Showing posts with label Reagan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reagan. Show all posts

11 February 2025

Israel and the United States - No the Tail Does not Wag the Dog

Those Who Argue That Israel Controls American Foreign Policy Are Letting US Imperialism Off the Hook

I understand why, for many people, it seems as if Israel controls US foreign policy. After all Israeli politicians, Netanyahu included, boast of how much power they exert and in all probability they believe it.


I must confess that I was surprised by the video of Lowkey whose title was ‘Donald Trump is a Puppet of Israel’. In the video Lowkey explained which billionaires and Israeli/Zionist individuals and organisations had financed Trump’s successful election campaign.

xxxx

The heading on the video from Double Down News was ‘Donald Trump is a Puppet of Israel’. Although Lowkey didn’t actually say these words in the video, I assume that he was nonetheless happy with the title..

It was on this basis that I posted a comment making it clear that this was ‘political idiocy’ and that it was a ‘fucking stupid thing to say’. I went on to say:

Israel is the attack dog of US imperialism. Israel does what the US can only dream of. Why the fuck do you think Biden said that if Israel didn't exist it would have to be invented. Christians evangelists wanted an Israel when Jews didn't. Read up on your fucking history and use your brain

@lowkeyonline

the US controls Israel or rather supports her because an unsinkable aircraft carrier is in its interests - that's why the most rabid anti-Semites love Israel

For this I was duly reprimanded by Asa Winstanley of Electronic Intifada who said there was ‘no need to abuse @Lowkey0nline over a political disagreement. He’s a good man and doesn’t deserve to be sworn at like that.’

I don’t accept I swore at or abused Lowkey but I didn’t pull any punches either. I agree that Lowkey is a good man and an excellent researcher. However it is one thing to do the research and it is an entirely another thing as to what conclusions you draw from that research.

I have no doubt that rich Jewish Zionists like Miriam Adelson funded Trump’s campaign. So did the Hitler saluting neo-Nazi Elon Musk, who is not Jewish.

Elon Musk’s ‘awkward gesture’ according to the Zionist ADL

But it is an entirely different matter to conclude from this that Trump is Israel’s puppet. Or that United States foreign policy is controlled by Israel. Because if Israel, a relatively small state that is entirely dependent on US weapons and finance, does control the US, a much bigger and more powerful state, then the question arises as to how this is possible. A moment’s thought should tell us that this is highly unlikely. Why would the Pentagon, American multi-nationals and billionaire class allow  the Israeli state or indeed any state to control their foreign policy?

Of course there are conspiracy cookies, of whom there are quite a number who, like Glenn Beck, the former Fox News presenter, will come out and say it’s a Jewish conspiracy as predicted in the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. But for more normal and rational people this is an absurd formulation. American Jews are 5 or 6 million. 40% of young Jews believe Israel is an apartheid state and young Jews are in the forefront of the anti-genocide protests.

Of course the Jewish capitalists, who with the exception of George Soros are all Zionists, are pro-Israel.  But is US support for Israel a result of rich Jews conspiring together? That is the only plausible explanation for how Israel ‘controls’ US foreign policy.

Butcher Biden, whilst always telling us of his red lines, funded and equipped Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Without US support Israel would not have been able to destroy Gaza. The question is why the US did this. The answer is not hard to find.

The Middle East is an incredibly important part of the world. It is the gateway to Asia with the Suez Canal and it is a region rich in oil and gas. Both British and US foreign policy is geared to suppressing the Arab populations through compliant comprador regimes. Arab nationalism with its threat to Western control of the oil is a dire threat to the West’s prosperity and Israel has been pivotal in defeating it.

Israel is the United States’s attack dog, used to frighten and police the region. Although the US uses Saudi Arabia in particular to do this in the Gulf,the Saudi regime is not based on popular support and is thus unstable. Israel is a western settler colonial state whose population is every bit as right-wing and racist as its politicians.

