skip to main |
skip to sidebar
So Rishi Sunak is going to Egypt after all for COP27 – or to give it its full name the 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. There he’ll meet his master, Jo Biden, as well as the leaders of Franco-German imperialism and the rest of the imperialist pack gathering at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheikh for the largest annual conference on climate change.
The woman Sunak kicked out of Downing Street not only shunned the UN jamboree but put the block on the King’s attendance as well. This was not surprising. Liz Truss filled her mercifully short-lived government with climate-change deniers like Jacob Rees-Mogg. She had ties with the anti-climate change lobby and she was also a vocal advocate for the role of gas as a transition fuel.
Sunak initially followed Liz Truss’ footsteps saying he was far too busy to go to Egypt next week. But mounting pressure from his own camp and fear that his absence would be exploited by Boris Johnson changed his mind.
Johnson, who is going to grandstand at Sharm el Sheikh, was the host at last year’s conference in Glasgow. There imperialist leaders and their minions trumpeted their self-proclaimed green credentials while the largest delegation came from the fossil fuel industry.
Not surprisingly little came out of the COP26 conference apart from the usual platitudes.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer says “caving in to criticism is not leadership. Real leadership is seizing your seat at the table”. But by overturning another of dismal Truss diktat the new Tory leader shows that he’s at least prepared to listen to the global demands for international action to cut planet-heating emissions
All the imperialist leaders, with the obvious exception of Donald Trump, pay lip-service to the environmental protection and climate change lobbies. None of them however are prepared to challenge the super-profits that the banks and corporations get from their fossil fuel investments.
The wave of record heat-waves, floods and the wild-fires that swept across the world in the summer has added a new sense of urgency to the call for action to tackle the climate emergency. While recognising that climate change was the ultimate cause of all these disasters the imperialists ignore the eco-lobby’s call for sustainable developments and continue to put profits before people
Last year the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a report that said climate change is “widespread, rapid, and intensifying, and some trends are now irreversible, at least during the present time frame”.
But there is still time to limit climate change. Strong and sustained reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases could quickly improve air quality, and over the next 20 to 30 years global temperatures could stabilise.
“There is no long-term prosperity without action on climate change,” says Sunak. “There is no energy security without investing in renewables”. But whether his government is prepared to take action to urgently reducing greenhouse gas emissions and deliver on the commitments to finance climate action in developing countries remains to be seen.
The last few days have been a lesson to those who say protests are pointless. At a symbolic level they can by-pass the mainstream media to raise issues on the street that the ruling class would otherwise ignore. At the best they can, indeed, change policies – especially if the protests come from within your own camp.
The Government’s U-turn over the 45 per cent higher tax rate followed the run on the pound and the panic in the City after the “mini-budget” that was supposed to boost economic growth and ease the cost-of-living crisis. An opinion poll that gave Labour an astronomical 33 point lead over the Conservatives fired the Tory back-bench revolt that has rocked the Truss government and forced the humiliating climb down over the 45p top rate of income tax last week.
Barely a month has passed since Liz Truss entered Downing Street but she’s already shown how unfit she is for high office. Her crackpot “trickle-down” economics don’t work at the best of times and they certainly don’t work now. The fact there was little support for it within the Establishment shows how far the Tory leader is out of touch with the people the Conservatives are supposed to represent. The row with the new King over his attendance at the UN climate change conference in Egypt next month won’t have endeared Ms Truss with the landed aristocracy either. The Tory grandees see the writing on the wall amid talk about removing Truss before the next election to stave off a Labour landslide at the next election. And now Starmer’s people prepare for office in the mistaken belief that the next election will be a walk-over for Labour.
But the struggle on the street goes on. Millions are taking industrial action against austerity. The demand for higher pay, public ownership and a health service worthy of a country as rich as the United Kingdom is growing.
Soaring energy prices mean a bleak winter for working people. Workers face mass unemployment and economic stagnation. Most of the benefit cuts and tax-breaks for the rich remain in the mini-budget are still in place. The Government blames it on the Russians but it was they, and their masters in Washington, which started the Ukrainian conflict in the first place back in 2014.
Ending sanctions on Russia, cutting military expenditure and closing all foreign bases would go a long way to reversing decline. So as the guns blaze in Ukraine, we have to build the resistance to the Labour leaders who crawl to the Americans and we must lead the fight-back against the union bureaucrats who defend the Ukrainian fascist regime.
Public ownership is meaningless without a socialist agenda to empower working people and pave the way to revolutionary change. And fighting for peace goes hand-in-hand with that struggle.
Jittery markets. A sinking pound. Labour streets ahead in the opinion polls. Just three weeks in and Liz Truss has already set her stamp on Downing Street with a mini-budget that has even enraged the faithful in the Home Counties. A handful of Tory back-benchers sending in letters calling for her resignation to their 1922 Committee.
