Tag: warfare

Here’s Hoping for a Happy New Year!

Tony Staunton1 Comment

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

Here’s hoping for a Happy New Year!

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

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

Heading into Strife

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly Comment int he daily Plymouth Herald (14.5.24) seeking to expose the “disaster capitalism” manifesto of Rishi Sunak, ex-hedge fund manager who made millions out of the global financial crash of 2008. It is difficult to say “corrupt”, “gangster”, “liar” and “spiv” of a Prime Minister and get it published. Nevertheless, my hatred of Sunak and his billionaire class has to be broadcast by whatever means necessary.

The Prime Minister began this week by warning that the next five years will see fundamental changes to the way of life in Britain. What could he be speaking of?

The beleaguered Sunak predicts more will change in the next five years than in the last 30.

“I’m convinced that the next few years will be some of the most dangerous yet most transformational our country has ever known.”

It sounds more like a threat than a promise. The signs are there. Tensions inside this country and across the world are ramping-up exponentially. Governments are responsible for the highest levels of corruption and self-interest, using propaganda mechanisms of nationalism and racism to maintain social control by setting us each against the other. 

All the time the politicians are managing the plundering of the tax-payers’ coffers and extracting record profits from all the necessities of life, our where-with-all being hoarded into the private off-shore bank accounts of the super-rich.

Internationally we are seeing deepening and entrenched warfare, Britain being drawn on the coat tails of the United States of America into direct engagement in Ukraine and Palestine, Africa and the South China Seas. Little wonder more tax money will be diverted to the military and away from spending on social welfare at home.

And no wonder that more millions of human beings are being forced to seek asylum, to migrate from their homelands, forced by everything from ethnic cleansing and genocides to climate collapse. 

The climate emergency has turned already into catastrophe for hundreds of millions across what is politically termed the “Global South” – those regions that have seen labour and natural resources plundered for the benefit of the nations of the North. Their crisis is coming our way, fast.

The climate changes that are killing millions each year are now hitting us. In Britain, eight months of record breaking rain represents new and less predictable patterns of extremes, in temperature, precipitation, meteorological seasons and the power of extreme weather events.

The unique speed of the rise in global temperatures is causing not only food shortages but the spread of disease. The classic killers and disabling infections of hot climates, such as malaria and Lyme disease are here now, brought north by warmer conditions by mosquitos and ticks, and fungal spores. 

The economic inequalities caused by harvest collapse, food shortages and transport disruption caused by both war and climate change will only produce more poverty, war and global warming.

So, sad as it is to admit, Sunak is correct. We are heading into social strife. 

What is left unsaid is that this is all the doing of Sunak and his Capitalist ilk, as part of the global political class and their Corporate masters who have created all these conditions: funding wars to reap massive profits for the arms manufacturers and fossil fuel companies; denying and investing billions in propaganda campaigns against the science of climate change and effective remedies; demanding tax-billions for pharmaceutical companies to cherry-pick the most lucrative vaccine markets and disregard the rest; and the super-rich driven by avarice, ready to make a short-term profit at the expense of the future of humanity.

The single most noticeable change we will experience over the next 5 years is the intensification of authoritarianism, whatever the party of government. More punishments for strikers and protesters daring to challenge all the above and demand investment in the future of humanity. More intense political repression is inevitable, that is, unless we increase protests now to protect democracy and force the political change we need. 

Right now, the students are leading the way!  Show them every support! Turn up with food and water, send them money, protect them from assault. Build the Resistance!