Women’s Marches across Britain rally against sexism

The marches show that there is a mood to fight sexism in society

UK Women’s March on Saturday

By Judy Cox
Saturday 18 January 2025

SOCIALIST WORKER Issue

Thousands of people joined Women’s Marches in towns and cities across Britain to rage against sexism.

The marches, organised by new group UK Women’s March 2025, came just two days before sexist abuser Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Up to 3,000 people joined the march in London from Waterloo to Old Palace Yard opposite parliament.

Serafina, who came from Ramsgate, told Socialist Worker, “Women need abortion rights. Abortion rights are human rights. It’s healthcare.

“We shouldn’t have to fight to be treated like human beings. We get treated like we can’t do our jobs when we have babies.”

Another protester said that she had marched for abortion rights in 1970s—and was furious that she had to get back on the streets.

Abbie from Southend said, “I’m marching because I’m angry about everything women have to deal with—and for abortion rights. People give bullshit reasons to oppose abortion, but foetuses are not babies and the same people don’t care about bombing babies in Palestine.”

Megan had come from Stevenage to join her first march with her daughter. Like many marchers, Megan had experienced domestic violence. “I feel so angry—but coming here makes me feel part of something bigger,” she said.

“I want things to change for the next generation and I want to show solidarity with women around the world.”

The Women’s Marches saw around 600 in Manchester, over 500 in Edinburgh, around 400 in Nottingham and 200 in Brighton.

Jade, who helped to organise the Sheffield march, said, “We are thrilled. It was absolutely incredible—500 women and allies. Now let’s keep up the momentum!”

In London, marchers chanted, “Women’s rights, trans rights,” as they made their way across Westminster Bridge.

At a rally, UK Women’s March London co-lead Elisa said, “A sexist abuser, Donald Trump, is back in the White House on Monday. He wants to roll back abortion rights, and enact mass deportations, which will affect millions of women.

“What happens in the United States affects everyone. A member of Trump’s administration, billionaire Elon Musk, has seized on the horrors of child abuse to push racist lies and a far right agenda in Britain. And he’s supported by Nigel Farage, who also wants to roll back abortion rights.

“Across the world, states are attacking women’s rights whether it’s in Hungary, Iran or Afghanistan. International solidarity is vital—and that’s why I stand with the women of Palestine who fight against colonial, racist and sexist violence.”

She told Socialist Worker a “united movement that challenges sexism, racism and all forms of oppression” and “says trans women are women” is vital to winning.

Sophia Beach, a Jewish socialist and Palestine activist, told the crowd, “I stand with every Palestinian woman who has been resisting Israeli apartheid—not just for a year but for the last 76 years.”

Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP said, “When one woman is oppressed, we are all oppressed. Oppression is interconnected so our feminism has to be intersectional too.

“Feminism which doesn’t challenge racism and imperialism is no feminism. Women are not not free until all women are free.”

Janet Maiden, a nurse and member of the Unison union, got a big cheer when she said, “Women’s rights, trans rights!”

She continued, “It was great to see Gisele Pelicot standing up for herself. And let’s not forget Sarah Everard—we are opposing a sexist system that kills women.”

Janet added, “Women’s place in the trade union. When a young doctor was murdered in Calcutta, millions of health workers went on strike.”

Other speakers included campaigner Pasty Stevenson and barrister Dr Charlotte Proudman, who spoke about her recent battle against sexism from the Bar Standards Board.

Many other speakers encouraged support for the migrant support movement, the anti-racist movement, and the reproductive justice movement.

The Women’s Marches show the mood to fight sexism in society.

We will be updating this article with more reports.

Labour Women Leading – tackling racism in hard times

JANUARY 19, 2025

Ruth Clarke reports on the recent AGM of Labour Women Leading.

The Labour Women Leading AGM in December was preceded by a discussion on how women can tackle racism in the current climate.  The session began with a presentation from Sue Lukes,who has worked with migrants since the 1970s, and is now a freelance specialist in housing and migration law. She is currently part of an academic study of migrant communities’ access to services.  Between 2018 and 2022 she was a Labour councillor in Islington, where she had the community safety brief and where she helped to initiate a network of local authority migrant champions (now co-ordinated by the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants).

Sue observed that under the Tories, hostility towards migrants increased; but Labour was also found lacking.  Ten years ago, Labour was the natural place for migrants, but this is no longer the case. The current Party leadership believe that voters want security and, mimicking the attack lines of the far right, that this means securing our borders.  In the summer riots, the most insecure people were the migrants, and the new government should focus on addressing the real issues that make voters insecure (inadequate housing, poor employment practices, etc.).

