For a genuine working class party

Starmer & Zelensky - the unpopular front

Last month Ihe NCP and the RCPB (ML) held a seminar to look at the challenges facing the communist movement following Labour’s victory in the summer general election. Both parties believe this is a discussion that needs to be taken throughout the labour movement. At the seminar Ian Donovan spoke on behalf of the Consistent Democrats, a Trotskyist movement that takes it name from a famous phrase of Lenin’s, and has, over the years, supported a number of NCP initiatives including the International Ukraine Anti-Fascist Solidarity campaign. This is what Ian said:

Starmer’s Labour is the least popular new British government after 100 days in office than any in living memory. The Tory government it replaced was an absolute shambles, led initially by the public school right-wing populist Johnson, whose corruption and penchant for pathological lying were legendary. When he had to fall on his sword having been caught partying when the population at large was locked down during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020-21, he was replaced by Liz Truss, the shortest-serving Prime Minister in British history, whose 2022 mini-budget with her Chancellor Kwarteng introduced massive, unfunded tax cuts for the very rich in such a way as to spook the capitalist market and cause a near-collapse of the British economy. When she was forced out after only 45 days, she was replaced by Rishi Sunak, the husband of an Indian IT heiress richer than the British monarch, who, like John Major at the end of his 1992-7 Tory premiership, struggled and juggled for nearly two years with multiple crises in a government that had obviously completely run out of steam. 
But after only 100 days in office, Starmer’s approval ratings dipped below those of Sunak, who is still caretaker Tory leader while they tear themselves apart trying to elect his successor!
A key starting point of this was the government’s refusal to abolish the Tories’ brutal two-child benefit cap, which condemns millions of working-class children to dire poverty and even homelessness. Popular hostility to Starmer’s government then exploded with his attack on poor and middling pensioners, subjecting their annual winter fuel payment, previously a universal payment, to draconian means testing so that 9 million pensioners, whose income is just above the threshold for pension credit, will have their winter fuel payments of around £300 taken away. They lost the vote at Labour Party conference on this, but of course the government does not take any notice of things like that – Starmer’s regime is implacably hostile to the trade unions.
 The new government abolished the Tories’ brutal scheme to deport refugees to Rwanda, but only because it was considered an expensive failure, not for any reason of principle.  In fact, Starmer has been off to Albania trying to arrange a cheaper replacement. The Blairite Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, ordered a massive series of immigration raids across the country in July, almost as soon as they took office. The anti-migrant, Islamophobic riots incited by far-right Zionist helpmates in August were seen as a ‘law and order’ problem, not a problem of racism, and the government had nothing to do with the mass mobilisations of socialists and anti-racists that stopped the wave of attempted pogroms. On the contrary, they instructed MPs and councillors not to go on anti-fascist demonstrations, and in some cases suspended those who did and were too outspoken against the far-right terrorists who were burning down mosques and refugee accommodation, and violently attacking people for having the ‘wrong’ colour skin. They have also been instructing the cops to harass anti-racists and Palestine protesters and arrest them often on phoney charges of supporting ‘terrorism’ (resistance to genocide)  and ‘anti-Semitism’ just as much as the Tory regime did.
Starmer and his neo-liberal clique are more worried about satisfying their Israel lobby donors and more general corporate sponsors than the working class, trade unions and oppressed minorities. This has manifested itself in the sleaze scandal, of Starmer and his ministers receiving gifts of luxury items from ‘donors’ who have nothing to do with the labour movement, which has discredited them the way similar scandals discredited the Tories. Though, like a classic bourgeois liberal party, which they aspire to project themselves as to the ruling class, they must make some gestures to the unions, they keep them as far away as possible from influencing policy. This has even upset Starmer’s most virulent supporter and apologist from the trade union bureaucracy, UNITE’s pro-Zionist semi-syndicalist Sharon Graham. Her leadership has actively sought to suppress political opposition to Starmer within the union, echoing the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ witch-hunt against militants within UNITE sympathetic to Jeremy Corbyn, and banning the showing of films about the witch-hunt within the union. But even she was not able to endorse Starmer’s General Election manifesto, and not does not endorse his tepid softening of some Tory anti-union attacks, as they do not remotely meet the concerns even of the union bureaucracy. 