But if Israel is the West’s attack dog then it is important that it retains its bite. If you kick your attack dog too often it becomes afraid to do anything. Far better that Israel murders a few hundred thousands in Gaza than that it’s afraid to slaughter Arabs when the US expects it to.

With the settlers of the West Bank now gaining critical mass in Israeli politics we are seeing a shift from the old secular racism of Israel to  Messianic racist politicians who believe they are fulfilling god’s mandate.

Of course the old Israeli Labor Party politicians weren’t really secular. There was no civil marriage in Israel as that would have enabled Arabs, Christians, Muslims and Jews to inter-marry and in a Jewish state based on racial purity that is not kosher. 

Israel prefers to keep its version of the Nazi Nuremberg laws which prevents Jews and Arabs inter-marrying. It was the ILP government which conquered the West Bank because it too signed up to the idea that the biblical territories of Zionist mythology must be conquered.

Noam Chomsky - Why Does the U.S. Support Israel?

As Noam Chomsky explains in the video, Christian Zionism predated Jewish Zionism by hundreds of years. This was the theology of Christian imperialism.  The first imperialist to dream of a Jewish state was Napoleon and he was followed by a variety of British politicians, Lords Palmerston and Shaftesbury in particular.

Why were the British so keen on Zionism that they agreed to sponsor the Zionist project via the Balfour Declaration? The answer is simple. They saw a British run client settler state as being in their interests although things did not turn out as they expected because after 1945 the British and the Zionist militias fought a war against each other. But at no stage did the British arm the Arabs. This was a repeat of the American War of Independence. Even though the British were losing to the American colonists, they never entertained the idea of arming the Black slaves.

When Israel defeated the combined Arab armies in 1967 they also defeated the Arab nationalism of Gamal Abdel-Nasser. Arab nationalism died with Nasser.

US President Joe Biden: “If there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one.”

Alexander Haig was right when he described Israel as an unsinkable aircraft carrier.  Biden was right when he said that if Israel didn’t exist it would have to be invented. A ready made friendly settler state in the region that supported and was dependent on the US fitted in with imperialism’s plans.

The Conversation gets it about right when it describes how:

Regardless of which political party or coalition is in power in Israel, and regardless of where public opinion in the U.S. is moving, the U.S. government’s “commitment to Israel’s security is ironclad,” as Vice-President Kamala Harris put it.

The U.S. sees Israel as a critical “strategic ally” in the Middle East….

Why would the U.S. need to invent an Israel? Biden has always seen Israel as an investment which produces the best returns for U.S. interests.

In 1986, when he was a member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, he opposed the sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia because they were not able to become “agents of .U.S interests in the Persian Gulf region.”

He stressed that his opposition to the weapons sale was not about whether the Saudis were good guys or bad guys, but about the ability of the Saudis to help advance and secure U.S. interests.

He emphasized that the “naked self-interest of the U.S.” should always guide their Middle East policy, and that his support for Israel is situated within that self-interest. As he bluntly explained: “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.”

Biden’s frank comments make clear that the U.S.-Israel “bond” is not about defending democracy. Rather, it has always been, and still is, about American imperial interests in the region.

That is why although the US has cajoled and tried to persuade Israel to come to some form of two-state bantust-type settlement with Israel, they never contemplated forcing Israel to disgorge its territory.

That is why, although Israel is the most powerful actor in the region, American and British politicians have always gone along with the fiction of Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ which really means Israel’s right to attack whoever it wants.

Of course in the United States there is a competition as to who can give Israel the most support, because it is taken for granted that Israel is an adjunct to American power in the region. It may indeed seem at times as if Israel controls the United States but all I can say to those who believe this is that appearances can often be deceptive.

It pays US politicians to pretend that Israel has them by the throat but when on occasion there really is a clash of interests then it is always the United States that wins. When Reagan wanted to sell AWACS surveillance aircraft to Saudi Arabia, Israel objected.

