And did those feet…

Boris Johnson was once the darling of Tory Party conference. He was the conference star who could pack halls with cheering delegates who believed that peppering his speech with school-boy Latin quotes put him in the same league as Cicero or Cato the Younger. Now Boris stands in front of a camera drivelling on about building a “New Jerusalem” with opportunities for all whilst his government staggers into another coronavirus crisis that could have been avoided if the lockdown had been maintained.
    COVID-19 is now spreading like the plague in all our universities that were prematurely re-opened last month. It is also returning with a vengeance across Scotland and large parts of northern England. The updated test, track and trace system is faltering, and there is confusion on how to use the NHS smart phone app that’s supposed to warn you of risk of infection.
    Whilst the Government has taken some steps such as the belated order to make face masks mandatory in public spaces that clearly are helpful, there is confusion over the local lockdowns as well as outright opposition from the publicans and the rest of the ‘hospitality’ trade over the 10pm curfews which, they say, will destroy their industry.
    The Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has yet to unveil his post-furlough plan to subsidise jobs over the coming coronavirus winter. But it’s clear that Sunak’s second phase will be a much more limited exercise and that millions of workers could lose their jobs in the coming months.
    “I can't pretend that everyone can do exactly the same job that they were doing at the beginning of this crisis. That's why we've put a lot of resource into trying to create new opportunities,” he says. He says that whilst the Government is “trying to do everything we can to protect as many jobs as possible”, unemployment is “likely to increase”.
    What exactly are these “new opportunities”? Well, Johnson talks about developing offshore wind power that would power every home in the country within 10 years, along with some mortgage reform designed to lure people back into the property market and some waffle about fixing “the injustice of care home funding” by “bringing the magic of averages to the rescue of millions”.
    And there is the “New Jerusalem”, the “bright future”, which Boris says will follow the end of the coronavirus crisis. We’ll see. The Puritans fought a civil war to build a new Jerusalem in 17th Century England. Things didn’t turn out quite the way they planned. Although they did get rid of a king their utopia lasted little beyond the death of their leader, Oliver Cromwell.
    Boris Johnson is no Cromwell and all his talk about a “world-beating” future to come is just more guff from a man who has clearly failed, even by the dismal standards of the Conservative & Unionist Party, to deal with the deadly crisis we are all in.
    Johnson’s vacuous promises barely inspired his own followers. He talked in front of a camera to a nation that was not listening. No one cheered. No one cared.

Trump declares war on the Arabs

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MILLIONS of people have taken to the streets throughout the world to protest against US imperialism’s decision to recognise Israel’s annexation of Arab East Jerusalem. Across the Arab world, from Morocco to the Gulf, demonstrators are denouncing Donald Trump, the chief American war-lord, and demanding action in solidarity with the Palestinians struggling against the barbarous Zionist regime. In occupied Palestine itself, some protesters have been killed and many more wounded in clashes with the Zionist police and security forces.

Moqtada al-Sadr, the militant Iraqi Shia cleric whose Mahdi Army led the Shia Muslim resistance to the American occupation, has called for the expulsion of all Israeli diplomats on Muslim soil and Lebanese cleric Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Shia resistance movement in Lebanon, has called for a united front “in the field” to support the Palestinian resistance against this “foolish decision”, which he hoped meant the “beginning of the end” of Israel.

The Zionists have always dreamt of dominating the Middle East and colonising Palestine. But their petty ambitions are not the driving force of US imperialism. The tail does not wag the dog, and Israel and the American ‘Zionist lobby’ does not dictate American foreign policy. They serve it. They provide American imperialism with a convenient alibi to play the role of ‘honest broker’ in the Middle East. They enable the feudal Arab oil princes to claim that the Arabs’ enemy is not imperialism as such but Israel and this supposedly all-powerful “Zionist lobby”, which pulls the strings in the USA. Trump has now revealed the true face of US imperialism to those venal Arabs who claimed that the Americans could push forward the “peace process”.

The tragedy of the Palestinian Arabs began when British imperialism occupied their land in 1918 and encouraged Zionist immigration. British imperialism sought to create a Zionist community that would prolong their occupation of Palestine indefinitely.

The Zionists helped British colonialism crush the Palestine Revolt in 1936. But in the immediate post-Second World War situation the Zionists seized the opportunity to push for a separate state of their own. In 1948 the British colonial mandate ended and the State of Israel was proclaimed. On that day the first Arab—Israeli war began. It has never ended.

The first war led to the expulsion of a million Palestinian Arabs from their homes by the Zionist regime. Those refugees and their descendants have never given up their right to return to their land. And this is the heart of the crisis in the Middle East that has led to five full-scale wars and continuing simmering conflicts.

Israel is economically and politically entirely dependent on American imperialism, and successive Israeli governments have existed to serve the needs of American imperialism in the region. And those needs are to weaken and divide the Arabs to ensure that the big oil corporations can continue their exploitation and plunder of Arab oil until it eventually runs out.

US imperialism believes it can call all the shots in the Middle East today. The imperialists believe that all resistance can be crushed by brute force and they still believe they can find willing Arab tools to do their bidding, hoist up the white flag and sign a surrender peace.

In the Middle East imperialist violence always leads to an equally violent resistance. Imperialism’s refusal to recognise this has led to the spiral of violence and terror that began in 1948 as a regional war to a conflict that now spans the whole world.

We call for the immediate and unconditional end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Syria’s Golan Heights, to pave the way for a comprehensive peace treaty to end the conflict in the Middle East based on past United Nations resolutions. A lasting solution must be based on the right of return of the Palestinian refugees and an independent Palestinian state, with Israel giving up all territories seized since 1967, including Arab East Jerusalem.