Last lap of the election…

It looks like curtains for Sunak on 4th July. Despite the fact that there is little enthusiasm for Keith Starmer on the street nothing the Conservatives say can shift Labour’s 20 point lead in the opinion polls. Amongst the Tory grandees the blame game has already begun with Remainers looking to the Liberal-Democrats while the die-hard racists and what’s left of their Brexit faction turn to Nigel Farage’s Reform platform. In Islington over a thousand volunteers are helping Jeremy Corbyn in his fight against the Labour machine to keep his seat in parliament and Nigel Farage managed to break the bourgeois consensus on Ukraine last week. 
To the eternal shame of the fake left Labour MPs who pose as peace campaigners while supporting NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine Farage’s repeated calls for a peace settlement
 take Russia’s legitimate demands into consideration. To the horror of Sunak and Starmer, who closed ranks to denounce Farage as an apologist for Vladimir Putin, Farage’s comments were favourably received on the street even in die-hard Tory and Labour areas. This is not surprising. Though tatty yellow and blue Ukrainian flags still fly over some Government buildings no-one on the street really cares about Zelensky these days. 

Assange: the end of a nightmare

 Seven years holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London followed by five years cooped up in a dungeon in Belmarsh. Julian Assange paid a very high price for defending journalistic freedom. Now he walks free following a plea-bargain deal with the American courts that led to his release this week. We all wish him well as he starts to rebuild his life in Australia.
The WikiLeaks founder will now fight for a pardon that Donald Trump says he will seriously consider if he returns to the White House while Assange supporters vow to continue to campaign to change the law in the United States to prevent further prosecutions against journalists.
We’ve learned many lessons from the Assange campaign whose ultimate victory was undoubtedly due to Assange’s refusal to grovel to imperialist demands and his campaign’s determination to fight for his freedom across the globe. That campaign swayed the Australian Labor government into pressing for his release. It clearly also influenced the Biden administration that is well aware that it needs to woo the liberal constituency in the United States with a show of clemency if it hopes to beat off the challenge from the Trump camp at the presidential elections in November.
The lesson learnt is to have no faith in British “justice” or the courts and constitutions of the other members of the “free world” in Europe. They will all do the bidding of their masters in Washington when the chips are down. The American whistle-blower Edward Snowden made a wiser choice when he fled to Russia in 2013...

Another brick in the wall

Moves to curb democratic protests and solidarity movements were announced this week under new government definitions of “extremism” that will be used to blacklist groups the ruling class deem to be seeking to undermine what they call Britain’s “liberal democracy”. 
The new rules will, of course, not affect the Zionists or the racists who see the Tory party as their natural home following the collapse of the BNP and the National Front. What they will do is  prevent public bodies from providing platforms for those spreading “hateful anti-British” ideas that “poison community life”. Though the definition will have no effect on the existing criminal law  as it only applies to the operations of government itself, its intention is clearly to isolate and marginalise the massive Palestinian solidarity movement and climate change campaigns that have swept the streets and challenged the bourgeois consensus in recent years.
The Sunak government would dearly like to ban the demonstrations outright but it simply doesn’t have the public support to do so. So now it is stepping up the harassment of demonstrators and smearing the organisers as merchants of hate. But who believes their lies these days?
London hasn’t become a “no-go” area for Jews. In fact many members of the Jewish community have joined the massive Palestinian solidarity marches that have rocked London over the past five months and have all ended peacefully – despite the dire predictions of “mob rule” in the Tory media. 
Hundreds of thousands of people have supported the recent cycle of demonstrations calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Millions more support the demand for justice for the Palestinian Arabs and an end to fighting in the Gaza Strip. This is an attack on democracy, not a defence of it. The right to protest must be defended.