Reagan bluntly declared that ‘It is not the business of other nations to make American foreign policy.’ he won the battle. Similarly when Bush demanded that $10 billion loan guarantees not be used to fund settlements on the West Bank and Prime Minister Shamir objected,

Bush stood his ground, insisting on delaying the entire loan guarantee for 120 days. ….

Shamir thought that with the help of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, he could force Bush’s hand by mobilizing Congress to approve the aid immediately in defiance of the president.

Unmoved, Bush vowed to veto legislation that authorized the aid before the 120-day delay had expired. He took his case to the media, speaking at length about his stance in a press conference on Sept. 12, 1991. He famously portrayed himself as an underdog against the might of AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups, which had recently organized a massive lobbying day on Capitol Hill.

“I heard today there was something like 1,000 lobbyists on the Hill working on the other side of the question. We’ve got one lonely little guy down here doing it,” he said, eliciting laughs from the White House press corps.

Shortly thereafter, Bush prevailed in his game of chicken with Shamir and AIPAC.

Congress backed down. And when the U.S. finally guaranteed the loans in the spring of 1992, it did so using a new formula designed to offset Israel’s spending on settlements. It guaranteed $200 million less for each billion Israel asked for to account for Israel’s projected settlement spending.

Historically the Republican Party has not depended on Jewish or Zionist financial support. That has always been in the Democrat’s pocket although today it is different. But regardless of who supported which party there was never any doubt that when it came to Israel there was total bipartisanship.

In short it is not Israeli control of US foreign policy that is the problem. It is US imperialism and its Israeli watchdog that are our real enemies.

Not only do those who attribute US support for Israel to the Zionist lobbies not understand where power lies but they let US imperialism off the hook. If only the lobby wasn’t so powerful these people claim then US imperialism would be more benign.

Or you do like David Miller seems to be doing and that is chasing individual Zionists in positions of power on the basis that once they are removed from office then Britain will adopt a pro-Palestinian foreign policy.

Such a strategy is a recipe for derailing the Palestine solidarity movement by failing to see where power really lies.

Tony Greenstein

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18 December 2024

On Thursday I will be Charged Under the Terrorism Act 2000 with Expressing an “Opinion or Belief” that the Government doesn’t like – We are sleepwalking into an Orwellian Police State

 Of One Thing We Can Be Certain – This is Not About Fighting Terrorism but Suppressing Freedom of Speech


I hope to see you on Thursday morning at 9.45 a.m. outside Westminster Magistrates Court, 1818 Marleybone Road, London NW1 5BR.

I would also ask you, if you can afford it, to contribute to my Crowdfunding Appeal Stopping the Police Persecuting Palestine Solidarity Activists.

On December 20 2023 my home was raided at 7 a.m. in the morning by South-East Counter-Terrorist Police who informed me that I was being arrested on suspicion of committing an offence under s.12(1)A of the Terrorism Act 2000.

This is what Starmer and Lammy Support By Approving Arms Sales 

What you may ask was my offence? Planting or conspiracy to plant a bomb? Assassinating war criminals Starmer and Lammy? Not a bit of it. The Police referred to a tweet I had posted a month before which expressed support for Palestinian Resistance in its fight against Israel’s genocidal occupation of Gaza.

I understand that the charge that has now been laid relates to a blog which I posted on October 7, Full Support for the Gaza Ghetto Uprising. Its subtitle referred to the hypocrisy of Biden & those who support Ukrainian resistance but condemn Palestinian resistance.

I referred to the Commander of the Warsaw ghetto resistance, Marek Edelman, who compared their resistance with that of the Palestinians. This is not of course a message that is welcome to the British state.

Despite the BBC and British press commenting favourably on the Syrian Jihadists of the HTS, who are still proscribed, there have been no arrests!

There can be no doubt about the intention of s.12(1A) of the Terrorism Act. It states quite clearly:

A person commits an offence if the person (a) expresses an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation, and (b) in doing so is reckless as to whether a person to whom the expression is directed will be encouraged to support a proscribed organisation.