In the recent US elections, 48% of Latino men under 40 and 32% of Latino women voted for Trump.  Even the views of people previously on the left are changing. How should socialists respond to those who define working class in cultural and not economic terms?  We need to listen, to be flexible and to engage with people where they are.  There is much that can be done at local level.  Local councils can establish structures to support migrants; for instance Bologna is working to house migrants despite the rhetoric of the far right Italian government.  In the UK, the City of Sanctuary movement is building networks of councils, universities and community groups to support people seeking refuge.  The migrant champions programme brings together local councillors to champion the rights of migrants in their areas and beyond.

Current issues that we should challenge include: a) the introduction of eVisas, which disadvantage people without access to the internet; the exploitation of care workers from abroad  -Unison is campaigning on this; the private provision of (unsafe and unhealthy) hotel places for asylum seekers; and inadequate move-on support for those who are granted refugee status.

Bell Ribeiro Addy, a Member of Parliament since 2019, currently represents the new constituency of Clapham & Brixton Hill.  She served briefly as Shadow Minister for Immigration in 2020, and she currently chairs the All Party Parliamentary Group on Afrikan Reparations.  She thinks that women can play a vital role in dismantling and addressing intersecting areas of oppression.  For instance, Black women are more likely to die in childbirth or to be ignored when they complain.  Bell has chaired the APPG on Black Maternal Health since 2021, campaigning for improved data, training and funding for culturally tailored services.  There is evidence too that the police profile black women as unworthy of support, and that reports of domestic violence are disregarded. 

Since the murder of her daughters in 2020, Mina Smallman has campaigned with enormous dignity and helped to change attitudes and practices in the Met.  In workplaces, women from ethnic minorities tend to be concentrated in low-status, low-paid jobs; and sisters in trade unions continue to challenge discrimination.  In education, black pupils are more likely to face exclusion from school, while barriers to higher education persist for black students.  Black and white women are stronger when they work together to fight misogyny, racism and other oppressions.

Bell concluded by insisting that the Equality Act 2010 should be applied to all legislation.  Black women need better representation; communities need better support; and there needs to be improved advocacy and accountability, supported by the collection of data.  Finally, Bell paid tribute to Diane Abbott, the Mother of the House, for her courageous and steadfast campaigning over many decades for equality and justice.

Aisha Malik-Smith, a Labour councillor in Lewisham, campaigns on issues such as housing, mental health and social care.  An active trade unionist, she currently serves as Unite’s London & Eastern Women’s & Equalities Officer (though at this meeting she spoke in a personal capacity).  Aisha noted that three Reform MPs were elected in East Anglia, and there have been protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers. Union members have responded by working with food justice groups and running political education campaigns in football grounds to bring people together. 

People have legitimate concerns about inadequate infrastructure and resources but this is the fault of the Tories, not migrants.  Sadly a group of Labour MPs, the so-called Red Wall caucus, are warning the leadership that they risk losing their seats to Reform if the Party fails to be tough on immigration.  Unite’s response is that concerns about immigration need to be addressed from the bottom up, by talking to people in workplaces, canteens, etc.  CLPs could also take this approach.

Other contributors agreed that, although it is alarming that some trade unionists share views with Reform, we need to understand where they are coming from and provide opportunities for debate.  In the US, the Trump campaign cleverly appealed to second generation migrants, whipping up their opposition to newcomers – something we need to head off here in the UK.  There are still concerns about policing.  For instance the recent heavy-handed raid by counter-terrorism police on the Kurdish Community Centre in Haringey, North London, created fear and anger amongst members of Kurdish communities across the capital.  The police also tend to engender the perception that women are more at risk from migrant men than from white men.  Concern was expressed about the recording of hate crime against black and minority ethnic women, and especially those with disabilities.

One trade union activist suggested that the issues faced by migrant communities should be highlighted when campaigning for improved public services; for instance migrants seeking healthcare may be asked to prove their status.  Stand Up to Racism defended asylum hotels during the summer riots, but we need to remain vigilant and ensure that migrants remain safe on an ongoing basis.  Another sister, who has been heartened by the generosity of donations for Care4Calais, observed that affordable legal advice is unobtainable for many; legal aid has been cut and law centres are overwhelmed.  She added that, in a hardening of the government’s immigration stance, over 600 Brazilian nationals were quietly deported in a series of secret flights in August/September 2024.  She nevertheless believes that the trade unions, and also socialists and feminists, have a huge role to play in supporting asylum seekers, Windrush campaigners, and those affected by the change to eVisas.