Keep up the fight

International efforts to stop the fighting in Gaza have come to nothing in recent weeks. The Palestinian resistance have rejected the Americans’ worthless Ramadan cease-fire “pause” that would clearly not have led to a lasting truce given Israel’s declared aim to re-occupy the Strip and wipe Hamas off the face of the earth. The Palestinians want a permanent cease-fire, the total withdrawal of all Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip and internationally guaranteed pledges to speedily work towards the establishment of the independent Palestinian state that the imperialists accept when they talk about a “two-state” solution.
Air-drops and floating piers aren’t going stave off starvation in Gaza. If the Americans really want to help they should just tell the Israelis to allow food and medical convoys cross their border into the enclave. If the Americans really want to see the release of the Israelis in Palestinian captivity they should accept the Palestinian offer of a prisoner exchange. If the Americans really want to see an end to the fighting they should stop vetoing truce proposals at the United Nations that have the support of all the members of the Security Council as well as virtually all the countries in the entire world.

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.

Walk on by…

None of us are going to miss Nadine Dorries who formally resigned as an MP  this week almost 12 weeks after she said she was stepping down with "immediate effect". 
Her resignation letter – a rant against her leader, Rishi Sunak, whom she clearly despises –  no doubt sets the scene for the launch of her forthcoming book on the downfall of her idol, Boris Johnson. 
In politics Johnson liked to be surrounded by people lesser than himself. Rishi Sunak and Dominic Cummings were notable exceptions. Nadine Dorries was not. 
Few, apart from herself, can recall her achievements as an MP and later a Cabinet minister in the Johnson government. If she’s remembered for anything at all it will be for the string of novels she’s written over the years or the time she lost the Tory whip for taking part in the TV reality show I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! In 2012.
Many will be glad to see the back of her – and not just in the House of Commons. Adam Zerny, the Independent leader of Central Bedfordshire Council, says his constituents won’t be shedding any tears over her departure from the political scene.
  "There's a great degree of relief amongst the many people who are constituents that finally this may be over and we may soon find that we have an MP that actually cares about the local community.” Zelny said. “She's rarely ever been seen in the area. And I think we've had very much the impression that what she cares about is her own life and her life at Westminster rather than Mid Beds”.
With exquisite timing Ms Dorries has ensured that the by-election in her Mid-Bedfordshire constituency will fall soon after the publication of her book The Plot: The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson and the Tories’ annual conference in October.
And Sunak may rue the day he denied her a peerage if her safe Tory seat falls to Labour or the Liberal Democrats – and both have high hopes given the slump in Tory fortunes. 
The fact that the Tories are openly fighting amongst themselves shows how deep the divisions are between the Remainers and Brexiteers. Back in the halcyon days of the 1960s and 70s Tories of all hues closed ranks to stop Labour returning to high office. These days they clearly think they’ve nothing to fear from Sir Keir Starmer and his Blairite chums. 
The latest opinion poll puts Labour 25 points ahead of the Conservatives and suggest that Labour has the support of 50 per cent of the electorate and at the moment Labour seems to heading for a landslide at the next general election.
Ms Dorries says in her resignation letter that “it is a fact that there is no affection for Keir Starmer out on the doorstep. He does not have the winning X factor qualities of a Thatcher, a Blair, or a Boris Johnson, and sadly, prime minister, neither do you. Your actions have left some 200 or more of my MP colleagues to face an electoral tsunami and the loss of their livelihoods, because in your impatience to become prime minister you put your personal ambition above the stability of the country and our economy,”.
She may not be right about Sunak but she’s spot on about Starmer.