The word ‘supportive’ is a weasel word. It is intentionally ambiguous or misleading. If what you say about a proscribed organisation is at all positive, that can be held to be supportive, regardless of whether it is true or not. This legislation deliberately embeds lies into British law.


The result is that when writing an article you must look over your shoulder in case what you write might offend the Zionist lobby which may report you to the Thought Police. This is the stuff of 1984. We are sleep walking into an Orwellian Dystopia. It cannot help but chill freedom of speech and is clearly contrary to Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights which guarantees the right of freedom of speech and expression.

William Tyndale died at the stake because the state disapproved of what he said

The second part of s.12(1A) criminalises the expression of an opinion or belief if the person is reckless as to its effect on someone who reads it. This is the stuff of police states. Recklessness forms part of the mens rea in criminal cases such as gross negligence manslaughter. Where the defendant was aware of the risks involved but nonetheless pursued a particular course of conduct and someone died they may be held liable. It is known as Cunningham recklessness.

Such a test is completely inappropriate when it comes to someone’s opinion or belief. We are not dealing with any fatal consequences. What is really intended is that you should keep your mouth shut when talking about a group that the government doesn’t like, which it defines as ‘terrorist’ or else face the consequences.

In the case of the expression of one’s opinion nothing need happen but you are held to be reckless as to whether someone might support the said organisation. Only a liar and a bully like Priti Patel could introduce such a clause into law.

I must confess that when I write an article, I hope that this is not used in evidence against me (!), I don’t think of consequences in terms of what my readers might do. I wonder if people understand the points I’m making, I wonder how many hits it may get and what readers think of the article but as regards what they might do? Nothing. Only a police state could think of introducing such a subjective law.

There is the question of what is or is not terrorism. Section 1 of the Terrorism Act defines terrorism as the use or threat of violence designed to influence a government. This is completely inappropriate when applied to a resistance or anti-colonial movement. Israel is not the government of Gaza. It is an occupying power whose occupation has just been ruled illegal by the highest court in the world, the International Court of Justice. Since the occupation is illegal how can resistance to it anything other than legal?

Subsection 2 of Section 1 states that the action must involve serious violence to a person, serious damage to property, endanger a person’s life, create a serious danger to health and safety and be designed to interfere with or seriously disrupt an electronic system. These provisions are not what most people call terrorism.

The irony is that the Israeli state itself played a key role in the formation of Hamas

Damage to property, health and safety or the disruption of electronic systems have their own criminal offences. There is no need to invoke the use of terrorism unless there are hidden motives and specific political objectives in mind. It is, after all, highly unlikely that a company which puts its workers at risk will be charged with terrorism, though it would be nice if they were!

Thatcher and Reagan both described the African National Congress as a terrorist organisation. If this law had been in operation back in the 1970s and 80s then support for the overthrow of Apartheid in South Africa would have been a criminal offence. Indeed support for any anti-colonial movement that used violence against the occupier would have been ‘terrorism’. This is the law of the occupier, the racist, the imperialist. It is no wonder that Starmer and Attorney General Hermer and his Zionist Deputy Sarah Sackman are so happy to use it.

Today the law is being used by the institutionally racist Metropolitan Police to attack the Kurdish community in London who largely support the PKK (Kurdish Workers Party) who are conducting a struggle against the semi-fascist Turkish state of Recep Erdogan. Erdogan is trying to ban and has severely harassed the HDP, which obtained 6 million votes at the last election.

The ban on the PKK in effect means supporting Erdogan, who has been waging his own genocidal war in Kurdistan, which Turkey occupies. It is another example of how this so-called anti-terrorist law is being used to support colonial oppression and fascism. See Banning the pro-Kurdish HDP in Turkey is a move towards fascism.

Terrorism is quite simple to define. It is the use of violence against civilian populations by groups which have no mass base, the intention of which is to coerce or frighten them. The Israeli state is the classic example of a terrorist organisation. ISIS and Al Qaeda similarly. Neither ISIS or Al Qaeda have any mass base and have never been elected by anyone.  That is why they send people to Europe to commit random acts of mass murder such as at the attack on the Bataclan in Paris when 130 people died and hundreds were injured.