Starmer’s government did not come to power on the back of a wave of working-class support and anger, and determination to sweep away the brutal Tories. Everyone with the slightest political consciousness in Britain knew Starmer as the political assassin of Jeremy Corbyn, whose main purpose was to smash the resurgent left that brought Corbyn to the labour leadership in 2015, and within a whisker of unseating Theresa May’s Tories in the 2017 General Election. In 2017 Corbyn’s Labour got 40% of the vote, nearly 13 million votes (12.87 million to be exact). In 2019, Corbyn’s Labour got 10.29 million votes, but a resurgent right-wing populist Tory party meant they got only 32.1% as a percentage. In 2024 Starmer got only 9.7 million votes, which amounted to a higher percentage, 33.6%, only because of a considerably lower turnout. This was not a class vote based on working-class enthusiasm for Labour, as was clearly the case in 2017. The vote was depressed because Starmer made it very clear (not that his war against the left did not already) that his government in power would just be another variant of anti-worker neoliberalism, fundamentally the same as the Tories, with only secondary differences. Thus, there was no principled basis for socialists to support Labour in the General Election in July.
Starmer’s government came to power 9 months into post-October 7th Israel’s Western-backed genocidal onslaught against the Palestinians, and in a developing crisis caused by the US/NATO slowly losing their Nazi-fuelled proxy war in Ukraine. It has proven utterly craven, supportive of these genocidal projects on a consistent basis, and as willing as the Tories to steal the remaining and threadbare social gains working class people depend upon to funnel the proceeds to Netanyahu and Zelensky.
Supporting Israel’s preservation as a transplanted settler-imperialist state in the Middle East is a strategic priority of imperialist capitalism in the early 21st Century. This is the reason that the pretence of so-called ‘international law’ has collapsed, and why there is such huge resistance from the ruling classes of the major Western powers to doing anything to hinder, let alone stop, the extermination of the people of Gaza and now the extension of similar monstrous crimes to Lebanon.  
The same goes for the proxy war against Russia over Ukraine and the seemingly distant, but gradually nearing prospect of a similar proxy conflict with China over Taiwan. All these militarist projects reflect the class interest of the imperialist bourgeoisie and the over-arching project of the bulk of them to preseve Israel and maintain the political cult of Zionism that helps to hold them together as a cohesive world-dominating class-cartel.  At the same time, they wage a parallel campaign for neo-liberal regime change and dismemberment of the anomalous bourgeois states of Russia and China, which embody elements of two social systems – capitalism and embryonic/invading socialism - in a unique manifestation of ‘combined and uneven development’. These giant former workers’ states are still too close to ‘Communism’ for the imperialists’ liking. 
Furthermore, they have put themselves at the head of a revolt by semi-colonial, oppressed countries around the world and thus threaten imperialist domination as it has existed since the late 19th  century. The aim of the proxy war and mooted extensions is to open them up fully to Western economic penetration and thus give the imperialists’ declining system a new lease of life. The converse possibility, of a defeat for NATO in Ukraine and possibly defeat of Israel by the Arab masses, opens up a horrendous scenario for the imperialists, where militarism and ‘sanctions’ (imperialist economic blackmail) no longer work, and the so-called ‘rules-based order’ (“we make the ‘rules’, you do as you are told”) ceases to function and hold any terror for oppressed countries around the world. The monopoly of world power of the Western imperialist countries, which lasted the whole of the 20th  Century and so far in the 21st century, is within sight of its own mortality.
