Only one choice...

Some of the childish elements on the left would have us believe that nothing could be worse than a Labour government led by Sir Keir Starmer. But last week’s Tory conference showed that no matter how bad the current Labour leadership is, the Tories are much, much worse.
There, in Manchester,  nonsensical talk about raising the retirement age to 75 was taken seriously while the former UKIP leader, Nigel Farage, who was covering conference for GB News, virtually outshone everyone on Rishi Sunak’s front bench.
Though Rishi Sunak had hinted that the former Brexit campaigner would be welcomed back by the party he left in 1992 no one seriously thinks it will ever happen, least of all Farage who says he’s not even interested in returning to Sunak’s “broad church”,.
But working till you drop could happen if former Brexit negotiator Lord Frost has his way. The Tory grandee told delegates that “the honest truth is that the pension age is going to have to go up quite a long way to solve this problem [of reducing public expenditure],That seems to me the best way of getting out of it in the medium term”.
“The big blocks of spending are health, pension, and benefits,” says the noble lord. “If you don’t tackle those you’re not really tackling anything. People are much healthier than they used to be and I think [the pension age] does need to go up,” he said. Asked whether it should be raised to 70, he replied “75, it’s quite a lot higher”.
Needless to say this is too much for even the Blairites to swallow. And as we’re in the run-up to the next general election there will, thankfully, be few takers in the Sunak camp for Frost’s draconian plan.  But this is what we’re up against.
Crawling to the Americans isn’t just about preserving British imperialism’s interests around the world or upholding the “special relationship” with what some Tory politicians still regard as our “trans-Atlantic cousins”. It’s about admiring the unfettered capitalist system that operates in the United States – a billionaires’ playground that’s hell on earth for the poor,  and the sick and the elderly who cannot afford to pay for treatment in the “land of the free”. This is what they want here. Liz Truss leads the pack but there’s plenty more that agree with her free-for-all neo-con economics that nearly brought Britain to its knees during her brief spell in office last year. 
The social-democrats may not be much better. The slavish support of their leaders for what they think is the dominant section of the ruling class has led to betrayal after betrayal.   
 But the possibility of change remains as long as Labour retains its links with the trade unions and the co‑operative movement.
We need to defeat the right‑wing within the movement and strengthen the left within the Labour Party and the unions to create a democratic Labour Party that will carry out the demands of organised labour when in office.
Bourgeois democracy is a fraud. It is democracy for the exploiters and dictatorship in all but a formal sense of the exploited. Bourgeois elections, when they are held, are used so that the smallest number of people can manipulate the maximum number of votes.
Standing left candidates without mass support against Labour only divides the movement and ignores the obvious fact that, at the moment, the only realistic alternative to a Tory government is one led by Labour.

Free all political prisoners in Ukraine!

Western politicians are the first to proclaim their support for civil liberties and religious and political freedom. Some civil rights campaigners are elevated like icons by the Western “human rights” campaigners. The chosen few even get awards from the European Parliament and the United Nations. But those who serve the interests of imperialism.
Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks campaigner languishes in Belmarsh jail ignored by those who loudly proclaim their support for free speech in the bourgeois media.
We see the bourgeois ‘human rights’ gang brand freedom-fighters as “terrorists” whilst passing off the brutish gunmen who served imperialism in Syria as the “moderate opposition”. We see the imperialists and their lackeys  holding “Summits for Democracy” to provide a platform for a new propaganda offensive against People’s China, Russia and the rest of the world that refuses to submit to Western economic and political control.

We see some of the worst human rights abusers in the world, such as Israel, Ukraine and, of course, the USA itself, hailed as bastions of freedom and democracy. 
In Ukraine all opposition parties have been banned. Thousands of Ukrainians – journalists, politicians, elected representatives, activists, priests, sportspeople, and even Ukrainian negotiators and military officers have jailed on trumped up charges of “treason” or support for Russia. Some have been tortured or murdered by the police or the fascist militias that prop up the Zelensky regime.
Since the Russian intervention most of our media has claimed that the fascist groups in Ukraine have changed their spots and are no longer fascists, but "patriotic defenders of Ukraine". We refuse to believe this ridiculous claim which is completely at odds with the evidence.
We think it is essential to speak out about the actions of a government for whom the British government seems to have unlimited resources to support, at a time when millions here in Britain are facing a grim and uncertain future and our basic public services are chronically underfunded and understaffed.
We stand side by side with the victims of fascist oppression in Ukraine. We demand their immediate and unconditional release and the restoration of full civil and political rights in Ukraine.

Something for everyone

They say it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good and that was certainly true of last week’s by-election results. Labour and the Liberal Democrats both took Conservative seats and the Tories managed to hold their other former bastion in suburban London.
Though there was, indeed, something for everyone in the results the biggest winners were the Lib-Dems, once again on the come-back trail. The Tories actually held onto Boris Johnson’s old seat, albeit by the skin of their teeth. And though the Starmer crowd were disappointed in failing to take all three seats the overall swing in their favour puts them on course to victory at the next general election. 
That, however, is not a foregone conclusion. With little to choose from between Labour and the Conservatives there’s going to be little incentive to even bother to vote next year. This can only work in favour of the Scottish nationalists and the Liberal Democrats who   share a firm commitment to take Britain back into the European Union and would almost certainly ally with the Remainer factions in Labour and the Tory party to create favourable conditions for a “rejoiner” second referendum in the not too distant future.
We had a golden opportunity to open the doors to free trade across the world when we left the EU. Boris Johnson wasted it crawling to the Americans. But returning to the EU is not the answer. You only have to look at what’s happening on the streets of France to see that the European Union is hardly a pillar of social justice. The only way out of the capitalist crisis is socialism and that can only come by ourselves alone, not the European Union or the United States of America.