Hamas, Hezbollah and the PKK are entirely different organisations from ISIS. They operate within the territory of their own countries. They have never planted bombs in this country. Hamas was elected in 2006 by the majority of Palestinians. However the US and Israel didn’t like the result so they ignored it and in 2007 Gaza was subject to a suffocating siege and repeated attacks on it which Israel’s military called ‘mowing the lawn’. Thousands died in these attacks but to reptiles like Starmer and Lammy Palestinian deaths are of no consequence. Assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin stated in 1992  that “I would like Gaza to sink into the sea, but that won’t happen, and a solution must be found”.


Anti-colonial resistance struggles are lawful under international law. The Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949 include the protection of peoples fighting against colonial domination and occupation and against racist régimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination.  Likewise UN General Assembly Resolution 3314 (XXIX) confirms that those living under colonial domination have the right to struggle to remove that occupation.

Nothing in this Definition, and in particular article 3, could in any way prejudice the right to self-determination, freedom and independence, as derived from the Charter, of peoples forcibly deprived of that right and referred to in the Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes or other forms of alien domination: nor the right of these peoples to struggle to that end and to seek and receive support, in accordance with the principles of the Charter and in conformity with the above-mentioned Declaration.

International law and the Conventions in question are part of British law. See Do Palestinians have the right to resist, and what are the limits?

Furthermore, the Additional Protocol 1 to the Geneva Conventions (1977), to which Palestine acceded in 2014 (joining over 160 countries), in its Article 1(4), classifies conflicts in which peoples are fighting against alien occupation and racist regimes as armed conflicts. Individuals engaging in such “fighting,” if captured, should be afforded the status of prisoners of war, meaning their fighting is legitimate.

To those who argue that Hamas, Hezbollah and the PKK have no right to resist Israel militarily, I point them to Stanley Cohen’s Palestinians have a legal right to armed struggle Al Jazeera 27.7.16. Cohen points out that the Israeli state was born in blood and fire. Its terrorism makes Hamas seem like amateurs:

On April 12, 1938, the Irgun murdered two British police officers in a train bombing in Haifa. On August 26, 1939, two British officers were killed by an Irgun landmine in Jerusalem. On February 14, 1944, two British constables were shot dead when they attempted to arrest people for pasting up wall posters in Haifa. On September 27, 1944, more than 100 members of the Irgun attacked four British police stations, injuring hundreds of officers. Two days later a senior British police officer of the Criminal Intelligence Department was assassinated in Jerusalem.

On November 1, 1945, another police officer was killed as five trains were bombed. On December 27, 1945, seven British officers lost their lives in a bombing on police headquarters in Jerusalem. Between November 9 and 13, 1946, Jewish “underground” members launched a series of landmine and suitcase bomb attacks in railway stations, trains, and streetcars, killing 11 British soldiers and policemen and eight Arab constables.

Four more officers were murdered in another attack on a police headquarters on January 12, 1947. Nine months later, four British police were murdered in an Irgun bank robbery and, but three days later, on September 26, 1947, an additional 13 officers were  killed in yet another terrorist attack on a British police station.  

Throughout this period, Jewish terrorists also undertook countless attacks that spared no part of the British and Palestinian infrastructure. Numerous attacks were carried out against the oil industry including one, in March 1947, on a Shell oil refinery in Haifa which destroyed some 16,000 tonnes of petroleum.

Zionist terrorists killed British soldiers throughout Palestine, using booby traps, ambushes, snipers, and vehicle blasts.

In 1947, the Irgun kidnapped two British Army Intelligence Corps non-commissioned officers and threathened to hang them if death sentences of three of their own members were carried out. When these three Irgun members were executed by hanging, the two British sergeants were hanged in retaliation and their booby-trapped bodies were left in an eucalyptus grove.