So Starmer’s government represents the will of the bourgeoisie, pure and simple, and in no sense can be said to be even a deformed product of working-class resistance to capitalism and neoliberalism. The strategic task of Marxists is to build a party that can split the working-class base from Labour to a genuine working class party, one that has the potential to generate a revolutionary programme and lead a proletarian revolution as part of an international revolutionary movement. This is a key strategic task for Marxists in Britain, but it finds expression in different ways depending on the concrete political configurations that dominate in Labour at a given time. In the period of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, from 2015 to 2020, the correct tactic for Marxists was to join the Labour Party and actively get involved in the struggles of its subjectively pro-socialist left wing against the neo-liberal Blairites, who despite Corbyn’s election remained enormously powerful in their hold over the apparatus of the party. In the late 20-teens the Blairite and Zionist right-wing, the ‘friends of Israel’ etc, devoted huge amounts of energy to sabotaging Labour’s chances of achieving government, both through the smears of so-called ‘anti-Semitism’ against the left, and though manipulating the issue of Brexit to try to mobilise backward workers influenced by right-wing populism against Corbyn and the Labour Party.
It is now very clear that the ‘anti-Semitism’ witch-hunt was political preparation for the Labour Party to support the genocide in Gaza, which was always on the cards. Indeed, Starmer’s Labour has done so, quite openly, as when on Nick Ferrari’s LBC Radio show in October 2023 Starmer clearly endorsed the measure announced by the genocidal monster and Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, who denounced Gaza’s Palestinians as “human animals”, that Gaza was to be starved of fuel, energy food and even water. Starmer, when explicitly questioned by Ferrari about these measures, replies that “I do think that they [Israel] have the right to do this.” A clear endorsement of monstrous, genocidal actions that should lead to Starmer being charged as a political accomplice of genocide. 
More recently, under massive pressure of public opinion and the Palestine Solidarity movement, the Starmer regime has put an embargo on around 10 per cent of arms export licences to Israel. But Starmer’s Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, who is a prominent supporter of Labour Friends of Israel, made clear at a meeting of that body that they did so reluctantly, that this was the minimum that they could get away with doing, and that if he had his way and his hands were not tied by popular pressure, even these minimal measures would not have happened.
Likewise over Ukraine, the Starmer regime has made very clear its support for NATO’s proxy war against the people of the Donbas, and Russia itself, and its support for the massive arming of Ukraine’s dominated politically by followers of the Nazi leader Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, who since the far right, US-funded Maidan coup of 2014, have waged war against Russian-speaking Ukrainians and the people of Crimea, on a genocidal basis. They seek to crush the Russian-speaking population of the Donbass and openly use cluster bombs and depleted Uranium against them. They fire missiles at Crimea aimed to kill civilians and punish them for voting to rejoin Russia in 2014, as they do to the Donbas population that voted to join Russia in 2022. The Starmer regime has stated that it would like to allow Ukraine to use long-range Storm Shadow missiles against Russia, which has drawn warnings from Russia that such actions would be regarded as an existential threat and likely to provoke a nuclear response. Because of these statements from Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, the Biden administration backed off from such provocations, in fear of Russia’s evident military capacity. But Starmer’s government has made it clear that it abides by the US decision reluctantly – it would like to let Ukraine go ahead and attack Russia with long range missiles.
Over the past few years, since the beginning of the Special Military Operation in February 2022, the Starmer regime has threatened any Labour MP who dares to endorse even pacifist opposition to what the West is doing in Ukraine would be thrown out of the party.
The tactical task of Marxists confronted with Labour at this point is to try to cohere a genuine (not bourgeois), workers party in opposition to Labour, and to give it as much coherence as possible in that regard. That is the point of our activity in the Socialist Labour Network. That does not mean that we cease to regard Labour as a bourgeois workers party. Our strategic aim is to split it along class lines. But a workers’ party outside it could be a key means of doing so in a period like this when the bourgeois, imperialist pole has achieved unparalleled dominance. That may change, as it did from Blair/Brown via Miliband to Corbyn. If it does, which is not guaranteed, we would have to change our tactics. But at this time, for Marxists, these are the correct tactical positions to take.

