Fanning the flames

The shameful decision of the Sunak government to send the RAF in to bomb Yemen in support of American offensive against the defiant Arab republic has done nothing for the merchant shipping the imperialists claim to be protecting. The Houthi government that controls most of the country have stepped up their blockade that’s closed the Red Sea to all Israeli shipping. And the US campaign, ludicrously called “Operation Prosperity Guardian” has now put the Red Sea off limits to British and American vessels as well.
    Though crawling to the Americans is second nature to Conservative and Labour leaders it’s a different ball game in Europe. Franco-German imperialism wants to sit this one out and the European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrel says that the bloc has no intention to send warships to the US naval mission in the Red Sea.
    “This bloc does not intend to escalate the conflict with the Yemeni army, we must do everything possible to ensure freedom of navigation, but at the same time avoid escalation,” Borrel said.
    The EU wants to distance itself from Anglo-American aggression to guarantee the continued supply of oil and gas from Qatar and the other oil kingdoms of the Persian Gulf which supply most of the continent with its energy needs these days. Qatar, which has long supported the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, has warned that the escalation of the crisis in the Red Sea could force shipping to take a much longer and more expensive diversion via South Africa that would seriously impact on LNG cargoes to Europe.
    It will also affect the delivery of supplies from the Far East to Europe. Tesla has announced that due to the auto parts flow disruption caused by transportation delays, it will stop its production in its Gigafactory in Berlin. Volvo, the now Chinese-owned car manufacturer. Has suspended production at its plant in Ghent, Belgium, due to delays in parts deliveries.
    The Houthi leaders have repeatedly said that their objective is to stop the slaughter in Gaza. Their blockade will end when the Israelis cease-fire. One call to Tel Aviv from the White House would do the trick, If the Biden administration had any sense it would do it now.

Preparing for Power?

The Tory government is on its last legs. Playing the race card over the refugee crisis has done nothing to boost their flagging fortunes. The pundits say Sunak will go for an autumn general election. The opinion polls put Labour streets ahead of the Tories. The media tell us Labour is preparing for power and Starmer is already writing the next King’s Speech. But what is Labour preparing us for?
    Absolutely nothing if anything the Labour leadership say is anything to go by these days. No national mass housing plans. No renationalisation of the railways or the energy and water utilities. No major increase in public investment in education or the health service, Doing whatever the Americans want – well that goes without saying.
    It difficult to see where Labour actually differs from the Conservatives on most issues – and this is what Starmer wants. Starmer’s spent most of his time knifing Corbyn in the back and driving out the former Labour leader’s supporters out of the party. The Labour leader clearly thinks this is the key to victory at the next general election.
    But a manifesto that consists entirely of vacuous platitudes will do nothing to mobilise working people to vote Labour – and if Labour can’t get their vote out then the Tories will win by default.

A dangerous escalation

In the 19th century the imperialists used “gun-boat diplomacy” to carve up Africa the rest of the world into various European spheres of influence. It worked because only the colonial powers could manufacture the weapons of mass destruction needed to enslave the people of what is we now call the Global South. They thought their realms, like the British Empire on which “the sun never set” would last forever. They called it “civilisation” and “the White Man’s burden” when they brutally crushed all resistance to the forces used to build colonial empires that spanned the globe. But they couldn’t crush the spirit of freedom amongst the oppressed masses who swept away the colonial system after the second world war.
The masses of the Third World who took up the gun in the national liberation wars in Algeria and Zimbabwe showed that it was people, not arms, that decide the outcome of struggles while the Korean and Vietnamese people taught the American imperialists a lesson they still have yet to learn.
If the Anglo-American attacks on Yemen were meant to build a new NATO bloc in the Middle East to protect Israel and intimidate the Arabs it has clearly failed. Most of America’s allies have refused to join this new “coalition of the willing” which only consists of Britain, the United States, Canada and some tiny islands in the Pacific that no-one’s ever heard of.
If the US-led attacks were meant to force the Houthi government to abandon its blockade of Israeli shipping they have clearly failed. The Red Sea remains the “Arab Sea” and the Houthis are now adding British and American vessels to their list.
The Yemenis say they will end their blockade once the fighting in Gaza stops.  All the Americans have to do to make that happens is to tell their puppets in Tel Aviv to cease-fire and end the carnage.

