Bad news on the doorstep

Rising prices, logjams at the ports, uncertainty on the jobs market and a damning report on the Government’s mishandling of the Covid crisis. Boris Johnson has, predictably, crept off to sun himself in Spain to avoid the flak. Not that there’s much of it these days. What little opposition there is to Johnson is limited to some columnists in the bourgeois press and the backstabbers in his own party. Starmer confines himself to ritual jousts with Johnson in Parliament while his party sinks into a morass of its own making over the Blairite drive to boot out all the remaining Corbynistas from Labour’s ranks.
    Johnson says his government is going to “level up” society with a “high-wage high skill” and “low tax economy” which he claims the capitalist market can deliver. But only where there is a clear labour shortage like the current need for more lorry drivers and the dearth of fruit pickers due to the end of cheap labour from the European Union.
    Pay rises are rarely the gift of the employer. They have to be won by unions determined to fight for their members’ interests and not those of their own bureaucracies whose only interest is to advance their own careers and pump up their own juicy pension pots.
    Johnson and Starmer both foster the illusion that we are all in it together, But we’re not. Workers don’t have a stake in capitalism not do they benefit from some trickle-down effect.
    All we get from the capitalist table is the crumbs and that’s all we’re ever going to get while capitalism survives. It is either us or them; the workers or the bosses. The alternative to workers’ power is a festering morass of exploitation of working people and the environment, racial and communal strife, rapid growth in crime, drug trafficking, violence and conflict from local to international levels. The capitalists must not be allowed to destroy society; it is they who must be supplanted.
    Until such time as socialism replaces capitalism, there needs to be a continuous political struggle to defend and improve social services and benefits. In tandem with this fight there must be a collective industrial struggle for better wages and working conditions that takes on the capitalist class head on

Standing up for Palestine

Congratulations to Sally Rooney, the Irish novelist who refused to allow her best-selling new book to be translated into Hebrew by an Israeli company. The author says she was answering the call from Palestinian civil society to impose “an economic and cultural boycott of complicit Israeli companies,” referring to BDS – boycott, divestment and sanctions – as an “anti-racist and non-violent” movement.
    The acclaimed writer turned down a bid by the Modan Publishing House to translate and publish Beautiful World, Where Are You because she could not "accept a new contract with an Israeli company that does not publicly distance itself from apartheid and support the UN-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people”.
    But "the Hebrew-language translation rights to my new novel are still available, and if I can find a way to sell these rights that is compliant with the BDS movement's institutional boycott guidelines, I will be very pleased and proud to do so."
    Ms Rooney cited reports published by Israeli human rights group B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch earlier this year belatedly recognising Israel’s system of apartheid imposed on Palestinians. These reports “confirmed what Palestinian human rights groups have long been saying: Israel’s system of racial domination and segregation against Palestinians meets the definition of apartheid under international law,” she said.