Zelensky's illegitimacy

Zelensky with his master, Joe Biden

by our Ukrainian correspondent Alex Miller

The famous French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau once said that “the Tyrant is one who, against the laws, proclaims himself a ruler acting in accordance with the laws. The Despot is one who places himself above the laws themselves. Thus, a Tyrant may not be a Despot, but a Despot is always Tyrant.”

The President is a person elected by voting, but the absence of an electoral process clearly indicates that we are talking about a Tyrant or Despot.

Many are willing to ignore the fact that Vladimir Zelensky came to power illegally due to gross violations of the Ukrainian constitution. Today, half a decade later, we can say that it was the political “theft of the century” that shocks society.

Nevertheless, taking into account all the illegalities described below, according to the Constitution of Ukraine, if in January 2019 Zelensky was elected president for a term of five years, then in May 2024, this five-year period passed and the presidency expired.

Like a mad joke from one of his sitcoms, Zelensky’s election promise “to free Ukraine from political corruption” was met with laughter by viewers.

At the same time, his personal political corruption began in January 2019, when his party congress falsely announced the nomination of Zelensky as a presidential candidate.

Ukrainian legislation strictly requires registration of the existing 14 regional branches of the party that participate in the nomination of a presidential candidate. However, this law was violated and Zelensky’s candidacy was nominated by only one branch of the party, registered with the Ministry of Justice in city of Kryvyi Rih. From the very beginning, Zelensky’s nomination did not comply with electoral rules.

Instead of a legitimate nomination, the Zelensky party congress turned into a theatrical play by ‘Studio Quarter-95’. For those who may be unaware, “Studio Quarter-95” is a Ukrainian comic group founded by Zelensky and some of his schoolmates in 2013. The group perform stand-up shows to entertain the masses with crude and degenerate humour. Thus, the comedian-turned-politician used vulgar shows and illegal actions to campaign for election instead of regular political rallies. Indeed, much to the dismay of millions of Ukrainians and international observers, he always lied and acted as a political clown, performing as an entertainer in all political debates and interviews.

"The law provides for a strictly regulated procedure for meeting political parties and nominating presidential candidates,” says Verkhovna Rada deputy, lawyer Volodymyr Oliynyk. “The Servant of the People party was registered as a local organisation in Kryvyi Rih, and Zelensky was nominated for president from it, and not from the all-Ukrainian party”.

Thus, the mentioned party congress was nothing more than a crude caricature of nomination – another work of fiction and corrupted political machination.

Zelensky deliberately entered into his lifelong role as a president with the help of media promotion and deep-pocketed criminal oligarchs, but not the law. They also helped to stage-manage the later creation of a political party – the ‘Servant of the People’ - for entry into the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada. According to the financial report filed to the Ministry of Justice, the said ruling party rented just four square metres of office space in Kiev. This act legally proves the actual absence of the all-Ukrainian political party at the time of presidential election and its subsequent official registration after the elections.

At the same time, some new foreign actors began working in the shadows, paving the way for Zelensky’s rapid ascendancy in the murky, corrupt world of Ukrainian politics. Minister of Justice Pavel Petrenko and Minister of Internal Affairs Arsen Avakov actively worked behind the scenes to cover up the illegitimacy of Zelensky’s registration as a presidential candidate.

According to the testimony of eyewitnesses, Ukrainian deputy, journalist and right-wing politician Igor Moseychuk said “Zelensky paid a bribe of $300,000 to register his candidacy for president”.

“We were astounded by the level of backdoor corruption and public deception that accompanied the sudden rise of Vladimir Zelensky” noted one European-based election observer, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to ongoing investigations. “I think most Ukrainians would demand full accountability if they understood the full scope of the deception that occurred in 2019 and beyond”.

While a resounding defeat for democracy, the pay-for-register candidacy eventually turned out to be a relative success for Zelensky and his inner circle. Official forms were quickly filled out, and a political party without a permanent office, called the “Servant of the People”, was miraculously registered and went to the parliamentary election at the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine. In total, according to the election results and if the reported votes are legitimate, Zelensky's party holds 247 seats in Parliament out of 450. A party with more than 226 seats in the Ukrainian parliament can adopt any law except the Constitution of Ukraine.