Smear campaigns are here again

Last week, the Labour Party tweeted a photo of a smiling Prime Minister alongside the words: “Do you think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison? Rishi Sunak doesn’t”. A follow-up accuses Sunak of not wanting to jail gun owners who possess the weapon with intent to harm and another appears to accuse the prime minister's family of benefiting from a 'non-dom' tax loophole, after the Tories raised taxes for working people.
    Tory MPs have rushed to defend their leader denouncing Labour for the “gutter politics” of these attack ads that are focusing on the Tory leader in the run-up to next month’s local elections. Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey says "I think it's wrong when people attack individuals personally, particularly over subjects which are so sensitive, which are so important to the British people". Even some Labour MPs have expressed doubts about the new social media campaign including John McDonnell, the former Shadow Chancellor. McDonnell, who likes to pose as a left-winger, piously says "this is not the sort of politics a Labour Party, confident of its own values and preparing to govern, should be engaged in. I say to the people who have taken the decision to publish this ad, please withdraw it. We, the Labour Party, are better than this".
    But the Labour leader is unrepentant. Sir Keir Starmer says "I make no apologies for highlighting the failures of this government. They've broken our NHS, they've broken our economy. And this argument that because they've changed prime minister five times, that somehow the prime minister doesn't bear responsibility for 13 years of grief for many, many people, I just don't think stacks up...behind these adverts is a basic truth - that they have broken our criminal justice system, broken our NHS, and broken our economy".
    We need not trouble ourselves with the bleating of the Tories and the Liberal Democrats. These were the people, after-all, who had no qualms in targetting Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-semite and a supporter of terrorism throughout his leadership of the Labour Party. But adverse comments from Labour MPs, no matter how misguided they may be, have to be taken seriously.
    It’s not a question of personal attacks or taste. The political power invested in the leaders of the mainstream parties inevitably makes them fair game for public scrutiny and
    smear campaigns by their very nature are invariably in bad taste. What they achieve is, however, debatable.
    No one doubts the power of the media when it focuses on the foibles of the high and mighty. The truth is nobody likes them. When politicians are exposed for departing from the bourgeois moral standards of the day or as venal corrupt chancers they go down and rarely come up again. But when one falls another always takes their place.
    Denigrating Sunak may make a change from attacking Corbyn but it’s no substitute for genuine election pledges that reflect the demands of the labour movement as a whole.
    Smear campaigns only work up to a point. This one may put some off voting Conservative at the next election but it won’t in itself bag more votes for Labour. Disaffected Tories are more than likely to turn to the Lib-Dems or even the Greens rather than Labour. And at the end of the day they do little to mobilise your own supporters at election time.
    To do that Labour should restore the ‘Welfare State’ and defend the health service, champion the unions fighting for higher pay, lift the limits on councils to let them build vast new estates to end homelessness. All of this could be paid for by restoring the tax levels and the public sector existed until 1979 and cutting the wasteful arms expenditure that is crippling the economy. This is what Starmer should do. But he won’t.
    Labour hasn’t won a general election since 2005. Now there’s a surprise...

A Windsor Knot

Rishi Sunak may not have achieved much during his tenure in No 10 over the past five months. But the “Windsor Agreement” that resolved the long-standing dispute over Northern Ireland’s post-Brexit relations with the European Union was no mean achievement for the Tory leader who had to ride rough-shod over the protests from his Unionist allies in the north of Ireland and amongst his own back-benchers.
    The agreement was given a diplomatic and highly symbolic blessing by King Charles and Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, over tea at Windsor Castle last week. But the donkey work was done by Sunak’s team, who together with their Irish and Brussels counterparts, managed to settle the dispute over the movement of goods between the European Single Market and the United Kingdom to the satisfaction of all the players with the exception of the northern Irish bigots and Boris Johnson.
    Johnson, who clearly hoped to exploit the issue to pave the way for his political come-back, predictably says he cannot support this new Brexit deal. The Democratic Unionists are equally sceptical claiming the new agreement may undermine Northern Ireland’s status as part of the United Kingdom. But Sinn Féin Vice-President Michelle O'Neill said "I rarely find myself agreeing with a British prime minister but access to both markets has to be grabbed with both hands".
    The Irish government, the rest of the European Union and the majority on both sides of the House of Commons have welcomed the Windsor Framework. More importantly, as far as the British ruling class is concerned, so has the White House.
    The Remainers are, naturally, hoping that this will create a new and favourable climate to greater co-operation with the European Union. Regardless of who wins the next general election they’re working in their think-tanks and their less than secret conferences for some sort of associate status with the EU that would create the climate for a second referendum and a return to full membership of the Brussels club.
    They say Brexit isn’t working but that’s not true. There have been problems but these were almost entirely due to the short-sighted policy of the Johnson government that placed all its bets on replacing the Treaty of Rome with a “Treaty of Washington” that would create a colossal trans-Atlantic free trade area. It was a pipe-dream that depended entirely on Donald Trump getting re-elected. And we all know what happened next.
    What Johnson should have done – and what Sunak should do now is to reach free trade agreements with our other major trading partners – like China – and ending the sanctions regime against Russia which had pushed energy prices to breaking point. There is an alternative to slavishly imposing sanctions at the behest of the Americans. Sunak could pursue an independent economic policy to revive the ailing British economy. We could return to the “golden era” of trade with China that existed when David Cameron was at the helm. We could access cheap gas from Russia if we stopped supporting the American sanctions regime.
    But Sunak won’t. Neither will Starmer. The bourgeois consensus that all the leaders of the mainstream parties reflect is that British imperialism’s future can only be guaranteed by American might – and that can only be secured by doing America’s bidding.
    It may work for them but it doesn’t work for us. Socialism is the only answer to the crisis and we have to put it back on the working class agenda now!

