Tag: trump

B-1 Bombers over Plymouth are Propaganda

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (21.4.26) challenging the albeit minority support for the illegal war against Iran. Trump is under huge pressure at home and globally, more threatened by oil prices than any moral upset at human death and environmental destruction. But Starmer’s hypocritical role is possibly the most astounding of all – stating that the UK does not support Trump’s war but ensuring Britain as the launchpad for the weapons of mass destruction. We have to protest!

A B-1 Bomber is filmed high in the sky over Plymouth. Its rumblings, distinct from rolling thunder, cause us to look up, to question and to assess. It is not normal, not a usual sound. Some marvel at the power represented by the technology. But the black silhouette causes many to fleetingly reflect on the distant wars that are being rehearsed overhead. 

Britain is an aircraft carrier for the United States. Only those who are comfortable with this “special relationship” applaud the US bases strewn across our island and the use of the Royal Air Force for Trump’s illegal war in Iran. 

At least 23 US strategic bombers are now operating from RAF Fairford, Gloucestershire, US military personnel flying missions from England in support of ongoing strikes against Iranian targets. They’re practising and refuelling over our homes, but dropping huge payloads – 2,000lb “bunker buster” bombs – on everything from schools and hospitals to ancient historical monuments and, oh yes, civilians, women and children.

Just as Blair and Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 was formally recorded as illegal under international law, so will the bombing of Iran in 2026. There are no weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear weapons in Iran. Only Israel has nuclear missiles in an otherwise nuclear-free Middle East. 

Wars are deadly. And costly. Thousands dead, hundreds of thousands injured, millions homeless inside of one month’s assault. This illegal invasion is costing the US $891million each day and the global economy hundreds of billions in disruption, transport and agriculture descending into chaos. Blocks to oil supplies is already the equivalent of the daily consumption of Europe’s five largest economies combined. Petrol and gas prices are a superficial inconvenience when compared with the real and lasting costs to us all. 

By the end of this week, roughly 60,000 American service members will be in or around the Middle East, the largest concentration since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Trump is calling the current pause in fighting with Iran a fragile two-week ceasefire, set to expire on Thursday April 22 after talks in Pakistan fell apart almost as soon as they began. Then what?

Only last week, Trump’s threat to destroy a civilisation, with its implied threat of nuclear war, sent a chill around the world. Trump and Netanyahu’s war has been a brutal and illegal onslaught on the people of Iran and Lebanon. It has created a humanitarian disaster and caused the destruction of infrastructure, environmental damage, and economic crisis. And the British Government is wholly implicated.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been complicit in this illegal war, allowing US planes to use British bases. The British government must break with Trump and his warmongering policies, including disallowing the stationing of US nuclear weapons at the Lakenheath USAF base in Suffolk. 

British “patriots” are cheerleading the US  bombers as if they’re “our own”! Their allegiance is to Trump’s  Stars-and-Stripes far-Right White-supremacy, not the Union Jack, and to western capitalism, the only beneficiaries of mass slaughter being the western oil companies who have made an extra $100billion more than their usual profits in the last month, and the arms companies scurrying to increase production. 

Which brings us back to Plymouth. The B-1 stratospheric rumblings are in part a propaganda exercise to pull the population behind support for rearmament and the diversion of much-needed tax funding for health and education into arms spending. The real power of that jet bomber is in tying us to the politics and economics of warfare, not welfare. Nothing at all to cheer about in a country ravaged by austerity politics and corrupt profiteering.

On Saturday we will be protesting at RAF Fairford to demand the UK stops the bombers! Kick US nuclear weapons off British soil! Fund doctors and nurses, not Nukes! Vote for Welfare not Warfare! 

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We’re Constantly Distracted by Crisis

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (7.4.26), where I write a piece, edit it down to the maximum of 600 words, and then it’s edited again to meet the so-called “standards” of the corporate media. Little surprises me these days, but to see my phrase “Distracted from paedophile Presidents and Princes…” have the term “paedophile” edited out did raise my eyebrows. I thought, at least, that Trump has had a court case rule him as such, and that Randy Andy had been stripped of all titles and wealth because his alliance with Epstein. Oh well, there we go, the article is about the Climate crisis anyway!

The unedited version below, or read the published article by expanding the picture.

The latest HD pictures of the Earth from space are undeniably moving. An expressed emotional response often includes something about vulnerability.

So it should. One look at the globe and its obvious that everything is connected. The question is, what should we focus upon? Is there a first priority if we are to protect and sustain life on Earth?

Where should we start? Right now, moonshots are distracting from illegal wars and genocide distracting from the rise of fascist organisations distracting from paedophile Presidents and Princes distracting from corrupt exploitative billionaires and all distracting from the climate crisis.

And there it is. One look at our world and it should be clear that climate and environment are top and centre.

“Planet Earth is being pushed beyond its limits”, announced United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres reporting on the 2025 State of the Global Climate Report, completely eclipsed in its urgency and warnings by the war in the Middle East. The Earth’s energy imbalance – the gap between heat absorbed and heat released – is the highest on record. The vast majority of the heat, 91%, is absorbed by the ocean, harming marine life, fuelling storms and causing ice melt. Arctic and Antarctic ice loss together with melting glaciers are driving sea-level rise. Our weather has become more extreme. In 2025, heatwaves, wildfires, drought, tropical cyclones, storms and flooding impacted hundreds of millions of people and caused billions in economic losses.

In February this year, the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee, on which heads of MI5 and MI6 sit, released a heavily edited version of its national security assessment of the climate crisis. It came with a stark warning: “some ecosystems will start to collapse by 2030 or sooner”, suggesting an immediate threat to national security, prosperity, food systems and public health.

Government intelligence agencies have compiled full scientific reports on the imminent national security implications of climate breakdown, biodiversity loss and global ecosystem collapse.There’s talk across the Establishment of adaptation to a world at an average temperature 3C higher than 150 years ago. We are locked-in to a return to Pliocene conditions, 3C hotter and, eventually, a 20m sea-level rise.

You may expect the government to share this knowledge with everyone so we can all make important life decisions. But the UK’s Defra has refused a Freedom of Information request to see the full, uncensored report prepared by the Joint Intelligence Chiefs in connection with national security threats associated with climate and ecological breakdown.

The question remains unanswered: what do we need to do to be able live in these conditions? Perhaps die in our billions? Those who have significant resources to build away from floods and fires, insulate our homes against severe temperatures, access nutritious foods that are grown despite soil-depletion and chemical pollution, will live. But that’s not the most of us.

It is no coincidence that the far-Right is being sponsored to call-out climate science as false conspiracy, and oppose net-zero targets at the ballot box. “Drill, Drill, Drill!” Is the cry of the oil industry lobbyists, echoed by far-Right idiots hoping for crumbs of cash and power from the Billionaires’ tables. The barbaric decadence at the top of global capitalist society has never been more obvious, now funding climate denial to a greater extent than their previous campaigns denying cancer from smoking or asbestosis from unsafe chemical production. Starmer complies with support for new drilling at the Rosebank field in the North Sea.

The global North is being lulled into believing we’re safe from the climate crisis. Those in the tropics and Earth’s southern regions are already suffering climate chaos. As Jane Fonda said last week, “There’d be no climate crisis without racism!” This is probably the main reason behind Trump and Farage opposing net zero goals away from fossil fuel dependency: in the first instance, stopping climate chaos will be of primary benefit to the countries of the global south, non-white populations! To hell with that, let them die first! Racist it is, but also very short sighted – the worse chaos global heating causes the tropics, the more likely the temperate zones will suffer seasonal dissonance, extreme weather and food shortages. The climate does not recognise national boundaries or human cultural differences.

The climate crisis is not a matter of opinion. The real conspiracy is the opposite of that spouted by The Deniers – governments have compiled the information on the Climate Crisis already – they’re just not letting us see it, preferring to distract us with photos from space. We should each make the links and act now.

We are each at liberty, for now, to submit a Freedom of Information request to government to release the full report produced by the Joint Intelligence Committee on the national security implications of climate breakdown, biodiversity loss and global ecosystem collapse. Email your Freedom of Information (FoI) to informationrequests@defra.gov.uk

In the meantime, stop war to stop the murder, massive environmental destruction, pollution and global heating carbon emissions, and campaign against the opening of any and all oil and gas fields, most urgently, Stop Rosebank!

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The Old World Order is Dead

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (31.3.26) advertising next weekend’s mass blockade of US Air Force base at Lakenheath, Suffolk where US Bombers, fully armed, are taking-off to drop pay-loads on Iranian civilians in an illegal war. You’d think Starmer’s Government and our local MP Luke Pollard would be more embarrassed. Instead, they promote the drive towards nuclear war. Sickening. Inhuman. Detestable. Pandering to their rich imperialist paymasters.

Unedited below:

The illegal war on Iran is in its 4th week, upwards of two thousand Iranian civilians are confirmed dead so far, 24,000 injured and over three million displaced. 13 US military personnel killed and 300 injured. Iran has bombed Israel and Arab States in retaliation. In the West the care and concern is for prices at the petrol pumps and for home heating, the wider implications obscured by immediate self-interest.

This latest war is not going to end any time soon. Indeed, the media chatter is focussed upon the question of whether the Third World War has already begun. In associated reports the people of Ukraine generally accept it already has.

Following the nuclear bombs dropped upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 it was always assumed that WW3 would be a nuclear war.

Throughout March 2026 the two nuclear-armed states of USA and Israel have been pounding nuclear energy installations holding deadly radioactive materials in Iran. There are growing threats to nuclear facilities as has been the case in Ukraine where nuclear power plants have been damaged. In Iran, Israel has targeted the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant, the country’s only operational civilian nuclear power plant, and Iran threatening the nuclear site in Dimona, Southern Israel. Nuclear installations are frontline targets in war, posing the greatest mass threat to civilians downwind of radioactive fallout.

Targeting nuclear installations is act an of defiance of the UN Charter detailing rules of war. Indeed, nuclear weapons themselves are illegal under international law as weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction. But in 2026, the Old World Order is well and truly dead. The new situation has been being developed for decades, international agreements on nuclear arms reduction being eroded, disregarded or broken. Trump finally ended the New START Treaty last year despite the second major nuclear power, Russia, proposing its extension.

As a result we are seeing global nuclear proliferation, including by Britain. China is expanding its arsenal, Pakistan and India make routine threats against each other, US and UK building new “useable” so-called low-yield warheads with explosive power still larger than the Hiroshima bomb. They are designed for “first use”.