Later, realising that Zelensky faced criminal charges, he and his team began work to decriminalise responsibility for falsifying documents at the Central Election Commission. They created and passed a special bill. The authors of this bill were deputies from the “Servant of the People”, in particular, Oleksandr Kornienko, who today holds the post of First Vice Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada. They also attempted to hold early new presidential elections around the time hostilities broke out between Ukraine and Russia. When it became clear that any elections could entail huge troubles and loss of power, the Office of the President, in direct violation of the law, cancelled the elections “due to the military situation in the country” preferring to remain in office as long as possible with the iron fist of tyranny. 

On 21st May this year, after the expiration of the five-year constitutional deadline for new presidential elections, Zelensky’s Tyrant colours shone brightly as he formally forfeited the negligent amount of his ill-gotten legitimacy. His term of office has expired. He no longer has the legal authority to represent Ukraine as its top official, he has cancelled all elections and has completely lost his power as head of state. Yet Zelensky continues to flaunt his illegal, arbitrary powers without the consent of the people of Ukraine. On 7th August 2024, he passed and approved another law that allows press gangs to kidnap and send unhappy people to the front line without justice.

The Ukrainian people are gradually beginning to understand that the increasingly unpopular Zelensky clearly lacks the legal power to indiscriminately send people – including the elderly and physically impaired – into war zones or make any other decisions as head of state.

But endemic corruption, of course, dates back to the bloody coup d’etat of 2014, when Ukraine ceased to exist as a rule-of-law state. Then Washington and Brussels sponsored the implementation of neo-Nazis into state. These hardened criminals continued to occupy official positions including in the Ukrainian army. It is these dark, sinister forces under the Supreme Commander of the Ukrainian Army, Vladimir Zelensky, that people face today in its existential struggle against a ruthless NATO proxy which acts out of the law.

Corruption always brings tyranny and despotism. Today Zelensky holds the office, like the Samosa dynasty that ruled Nicaragua for over forty years, for the benefit of US imperialism. Millions of Ukrainians pay the price with their lives.