Aisha Malik-Smith concluded by reporting that her region of Unite have recently formed an anti-racism task force, which is mapping areas and workplaces in need of help, such as the buses and the Ford Dagenham factory.  To address ingrained racism, they plan to mobilise in the streets with the aim of making groups like the newly-formed Turning Point UK appear unpatriotic.  They also plan to engage with more open-minded individuals, in person and via social media, to highlight the flaws in racist thinking.

International solidarity is vital at a time when conflict and climate change are producing increasing numbers of refugees.  We need to oppose the myth that women are more at risk from immigrant men, or that black claimants are less deserving of benefits.  Unite has a confidential list of asylum hotels, and has been bringing local union branches together to challenge racist rhetoric and offer support.

Sue Lukes added that we need to insist that politicians be better, challenging racism and creating a more welcoming environment, as Pedro Sánchez has done in Spain.  It seems strange that there has been no UK refugee programme for Palestinians.  At a local level, we need to ensure that migrants can access services without unnecessary status checks.  We need to encourage councils to divest their pension funds from institutions that collude with racist regimes.  Local authorities need to understand and engage with their communities and speak out against heavy-handed treatment.

Finally, Labour Women Leading’s chairnoted that times are not easy for the Labour left, with seven MPs suspended for voting to scrap the two-child benefit cap.  Even so, there have been small victories, with three left women re-elected by CLPs to the National Executive Committee.  LWL will continue, with relatively limited resources, to campaign on matters of importance to socialist feminists.  Within Labour we shall continue to press for democratic equalities structures, including a two-day standalone annual Women’s Conference.  There is much to do, and in hard times much to be gained by working with others in broad alliances.

Ruth Clarke is Secretary of Labour Women Leading. To get in contact, email laourwomenleading@gmail.com

Image: Migrants welcome here GJN banner. Author: Global Justice Now, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

A pioneering socialist, pacifist and women’s rights activist

Mike Phipps reviews Minnie Pallister: The Voice of a Rebel, by Alun Burge, published by Parthian.

“Even before she was identified by Keir Hardie in 1915 as a new star bursting over the political horizon, Minnie Pallister’s life was exceptional,” writes Alan Burge in the Introduction of this absorbing book. “Later, whether she was making rousing speeches from halls and hillsides, under police surveillance and twice accused of sedition for her opposition to the Great War, rescuing Jews from Nazi Germany, being banned by the BBC for her politics or likely inspiring a character of Spike Milligan in his writing of The Goon Show, she was such a compelling figure that Woman’s Hour serialised her ‘Life Story’ over five episodes in one week during her lifetime.” If she is less well remembered today, it is because she spent a decade of her life floored by a mystery illness from which she never fully recovered.

She emerged from the industrial South Wales valleys, where women had difficulty being accepted as public figures, to become one of the most important Labour women politicians from Wales in the first half of the twentieth century. A socialist, feminist and pacifist, she was an outstanding orator, perhaps the first person ever to make a political broadcast on radio, and one of the first women to stand for Parliament. Yet, on the threshold of a potentially outstanding political career, her catastrophic illness removed her from public life and brought her to the brink of penury. After years of invalidity, she recovered to reinvent herself as a journalist on the Daily Herald.

Born in 1885, Minnie was the daughter of an ex-miner turned clergyman who moved to Wales when she was 14 years old. It was a comfortable but also fairly egalitarian family environment and Minnie was something of a child prodigy. By age 15 she had delivered two recitations to large audiences on women’s rights.

Graduating from university, she became a teacher in industrial South Wales and a year later was put in charge of Brynmawr Elementary School. It was a poor area where life revolved around the colliery. Minnie became involved in the broader social life of the town, including conducting and accompanying winning juvenile and adult choirs. She became joint secretary of the Brynmawr Mutual Improvement Society and active in the teachers’ union and was introduced to the ideas of the Independent Labour Party. Its leader Keir Hardie represented Merthyr, but elsewhere in Wales the Party was weak and the Liberals still dominated.

Minnie’s view of sin “shifted from being about personal behaviours to recognising that low wages, slums, and unemployment could be the result of social and economic forces beyond an individual’s control,” Burge tell us. “She did not wrestle with her faith as much as transfer it from the Church to the ILP.”  She became one of the pioneering Labour women in Wales, travelling the country and spreading the word. Her profile rose and in 1914 she was elected President of the Monmouthshire ILP Federation, which had nineteen branches, and became an ex oficio member on the ILP’s South Wales Divisional Council. Within weeks, the Great War broke out.