Local Plymouth MP and minister for military procurement, Luke Pollard, has waxed lyrically recently extolling the virtues of huge new investments in the US Trident nuclear system, the nuclear weapons system leased to the UK. At least one quarter of the entire UK military budget is now dedicated to nukes. He suggests nuclear weapons are a deterrent never to be used. He argues that nuclear weapons represent jobs and prosperity and a power too horrific to be unleashed, protecting the Peace. What’s not to like?

Such nonsense is belied by the list of hundreds of millions subjected to wars since 1945. What Peace has been protected? The international Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has offered evidence this year that the imminent potential for use of a nuclear weapon has never been greater. Only fools believe nuclear war cannot happen or that it can be contained once the first bomb is dropped.

Thankfully, despite Pollard, the majority of political leaders across the world understand this threat. Trump is not getting support from allies, governments like Spain actively defying Trump’s unbridled aggression. But Britain has fudged its direct involvement in Iran as “defensive support”, an increasingly untenable position. UK and US bases in Britain are launching attacks on Iran. At RAF Fairford there are 21 bombers running bombing raids twice a day, dropping the same 20-30k bombs that Israel has been dropping on residential areas in Iran, Palestine and Lebanon.

Bombers are also flying from USAF Lakenheath nuclear-weapons base in Suffolk, with the agreement of the UK government.

In all, the Iran war is being used as a nationalist propaganda tool promoting UK’s massive rearmament programme and militarised culture, in preparation for wider war. Yet there is strong public opposition to both US bases and US nuclear weapons here. 65% of UK citizens oppose nuclear weapons and over 70% oppose the war in Iran.

Defying public opinion, the political establishment and government are demanding we reorient towards European military coordination and nuclear expansion. The NATO nuclear alliance is being pulled-apart over continued US military alliance.

The joint committee on the National Security Strategy published last Friday, says Britain must delink from the US Trident weapons system and have an independent nuclear weapons system. In other words, build more nuclear weapons. And the government still hasn’t published its National Investment Plan due last year because of a £200billion shortfall – where are they going to get the money from? Higher taxes and cuts to welfare services, of course.

Meanwhile, we are building alliances and coalitions calling on a rethink of the nuclear expansion. Anti-nuclear campaigners are protesting. Our Peace Camp at USAF Lakenheath this week will demand the removal of all US nuclear weapons from Britain. We will blockade the base this weekend, demanding Welfare not Warfare! No Nukes! US Bases off British Soil! Join us at CNDuk.org

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Join us in Challenging the Rise of the Far Right

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (24.3.26), obviously advertising the mass demonstration against the far-Right taking place at the weekend. The back-room complexities of fund-raising and organising coaches, and filling them with activists, remains unseen. Commercial hire is absurdly overpriced. We are in debt and need donations, if you can. But more, we need to fill the coaches and build the mass movement against fascism.

Join us in Challenging the Rise of the Far Right

Hundreds of people will be travelling from Plymouth to London on Saturday to join the national demonstration against the far-Right. The protest by the Together Alliance and accompanying festival of diversity in Trafalgar Square will be the largest assembly against race-hate and fascism in British history.
The threat of fascism is very real and present. The numbers of fascist organisations in Britain have grown, and their ranks expanded, greater than the National Front in the 1970’s or the British National Party in the 1990’s. At the same time, the level of public awareness has decreased as we have been separated and isolated into private social bubbles by financial Austerity, the Covid Pandemic and the sense of vulnerability caused by wars and climate crisis.
We are emotionally jostled by conspiracy theorists seeking power through spreading fear and threat. We are lied to by far-Right politicians blaming and scapegoating minorities for all society’s ills. We are confused by politicians broadcasting conflicting fake facts in the name of Truth, just to further their own influence.
Our children are subjected to all this in a concentrated form of professionally produced propaganda on-line, the Incel “Manosphere” telling boys they must be ready to fight, and girls they must submit to men’s needs. The saturating levels of You Tube generated sexism and misogyny is alive in the playground and classrooms, daily observed and documented by teachers themselves, taking a collective toll on the mental health and wellbeing of all concerned.
Racism, the learnt prejudgment and assumptions of people of colour or minority ethnic group, is being encouraged and organised by antisemites, white supremacists and Christian fundamentalists, the targeting of Muslims most prevalent. Powerful political forces and social dynamics are being forged to develop fascist organisation here and across the world.
In the United States of America, President Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) armed street thugs are terrorising minority communities, a style of para-military State organisation that Nigel Farage of Reform UK and all to his Right are pledging to bring here the moment they achieve power, targeting a million or more people of colour for forced deportation. Yet we know it’s not migrants that have created the cost of living crisis, food and fuel poverty, our austerity has been caused by the blatant profiteering of the richest multi-millionaires on the planet.
Across Europe, openly racist and Islamophobic parties including the AfD in German, with whom Britain’s Tory Party are allied, is building street organisation to assert white privilege and forcibly smash all resistance. In France the same is happening with the leadership of the ultra-nationalist and openly racist National Rally set to win the Presidency within the next year.
It is not an extreme view to be concerned about these developments. It is not politically extreme to oppose racism and fascism. Opposing the far-Right is essential to personal preservation as a member of the working class. It is now essential that we counter the rise of fascism on our streets and in our workplaces. We remember the history of the twentieth century, the death and devastation caused by the fascist parties that took power in Spain, Italy and Germany.
We know that the totalitarian dog-eat-dog militarised organisation of society in the interests of a small super-rich all powerful elite produces a life of fear and subjugation, threat and violence for the majority. For example, after Hitler’s fascists, the Nazis, seized power in 1933 they banned political parties, trade unions and civil society organisations. They were “razing to their foundations” the institutions of any and all working class democracy. No semblance of resistance was tolerated.
Key to this was the funding and organisation by the wealthy of violent street gangs recruited from the dispossessed, to “take the streets” and destroy all opposition. This is the blueprint and the goal of the fascist organisations in Britain today. Funded and informed by USA groups including the Homeland Party, the successors to the BNP including Patriotic Alternative and Britain First are joined by the reformed UKIP group led by the self-styled fascist Nic Tenconi, and others.
The Flag Force groups encouraged by the White-supremacist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) are raising the English flag and Union Jack as symbols of neighbourhood domination in order to intimidate minorities. They are mirroring the 1930’s fascist strategies in a new era of capitalist crisis, nationalism and expanding warfare.
In Britain there are currently many more anti-racists than racists. We must not allow ourselves to be out-organised.
When we show our strength in numbers, the bullies and dominators disappear back into the shadows.
Now is the time to stop the far-Right. Challenge far-right propaganda. Counter fascist-led demonstrations. It will only get harder, the longer they are left alone to breed hate and division. Join the demonstration in London, coaches from Plymouth and across the South West: go to togetheralliance.org.uk/getting-there

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We are in a new age of war and extremes

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (10.3.26) ensuring a statement against the bombing of Iran and identifying some of the dangers of US imperialism. Most essentially, the need to protest. Right now 56% of UK voters (and 51% of US voters – none of whom read this(!)), oppose Trump’s murderous illegal bluster, and we must ensure their views are seen on the streets and in the media. If all that is seen is BBC pro-war nonsense and far-right media memes, populations will shift into acceptance of war economies and war ideology. “Protest and Survive” as the old saying goes!

Unedited version below or expand the pic for the published article.

We are in a new age of war and extremes

Stability has been blown away. We are In a new age of war and extremes, Most of us don’t want life to get any worse than it is now, and yet it is getting worse. The most dangerous sensation in such circumstances is that gnawing feeling of powerlessness.

Yet another illegal war has begun, unapproved by the democratically elected majority in Washington USA or Parliament UK, this time bombing the ninety-three million people Iran. Various opinion polls have shown the majority in Britain to oppose the war on Iran, from a simple self-interested concern for the financial impact if not a humanist care for the lives of civilians everywhere. But what can we do?

The years of imagery of the total destruction of Gaza, the crumpled concrete and mangled steel of apartments, streets and entire neighbourhoods, the burnt and crushes bodies of children in Palestine are now accompanied by the familiar mushroom smoke plumes and colossal streaks of flame over Tehran, Iran. Humanity must not become desensitised to the cries of and for Humanity.

US Secretary of State for War, Pete Hegseth, has set out his endgame for Iran: the total destruction of the country’s infrastructure and many of its people: “With complete control of the skies, we will be using 500-pound, 1,000-pound and 2,000-pound bombs, of which we have a nearly unlimited stockpile.” Some of his military commanders have been invoking far-right extremist Christian rhetoric about biblical ‘end times’ to justify involvement in the illegal Iran war to US troops.

We can oppose the Iranian government and oppose the imperialist war against it. We can support the Iranian civilians who bravely protested against Khomeini’s brutal Police last month, at least twenty-thousand shot on the streets, and at the same time understand that bombing children from on-high does not liberate the children. Under the rockets of Israel and the bombs of the USA, some flown out of the UK, we shall see more mass murder not freedom.

We may be able to understand the logic of the Iranian diaspora across the world protesting in favour of Trump and Israel as liberators. But we should not agree with them. We only need to reflect upon the illegal invasions of Iraq and Libya to understand that western bombing leaves formerly modern economies in ruins, the infrastructure crushed back, in the words of president George Bush Jnr, “to the Stone Age”.

Then the western corporations moves-in to rebuild in their own image, for their own profit, leaving the local economies devastated and impoverished. The war on Iran is an imperialist war like all others, Israel the preferred launching pad for the US in the Middle East, seeking complete control in the interests of US economic security and power, not those of Iran or anywhere else.

The potential to destabilise the adjacent countries and, indeed, the West, is very real. The autocratic governments of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar and even Egypt are already very vulnerable and in tension against each other. Not least, against all the deniers, the very real impact of global heating caused by climate change is having dramatic impacts on their people’s access to drinking water, any loss of electric power stopping their energy-thirsty desalination plants and wrecking both food production and social stability.

The very idea that the bombing or Iran will have positive outcomes for the people of Iran, even in “the long term”, goes against all evidence from history and today’s material conditions. Contrary to the pretext for the bombing, Iran had no nuclear weapons and no stated intent, whilst Israel has 400 nuclear warheads and is threatening their use. But what can we do?

We can demand our own government plays no part in this destruction. The fact that US B-1 Lancer bombers flew from UK’s RAF Fairford this weekend means we are party to the war, whatever defamatory names Trump calls Starmer. Turkey’s attacks on Iran represent the engagement of NATO – an escalation of itself.