Support the strikes!

We’ve seen the biggest wave of strikes for a decade this week. Hundreds of thousands of teachers, along with train drivers, civil servants, bus drivers and security guards walked out in a co-ordinated day of action on Wednesday. And their leaders warn of plenty more to come if their just demands for more pay are not met. While the mealy-mouthed Labour leader sits on the fence and tells his MPs not to join picket lines the TUC general secretary Paul Nowak rightly says “it really is now the responsibility of Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt to get round the table and make sure resources are available to fund decent pay in public services”.
    Workers are taking industrial action across the public and private sectors, in response to 12 years of falling pay and an environment that has repeatedly asked workers to pay the price while dividends and executive pay have soared.
    For months and months the Tory government has refused to open serious negotiations with the unions. While energy prices soar and inflation rises the Tories smear the unions with talk about “Reds” and “wreckers”. While the Tories bleat on about the “economy” they can still find plenty to give the Western puppet regime fight the Russians in Ukraine. And there’s still plenty of tax breaks to ensure that the ruling class can continued to live their lives of ease while millions of out-of-work or poorly paid workers turn to food banks to survive.
    The bourgeois media have done their best to sway public opinion against the unions. But no-one believes them any more. Support for the workers remains high in the opinion polls and more importantly, on the street. The public want an end to the austerity regime and this is why Labour, if the opinion polls are to be believed, still has an astronomical 25 point lead over the Tories.
    The Sunak government can be forced back to the negotiating table. The new anti-strike laws can be defeated. But only through mass pressure and mass protests. This week’s strike could be the spark that ignites a movement to end austerity once and for all.

rotten to the core

Why it took two weeks for Rishi Sunak to get rid of Nadhim Zahawi is a mystery in itself. The Tory press has been full of stories about to the now disgraced former Tory party Chairman’s breach of ministerial rules in an attempt to cover up the fact he was facing a probe into his tax affairs.
    Now the Sunak camp is saying that this all goes back to the Johnson era and it has nothing to do with the new premier – which is at best slightly misleading as Sunak was, afterall, the most senior minister in Johnson’s Cabinet.
    Though Zahawi seems surprised at the furore in the media that may have ended his political career for ever nothing should surprise us about his antics. Tory politicians, like most of them on both sides of the House, are just in it for themselves. One goes. Another takes his place.