In the first eight weeks, over three-quarters of a million men rushed to enlist. Labour unrest subsided and the fight for women’s suffrage was put on hold. The ILP’s opposition to the war was a distinctly minority position. Minnie’s speech at the April 1915 ILP Conference – held despite cancelled venues and delegates being abused in the street – caused a sensation, and won praise from Keir Hardie, for its criticism of the pro-war Church that  was “breathing the spirit of hatred.”

As the government introduced conscription, Minnie continued to speak out across the country, organising the No Conscription Fellowship (NCF) in Wales, while ILP offices and homes were raided by the police, and its newspapers and leaflets were seized. In April 1916, she chaired a meeting of 1,500 people in her home town of Brynmawr at which the anti-war Ramsay MacDonald spoke. She would stay in close touch with the future Prime Minister for the next twenty years.

That summer she started working in the London office of the campaign. By now, writes Burge, “Minnie was an open and independent woman, who had aspirations for her future and looked to shape her personal and professional life on her own terms.” But her return to South Wales as full-time teacher and part time secretary of the NCF entailed unglamorous hard work – “coordinating support to the approximately 900 conscientious objectors across Wales, monitoring where they were being held, visiting them in barracks, prison and military camps, acting as a friend of the defendant and a witness in military tribunals and courts martial” – and more, all amid arrests and harassment from the police and patriotic hooligans.

The Russian Revolution in 1917, which brought an amnesty for political offences and an extension of political liberties and adult suffrage, provided British pacifists with an important point of reference. Minnie was now a much sought-after speaker and worked closely with Sylvia Pankhurst, her almost exact contemporary, with whom she shared many beliefs – although these later diverged as Sylvia became a strong supporter of the Bolsheviks and Minnie began to focus more on the oppression of women and later building the Labour Party.

From the summer of 1918, Minnie was the ILP’s Welsh Division organiser, the first full-time female labour organiser in Wales. This was no office job: it entailed walking from village to village to call on sympathisers and organise meetings. She continued to integrate the struggle for women’s rights into her work: one of her talks was entitled “Woman: Slave, Rival, Comrade – Which?”

In 1920, she became Labour organiser-agent for Aberavon, helping Ramsay MacDonald win election there in 1922, the same year she was given the full front page for an article in Labour Leader. The following year, she became National Propagandist on the ILP’s ‘Now for Socialism’ campaign, travelling across the whole country on speaking tours – “probably the most impressive woman speaker in the labour movement.” She stood in unwinnable Bournemouth at the general election in 1923, getting 20% of the vote, and again in 1924, when she got 27% and came second.

Minnie worked a punishing schedule, with her diary booked with speaking events for months ahead. It was around this time that she experienced the first bout of a debilitating illness, probably exacerbated by overwork. In 1926, a specialist told her that the muscles on her face and throat were becoming paralysed and that she would have to give up public speaking and political work altogether. But it was the year of the miners’ lockout and, after addressing sixteen open-air meetings in one week, her health failed completely. She won election to Labour’s National Executive that year at her first attempt, but poor health prevented her from ever attending a meeting. She could not walk, or even reply to letters. Her political career was over.

Minnie’s account of her collapse and recovery in her 1934 autobiographical Cabbage for a Year is misleading, says Burge. “Its unreliable chronology… telescopes nearly a decade of life into one year.” By the end of the 1920s, she was still confined to bed for much of the time, but getting some articles published, which was essential as she was now quite poor.

Her situation improved when she got a regular column in the Daily Herald, which led to commissions from other national newspapers, including a column in the Daily Mirror between 1935 and 1937. As her health improved – although not her throat or voice (she was unable to speak in public again until 1941), she took over the editorship of No More War for a year in 1934 alongside other pacifist campaigning work.

From late 1937, Minnie was increasingly active in the Peace Pledge Union. She also bravely returned to Frankfurt in 1938, just after the Kristallnacht pogrom, to stay with a Jewish family she had visited two years earlier. All the male relatives whom Minnie had met in 1936 had been taken to Buchenwald Concentration Camp. “Minnie spent her time going around police stations and shipping companies in the city, trying to arrange the men’s release and obtaining passage for family members.” When she learned that “the only thing which could get anyone out of a concentration camp was an invitation to England”, as she was told, she returned to Britain to arrange permits. Peace News urged individuals to immediately invite Jews from Germany into their homes and act as surety to help overcome government objections. Visa approvals gradually trickled through and some prisoners were released and allowed to leave.

During and especially after World War Two, Minnie became a frequent BBC broadcaster. She was  a regular voice on Woman’s Hour throughout the 1950s, to which 3 to 4 million people listened regularly. Her willingness to talk about her own difficulties and problems made her popular – a rare authentic voice. With her health largely recovered, her renewed fame led to a series of spealing tours around the country. In 1954, nearing 70, she spoke at 45 places in a five-week period, often on her keystone beliefs about pacifism and the position of women in society.