We can support the people of Iran and the Middle East in their demands for human rights, the end to dictatorship and the fight for the self-liberation of their own countries. Last weekend a hastily-called demonstration of over 50,000 marched through London to the US Embassy, calling to stop the bombing. In opposition to the protests there and across the country, Neo-fascist organisers and far-right protesters joined with Iranian royalists to counter the anti-war demonstrators, echoing the war cries of Trump and Netanyahu.

We have to protest against war. If we don’t, the voices for more conflict will grow louder. If we do not stand up now, the organisers of division, promoting war, racial hatred and western “white supremacy” will be allowed to grow more powerful, the lack of opposition imposing passivity. We must prove in practice, in person and in public that we, the majority, want Peace.

Trade unions must be involved in processes to end conflict and build a peace grounded in social justice. Join us on the streets!

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Bombing Iran will NOT liberate the People

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (3.3.26), damning the suggestion that bombing women liberates women, anywhere. International Women’s Day on 8th March should see a battle cry rage against Trump’s misogyny, racism, anti-Trans bile and deadly military imperialism. They’re all linked!

Bombing Iran Will Not Liberate the People!

Welfare not Warfare!

The illegal Israeli military mass-bombing of the girls’ school in Minab in the south of Iran killed at least 153 women and girls last Saturday. This cannot claim to be in the interests of the liberation of women in Iran.

The rights of Iranian people have never been on the agenda of Western powers. Women, and men in Iran have protested heroically to change their government towards women’s rights, with death their only answer. The bombing of Iran offers no solution to women’s oppression there or anywhere. War always treats women as targets.

There’s so much hypocrisy spoken about women’s rights that we should all take responsibility for calling it out. We live in a deeply sexist human world. A global system based upon individual power and control vested primarily in super-rich men. The Epstein files show how corruption and sexism are so pervasive and entrenched. Andrew represents the corruption, both financial and sexual, of unaccountable wealth. Trump symbolises white male supremacy. Women’s oppression and capitalist class society are intertwined.

The genocide in Gaza has exposed the brutality of war and the unique impact on women, famine, physical abuse and incarceration impacting menstrual health and pregnancy. We still have a long way to go to win a world free of women’s oppression.

Let’s be clear: women’s oppression encompasses all social, economic, and political spaces causing personal subjugation for simply being a woman. Its is based upon class: wealthy women whilst suffering the indignity of being considered primarily as sexual objects have sufficient agency to combat much of the oppression. They side with the class privilege of wealthy men and collude in the exploitation and oppression of other women as low-paid nannies, personal assistants and cleaners.

Most working class women’s experiences of oppression are internalised into self-blame. Interactions and relationships are all based upon sexism – the portrayal of women as objects to be used, owned and controlled permeate all aspects of women’s lives. The modern capitalist family requires women to fund the domestic budget by working as well as running the home as carer, educator, nurse, chef, bottle-washer and on-call lover.

Next weekend we celebrate International Women’s Day, March 8th, in deteriorating circumstances. The backlash against campaigns for women’s liberation is well-funded and growing. In the name of women’s rights, the far-Right now proclaim themselves the defenders of the “traditional” heterosexual family as the “natural order”, recruiting women to specific roles in political organisations, “Pink Ladies” mobilised to protest outside refugee hostels for traditional women’s roles and heterosexual family values, and to keep white children safe from Black men. Disgusting!

Farage and his Reform UK private business echoes vice President J D Vance in demanding women should have more babies, referring to Musk’s “population apocalypse” of white families in the face of migration, inter-marriage, LGBT+ parents and left-wing “wokism”. The far-Right are reawakening the fascist campaigns of last century, for “children, kitchen and Church”, opposing women’s rights and imposing a woman’s place apart from any self-determination.

International Women’s Day (IWD) has been celebrated for over 100 years, born from mass revolts of young women workers challenging exploitation and the abusive power of the Boss class. Today many companies and businesses use IWD to sell cosmetics and gimmicks to reinforce the cardboard cut-out female rather than address the issues women face.

But IWD has radical roots and is a day to remember those who have fought for women’s liberation – from the Suffragettes in the UK to the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement in Iran. The women trade unionists and the men who have joined their cause remain clear-eyed – the working class have nothing to gain from women’s oppression. Free domestic labour, tasks still primarily allocated to women, protect the profits of big business not having to pay for the child care and raising of the next generation of the workforce.

And so, women are kept down. One-in-four women in Britain suffer domestic violence and abuse, often sexual, an average for a period of 6 years of their adult life. Rape in this country is lawless, only 3% of alleged cases followed through to a conviction. Child sexual abuse is reportedly on the increase again, the vast majority of cases girls abused inside the family, the majority of families being white. Sexual abuse is not the preserve of the black male refugee but the privileged white misogynist.

The cuts to social welfare, repeated and enforced in order to divert essential funding away from our health and welfare services and into war and military spending, affect women most acutely. Women’s rights depend upon a well-funded Welfare State alongside the ideological struggle for liberation from this system enforcing roles and relationships of power-and-control.

Here in Plymouth, trade unionists are fighting the cuts to health services, including stopping the closure of Plymouth’s Sexual Abuse Referral Centre, reducing the support that women and children receive following rape and abuse. You won’t see the far-Right protesting about that except as a “drain on the tax-payer” and a symbol of the “Nanny State” they want demolished.

For socialists, the challenge to class exploitation has to have the fight against oppression at its heart. We encourage and support the struggle by women against all forms of oppression, including gender stereotyping, role-segregation and being made scapegoats blamed for the imposition of low wages, high child care costs and poor social conditions. Welfare not Warfare! On this International Women’s Day we must remember the struggles of the past and unite for social justice and women’s liberation today!

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Britain’s role as USA’s 5lst State is Proven

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (24.02.2024) continuing the scrutiny of warmongering and rearmament. Since writing this (deadlines are Monday mornings), today – the fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – the French President Macron has stated his intention to place nuclear weapons in Ukraine…with Starmer likely to follow his lead (or is it Trump’s?). its time to protest against nuclear weapons – Marham, Suffolk, Saturday 28th February 2026.

Britain’s role as USA’s 5lst State is Proven


In military terms, Britain is undeniably, umbilically tied to the United States of America. There is a network of at least 19 US military bases across Scotland, Wales and England each assuming autonomous legal status as the blood and soil of Trump’s USA.
With Europe being coerced into developing a continental army to rapidly rearm, Britain’s long-perceived role as America’s 51st State is practically borne-out. The rapid rearmament of Germany is reducing its role as the USA’s second military carrier after the UK, whilst Britain expands its reliance on US power.
The primary evidence of this has to be the return of US nuclear warheads and infrastructure to these shores. All reports from observers prove that the US Air Force base at Lakenheath, Suffolk has now taken delivery of B61-12 nuclear bombs, only to be launched from here on the specific orders of the President of the United States. Yesterday, US F-22 “Raptor” fighters flew from there towards Iran without Starmer’s approval.
Down the road at Marham, Starmer is spending billions on refurbishing the Royal Airforce Base, ready to accommodate 12 nuclear-capable fighter jets, a significant expansion of Britain’s nuclear capabilities. This country will now be able to launch nuclear weapons from both the sea and sky.
Be clear, theses are American nuclear weapons. The Trident nuclear warheads and systems, supposedly ready to be launched within minutes from one of Britain’s four “independent” nuclear submarines, are actually owned and controlled by the United States.
Britain’s home-bred ultra-nationalists and xenophobes are wholly unperturbed by this, many wearing Make America Great Again caps as if staking their claim as part of Trump’s Republic! The contradictions are bizarre.
The far-Right criticise Starmer for not spending enough on the military and, in particular, nuclear weapons. In the face of rabid nationalist fervour Starmer is bound to back down from blocking Trump’s intention of utilising British bases in the bombing of Iran. Ours is a vassal State of US Imperialism, the Stars & Stripes the real Flag Force!
Plymouth’s Devonport MP, Pollard, the Minister of State for Defence Readiness & Industry, echoes his right-wing predecessor David Owen, SDP MP, in glorying Starmer’s ever expanding tax-investments in nuclear arms.
Starmer jumped to Trump’s command last week, increasing military spending by an additional £14bn a year, much of it on US equipment. Pollard and Owen sang the praises of Babcock, owners of the Devonport nuclear dockyard, about to receive a further £4.4BN of tax-payers money for increasing nuclear weapons readiness.
Devonport and neighbouring St Peters wards have the highest indicators of social deprivation in England, published on the Council’s website. One-in-Three of our children here live n poverty, the life-expectancy of a working class man some 14years lower than a professional living in Plympton.
Babcock’s profits (£73m last year) do not engorge Plymouth’s economy but get banked oversees, the well paid workers live and spend elsewhere. Following a 4.4BN bung, talk of 20,000 new jobs was a pie-in the-sky figure easily debunked by any scrutiny of similar claims made for Plymouth’s Freeport.
Britain’s Ocean City is about to be renamed, “Nuclear City”, Babcock taking over the city centre and University in pursuit of its nuclear military profiteering. At the same time as Starmer’s additional £14BN will be found from budget cuts to our crumble schools and hospitals and welfare benefits.
Trump has removed all Treaty safeguards from nuclear proliferation including nuclear weapons testing, and domestically ended rules on the safety of nuclear facilities, military and power plants alike. Expect the same here, soon. Forget any information on the impact to the environment of radiation leaks and nuclear accidents.
The end of a rules-based system for military conflict has now ensured a free-for-all. The increasing reliance on nuclear weapons in the face of a declining infrastructure of conventional weaponry and military forces makes us ever-more reliant on the threat and actual use of nuclear weapons.
That’s why we’re campaigning against all nuclear weapons, starting with any and all nuclear United States nuclear weaponry based in Britain. A delegation from Plymouth will be at the national protest at Marham on Saturday, opposing the purchase and basing of US nuclear-armed jets there. Join us: cnduk.org

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reStart START!

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An additional comment on an historically significant day. The end of the START Treaty on nuclear arms limitation. Please share and publicise our meeting on 17th February. We have to get organised!

START Treaty

We are very likely to hear of a nuclear explosion somewhere, soon. It is not just that Strategic Arms Reduction Talks on nuclear weapons came to an abrupt end last Thursday, it is that nuclear proliferation is part of the New World Order, deregulated, un-inspected. 

The START Treaty, regulating and controlling the numbers and development of the nuclear weapons of Russia and the United States of America, has expired. Trump is not bothered. Russia has said it will keep to it, for now. This is the last remaining agreement to mutually prevent nuclear weapons testing and limit the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal – Russia and the USA own and control at least 87% of all nuclear warheads, many fired-up and ready to launch.