A week in the Alps

Yes it's time for the so-called “World Economic Forum” (WEF) held in the Swiss Alps to allow the great and the good of the capitalist world to transform Davos into a millionaires’ playground to talk about 'Cooperation in a Fragmented World' for a few days in January. In the town demonstrators from the Swiss Socialist Youth and Greenpeace are demanding a climate tax on the super-rich while some 5,000 soldiers and police stand by to protect the 2,700 leaders from 130 countries including 52 heads of state or government taking part in a host of meetings in this Alpine ski resort.
    The World Economic Forum has grown from more modest beginnings as the European Management Forum that was set up in 1971 to bring American and European capitalists together. It has now grown, particularly following the collapse of the Soviet Union, into an annual global jamboree that some of the corporate elite would like to rival and sideline the United Nations. In recent years the forum has reached out to the people’s democracies with the attendance of Vietnam and People’s China and even an invitation to Democratic Korea in 2015 that was, however, revoked the following year over the nuclear issue.
    The world’s media pack has naturally descended on Davos to report the set-piece speeches of the leaders of the political and corporate world but nothing is ever said about what the WEF stands for or even what it actually does.
    It’s the same in the bourgeois media which generally confines “business news” to the ups and downs of the stock exchanges and investment markets along with fiscal law issues and the occasional corruption case. While the traditional rivalry amongst media tycoons has meant that the likes of the Murdochs are put under the spotlight from time to time are subject to scrutiny the political motives of the oligarchs who own the big corporations in Western Europe and the United States are rarely, if ever, questioned.
    No Western get-together can be without a Vladimir Zelensky video appeal for more guns and money to keep his war with the Russians going but he has to compete with many others for attention in Davos this week.
    Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, is in Davos posing as “Prime Minister in waiting” and re-assure the global elite that he’s not another Jeremy Corbyn. But the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, who is one of the global elite, and his Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, have decided to give it a miss. Sunak doesn’t want to be seen lording it abroad in the midst of a cost of living crisis that has triggered waves of strikes across the country. And his UK delegation – trade secretary Kemi Badenoch and business secretary Grant Shapps – have been told to keep a low profile at the world forum
    So we have to make do Boris Johnson comparing Vladimir Putin to 'the fat boy in Dickens' in an allusion probably lost to most of the delegates who were actually listening to him and Greta Thunberg, the perpetual youth protester, at a fringe meeting saying it was “absurd” listening the people at Davos talking about the climate crisis when they are, in fact, the cause of it. And, of course, she’s right.

Defend the right to strike

As waves of strikes sweep through Britain the Tory government responds in the only way it knows how – repression. The Sunak government is moving anti-union legislation to curb industrial action in key public sectors to ensure that essential public services are maintained during industrial action.
    Rishi Sunak likes to pose as a pragmatist and a liberal conservative, and he was certainly opposed to the sham, empty popularism of Boris Johnson and the crude neo-liberalism of Liz Truss. But while he can rely on their support he’s not a member of the Tory “One Nation” faction in parliament and he clearly doesn’t want to burn all his bridges with the Neanderthal element that is clamouring for more and more anti-union laws to ban industrial action in more and more areas of the public and private sector.
    If this new legislation gets off the ground it could easily be used to crush all independent union action by allowing employers to sack strikers out of hand if they walk out and take unions to court for compensation if they do. Reducing unions to impotent staff associations that existed in some sections of the old, and now long gone, public sector or the “company unions” set up by employers specifically to keep independent unions out of their factories has always been the dream of some in the Tory camp. It is after-all what the “Victorian values” the Tories used to drone on and on about actually means.
    But we’re not going back to the days when workers eked out a miserable existence working round the clock on pittance pay while kids crawled up chimneys for pennies to stave off starvation.
    We get the usual weasel words from Labour’s leaders vowing to repeal any new anti-union legislation. We see the TUC called on its members to come together to agree on a collective response to the new threat to their existence. But what we need is total defiance – enough to kill this proposal stone dead.