Starmer thinks his time has come while Rishi Sunak waits in the wings pondering his next move.
The Daily Mail calls it a ‘True Blue’ budget as indeed it is. Robbing the poor to help the rich is what the Tories are all about though they usually try to cloak their bourgeois greed with the Union Jack and the sort of pious platitudes Sir Keir Starmer thinks will propel him back into the corridors of power.
In New York last week Truss said she was prepared to be unpopular at home to take the “difficult decisions” needed to secure economic growth. She’s certainly deeply unpopular and few outside her immediate circle believe that the “difficult decisions” announced by the new Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, will do anything to secure economic growth.
The International Monetary Fund was not amused. It said “We understand that the sizeable fiscal package announced aims at helping families and businesses deal with the energy shock and at boosting growth via tax cuts and supply measures.
“However, given elevated inflation pressures in many countries, including the UK, we do not recommend large and untargeted fiscal packages at this juncture, as it is important that fiscal policy does not work at cross purposes to monetary policy. Furthermore, the nature of the UK measures will likely increase inequality.”
While Labour opens up a 17 point lead over the Conservatives in the opinion polls Starmer struts the stage at Labour’s conference in Liverpool to pose as a new Messiah destined to take the country "out of this endless cycle of crisis" through a mediocre package of reforms (like neighbourhood policing and free breakfast clubs in primary schools) that the Blairites believe is enough, along with singing the national anthem, to win back the working-class vote in the northern ‘Red Wall’ and sweep them back to power.
Blair, of course, rode on the wave of an economic boom and the support of the traditional right-wing blocs that controlled many major unions in his day. Starmer, bereft of any allies in the union movement, has to deal with the global capitalist slump that began with the housing market crash in 2007. His only answer is the usual half-baked Keynesian solutions favoured by the American Democratic Party and Europe’s diminishing band of social-democrats intended to cushion the blows of the austerity regime and do little or nothing to end the poverty crisis in the imperialist heartlands.
Jeremy Corbyn may be finished. But others are waiting in the wings ready to take Starmer’s place. Andy Burham, the Labour Mayor of Greater Manchester, is said to be thinking about using the grass-roots Enough is Enough campaign as a platform for his greater ambitions – to get back into the House of Commons to secure a place in a future Starmer government and secure his place to challenge Sir Keir when the time comes.
The Prime Minister didn’t need to meet Joe Biden in New York to be told that the Tory dream of an Anglo-American free trade agreement was dead as the dodo. Truss didn’t need to be reminded that the Biden administration is determined to uphold the Northern Ireland protocol and support the Irish position and that of the rest of the European Union. Nor would she be too happy to see Biden dismiss Tory economic dogma to tell the world that he was 'sick and tired of trickle-down economics' which never work. What she hoped to achieve at this meeting on the fringe of the UN General Assembly remains to be seen. But crawling to the Americans comes as second nature to those sections of the British ruling class who believe that their global interests are best preserved through the might of US imperialism. The politicians who serve them on both sides of the House call it the “special relationship” – a term first used by Winston Churchill in 1946 at the start of the Cold War.
Churchill, the war-time Tory leader turfed out of Downing Street by Labour at the general election in the previous summer, may not have inspired the Anglo-American pact that was being built by the new Attlee administration. But he certainly started the myth of the “special relationship” claiming it was an alliance of equals who shared a common history, a common language and a common literature and therefore a common destiny in defending what Western leaders were already starting to call the “free world”. It was, in fact, a delusion, or as maverick Labour MP Peter Kilfoyle would say many years later only “special” in the sense that it was a one-way road.
The strategy of the British bourgeoisie following the establishment of the Common Market in 1957 was to act as a trans-Atlantic bridge to defend their global imperialist interests by playing off Europe against America. But the “bridge” to Europe was burned by Tony Blair when he threw in his lot with Bush over Iraq while Washington sees no need to heed any “special” British concerns because Britain now has no one else to turn to for support.
If Liz Truss does not break with the die-hard Ulster Unionists she will never get back into Biden’s good books let alone build a post-Brexit understanding with Franco-German imperialism. That is, of course, her problem not ours.
The Treaty of Rome or the ‘Treaty of Washington’ – either way there’s nothing in it for workers. We need to argue for an end to the American alliance which is dragging us into a conflict with Russia that has already sent the cost of energy spiralling. We need to confront the labour bureaucracy and the fake left posers who support the trans-Atlantic alliance and NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine.
Above all we must campaign for an end to the fighting in Ukraine and for a just and lasting peace in eastern Europe. This can only come with a neutral and de-Nazified Ukraine that recognises the independence of the Donbas republics, Crimea’s decision to join the Russian Federation and equal rights for all the people of the regions of the Ukraine.