There has been nuclear arms controls for over 50 years, as part of the rules-based international order established after the second world war, the first treaty signed in 1963 after the horror of the Bay of Pigs crisis where US warheads sited in Turkey and retaliatory Russian nuclear missiles placed in Cuba very nearly sparked a global nuclear war. 

The old cliche is that “the world stepped-back from the brink”. Well, we’re back at the brink again today. There are at least nine nuclear powers including Israel and North Korea, in a world where there are no restrictions on nuclear weapons whatsoever. 

There is now no agreement that morally or legally can deter any State from developing or using nuclear weapons. Cynics may suggest that Treaties aren’t really worth the paper they’re written on, but START has certainly been raised in the midst of any and all tensions and negotiations as the basis for de-escalation in recent history.

It is now the case that the traditional axiom of “Mutually Assured Destruction” no longer applies. The UK is at the forefront of global research and development of new nuclear warheads and the infrastructure with which to launch them, focussed upon “battlefield nuclear weapons”, “low-yield” and “useable”. 

The Trident replacement programme is effectively a project to prove nuclear weapons can be exploded in war and the world will not end. It represents humanity’s greatest gamble, and a Great Lie from beginning to end. The lowest yield nuclear warhead designed for battlefield use has the power and intensity of the first bomb dropped by the USA upon Hiroshima in 1945. That’s their definition of “useable”: 85,000 humans killed by one bomb, and tens of thousands more left unwell with shortened lives caused by the radiation that one explosion spread trans-generational toxic contamination.

The entire Trident launch system is owned by the United States and leased to the UK, any notion of Britain having an “independent nuclear weapon” a complete fallacy of public relations spin.

Now, Starmer, in his final days, has agreed to the Royal Air Force carrying US nuclear-armed missiles, making the UK Europe’s frontline of US offensive forces, with navy and airforce ready to fire Trump’s nuclear weapons.

Trump may agree a new nuclear treaty if it has his name on it and it includes China. But that’s not the point. The regulation and inspection of nuclear facilities has prevented accidental launch or detonation of nuclear weapons. The technology is intricate, and the litany of accidents across the nuclear industry, releasing deadly radioactive contamination into our land, air and waters, too long to list here. But inspection has prevented explosion, to our knowledge.

The Treaty and its protocols can be said to have prevented accidental nuclear war between the super-powers. Nuclear weapons are on hair-trigger standby at all times, the timing of launch and counter-launch measured in seconds rather than minutes and managed primarily by computers armed with Artificial Intelligence. To prevent the machines taking-over, there were international agreements on the human element in decision making, checks and double-checks, giving time for reflection and negotiation before the launch of Armageddon.

No need for all that woke health-and-safety nonsense now. Let’s just get on with it! The new Arms Race has been unleashed. The new nuclear countries outside of the obvious top three have no tradition of Treaty or constraint. They have never adopted the protocols for nuclear war. They have no constraints. And without START even the big players have no witness or knowledge of what their competitors are doing. No checks and balances. 

The simplest solution is to not make anymore nuclear warheads and to disarm. Nuclear Weapons are already, according to the totally debunked United Nations, illegal under international law as weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction. They obliterate everything and everyone. There’s little point in firing back once the other side has launched except as an act of vengeful mass suicide.

In the meantime we have to campaign for a new Treaty as soon as possible, as some form of safeguard without any illusion in it preventing the possibility of nuclear war. The end of START opens-up fresh and immediate possibilities for nuclear escalation in Ukraine and the Middle East. In Plymouth we have the infrastructure and machinery that carries the US’s Trident nuclear warheads. This is not someone else’s problem. 

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, with our world famous CND Peace Sign and seventy years of active campaigning, is at the forefront of challenging nuclear weapons. We will protest at Marham Royal Airforce Base on February 28th where the F35A Lightning II fighter jets will be loaded with US nuclear missiles, and at Lakenheath US Airforce Base on 4th April where Trump’s B-2 Spirit and B-52 Stratofortress Bombers carry B61 nuclear bombs.   

At the very least let’s get US Nukes off our soil, and campaign to scrap the £210billion Trident Replacement programme in the UK. Please attend our CND meeting in Plymouth at 7pm at the Quaker Centre, 74 Mutley Plain, PL4 6LF and on Zoom, Tuesday 17th February 2026.

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Interests of a Few Can’t be Allowed to Rule Us

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (20.1.26) raving mad about the billionaire jamboree in Switzerland courting Trump and his cronies. It’s deadly serious, this carve-up of the world and it’s people’s for the wealth and power of a tiny minority. It’s why I want a revolution!

The unedited version here, or enlarge the picture for the original.

Those of us seeking to further the interests of working class people should keep a close eye on what the ruling classes are doing. Once every year, the world’s billionaires and their toady hangers-on meet together, parking record numbers of private jets on the tarmac outside Davos, Switzerland. The World Economic Forum. They’re there now.
Trump is attending, with the largest and richest-ever “Team USA” following-on as the Emperor’s entourage. The great pretender, Nigel Farage is also there, pretending to be part of the elite he derided only last year as a “gathering of the globalists”. He wants to offer his services.
Let’s breathe for a moment. In a world of nearly nine billion human beings, fewer than 60,000 people own and control most wealth in the world. 0.001% of the world’s population control three times as much wealth as the 4,000,000,000 bottom half of humanity.
They’re coming together at the Swiss Alps resort to discuss how to further carve-up the world’s wealth between themselves. Their deliberations have more power and impact on every one of us than all the fluff and nonsense of every parliament. The People’s democracies have very little influence upon the real decisions made inside the corporate boardrooms across the continents.
Fifteen of the world’s richest exploiters are American. Musk has a personal wealth of $682billion (a billion is a thousand million), Bezos only $260BN, nine of the ten richest making their money in the technology business. Clearly we pay far too much for tech.
But they have problems. The world’s economy is in a deep crisis of debt and inequality. The climate crisis is documented, with dire medium-term economic consequences. So the rich aren’t investing in anything that doesn’t make a short-term hefty profit. Most of that private accumulation comes from gambling on projected future prices in an era of catastrophe. The immediate task is to raise prices to us as high as possible whilst cutting the wage and welfare bills to the lowest.
And so the Bosses compete against each other for ownership of lands and workers. The big corporations have real power but this is no world conspiracy – they’re all in competition against each other, undermining all planning and subject to the anarchy of the Capitalist System. When they come together at Davos they smile and shake hands, laughing all the time with a knife ready behind their backs, doing deals and hostile takeovers. They hold their pet politicians in tow ready to change laws to keep their scams legal.
Posturing over regional influence, possession and wealth extraction, such as over Greenland, is happening alongside who can afford the $1BN to sit on Trump’s “Board of Peace” with war criminals Blair and Rubio. Carving-up the Middle East and carving-out the Palestinians, profiteering from genocide, is symbolic of the rabid clawing for power and resources. The certainties of global “rules-based order” has broken down and the Nations attached to the big corporations are preparing for “geoeconomic confrontation”. War!
This week they will headline a “Spirit of Dialogue” whilst bitterly negotiating their competing interests over Venezuela, Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, Taiwan, Iran and Greenland. Davos replaces the United Nations for a week. They will not let democracy stand in their way.
As a band of warring brothers, a giant corrupt cartel, the Capitalist’s common enemy is us. The Rich fear the potential power of the working class. The Mass Strike and revolution from below is their greatest foe.
The Big Bosses work together to keep us in our place. In this fevered era of instability they are turning away from democracy and towards autocracy, ready to allow military conflict and fascism to prevent revolt and protect their wealth and power.
The billionaires are living in a bubble, and they know it. The absurd scale of $trillions of cryptocurrency investment in Artificial Intelligence cannot be sustained and will crash, hurting a few of them but destroying entire social economies and hundreds of millions of our jobs and lives. Investment in arms manufacture and the military suck tax cash out of social welfare. The rent and mortgage rate increases – the cause of the international housing crisis – is mirroring the investment bubble that led to the global financial crash of 2008 for which we’re all still paying. Enforced austerity is intensifying discontent.
Workers’ real spending-power is lower today than it was in 2008. The spending-power of the average full-time worker is 25% less than in late 2021. Their corruption screwed us for decades. It’s gonna happen again, but worse.
The super-rich know all this. Their champagne-fuelled seminars in Davos may publicly play-down the scale of the global crisis, but in the back rooms the real wheeler-dealers are drawing-up the blueprints for a refreshed Bosses offensive, ever-intensifying the exploitation of the working classes, by force. They will continue the accelerating descent into war and barbarism. The super-rich must be stopped by the collective power of the international working class!

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message to Trump: “Hands Off Venezuela”

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My weekly comment column daily Plymouth Herald (6.1.26), attempting to challenge the media blanket-lie condemning Maduro as a drug-cartel boss and international criminal. The media suppression of facts is so absolute as to deny any possibility of a full response in 600 words or less. Here’s 900 words, still inadequate, but more fleshed-out than the printed edited version in the paper (which you can read by expanding the picture below). My intention is singularly to ensure there is a left voice in the local paper – to suggest it has any real influence would be nonesense, but please share if you agree.