On the unity of the movement

It is amusing to note that calls for a new Communist International often come from the most sectarian elements of the world movement. But world-wide contacts between communist parties can only strengthen the communist cause.
    Nevertheless a new international can only succeed, firstly if it includes and has the agreement of the ruling parties of People's China, Cuba, Democratic Korea, Laos and Vietnam. It should be based on Marxism-Leninism and the principle of equality between big parties and small parties. It must recognise the principle of a collective secretariat which reflects the views of the co-operating parties and not that of one big party. And it must recognise that in countries where there is more than one communist party -- the case in most countries these days -- the differences between them are a matter for those parties alone to resolve.
    The New Communist Party has supported many of the efforts taken since the collapse of the Soviet Union to encourage co-operation and the exchange of views between communist and workers parties throughout the world. Though the Brussels May Day festival and seminar programme organised by the Belgian Workers Party (PTB) has been dissolved the annual Solidnet conferences that began in 1998 are still going – but even that forum is now being undermined by sectarians who refuse to recognise the principled stand of the Russian, Donbas and Ukrainian communists and equates the prime mover – US-led imperialism – with the major victims; the Russians and the people of the Donbas.
    Now, more than ever, is the time for a clear call from the world communist movement for an end to the fighting and a just and lasting peace in eastern Europe. This can only come with a neutral and de-Nazified Ukraine that recognises the rights of the Donbas republics and the Crimea to join the Russian Federation and equal rights for all the people of the regions of the Ukraine.

An angry winter

A wave of strikes is sweeping the country. Rising inflation and soaring heating bills have fired the resistance to austerity and now not a week passes without industrial action of one form or another over pay.
    On the left the routine calls for a “general strike” or a “united front” of workers are beginning to have more relevance as more and more working people vote to confront the employers in the fight for a living wage.
    The key to victory is unity at all levels from the rank-and-file to the union leaderships but that unity is not easy to achieve. Some years ago a number of public sector unions did combine to co-ordinate their campaigns on pensions but it broke down when one key player unilaterally reached a settlement with their employers.
    There is, of course, the TUC. But its role has been partially eroded by giant unions like Unite and Unison who have also done their best to take away what little authority the trades councils still have in a union world dominated by the mega-unions of today.
    Communists must naturally support all initiatives efforts to strengthen working class organisations and bring them together in times of struggle to build support for all strikes and to maintain solidarity to speed the day to victory.

Like a Cheshire cat

In Victorian days the grinning Cheshire cat slowly disappears until only thing left is his inane grin. These days, with Labour streets ahead of the Tories in the opinion polls, the Blairites are now strutting around bragging that they’ll soon be back in power and that it’s all down to getting rid of the Corbynistas. But this could also be illusionary.
    Labour’s victory in last week’s by-election was, therefore, hardly unexpected. With Labour 25 points ahead of the Tories in the opinion polls Labour could hardly fail to hold the City of Chester seat and that’s what they did last week when they trounced the Tories with a 13,8 per cent swing – one of the largest since the Second World War.
    But turn-out was low and the swing was well below Labour’s lead in the opinion polls. The election gurus tell us that it will still give Labour a 30 plus majority in the House of Commons at the next election. But Rishi Sunak still has plenty of time to close the gap.
    Starmer and the Blairites clearly believe that they’re going to win over a significant number of Tory voters at the next election – and indeed they may well do so in the northern “Red Wall” seats Labour lost in 2019. But Labour needs more than that to win an overall majority in parliament and to do so it needs a programme that can actually inspire people to campaign for and vote Labour when the time comes.
    There’s not much sign of that at the moment. Labour’s leaders have little to offer workers apart from meaningless platitudes about health, education and welfare and nothing at all to rally the youth, the young workers and the millions who turned to Jeremy Corbyn in the hope of change only a few years ago.
    All Sunak needs to do is get the existing Tory vote out on the day. Labour has to insopire the millions of workers sick of austerity, poor housing, and bread-line wages. Shunning the nurses and ambulance crews, the civil servants, teachers and transport and postal workers, all locked in struggle with employers over pay is a bad start. Starmer ignores them at his peril.

Support the nurses!