In announcing their execution, the Irgun said that the two British soldiers were hanged following their conviction for “criminal anti-Hebrew activities” which included: illegal entry into the Hebrew homeland and membership in a British criminal terrorist organisation – known as the Army of Occupation – which was “responsible for the torture, murder, deportation, and denying the Hebrew people the right to live”. The soldiers were also charged with illegal possession of arms, anti-Jewish spying in civilian clothes, and premeditated hostile designs against the underground (pdf).

Well beyond the territorial confines of Palestine, in late 1946-47 a continuing campaign of terrorism was directed at the British. Acts of sabotage were carried out on British military transportation routes in Germany.  The Lehi also tried, unsuccessfully, to drop a bomb on the House of Commons from a chartered plane flown from France and, in October 1946, bombed the British Embassy in Rome. A number of other explosive devices were detonated in and around strategic targets in London. Some 21 letter bombs were addressed, at various times, to senior British political figures. Many were intercepted, while others reached their targets but were discovered before they could go off.

Of course the British press, both locally and nationally, refuse to see that charges under the Terrorism Act have any connection with such subversive ideas as freedom of speech. ‘Terrorism charge over man's online comments was the BBC headline on my arrest. The headline in the Brighton Argus was Brighton man charged with terror offences over Hamas comments and Tony Greenstein charged with terrorism offence.

There are some who will say that it was the Palestinian resistance that breached international law when they seized Israeli captives and took them back to Gaza in order to exchange them for Palestinian captives. If this is unlawful under international law then so is the holding of 10,000+ Palestinians in Israeli captivity. A third of them have had no trial at all and the remainder are ‘convicted’ in Israeli Military Courts which have a 99.74% conviction rate.

We should also bear in mind, although our pitiful press won’t inform people of this, that Israel has regularly captured hostages to exchange for its own prisoners. The ‘liberal’ President of the Israeli High Court Aharon Barak held in 1997 that

a detention is legal if it is designed to promote State security, even if the danger to State Security does not emanate from the detainees themselves.

and that “detention ... for the purpose of release of ... captured and missing soldiers is a vital interest to the State.”

Tony Greenstein

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18 January 2023

Overwhelming Public Support for NHS Strike Pickets but Starmer & Streeting Refuse to Support the Nurses

 The Failure of Starmer & Streeting to Give Any Support to the Nurses Proves the Irrelevance of the Labour Party - We Need a New Working Class Socialist Party


NHS Strike Picket Today at Brighton's Sussex County Hospital

As you can see from the video the NHS strikers have overwhelming public support.  But public support doesn’t translate into victory against a government which is committed to transferring wealth from the poor to the rich.

We have had neo-liberal governments for the past 40 years and in that time the rich have grown richer. Since 2020 the richest 1% have, according to a new Oxfam report, grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth worth $42 trillion created since 2020, almost twice as much money as the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population. During the past decade, the richest 1% have captured around half of all new wealth. 

The table below shows how, beginning with Ronald Reagan in the United States, wealth flowed from the poor to the rich. In 1967 the richest 20% had 43.6% of wealth. By 2014 this had increased to 51.2%, whereas the share of the poorest 20% declined from 4% to 3.1%. This continued under the Democrats and under Trump, with his tax cuts for the rich and Biden, the trend has continued.

According to Statista and the Sunday Times Rich List the UK’s top 10 richest people are wealthier than ever. The cumulative wealth of the top 10 billionaires in the UK has grown from £47.77 billion in 2009 to £182 billion in 2022 - an increase of 281%.

Following the 2008 crash, UK’s billionaires have seen a steady and steep incline in their wealth. The upward trend continued despite the pandemic, which saw the UK’s economy shrink by 20.4% in the second quarter of 2020. 30.5m people in Europe were pushed into poverty. By way of contrast the UK’s 250 ultra wealthy saw their collective wealth surge to a record high of £653 billion in 2022.