Ukraine: NATO in deep crisis as the dangers to Zelensky grow

IUAFS solidarity with Donbas

 by Theo Russell

The current direction of the war in Ukraine has created an acute crisis in Western capitals, above all in Washington, and the position of Vladimir Zelensky, the president elected on a promise to end the war in Eastern Ukraine, now hangs by a thread.
We must make clear here that this is not a war between Ukraine and Russia; this is a war forced on Russia by the NATO alliance. Ukraine is merely a proxy for NATO and is paying a horrific price for this war.
The weaknesses of the once mighty NATO alliance have been exposed: after decades of relocating factories to developing countries they have now discovered that they are no longer able to produce sufficient weapons for a major sustained war.
In contrast Russia, which Western experts love to claim has a GDP the size of Italy, has proved to be a manufacturing superpower with a highly skilled workforce and mighty technological and scientific resources.
Russia has not only increased arms production, from bullets to hypersonic missiles, by several times, but has developed and improved those weapons during the fighting in Ukraine, while maintaining growth at 3.2 per cent, according to the IMF.
Ukraine’s military have discovered that Soviet-era arms, whose designs date back to the 1980s, have proved more effective on the battlefield than the vast amounts of Western weapons supplied since 2022.
Zelensky’s presidential term officially ended on 25th  March, and Russian officials have now declared that under Ukraine’s constitution he has been replaced by the speaker of the Kiev Rada as Ukraine’s highest representative.
Zelensky has become increasingly erratic and unstable as the direction of the war has turned sharply against him. By ruling out any talks with the Russian Federation, and continuing to insist on totally unrealistic terms for peace negotiations, he has clearly become an obstacle to Washington’s requirements.
His constant demands for weapons which NATO has actually run out of, and frequent attacks on his most important allies, have done nothing to improve his chances of survival.
The growing dangers for Zelensky have now been spelt out in an extraordinary article in the Financial Times (FT) on 30 May, “US to offer Ukraine security pact as tensions rise between allies”. The FT has been a leading source of inside news on Ukraine, and is believed to have very high level contacts in Washington.
The article reports detailed and open criticism of Zelensky’s actions from “more than a dozen current and former Ukrainian officials and G7 country diplomats in Kyiv”.
The high level group of officials and diplomats questioned “the removal of top government and military officials the US had worked closely with”, including the firing of commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhny in February and infrastructure minister Alexander Kubrakov, both of whom “… enjoyed close working relationships with US and EU officials”. The FT reveals that “G7 ambassadors have warned Zelensky’s government about what they see as disruptive and inexplicable moves.”
It goes on: “A senior Ukrainian official said Zelensky has grown more ‘emotional and nervous’ over the situation on the battlefield and what they say the president sees as Washington’s eagerness to start negotiations with Russia”.
Another Ukrainian official raised Zelensky’s obsession with the US-inspired “peace summit” in Switzerland on 15-16 June, which has already been abandoned by all the major players.
Zelensky is desperately clinging to the futile hope that presidents Biden and Xi will attend the summit, and asking his officials to put pressure on them. But after hearing that Biden has decided that a Democrat fund-raising dinner is more important, Zelensky publicly criticised him.
“Several members of Zelensky’s own government,” the article says, “expressed worries about Zelensky’s attacks on US officials – including Secretary of State Antony Blinken after his recent visit to Kiev. One of them spelt it out: “What do you say in America? Do not bite the hand that feeds you.”
Such veiled criticisms by very senior Ukrainian politicians do not bode well for Zelensky’s immediate future. In fact this effective group denunciation of Zelensky suggests the he has effectively outlived his usefulness to his masters in Washington.
Evidence of Zelensky’s growing instability has also come from Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, who says that in late April in meetings with foreign ambassadors “he spent most of the time improvising hectically and almost hysterically to demand support for his 'peace formula' as a means of forcing Russia to its knees".
US media reports describe Zelensky screaming at his generals –  convinced he was being lied to about the fighting near Kharkov – conjuring up images of Hitler in his Berlin bunker.
Meanwhile Beijing, which has played a major neutral role in encouraging Ukraine peace talks, has explained China’s decision not to join the Swiss summit.
On 31st  May Mao Ning, a senior Chinese Foreign Ministry official, said that although China “attaches great importance to Switzerland organizing the first summit on peace in Ukraine,” the conference “needs to meet the three important elements: recognition from both Russia and Ukraine, equal participation of all parties, and fair discussion of all peace plans, otherwise the peace conference can hardly play a substantive role for restoring peace”.
Mao said this was the position “Jointly issued by China and Brazil recently, and reflects the universal concern of the international community, especially the vast developing countries based on what we have heard from various parties.
She said China “Will continue to promote talks for peace in our own way, and maintain communication with all parties.”
In March Sergey Lavrov said that president Putin “has repeatedly spoken about our readiness to start serious talks”. However both Putin and Lavrov have made it clear that any negotiations must be based on realistic proposals, and above all must recognise Russia’s fundamental security interests.
The truth is that ever since February 2014 Western leaders have blatantly lied about Ukraine and sabotaged every opportunity for peace.
They lied about a “Russian invasion” in 2014, they pushed Ukraine into starting the war by launching the Anti-Terrorist Operation, a huge military offensive to crush the anti-Maidan uprisings in eastern Ukraine, and they used the Minsk peace process to deceive Russia while arming and training Ukrainian forces.
Five days before the start of Russia’s Special Military Operation, Ukraine launched another massive offensive against the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. Then in late March 2022 NATO wrecked the Ukraine-Russia peace plan, since then over 100,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed or injured.
Incredibly, these talks were initiated by Zelensky himself, who asked the then Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to contact Vladimir Putin, backed by Turkish President Erdogan and former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.
Schröder later told the media: “The Ukrainians did not agree to peace because they were not allowed to. They first had to ask the Americans about everything they discussed. My impression was that nothing could happen because everything was decided in Washington.”
According to senior UN official Michael von der Schulenburg, “NATO had already decided at a special summit on March 24 2022, not to support these peace negotiations”.
On April 5  2022 the Washington Post reported: “For some in NATO, it’s better for Ukrainians to keep fighting and dying than to achieve a peace that comes too soon or at too high a price for Kiev and the rest of Europe.”
The truth is that the Russian Federation did everything possible to avoid a full-scale war in Ukraine, spending eight years supporting the Minsk process plan, involving simple autonomy for the then Donetsk and Lugansk Republics, while Ukraine, with NATO’s support, broke ceasefire after ceasefire and thousands of civilians in those republics died in constant Ukrainian attacks.
The aim of the NATO alliance all along has been to force war on the Russian Federation, and now the whole world can see the terrible price which has been paid for a war which could so easily have been avoided.