NHS nurses have voted to strike over pay for the first time in their union’s 106-year history. The Royal College of Nurses (RCN) says it will take industrial action before Christmas following a ballot of its 300,000 strong members across the country. The Government offered an £1,400 pay rise – which after inflation, now around 12 per cent, would be a significant pay cut in real terms.
    Real earnings amongst all private sector employees have fallen by 3.2 per cent over the last 10 years; but the average weekly pay for nurses has dropped by six per cent in real terms between 2011–2021. Many have been forced to use foodbanks to survive., others are simply jumping ship due to the soaring cost of living.
    The nurses are campaigning for a five per cent above inflation catch-up rise that recognises the crucial role that they play in the health service by paying them a living wage.
    RCN General Secretary Pat Cullen told her members this was a “once in a generation chance to improve your pay and combat staff shortages” that put patients at risk.
    “I want to thank every member who took part in, or supported, this ballot. You can be very proud. The results are strong and clear,” she said.
    “This is a defining moment in our history, and our fight will continue through strike action and beyond for as long as it takes to win justice for the nursing profession and our patients.
    “Anger has become action – our members are saying enough is enough. The voice of nursing in the UK is strong and I will make sure it is heard. Our members will no longer tolerate a financial knife-edge at home and a raw deal at work.
    “Ministers must look in the mirror and ask how long they will put nursing staff through this. While we plan our strike action, next week’s budget is the UK government’s opportunity to signal a new direction with serious investment. Across the country, politicians have the power to stop this now and at any point.
    “This action will be as much for patients as it is for nurses. Standards are falling too low and we have strong public backing for our campaign to raise them. This winter, we are asking the public to show nursing staff you are with us.”
    Support for the nurses is riding high in the opinion polls at the moment. We need to ensure that it becomes a massive solidarity movement in support of the just demands of the nurses and all the other workers who keep the NHS running.

So long Gavin Williamson

So Gavin Williamson is out of the Cabinet again following charges of bullying from fellow Tories that made for his inevitable departure. The man Keir Starmer calls a “pathetic bully” has fallen on his sword following charges of abusive behaviour from fellow Tories, including former premier Theresa May, which go back years. He lasted just under two years as defence minister before he was sacked by Mrs May for allegedly leaking confidential information to the media.
    Williamson returned to high office under Boris Johnson and served as education secretary for just over two years before being dumped during the post-COVID reshuffle in September 2021. And he lasted just two weeks under Rishi Sunak, who says he now regrets appointing Williamson in the first place.
    He now returns to the backbenches for the third time in his parliamentary career. No-one will miss him at the top table; there are plenty more queuing up to take his place.

The Road to Sharm el Sheikh

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.

Pay the Nurses, fund the NHS

Nurses are gearing up for a “summer of action” over pay following the Government’s derisory three per cent award that the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) said amounts to a cut after inflation is taken into account. The RCN is organising demonstrations across the country and a consultative pay ballot in the run-up to its annual conference in September. Unison and the British Medical Association (BMA) are sounding out their members on future industrial action for higher pay.
    Whilst the Tories bleat that their award is higher than the initial one per cent they offered in March, it is still well short of the 12.5 per cent demand from nursing staff or the similar demands of the GMB and Unite, who also organise workers in the health sector.
    Prime Minister Boris Johnson came under attack this week after he tried to dodge being 'pinged' for self-isolation – a day after announcing that so-called vaccine passports would be required for entry to nightclubs, concerts and other large public events from September.
    Meanwhile the knives are out for Johnson following a Tory dip in the opinion polls, which his rivals say is down to Johnson’s incompetent handling of the lockdown lifting. The latest YouGov poll put the Tories down six points to 38 per cent last week, just four points over Labour, whilst the minor parties – the Liberal Democrats and the Greens – also gained three points at the expense of the Conservatives. On this basis a general election would produce a hung parliament dependent on the whims of the Scottish nationalists and Northern Ireland’s unionist parties.
    Some Tory backbenchers say that momentum is growing to ditch Johnson in favour of his Chancellor, Rishi Sunak. But this may be premature. Sunak is undoubtedly a very ambitious man – but he probably still needs a few more years in high office before reaching out for the premiership and he certainly needs to reach some sort of understanding with the Remainer grandees to secure a seamless succession.
    This should be a golden opportunity for Labour to regain lost ground by backing the health workers to the hilt. The Corbynistas have pledged full support. But all we’ve got from Sir Keir Starmer are some mealy-mouthed words about fair pay for nurses. Starmer said the three per cent offer was “not fair” – but he refuses to endorse the union claims or to say what he thinks would be “fair”.
    Millions of working people are eternally grateful for the dedication and sacrifice of the health service workers who are on the front-line in the battle against the coronavirus plague. Opinion polls show that most of them support the nurses’ demands. But far from heeding the voices on the street, Starmer would rather go down the road of the Blairites and Zionists to pursue pointless vendettas against tiny Trotskyist sects in the mistaken belief that this will give him some street-cred with northern workers and chalk-up some more brownie points with what is perceived to be the dominant wing of the ruling class.
    The entire labour movement needs to close ranks around the NHS workers’ pay campaign to force the Government to respond realistically to their just demands and to provide concrete solidarity if they are forced to take industrial action later in the year.