Stop Trump – Defend Venezuela

Let’s just get this straight. It is perfectly acceptable for Trump to invade Venezuela, bomb homes and kill over 50 people, abduct the President and his wife, and install an administration run by US oil corporations. Really?
No! We are told that, because “The West” never accepted Venezuela’s government of Maduro, it is only right to overthrow it. Like Iraq, and Libya and Chilé and so many other countries.
Regime change follows the logic of unbridled Capitalism – the rule of the most powerful. Power and Control behaviours, nationalist military might and domination, plunder, wealth extraction and accumulation, colonialism and imperialism. The logic of the armed privateer, the legalised gangster.
In the specific case of Venezuela this week, we see the proclaimed right of the United States of America’s Capitalist ruling class to dominate and control the Western Hemisphere.
This is not an interpretation, it is the statement of Trump himself, quoting the doctrine first espoused by President Monroe in his Doctrine of 1823 that warned against interference in the Americas. Monroe declared that the USA owns and controls the American continents.
That means the USA has the right to the subjugation all the peoples, and the exploitation and extraction all the resources of the lands and oceans. By force. Because it can. And for so long as it can.
The people of Latin America have fought back for self determination and national liberation for centuries. From the revolution led by Simon Bolivar in 1797 Venezuelans have fought back against colonialisation from Spain, attempts by Britain and Portugal, and then Corporate domination from the USA. It is a history of the illegal seizure of assets for foreign personal gain versus the use of national resources for national social and local economic collective development.
Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, drove the Bolivarian Revolution into the 21st Century, seeking national control with an emphasis on using Venezuela’s extensive oil revenues to lift the mass of the Country’s poor out of poverty. This was a democratic socialist programme, taking control of the country’s oil assets and beginning the redistribution of the huge wealth away from the richest elite and foreign corporations and towards the country’s population, housing, education, health and social infrastructure. Nationalisation but not workers’ control of industry.
Of course, those in support of Capitalism have fought back. Capitalists hate socialism. They seek to destroy all and any semblance of it, because every social programme eats into their opportunities to hoard private wealth for themselves. Billionaires hate the very ideas of common wealth and social justice. In any class society, one groups’ profits come at great cost to the other.
The invasion of Venezuela has the purpose of the seizure of the country’s valuable natural resources by the USA. But is is also a far-Right ideological assault on democracy and socialism.
Nationalisation of oil reserves is an anathema to the Capitalist Class and their wealthy middle class beneficiaries. Oil is the most profitable of resources. It symbolises power and domination. Those who control oil control the world. That’s fine when owned by self-appointed dictators in Saudi Arabia, compliant with the western corporations, but wholly unacceptable when owned by the Venezuelan State aiming to use the revenue for the good of the People.
Venezuela, as with the rest of the countries of central and southern America, has been constantly beaten down by the military power of the United States for the past centuries. The Bolivarian Revolution was constantly weakened by attempted coups and para-military insurgencies funded and controlled by the USA. The resulting frailties of the Maduro administration was hammered for years by US and Western economic sanctions and blockades, left open to corruption and subject to powerful assaults by well-funded far-Right insurgents, and infiltration from agents of the country’s own super-rich class and Trump’s military.
Maduro’s government became beseiged, the economy in crisis and inflation rampant. The repression of dissent undermined his base. Trump’s justifications – that Maduro is the boss of a drug cartel, that his regime is undemocratic, are fake. By their own analysis the US State concludes that Venezuela is not one of the world’s major drug exporting countries.
Trump is continuing the same old practices – nothing new there. The bombing of Caracas is a naked act of imperialist aggression. Donald Trump’s declaration that “we are going to run Venezuela” sums up the arrogance of US power. This is about removing a regime that has long been a thorn in Washington’s side and seizing the largest oil reserves in the world.
By overthrowing Maduro, Trump is pointing a gun at the head of every other Latin American president, and is challenging the economic links between South America and China. Cuba may be the next target.
It is the sole right of the Venezuelan working class, with their long revolutionary history, to determine governance of Venezuela. Trump may have control of the military, but the mass of the working class support socialism in their own interests. Their fight against recolonisation by US corporations must be reinforced by a global movement of solidarity with the Venezuelan people.
Trade unions in Britain have long supported the rights of workers across South America, just as we support the struggle of the Palestinian people against Israel’s genocidal occupation. The struggles are linked and from the same source. Trump has threatened to take-over Cuba, Panama, Greenland and Canada. These threats continue and will escalate.
Keir Starmer has refused to condemn the coup, incoherently mentioning support for “international law”. He is guilty of active support for genocide in Palestine and now by his silence he makes himself complicit in the assault on Venezuela.
We must protest. Hands of Venezuela! Down with Trump’s pirate empire!

National Flags used as Weapons to Intimidate

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (9.12.25), almost incandescent with anger at the amount of apolitical claptrap being spouted about “finding common ground” with the flag-waving, hate-spouting racists. I’m being told I should “listen to the other side” and “respect the opinions of others”. I refuse! After 50+ years of political activity I know very well what a fascist is, thank you. I know humanity is capable of such a vast spectrum of beliefs and actions that you cannot have common cause with them all. There is a left and a right of the political spectrum, and always has been. And it’s not me but the fascists who will be the first and last to shut you up and shut you down. They must not only be opposed, ardently and collectively, but they must be defeated.

Unedited:

Another racist march through Plymouth last Saturday, and more threatened. A small and bedraggled and of fewer than 60 paraded huge union jacks and flags of St George around the Barbican and Frankfort Gate with clear intent. To use Britain’s national flags as weapons to intimidate all people of colour.
They wish for Britain to be a white-supremacist Apartheid State, those of colour to be subjugated as second or third-class citizens or forcibly deported in their millions. They spout absurd assertions that Britain has been taken-over by Muslims or Black power.
They scream “save our kids” to present the lie that migrants en-masse are sex-abusers, without any evidence and when the vast majority of child sexual abuse occurs in white families, because Britain is an 85% white-skinned population. They demand “stop the boats” when the total costs of offering asylum to those suffering is a fraction of one-percent of the country’s gross domestic product, and Britain is fuelling the wars and climate chaos from which they’re escaping.
Those who called the demonstration publicised their rallying cry across the entire South West from Bristol to Truro for extremists to converge upon Plymouth. A few of the most mouthy on the day have been seen demonstrating outside a hotel where traumatised people who are totally innocent and have every right to be here. They brandish emblems of “Britain First”, a fascist organisation formed out of the failed British National Party in 2011 and allied with fascists across Europe such as Germany’s AfD, supported by Donald Trump.
Members of Patriotic Alternative, a white-supremacist hate-group have also been involved. Flag Force Plymouth, the ones hanging flags from lampposts to intimidate and claim communities as ruled by them, are directly allied to these far-right and neo-nazi groups. The question has to be asked, by what right do they have freedom to march in Plymouth or anywhere else, spouting racial hatred and misogyny?
Police data, publicly available, shows that over 40% of the far-Right protesters arrested in the last year had previous offences of violence against women or had been reported for domestic abuse. Perhaps their calls for justice for women and girls are another example of the actual perpetrators hiding in plain sight.
Thankfully, the people wanting to expose the lies of the far-Right turned-out on Saturday, as we always do, to swamp the fascist-led flag-usurpers, trade unionists and human-rights protesters outnumbering them three-to-one. But the vast majority of decent Plymothians should be up-in-arms against the far-Right, not just a dedicated few.
The media and government are broadcasting much of the same racist mythology, with one aim in mind. To distract and desert attention from the crisis of low pay and high prices, poor housing and the fragmentation of health and social care services. “Blame the Boat people” just doesn’t work. Asylum seekers are not the landlords hiking unaffordable rents, refugees are not the directors and shareholders of the banks extorting our cash through high interest rates, and do not own the energy companies creating our fuel poverty. Black migrant workers are the ones propping-up our caring services despite the efforts of Starmer’s government to expel them.
Now, trade unions and campaign groups have formed a fresh alliance to challenge the lies and hatred. The Together-Alliance against the far-Right is uniting the country, from civil organisations through to celebrities, Friends of the Earth to Paloma Faith and Lenny Henry, to Stand Up To Racism. Join us and defeat hatred. http://www.togetheralliance.org.uk

Gaza Deal is a Lie

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This Week’s column in the daily Plymouth Herald (14.10.25), stating the obvious about Trump’s Plan for Gaza – no plan at all for Palestinian sovereignty. It is not just that our protests against genocide need to continue, but they must grow and combine anti-imperialism and opposition to rearmament before we’re all treated like Gazans. Written on Monday morning whilst watching the Trump Show, by publication on Tuesday morning the spectacle had already been exposed as an empty fraud to be condemned. The Big Lie! Keep protesting!

Here’s the original unedited version (900 words) with the printed version (max 600) beneath.

So President Trump has proclaimed Peace in the Middle East and the end of the violence against the people of Gaza! Why, then, did 600,000 people march through London last weekend calling for Freedom for Palestine? They’ve won, haven’t they?
No! This ceasefire is a respite, the third ceasefire in the two-years of assault upon Gaza. It does not represent peace or justice. It is not a Peace Agreement. Despite all living hostages being released, Israel has not agreed that this is a permanent ceasefire. Medical workers, doctors and nurses arrested without charge during the destruction of the hospitals of Gaza are not being released from detention. Gaza has no electricity, neither water nor sanitation, almost no food, medical supplies or any basic infrastructure whatsoever. No economy. At least 180,000 Palestinians dead including 20,000 children, 5 times that injured, the entire Gazan population of two-million traumatised.
The seige conditions that may be be lifted were always illegitimate, inhuman and illegal under international law. Netanyahu’s Israeli Defence Force has violated one international law after another and is not withdrawing from Gaza. Netanyahu is a war criminal yet applauded by the most powerful rulers of the world. The Israeli State refuses to recognise Palestine and cannot be trusted.
The first phase of the Peace Plan has no timetables and has no plan for self-determination or even representative government for the Palestinian people. The Board of Peace chaired by the President of the United States of America is now unlikely to be administered by Tony Blair, an architect of the illegal invasion of Iraq, and equally unlikely to replace the Israeli occupation with an international military force. In any case, Israel will maintain a security perimeter to Gaza’s borders, ensuring a militarised open-air impoverished prison.
Any Palestinian civil authority will be fragmented and disempowered. The plan does not include any plan for reparations for the wholesale destruction of Gaza by Israel, and no accountability for Netanyahu’s war crimes. There will be no dismantling of all the Israeli settlements in and around Palestine’s West Bank – the larger part of Palestine not even recognised by the Trump Deal – gained by force and ethnic cleaning and declared illegal over decades by the United Nations Council. There’s no right-of-return for any of the 8 million Palestinian diaspora – those already forced from their own land and living in exile.
Previous agreements surrounding Gaza, for example at Camp David or the Oslo accords, have been signed and then discarded by Israel. Earlier this year, the Real-Estate billionaire Steve Witkoff organised a deal accepted by not only by Hamas but a wide range of different regional liberation groups representing a much broader cross-section of Palestinian society. They all signed the Witkoff Deal on August 18th, only to have the entire negotiating team of Hamas targeted by Israeli air strikes hours later, bombing buildings in Doha, Qatar but failing to kill Hamas leaders. Israel can’t be trusted.
Trump’s Plan is neo-colonialist. The racist apartheid military state of Israel wants the entire surrender and subjugation of the people of Gaza. Israel is creating open-air concentration camps of the most intense poverty, heavily restricting water and food aid as well as maintaining a visible and palpable atmosphere of disempowerment and fear. For the Zionist ultra-right nationalists, the Palestinian people are still the target for complete extermination, Palestine to be erased from the map and from history.
This short pause is better than nothing. A respite. But it’s not over. No people can agree and sign-up for the end of their very existence. Israel remains wholly entrenched in Gaza. The people are traumatised and immiserised but have not surrendered. The potential for a viable Palestinian State, as already recognised by the UK and 148 other nations, is further away than the serious opportunity for “a land for all” – a secular and multicultural democratic state from the river to the sea.
The Israeli people may not like Netanyahu but show no wish for a Palestinian State. The loss of support for Israel by the majority of people across the West and further afield is extensive and irreparable. Our protests have made Israel a pariah State.
Gaza represents the most barbarous peak of the logic of the system we are all subjected to. The brutality of Capitalism. Why does no-one ask for Israel to disarm? Why is Israel allowed to produce, site, arm and aim nuclear weapons, threatening their imminent use, whilst all others in the region are banned? Why is the single-ethnicity state of Israel allowed to maintain an Apartheid constitution when the world previously damned and deposed the Apartheid State of South Africa?
The answers are two-fold: the ideological commitment of western politicians to the racist elitist tenets of Zionism, and the capitalist economics clawing at the wealth of the region through imperialist militarism. So the genocide in Gaza has awoken peoples across the world to the nature of Israel and imperialism. There is a movement of millions across five continents that is focussed upon challenging Israel.
This week’s meetings of the most powerful politicans and Corporate directors in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, will include business talks to carve-up the beach-front property rights and the gas and oil extraction off the coast. Trump wants this deal because he wants-in on the Gaza Riviera property developments, and his negotiators are in on the scam.
We can’t easily access these facts of what’s happening. Trump’s friends, centibillionaire Larry Ellison and his son David, own Paramount and are buying media institutions including CNN and TicToc. The billionaire owners of global mass media control the narrative. They buy mass media to ensure it will report what they want said. And censor what they don’t want said.
Trump’s Plan was represented by Trump’s son-in-law-law, the billionaire financier Jared Kushner, his US speculative land acquisitions once bankrolled by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and with major shares in Israel’s finance firm Phoenix known as “the JPMorgan” of Israel. Yet he is portrayed as a neutral player negotiating for human rights.
If the media and politicans can lie straight-faced and contiunously, if the big corporations are granted ever more power and control without challenge, and if the military is allowed to infiltrate public spaces to protect the rich and powerful, then we will all become Gaza – subjugated to the inhuman drive for wealth and power by the billionaire class, and terrorised if we resist.
The Palestine protests will continue. We will apply boycotts, divestments, sanctions (BDS) against Israel to end the genocide and colonisation. We will expose the lies and slights-of-hand of the media spin and political machinations on behalf of the imperialists and colonialists. Freedom for Palestine, self-determination for the people, is the test for freedom for us all.