One up for the RMT

The RMT transport union ended its dispute with Transport for London (TfL) following an improved pay offer from City Hall that has added an extra £30 million to the pay budget to meet union demands on pay, grading structures and travel facilities. 
Last month RMT rejected  a below inflation pay offer of five per cent from the London Underground. This, they said was “unacceptable when TfL has created a bonus pot of £13 million for senior managers and the commissioner took an 11 per cent pay rise in 2023 taking his salary up to £395,000”.
RMT general secretary Mick Lynch said: “Following further positive discussions today, the negotiations on a pay deal for our London Underground members can now take place on an improved basis and mandate with significant further funding for a settlement being made available. This significantly improved funding position means the scheduled strike action will be suspended with immediate effect and we look forward to getting into urgent negotiations with TfL in order to develop a suitable agreement and resolution to the dispute”.
Though Management initially refused to budge the solid response by the membership to past strike calls and the union’s determination to continue prolonged industrial action forced them to respond realistically to the union’s demand for higher pay and the restoration of full staff travel facilities for all Tube workers.This is what collective bargaining is all about and this is why it has to be defended.

 

Early days for Joe Biden

THE LABOUR movement in the USA largely backed the Democrat drive to dump Donald Trump in last year’s presidential election, and their leaders welcomed the inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in January. Getting rid of Trump was, of course, a victory for American workers.
    The march of the most reactionary and racist elements of the US ruling class and the degenerates they mobilised to build the Trump movement has been stopped – at least for the time being – by the mass movement that grew from the Black Lives Matter movements and the rage on the street at the Trump government’s indifferent response to the coronavirus plague that is sweeping through the USA.
    Reversing Trump’s immigration laws and re-joining the Paris agreement on climate change may have won the praise of the environmentalist lobby, but on the left, few seriously expect much from the new administration apart from the usual platitudes that the Democrats dish out to keep their blue-collar voters sweet.
    The new US administration is naturally focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic that has already claimed some 480,000 American lives whilst the stimulus plan seeks to revive the country’s ailing economy. Whilst there are some very modest concessions to the working class, Republican Senators, with Democratic support, have stalled the proposed plan to double the minimum wage – which now looks likely to be replaced with staged increases over the next four years.
    On the world stage, Joe Biden clearly wants to continue where his predecessor, Barack Obama, left off. His first task is to restore US imperialism’s hold over its European NATO allies to restore US hegemony throughout the capitalist world and lead a global imperialist front to confront Russia and People’s China.
    Although talk about “regime change” is no longer fashionable in Washington, the Americans haven’t abandoned the dreams of world domination that they once called the “new world order” or “globalisation”.
    The US-led economic blockade of Cuba and Democratic Korea continues, and new sanctions are applied to Russia and China. American dollars prop up puppets in Ukraine and the Caucasus and the reactionary separatist movements in China.
    In the Middle East, Biden tells the Palestinians that he supports a “two state” solution and that the USA is ready to resume aid that Trump cut to their “autonomous” government in the West Bank. He tells Iran he wants to revive the Iran nuclear deal that Trump tore up in 2018.
    But Biden wants the Iranians to agree to new terms and conditions before lifting sanctions on the Islamic Republic and tells the Palestinians that he will not reverse Donald Trump’s contentious US embassy move to Jerusalem.
    Biden’s team no longer call for the outright overthrow of President Assad’s popular front government in Syria – Russian intervention put a stop to that nonsense a few years ago. Now they seek to partition the country through a bogus “federal” plan that would legitimise the US occupation of the Kurdish region in eastern Syria.
    They’ve changed tack on Yemen. Trump backed the disastrous Saudi intervention in the civil war. Now Biden says he’s going to end all US support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arm sales. But he’s only doing this because the Saudi intervention has backfired, bringing death and destruction to Saudi Arabia that threatens the House of Saud and the vast oil industry that serves US imperialism.
It is indeed ‘business as usual’ in Washington these days.