Bailing out the Bosses

The Budget took place on Wednesday, a most inconvenient time for the New Worker. However as the days are long gone when it was customary for Chancellors to resign if so much as a paragraph appeared in the newspapers beforehand, we have a good idea of what it contains without recourse to a crystal ball.
    Regardless of the details, it will safe to assert the Budget, despite the rhetoric, will be designed for the benefit of the capitalist class rather than the working class even if a few crumbs are allowed to fall from the rich man’s table, but these crumbs are solely for the purpose of keeping the working class from grumbling too much. The extension of the furlough scheme until September might be regarded as a good thing, but the fact that a Tory Chancellor thinks it will be needed is a sign that the economy will not be making the promised bounce back any time soon despite the Chancellor’s claims the economy will be back to normal by the middle of next year. The Trades Union Congress has demanded that it be continued until the end of the year.
    What is not said is often as significant as what is said. Workers in the NHS have had a real-time 19 per cent pay cut since the joyous days of the last Labour Government came to an end according to the public sector unions. While they got plenty of Thursday evening rounds of applause in the early days of the pandemic it proved impossible to exchange claps in shops. Unions wants a 15 per cent rise, but it that seems to have been ruled out. Campaigning group Disabled People Against Cuts have denounced the Treasury’s refusal to extend the modest temporary £20 Universal Credit increase which has been a lifeline for many.
    Obviously the Tories have more important priorities. One of their deserving causes is the Beerage. A £150 million fund is to be established to help community groups acquire their local pubs if the breweries want to off-load them if they are not profitable enough. No doubt such funding, of up to £250,000 matching funding will be carefully distributed in marginal constituencies.
    Another deserving cause is offering free “MBA style” management training for firms who are not terribly clever at doing their job.
    Bread and Circuses are to the fore in both a £300 million fund for sport and £400 million for the arts. He has promised £25 million of new funding to support grassroots football, which is claimed will build about 700 new pitches up and down the UK. That might go some way to reverse a decade of schools being forced sell their sports fields for housing, and perhaps to compensate for the closure or privatisation of council run sports facilities.
    To keep the luvvies happy £400 million is going to the arts which has been more or less entirely closed for a year. While we need not shed too may tears for the fat ladies and men of Covent Garden and Glynebourne many who work in the sector are freelancers who have fallen through the many cracks in the schemes set up for the self-employed.
    Other deserving causes include the shopocracy who are to get £5 billion for the benefit of some 700,000 shops, restaurants, hotels, hair salons, gyms and other businesses in England, struggling High Street shops and hospitality firms in England, with similar largesse for Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.
    To benefit the property market the Chancellor will bringing back 95 per cent mortgages which in future years will provide a boom for advisors in handling debt problems. Launching a council house building programme was unlikely to be on the pre-Budget discussions.

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.