In print:

President Trump has proclaimed Peace in the Middle East and the end of the violence against the people of Gaza! Why, then, did 600,000 people march through London last weekend calling for Freedom for Palestine? We’ve won, haven’t we?
No! This ceasefire is a respite, the third ceasefire in the two-years of the current assault upon Gaza. It does not represent peace or justice. Despite all living hostages being released, Israel has not agreed that this is a permanent ceasefire. Gaza has no electricity, neither water nor sanitation, almost no food, medical supplies or any basic infrastructure whatsoever. At least 180,000 Palestinians dead, 5 times more injured, the entire Gazan population of two-million traumatised.
The siege conditions are illegitimate, inhuman and illegal under international law. Netanyahu’s Israeli Defence Force has violated one international law after another and is not withdrawing from Gaza. The Israeli State refuses to recognise Palestine and cannot be trusted.
The first phase of the Peace Plan has no timetables and has no plan for self-determination or any representative government for the Palestinian people. Any Palestinian civil authority will be fragmented and disempowered.
A Board of Peace chaired by the President of the United States of America is yet to be organised, unlikely to include the hated Tony Blair or to replace the Israeli occupation with an international military force, the tensions high across the Region. However contrived, Gaza will remain a militarised open-air impoverished prison, the IDF securing its perimeter.
The Plan does not include any details of reparations for the wholesale destruction of Gaza by Israel, and no accountability for Netanyahu’s war crimes. There will be no dismantling of all the Israeli settlements in and around Palestine’s West Bank, gained by force and ethnic cleaning and declared illegal over decades by the United Nations Council. There’s no right-of-return for any of the 8 million Palestinian diaspora – those already forced from their own land and living in exile.
This short pause is better than nothing. A respite. But it’s not over. No people can agree and sign-up for the end of their very existence. The people are traumatised and immiserised but have not surrendered. The potential for a viable Palestinian State, as already recognised by the UK and 148 other nations, is further away than the serious opportunity for “a land for all” – a secular and multicultural democratic state from the river to the sea.
Gaza represents the most barbarous peak of the logic of the system we are all subjected to: the ideological commitment of western politicians to the racist elitist tenets of Zionism, and the capitalist economics clawing at the wealth of the region through imperialist militarism.
Today’s meeting of the most powerful politicians and Corporate directors in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, includes business talks to carve-up the beach-front property rights and the gas and oil extraction off the coast. Trump wants this deal because he wants-in on the “Gaza Riviera” property developments.
The media and politicians obscure the facts. We are all at risk of becoming Gazans – subjugated to the inhuman drive for wealth and power by the billionaire class, and terrorised if we resist. The big corporations are granted ever more power and control without challenge, and the military is allowed to infiltrate public spaces to protect the rich and powerful.
The Palestine protests will continue. We will apply boycotts, divestments, sanctions (BDS) to end the genocide and colonisation. We will expose the lies and slights-of-hand of the media spin and political machinations. Freedom for Palestine! Self-determination for the people! Gaza is the test for freedom for us all.

Far-Right call to Arms is a Chilling Sentiment

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (16.9.25), listing a few of the policies of President Trump, representing a clear and present danger to the working class of USA, and indeed, everywhere. The speed of change must be disorientating for most of us but we have to catch-up. Fascism is off-the-leash and has to be challenged.

Trump falsely blamed the “radical left” last week, following the political assassination of his ally, Charlie Kirk. Trump’s was a far-Right call to arms by the holder of the most powerful position in the world, reverberating everywhere. He will no longer tolerate the protests against genocide in Gaza, for action on Climate and for Peace not War.

In fact the assassination of Kirk had nothing to do with the Left but did create a martyr to rally behind. History is littered with such acts. The Left tends not to have skilled marksmen nor to advocate individual acts of terrorism. We know that assassinations produce exactly this reaction of state clampdowns and reprisals. 

Socialists and trade unionists organise for a collective response to exploitation and oppression, knowing that individuals cannot wield the level of power needed to live with agency and free choice. We know that a society based upon powerful hierarchies ensures the tyranny of a ruling class controlling the lower ranks, profiting from all our toil.

The “radical Left”, as Trump describes us, organises against exploitation and oppression. In very real terms, we want the end of poverty through redistribution of the product of our working lives – working for each others needs not the avarice and hoarding of multi-millionaires and billionaires. That’s obviously why the rich hate us so much that they call us dangerous subversives, we are challenging the system that they create and run for their own advantage. We deny their right to exploit us.

Trump’s State visit to the UK today will see parliamentary democrats celebrate the global leader of the far-Right , a Labour Prime Minister dancing to the tunes of a billionaire organising for totalitarian power and control. 

Trump’s defence of the far-Right racist misogynist, Charlie Kirk illustrates his true intent very well. Kirk’s speeches were racist and hate-filled, the 31-year-old evangelical firebrand of the far-Right publicly arguing that Black pilots were incompetent compared with white-skinned pilots, Gays should be stoned. He opposed all gun control, abortion, denied trans-rights, denied the climate emergency, condemned Martin Luther King Jnr and the Civil Rights Movements, Black Lives Matter and the Me Too women’s movements. The misogynist Kirk promoted Christian nationalism, advanced COVID-19 misinformation and was a proponent of the white-supremacist’s Great Replacement conspiracy theory. 

Trump’s represents the drive to dictatorship, seeking domination at home as well as abroad. Democracy will not be allowed to get in the way of his global protection racket, his tariffed numbers game. Trump is threatening to jail judges who rule against him, ending the separation of legislators from the judiciary, a key safeguard for checks and balances.

US military spending is at an all time high under Trump: $1trillion a year announced in April, ten times that of any other country, for new nuclear weapons systems as well as expansion of “homeland security”, despite increasingly severe poverty of tens of millions of Americans and a faltering economy. 

Trump as Commander in Chief has ordered the US Army to swear-in four executives from the technology industries as Lieutenant Colonels, politicising the chain-of-command: Shayam Sankar, the CTO of Palantir (Peter Thiel’s company), Andrew Bosworth, the CTO of Meta (Mark Zuckerberg’s company) and OpenAI’s chief product officer Kevin Weil and former chief research officer Bob McGrew, (the company belonging to Sam Altman.) 

The definition of fascism includes the maintenance of capitalism but through the melding  together of the big corporations and the State. It’s happening, the billionaires taking charge, employing street gangs to exert terror.

Consider the conditions now engulfing America. Armed and masked men in plain clothing are beating and arresting people of colour in most American cities now, sub-contractors of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency deporting record numbers of migrants in a multicultural country built upon immigration and colonisation. This is a fundamental change to the Constitution.

Of course there is organised opposition and resistance to Trump’s continent-wide militarisation of American society. But not nearly enough, the fear palpable on the streets and in workplaces, trade unions weakened and disorganised in response. 

Why is Starmer courting this far-Right autocrat? Why is Starmer enacting the same policies here? And why are so-called “English Patriots” supporting the domination of Britain by a foreign military power? 

The lessons for the UK should be obvious. In defence of democracy Trump should have no place here, let alone the accolades of a State Visit. In defence of worker’s rights British trade unions should protest his appearance. In defence of equality, human rights and social justice we should take to the streets and expose Trump’s racism, violence and corruption. Only fools want the UK to become the 51st State of Trump’s Amerikkka.

Tony Staunton

President, Plymouth Trades Union Council

Defend Workers Rights and Defeat Fascism

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (9.9.25) challenging the media censorship of the words “fascism” and identification of active fascists in the UK. In the course of a broadcast BBC interview with me, editors clumsily cut my sentences to ensure the word fascist” wasn’t included. That is a sophisticated editorial decision, and probably institutionally dictated. This was published before the violent protest by the fascist Tommy Robinson supporters on Saturday 13th September 2025, an historic turning point with upwards of 250,000 supporters racist Islamaphobe surrounded and kettled 15,000 anti-racists, boot-boys looking to assault us all. We were kettled for over three hours, the Police having allowed the mobs to encircle us in Whitehall, the seat of UK Governance. The Nazi-saluting Elon Musk addressed the huge gathering, having donated towards the costs of coaches from across the countries and thousands of nationalist flags, to state that the current British government must be dissolved, and the gathering should prepare to fight to defend themselves. My article had not anticipated the grotesque scale of the rise of organised racism in Britain, but the point is made in print, in time. We need to call out fascism, everywhere, all the time.

