Deck the halls…

The decorations are up, the Christmas lights are on and the costumed Santas are ho, ho hoing back in the grottos of departmental stores up and down the country. But the shadow of the plague once again hovers over the land as we don on our masks and queue for booster jabs, waiting for the almost inevitable fourth lockdown in the New Year.
    They tell us that this is the season of goodwill. Boris Johnson, for one, will certainly hope so now that the knives are out for him as he’s no longer of any further use to the ruling class.
    The back-stabbers include the grandees he purged in the run-up to the Brexit election of 2019 as well as those who see the scandal-ridden Tory leader as a political liability and the obstacle to restoring the “special relationship” that they believed once existed between British and American imperialism.
    The Prime Minister, who has always believed in his ability to talk his way out of any embarrassing situation, is clearly in deep trouble. Johnson crawls to the Americans over Assange and nukes to Australia, but he cannot see that unless he honours the agreement with the Irish government and the rest of the European Union that he signed up to in the first place he’s never going to get into Biden’s good books.
    Johnson may not want to rock the boat with his Ulster Unionist allies but others, including many in his own ranks, are not prepared to accept an endless Ulster veto on British foreign policy – particularly now their votes are no longer needed to maintain the Conservative majority in the House of Commons.
    We are, supposedly, celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ, the founder of Christianity. And as usual, the great and the good will make their annual obeisance to the Nazarene, whom they claim to worship, but whose teachings they ignore for the other 364 days of the year.
    We’ll get more drivel from the clergy, who reserve their most pious platitudes for the supposed birthday of the ‘Prince of Peace’ on 25th December. But like the Pharisees, whom they pretend to scorn, these charlatans ignore the teachings of their Master who drove the money-changers out of the Temple and said “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”.
    But the days when people listened to the rich men who told us that the greatest virtue of humanity was the possession of the largest amount of money are over.
    Nothing demonstrates the superiority of the socialist system over capitalism more than the response to the Covid crisis over the last two years. Democratic Korea has kept COVID‑19 completely out of the country. The people’s governments in China, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam have successfully beaten back the plague whilst hundreds of thousands die and many, many more are struck down by the coronavirus plague in the imperialist heartlands of Western Europe and North America.
    The ruling class maintains that capitalism is the only game in town. And it is – but only for themselves. Capitalism, in the final analysis, is simply a system designed to perpetuate the rule of the landowners, industrialists and capitalists to ensure that a tiny handful of parasites can live the lives of Roman emperors on the backs of the millions upon millions of working people.
    There is only one solution to the capitalist crisis and that is socialism. Let’s make that our resolution for the New Year. Speed the day!