George Dibbs, the head of the Center for Economic Justice at the Institute for Public Policy Research, explained how we are seeing a widening wealth gap

As we enter a once-in-a-generation cost of living crisis, the Sunday Times rich list shows us again that vast wealth often begets more wealth. That has proved particularly true during the pandemic, when the wealthiest accumulated more wealth than poorer people, who saved nothing.

As most people faced a cost of living crisis Rishi Sunak and Akshata Murty joined the UK rich list with a combined £730m fortune. Dominic Raab, now Deputy Prime Minister, said it was “fantastic” news that Sunak had joined the rich list.

“He’s a fantastic example of someone who’s been successful in business, who’s coming to make a big impact in public service. I think we want more of those people. I think it’s fantastic that you’ve got someone of British-Indian origin, showing all people in our country that you can get to the top of politics.

The UK now has a record 177 billionaires, up six on 2021. Their combined wealth is up 9.4% to a record £653bn.

Nurses Picket Outside Brighton's Sussex County Hospital

This is the background to the current strike wave. It also explains the new anti-strike laws and the further attack on public protests with the new Public Order Bill. These bills have nothing to do with preventing ‘disruption’ to the public despite government’s lies. They have everything to do with defending the right of the rich to get richer.

The refusal of Starmer and Streeting, both of whom support further privatisation of the NHS, is contemptible. If they had a shred of honesty they would change the name of the Labour Party to ‘The New Tory Party’ but Honesty and Starmer is an oxymoron.

At the same time we have seen massive corruption arising from giving COVID contracts to friends and cronies of the Tories. Just 10 Conservative MPs and peers referred companies to a “VIP lane” that won £1.6bn of PPE contracts. The “VIP lane” was recently declared unlawful by the High Court but no one has been prosecuted by the Police because their sole focus is on benefit claimants. Government corruption is not their concern.

One Fifth of Covid contracts ‘raised red flags for possible corruption’. We have a corrupt government and a corrupt capitalist system where wealth flows upwards, away from workers to the parasites who preside over this system.

When Sunak and Starmer tell workers that we ‘cannot afford’ 19% pay increases for nurses we should bear in mind that the average pay packet of Chief Executives in the FTSE 100 companies jumped by 39% to £3.4 million. The average UK CEO now collects 109 times that paid to the average British worker, up from 79 times in 2020.

About this Starmer, Reeves and the rest of the traitorous Labour MPs have nothing to say. After all Labour is now ‘business friendly’.

What we need to create is a genuine working class socialist party that defends the poor against the spivs, speculators and parasites who have plundered the economy whilst telling us that we ‘cannot afford’ to pay decent wages and benefits. Neo-liberal capitalism means privatising the public sector and allowing the capitalist pigs to hide their ill gotten gains in tax havens whilst avoiding paying taxes.

Corbyn still does not understand that the ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations were designed to remove him and nothing more

People should sign up to the Socialist Labour Network’s appeal for a new mass working class party. The time is for socialists to get together and organise after the debacle of Corbyn who has proven that he couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag with his appalling interview with Liz Kendall when, despite everything, he still accepted that there was a genuine ‘anti-Semitism’ crisis in the Labour Party.

Nurses Picket Outside Brighton's Sussex County Hospital

It is time for the trade unions to fight back. Individual strikes are not enough. Only a general strike that challenges the privileges of the idle rich and their supporters in parliament will challenge the Tories. It is clear that although welcome, the current strike wave, uncoordinated as it is, is not enough.

Nurses Picket Outside Brighton's Sussex County Hospital

Meanwhile everyone who can should join the strike picket lines and reject the divide and rule tactics of the ruling class. The trade union bureaucrats want a quiet life and would prefer to accept minimal concessions rather than lead a fight back. They need to have their feet held to the fire. We need a strategy of outright defiance of the trade union laws. Anti-strike laws are a negation of the most basic principles of a democratic society. It was Hitler who outlawed strikes and unions on May 2 1933. The anti-strike laws are nothing but a continuation of Hitlerism by other means.

Tony Greenstein

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