US imperialism sets the agenda at the Group of Seven

Once upon a time the Group of Seven (G7) had some purpose – at least for the leaders of the Western world – in providing a platform for the masters of imperialism to present a common economic front to challenge the Soviet Union and the Third World during the Cold War. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 the G7, like the Trilateral Commission and the World Economic Forum that meets in Davos, was used by the Western powers to by-pass the United Nations in their bid to rule the world at the turn of the century. 

That American dream brought death and destruction to the Balkans and the Arab world until finally brought to a halt on the streets of Baghdad and Aleppo. No-one talks about the “New World Order” these days – not even at the G7 which claims to uphold the shared values of what they call pluralism, liberal democracy, and representative government. 

These mythical “values”, which are simply a mask to cover the oppression and exploitation of capitalism at home and abroad, have few takers beyond the heartlands of the Western world that lives off the backs of the Global South it seeks to plunder and exploit.

The G7 now is simply another forum for US imperialism to set out its agenda to the leaders of the other imperialist powers – Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Italy and Canada – that do the bidding of whoever is in the White House at the time.

No Western get-together can be without the presence of Vladimir Zelensky and this year’s G7 in Hiroshima was no exception. Zelensky turned up in person – invited, it is said, at the initiative of the British government – to appeal for more guns and money to keep his war with the Russians going.  Zelensky says that escalation is the key to victory but he’s hardly a military expert. And in any case everybody knows he is merely parroting the wishes of the Biden administration in Washington.

This is Biden’s war. And as retired Italian general Marco Bertolini pointed out the other day, if Western arms supplies to Ukraine had stopped “the war would have ended a year ago and would not have cost hundreds of thousands of lives”. 

Zelensky says he’s a “servant of the people”. That was the name of the TV comedy show he starred in when he was still an actor. It’s now the name of Zelensky’s own political platform. And it’s true, Zelensky is a servant of the “people”. But they are clearly not Ukrainians. 

The people Zelensky serves are the Americans behind Joe Biden – the venal and aggressive war-party of American industrialists, bankers and landowners that still believes in world domination. 

There is, of course, division and opposition to the Ukraine war within the American ruling class. We see it in the dissident voices of investigative journalists, politicians, retired generals and diplomats that even include Nixon’s scheming foreign minister, Henry Kissinger. We also see it amongst the Republican opposition.

The two Republican front-runners set to challenge Biden at the next election are former President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Both are opposed to Biden’s proxy war. And they’re not the only ones.

This is why Boris Johnson has gone to Texas. He’s in Dallas trying to sway leading Republican politicians, donors and businessmen away from what the war-lobby see as a deviant line from the Trump camp.

Sadly the dead hand of the bourgeois gurus, the social democrats and the bogus left that also serve imperialism has stifled open debate on the Ukraine conflict in the media and more importantly, within the labour movement itself. 

Communists like us, working with other genuine left anti-war forces, can make the difference, and indeed we must, to build the campaign to halt the British role in the war and build solidarity with the fighting people of the Donbas.