The unedited version below:

There are fascists in Britain. Organised fascists. And they are organising. But we don’t talk about them.
Across Europe there have been fascists ever since Mussolini first adopted the political concept of a mass movement for authoritarian rule. Political descendants of Hitler’s National Socialist “Nazis” in Germany and Franco’s authoritarian Falange militarist party in Spain still hold positions of power and privilege today, their street supporters numbering millions locally identified and opposed.
In the United States various fascist organisations parade with their guns demanding male white supremacy, allied with or spawned from the Ku Klux Klan and their vigilante lynch mobs.
In Britain, with the historical echo of us fighting and beating the fascists in the Second World War, tolerance of fascist speech and fascist organisation has been understandably very low by comparison. Low until now. British fascists are on the streets once again, funded by those in Europe and the USA.
Post-war Britain saw working class mobilisations destroying the fascist organisation of Moseley’s Blackshirts – his street thugs finally routed in the Battle of Cable Street. In the 1970’s we organised a mass movement against the fascist National Front through the Anti-Nazi League, in the ‘80’s and 90’s we beat-back the BNP through Unite Against Fascism. This century we mobilised against the English Defence League organised amongst the violence-obsessed ultra-nationalists on the football terraces.
But now we have a new breed who have studied and analysed their previous defeats and built a militarised cadre of organisers across Britain. Some fascist groups are proscribed, but new forces imported from the USA are permeating local housing estates and community organisations.
The largest fascist group, the Homeland Party has emerged from the neo-nazi “Patriotic Alternative” as a front-runner here, preaching white-supremacism and “white nationalism”. The “National Rebirth Party” and the previously defunct UKIP group led by the fascist Nic Tenconi are also competing for leadership. With links to American groups they’re helping fund the “Fly the Flag” ultra-nationalist protests across the UK, in competition with the “Britain First” fascist group, their leaders identified at the “Flag” demonstrations in Plymouth last week. They brandish Nazi salutes of Seig Heil and lead the chants of “let them drown”, whipping-up racist division.
Fascists are peddlers of myths and superstitions, lies and conspiracies. Fascists feed on fear and guilt and powerlessness. Fascists use individual force and violence to remove all opposition, weaponising individual traits to victimise entire minorities, creating division inside the working class. They currently lead the “anti-woke” brigades, opposing multiculturalism, gay and trans-rights, action on the climate emergency, and women’s rights. Fascists are misogynists and antisemites to the core.
Today, as in the past, the fascist organisations are funded by the super-rich and billionaires internationally, tolerated if not fed by mainstream politicians. Why? Because democracy can get in the way of unregulated profiteering and exploitation. Fascists may propagandise against “The Establishment” but theirs’ is no anti-capitalist revolution – on the contrary it is a promotion of dog-eat-dog exploitation and a reaction against any call for equality and human rights.
Today, Capitalism is in crisis and the billionaires are taking control. We are heading for war and climate collapse.
The definition of Fascism is the melding together of the big business corporations and the State. Trump is militarising American cities, placing corporate executives in charge of the military, and encouraging racist scapegoating of migrants. Elon Musk is funding the UK far-Right. Italy’s Meloni is drowning refugees. The fascist Le Pen is set to be France’s next President, fascist street gangs are killing migrants in Spain, and the fascist AfD now controls half of the German republic.
The Centre will not hold. Democracy is in peril.
The international working class is beleaguered and demanding change. The fascists are seizing the opportunity. Trade unions oppose racism and fascism for obvious reasons. The aim of fascism is the atomisation of the working class and liquidation of the Left as a progressive social force. The Capitalist ruling class have let the fascists off the leash for their own self-defence. It’s our job to defend workers rights and defeat fascism once again.
Trade unions will be mobilising for the national counter-protest against the fascist “Tommy Robinson” demonstration in London next Saturday. Standuptoracism.org.uk

Fascists are the threat, not Migrants!

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (20.5.25), warning of the fascist group coming to Plymouth on Saturday 24th May, under the banner “Great British Strike”, emulating the National Socialism of the Nazis, and conning the working class. Please join the counter-demo at the Sundial, Armada Way Plymouth City Centre, 11am.

The full article:

The fascists are coming! On Saturday, Nazi-sympathisers are returning to Plymouth to parade in the city centre that their forebears flattened with blanket bombing 84 years ago. They’re not welcome here!
We say Never Again! Never will we allow Hitlerites to foment violence, scapegoating sections of the working class or minorities identified by our skin colour or gender. Never again will we be conned by talk of white power and male supremacy preached and funded by super-rich multi-millionaires and their billionaire masters.
Fascism took-over in Germany and across Europe one hundred years ago resulting in social terror and genocide and world war in which more than 70 million people died. We should be historically informed and ideologically clear enough by now to recognise and oppose fascism when it speaks.
Fascism allows no free-speech or opposition, especially not organisation of the working classes such as trade unions. All individual interests must be subordinated to the good of the nation’s rulers, defined by those with wealth and power.
Fascism promotes extreme nationalism and militarism breeding contempt for electoral democracy and cultural diversity. Fascism is a political belief in there being a natural social hierarchy, white men at the top, and the rule of an elite as an autocracy with absolute power. Fascism is favoured by sections of the Capitalist ruling class when rumblings of discontent sound loud amongst workers.
Fascist ultra-nationalism was first fomented across Europe by isolating and demonising Jewish people, dividing the working class and ending with at least 6 million murdered in industrial death camps. Today it is Muslims similarly scapegoated across Europe, and now targeted in Britain as encompassing all Black and Brown-skinned “migrants” wherever born.
Racial hatred is being whipped-up again to divide us and rule us. Onto this stage comes Keir Starmer, echoing the nonsense that migrants are a threat to Britain’s economy, culture and identity. He claims that migration is making us a “country of strangers” when it is the extreme class divisions between rich and poor which segregate and alienate.
We’ve heard it all before. In the 1960’s Enoch Powell said white people were “strangers in their own country”, Nigel Farage marched with the British National Party in the 1980’s and praised Powell as his political hero, now Starmer echoed Powell with his “island of strangers” immigration speech. The fact is, this country’s working class has never tolerated a fascist party and isn’t about to now.
Migration isn’t a threat to the security and wellbeing of the working class. Migrants are not responsible for the housing crisis – rent hikes by landlords, interest rate hikes by banks, construction material price-hikes by monopoly corporations have together caused a crisis totally out of any power or influence of Black migrants.
Migrants are not responsible for the crisis of our Health Services – in fact migrants keep it going amidst decades of underinvestment. Without so-called “foreign-labour” the NHS and care homes for the elderly would not exist. You are far more likely to be helped by a migrant worker in a hospital than be in the queue alongside them.
Migrants are not responsible for the high prices of electricity and gas – they suffer the same charges whilst watching the record profits of Corporations like Shell and BP enrich the shareholding class.
We, the working class, are being fleeced by the super-rich, and fleeced by the same people telling us to blame the poorest and most powerless of the world on the basis of the colour of their skin. We’re not that stupid!
When we see Muslims being butchered in Palestine we protest – 600,000 on the streets of London last weekend. Britain’s multiculturalism is a hallmark of our post-colonial culture and identity.
Last weekend, leading fascist organisers in Britain called on Nazis to join Reform UK. They want to fast-track racism and male-supremacy, on a roll after the Prime Minister’s inflamatory speech.
Starmer is fuelling far-Right scapegoating out of fear of the rising tide of protest against his Austerity Mark 2 programme of social welfare cuts across the UK. We want to see real change for He could raise taxes on the Rich, but he’s on their side. He could restore the Winter Fuel Allowance and gain the support of the majority of of our cash-strapped elderly. He could u-turn on the £5billion cuts to welfare for people with disabilities. He could ensure a living wage for care workers and invest in the NHS and schools rather than military rearmament.
But Starmer is not on the side of the working class. History is littered with failed politicians who sought to appease fascists rather than expose their lies. Starmer is courting the same fate. Trade unionists must stand together and demand redistribution of wealth from the super-rich to the working class.

Trump’s Tariffs will not Help the Working Class

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My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (8.4.25), following a weekend campaign stall which heard many local people saying they “like Trump”. In general, nationalist sentiments and comments were the majority. Socialists really do need to heed this shift to the right, and argue back. I can’t offer any deep economic analysis and would never predict the global impact of Trump’s tariffs, but one thing’s for sure. The working class is going to pay a heavy price, everywhere.

What have tariffs to do with us?

In Truth there is no such thing as the “National Interest”. We are not one nation, not because of any differences in skin colour or ethnicity, but because of social class. The richest 20% of British citizens live totally separate and different lives from the poorest 20%. In general their bonuses come from our losses.
Tax cuts for the rich do not benefit the poor in any way. Surplus personal wealth tends to be spent on luxuries, the larger amounts squirrelled away in off-shore tax-free bank accounts. In Britain the luxuries mostly come from overseas, the luxury holidays generally happen overseas, the upper-middle and super-rich upper class investing in cheap labour overseas. The working class hardly ever see the real wealth of our Nation.
Trump’s tariffs are portrayed as his attempt to pull production back to the United States of America in order to revitalise their endebted economy and improve the condition of the poorest. He has no such intention, and in any case, tariffs don’t do that. Trump’s taxes on imports to the USA will fuel price rises, maintaining or even increasing inflation at home and abroad.
The tariffs will damage any capitalist’s confidence in investing, anywhere. Last week’s sudden record losses on stock markets worldwide are evidence of this. The retaliation of other countries with large economies, imposing tariffs on US goods will replicate the inflationary pressures worldwide.
The UK’s economy is stagnant already. Before Trump, for the poorest 50% of people in the UK, prices kept going up and our spending power decline. The tariffs will ensure this continues. The outlook is stagflation.
We are already suffering disgusting inequality and poverty levels. Low wages, precarious work, 6 million households in fuel poverty, 4 million children in poverty. To judge where you sit in the hierarchy of rich v poor, just consider that Britain’s median hourly wage is around £37,000 per year before tax, roughly the same as in 2006. Most wage-rates have been pulled down by wage-compression resulting in the top 10% of salaries averaging £73k, the poorest 10% less than £23k. Standard Universal Credit per adult £5kpa. State pensioner a maximum of 12kpa. Of course the super-rich aren’t in these stats – they’re the directors and executives and property owners – not the workers – averaging £200kpa before bonuses and dividends. Where do you sit?
The top 10% of households hold 43% of the country’s wealth while the bottom 50% of us (33 million citizens) share just 9%. The 170 UK multi-billionaires own £700billion between them, their collective income rising over £30bn in the last year. We never see their money.
America’s gap between rich and poor is even more extreme. Trump’s primary motive in enforcing tariffs is to get more dollars into the USA’s federal budget to be able to further cut the rate of tax for the wealthiest in America. Damn the poor, the social infrastructure and welfare services. Why any working class person would still wish to support Trump beggars belief.
We have lived the fact that the rich having more cash doesn’t trickle down to the poor, quite the opposite. The poor pay substantially more of our disposable income on essentials with little or nothing for luxuries, the prices of which will now skyrocket.
Trump’s tariffs will make the price of essentials increase. Here in the UK. The world’s smallest countries are being hit so hard they will be plunged into even more abject poverty (the current jokes about penguins are not really funny). The big economies responding with tariffs of their own will cost their working class a double-whammy.
Trump’s administration isn’t benign. His people know the history of trade wars. They’re not stupid. Tariffs deepen economic competition and lead to military competition. Trade wars lead to world wars. The USA has a military budget that dwarfs the rest of the world’s combined. And wars make huge money for the arms manufacturers at the expense of everyone else.
Little wonder Starmer’s government and those across the world are now preaching rearmament and militarism. Nationalism is being drummed into our working class mindset as a prelude to war. And wars always make the working classes much poorer, economically, socially and emotionally. Surely, war is not in our interest. And neither is Trump.
More than one million people protested across the USA last weekend, against Trump’s offensive. The working class here must challenge Trump’s poverty policies here, too. Welfare not Warfare!

