and Netanyahu). The signs of war are with us. The plans are being laid, whilst a single error of judgement of mistake could start the conflagration now. Organise to Stop the War!

The unedited version below:

Historians can describe the signs of coming war: crisis of economy, class tensions at home, scarcity of resources, competition for land and food, pestilence and poverty forcing mass migration.

But war does not begin before they’ve built their armies. War needs advanced planning, not just of the military hardware but of the emotional commitment of the populations involved.

Politicians need to begin making carefully contrived propaganda speeches years in advance. Allying the individual citizen with national interests is a starting point.

Identifying and detailing the alien nature of ‘The Enemy” and broadcasting their atrocities is an essential prerequisite to the conscription of the population ready to fight and kill the subhuman hoards threatening all borders.

The guns and tanks, fighters and mass uniforms must be produced well in advance. New factories have to be built, paid for by a raise in the tax percentage of the Gross Domestic Profit siphoned-off for weapons in spite of any other social concerns and needs of the day.

A sense of national pride must be reestablished, especially if the nation has, to date, been internationalist and multicultural. This can take years and years. Friends who enjoy a variety of cultural lifestyles or faiths have to be set against each other. A new hierarchy of acceptable and unacceptable behaviours and beliefs must be enforced, mirroring the nations’ elite.

This takes a concerted effort that crosses all other political drives within the ruling class. There has to be governance that espouses national unity to the masses – the working class. Corporations that are in constant competition can unite in favour of the flag, even while seeking fresh profits inside a war economy.

Politicians begin public statements early on. Some of their kites fly immediately, others need to be thrown-up over and over again on the run. A likely lad, easily disposed of if scorned and derided by public opposition, has to be chosen to say, for example, “we are moving from a post-war to a pre-war world”, and “Britain needs to be prepared for war”. Now.

It’s important that the Leader of the Opposition agrees, amplifying the call that the tax-payer must “raise the UK’s defence spending to 2.5% of GDP as soon as resources allow”.

Better still, outdo the policies of the current Party of government. Emphasise the barbarity of the Enemy. Expel the anti-imperialists. Promise to extend and accelerate current development of weapons of mass destruction. Ultimate support for, say nuclear weapons, should trump all other pledges.

All tensions between employees and employers, profiteers and wage-slaves, must be eliminated, class consciousness replaced with nationalist fervour.

Most vitally, the spokespeople for the working class – the people who will be transferred into military uniforms to die for King and Country or be moved to essential military production – must be forcefully cajoled into accepting the changes and bundled into common effort for the coming conflagration.

Trade union leaders have that role to play, primarily to oppose and isolate all anti-warfare activists inside their ranks. In park until they must witchhunt “groups that look to build networks inside trade unions to undermine the defence industry. Jobs for death must replace jobs for life.

An enormous degree of top-down propaganda promoting the need for war is needed because working class people know war is no good.

There has to be a period of one-off clashes, escalating violence and heightened tension between the opposing sides in order to prove that war is essential. Alliances need to be formed and tested between nations before the global war begins.

An enormous amount of top-down propaganda promoting the need for war is required because working class people know that war is no good. The doubters have to be identified as “The Enemy Within”.

War doesn’t make life better for us. Mostly, we die. A military economy is one of shortages and rationing, the absence of welfare, long queues for medical aid or charitable distribution of food aid.

War does make big money for the arms manufacturers and their big shareholders. On all sides. It produces long-term suffering for the rest.

It is time, in fact past time, for a fresh movement against war. The signs are with us, echoing the pre-war years of 1912-14 or 1937-39. The Third World War will dwarf the 70 million deaths of the last world war. All the efforts of those who care for the future of humanity have to combine to prevent the current drive to world war.

May be an image of map and text