Imperialist War only Helps the Rich to Get Richer

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (11.3.25), attempting to steer clear of censorship by not mentioning Ukraine or Gaza whilst opposing imperialist war (my original, printed below, did the mention but didn’t get away with it). The pro-war liberals and socialists appear to be confused by the Trump demand for Peace, as if you can’t oppose Trump and Putin and Imperialism. Choosing sides means being with the international working class always, with the bosses never, and consistently against Imperialism as the most powerful form of Capitalism. I haven’t got away with writing that yet!

The original:

The times they are a’changing.
The accelerating shift towards the domination of far-Right political leadership is happening because the global system of Capitalism is in crisis. Regions are scrabbling for resources. Competition is acute.
At such times, as in the 1910’s and the 1930’s, the vulnerable sections of the world’s ruling class turn away from the pleasantries of democracy and towards totalitarian control. Authoritarianism is growing everywhere seeking to make popular the politics of the far-Right.
At best, and only during times of relative prosperity, parliamentary democracy offers a chimera of popular suffrage – the ‘right to vote” symbolising a symbolic engagement of every citizen with the real forces of the Boss Class that rule over our lives and futures. In truth we have little say.
The “mixed-economy” of the 1950’s and ‘60’s allowed the social infrastructure to be rebuilt from the ruins of the Second World War, State taxes claiming 95% of each £ for the highest earners, raising the cash for social (council) housing, health, education, care of children and the elderly and vulnerable, and our nationally owned utilities.
But once the certainty of a working class healthy and educated enough to meet modern employment needs was established, the Capitalists decided to reclaim their profit rates by reducing the amount of tax they pay, at least by half, and organise to get most of the rest back in State-paid allowances to their private businesses. They returned to laissez-faire neo-liberal free-market economics.
The working classes are left to pay for our own services. Today, the super-rich and billionaires pay hardly anything into the common purse whilst getting subsidised by us. They are insatiable and in no way satisfied by the enormous increase in their private wealth and power since the 1970’s.
Most of the huge transnational corporate monopolies are now simply too big to fail, receiving routine tax-bail-outs whilst increasing levels of unrepayable debt.
They are too vulnerable to global tensions to spend their hoards of money. There’s little or no investment from the billions of billions in profits into maintaining the social infrastructure that their businesses need society to provide. If the bosses had to pay for the welfare of their workforce they’d make little profit. Instead, with the global growth of the working class, they don’t need a full pool of locally educated and healthy workers when they can trawl the world for cheap and able labour.
So our Western infrastructure is crumbling, the USA and UK being some of the worst examples. The Capitalists want sure-fired short-term high-yield returns on any investments they make. Public health, public housing, public education (just about anything publicly owned) doesn’t make big profits.
Many essential services and utilities aren’t profitable except through a one-time asset-stripping robbery. Transition of energy supplies to renewables doesn’t make the scale of profits from oil.
So what does make big short term profit apart from fossil fuels (oh, and mind-numbing drugs to manage the alienation of wage-slavery)? War.
A bullet or bomb can only explode once and has to be replaced. There’s no multi-use for munitions. The price of munitions is determined by the market – the more wars, the more demand, the higher the profit. The military-industrial complex cherry-picks for high-return investment, leaving the tax-payer to pay for the true costs of militarisation. High-tech, big bangs and nuclear capabilities make the biggest killing.
As an aside, the destruction of huge areas of infrastructure, let’s say Gaza or the Donbas region of Ukraine, the higher the value of the land and real-estate for fresh private investment. The decaying old infrastructure, now collapsed, can be purloined, owned and rebuilt with high profit margins. The prime land is worth investing in again.
Little wonder there is now a drive to war. It’s not so much about freedom for the People as freedom for the corporations to rejuvenate their portfolios and profit margins. They need to free-up the congested and aging markets to kick-start a fresh round of exploitation of people and natural resources. Wars kick-start a fresh round of plunder of people and natural resources.
Even then, it is the tax-payer who is expected to make the investment in building a new military, not the billionaires. Ruling classes and their tame politicians identify enemies, whip-up nationalism, glory in militarism, start the looting of land, minerals and the cheap labour of the battered survivors.
Politicians make a song and dance about security and justice, whipping-up fear and racism in their drive for compliance, whilst mostly it’s about competition between corporate states for market domination. That’s the definition of imperialism.
War is built-in to the Capitalist System. And always it’s the working class who are conscripted, either through financial imperative or legal requirement, to fight and be shot or die, whilst the profiteers rake-in the cash from wholesale destruction. We pay the price.
Be cautious of any enthusiasm for rearmament. In the immediate, the billions spent on war come at the price of cuts to the essential services we all need. Wars destroy our social infrastructure. Wars come at terrible cost to the survivors, our quality of life shattered, our memories polluted with images of horror, our relationships distorted, all supposedly in the name of our national interest.
The workers of the world never benefit from war. We must invest in Peace. Welfare not Warfare!

We in the UK have to take Trump Seriously

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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.

Trump Buying Gaza? Is he Just Flying a Kite?

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (11.2.25).

The unedited version here, or just widen the picture to read the printed version below.

Flying a kite is supposed to be therapeutic, especially in windy weather. The coloured cloth, swaying ducking and diving makes us chuckle, imagining we’re riding on its back.
Flying a kite is also used as an analogy in politics, meaning to test a proposal in order to see which way the wind blows.
When the world’s most powerful (if most bankrupted) property developer says he’s going to purchase Gaza we all need to understand it as a ploy – he’s flying a kite.
Two-thirds of the residential Palestinian territory of Gaza, home to 2.2million human beings, has been bombed to the ground, leading to President Trump putting-in a bid for ownership and land clearance, exactly as any unprincipled land speculator would do. But who is he proposing to buy it all from?
Our Victorian era saw factory owners ensure such pitiful wages as to render residential areas into slums, then change their caps to announce themselves as Landlords, turfing-out the poor people they had produced in order to clear the estate and rebuild to make money both from the stolen capital and the increased revenue.
Today this continues in Britain in the street-by-street “gentrification”, privatising the people’s Council Housing and speculating on property prices. Across the world the clearance of entire estates is recognised as ethnic cleansing.
The puppet-men of western parliaments have responded to Trump’s proposal with guffaws rather than outright condemnation, in awe at the height and speed and light of Trump’s kite display. Secretly, of course, being of the same ilk, they wish they’d had the guts to suggest it. They believe in the unethical and unprincipled system of Capitalism.
Gaza is a bomb site. It is, as Trump says, full of unexplored ordnance as well as the rotting corpses of tens of thousands of women and children, as inseparable from the collapsed concrete rubble as is the human dust of those burnt to death in the Grenfell Tower horror – also caused by property speculators.
Officially the body parts of around 50,000 humans can be offered as proof of mass killing of Gazans by the American bombs and bullets supplied to the Israeli Defence Forces. The missing, unaccounted for or deceased due to starvation and disease raise the number towards 200,000, two-thirds of whom were women or children.
This is why we follow the United Nations International Court of Justice in identifying all this as the indicators of Genocide – illegal under the Geneva Convention and the laws of so many States, including our own. Such levels of one-sided murder and maiming also explain why President Trump’s Disunited States of America has withdrawn itself from all matters of international community and international law, and exempted themselves from accountability at home.
Every predatory Capitalist will tell you. State laws get in the way of making money.
Most if not all laws protecting human rights have been fought for and won only by collective campaigning and open fights for them over generations – mainly by the world’s working classes. The working day, women’s rights, health & safety, housing and medical care are not offered freely by those who have wealth and power. We have campaigned and fought, and many died, in pursuit of our human rights.
And every time we take our newly-won comforts for granted, the predators creep-up to take them from us again. In Britain we have returned to a low-waged, long-working hours dog-eat-dog crumbling terrain.
In Gaza, and now planned for the much larger Palestinian region of the West Bank, the final solution for dealing with Gazans as “surplus humanity” (the term used by a self-proclaimed fascist and racist war minister in the Israeli Knesset) is to have them “clear out”.
It’s a class thing. For the ruling class, we the masses are there to produce more wealth for them. If we don’t we’re in the way. Surplus. An impediment to growth and prosperity.
For Trump, clearing Gaza is worth a try, for him and his peers to make $$$billions from the process of land-clearance that made America “great” in the first place – the murder of millions of native Americans already living there, and the slave-labour of the millions imported to build the new estate.
Unless we challenge Imperialism, the international height of Capitalist exploitation, we too will be enslaved. If Gazans are deemed surplus today you can rest assured it’ll be you soon after.
That’s why the fight for human rights for Palestinians, and the right of Gazans to stay and prosper in their homeland funded by reparations for the genocide they’ve endured, is a fight for the entire global working class. In this regard, we are all Palestinians.
Any self-respecting politician who claims to care for the working classes has to be held by this standard. Are you a true tribune of the oppressed? Do you care for and fight for those born at a disadvantage? To each and every Labour politician the question is asked. Do you recognise Palestine?
We will March again on Saturday 15th February – join us.

Needs of People Must Come Before Profits

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

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

The Needs of People have to Come Before Profit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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