After Minnie died in 1960 at the age of 75, a reader’s letter was read out on Women’s Hour from someone who said she was sure she spoke for thousands in mourning “a shining light of sanity and reason in the darkness of this world, and to stand for all that is meant by true values, in an age that appears to have forgotten them.”

Alan Burge has done a fantastic job of putting together this compelling biography about a pioneering socialist who, but for her debilitating mid-life illness, could well have been a huge figure in the mid-20th century Labour Party.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.

UK

The relevance of the Big Flame experience today

 January 20, 2025

Max Farrar introduces some upcoming events around his new book, co-authored with Kevin McDonnell, Big Flame: Building the Movements, New Politics, published by Merlin Press.

“I met Big Flame women in east London in the early 1970s. I learned a lot and they did great work. For example, they could see the local youth club really just catered for the boys. So they set up a youth club for the girls — it was a big success.” “What did Big Flame actually do to secure that its women members had equal power with the men?” “There’s all this talk now about a new left party — is Big Flame at all relevant to that?”

These were some of the many issues we discussed when Kevin McDonnell and I went went to Caracol Books in Norwich the other day. It’s taken us 15 years to finally get this book about Big Flame into print. The response so far makes us think it’s been worth the acres of time we’ve spent in archives and libraries, cajoling 40 or so ex-members to send us their contributions, digging up photos — and cutting a manuscript of 340,000 words down to a hefty 150,000.

Big Flame started in 1970 in Liverpool as a rough-and-ready newspaper that had more in common with the self-produced ‘community papers’ of the 1970s than any of those produced by the Leninist and Trotskyist groups. These burgeoned in those heady days when lots of us thought revolution was in the air. Yes, really.

From 1971 to 1981, BF spread across most of the big cities in England and some of the smaller ones. It had a national committee with little or no power and it never had more than 200 members. In fact, we never quite knew who its members were. We meet people today who say they were in BF but they never appeared in any papers held by the oddballs who kept lists. (I was one of those admin oddballs.)

Several influential members left in 1981 to join the Labour Party, and some of them became councillors and some were effective in the Labour Co-ordinating Committee. So we do have something to say about the ‘new left party’ question that’s running around the websites and meeting rooms right now.

In fact, being Big Flame, there will be a variety of responses. Some will support the idea but not all. We were congenitally anti-party, unless there was lots of singing and dancing. ‘Sympathetic rejection’ was the overwhelming feeling in the small but perfectly formed space that Caracol Books occupies in Norwich. Run entirely by eleven committed volunteers, breaking even because they’ve got the nous to successfully sell enough lefty books, they reminded me of Big Flamers 50 years ago. One even had to dash o to look after his baby.

Quite a few of BFers who voted against the pro-Labour Party motion in 1981 actually joined when Jeremy Corbyn was its leader. Most of those newbies left when Corbyn stood down, but some are still there.

BF always voted Labour but only because the Tories were so obviously so much worse. In 1978-9, we co-operated with the International Marxist Group in an electoral venture called Socialist Unity — but our votes were so pitiful that some turned decidedly against electoral politics and some thought we should actually join Labour, to support Tony Benn’s efforts to change it from within.

BF’s praxis throughout was to think and work simultaneously as Marxists, feminists, internationalists and anti-racist/anti-fascists. We did political work in the kitchen and the bedroom, within neighbourhoods, and in all types of waged workplaces. We believed that social and class movements would build organs of popular power and these would open up the space for revolution.

We said “the personal is political” and we wanted to level out all hierarchies (including within the organisation). We rejected gurus, but we admired Simone de Beauvoir and Harriet Tubman, and, with varying amounts of enthusiasm, Adriano Sofri and CLR James. We tried to apply much of the early writing of Marx and Engels. We didn’t have much time for Lenin.

When the boot-boys in Thatcher’s Cabinet and her police force defeated the miners, most of us thought this spelled time for a tiny organisation that was closer to libertarianism than Leninism. A few struggled on till 1987. Our unusual emphasis on supporting the autonomous radicalism of women and people of colour is now widely accepted and we count that as a gain.

We wrote this book because we thought its ideas and its methods were as relevant today as they were then. We know we failed back then, and we are wiser (and more cautious) today.

Authoritarianism (stepping towards Fascism2.0) is as great a danger as the protectionist, bluetoothed, autocratic capitalism that is forming itself under the auspices of regimes as different as Starmer’s and Trump’s. BF was acute in tracking the move from Keynesianism to monetarism, with the authoritarian and class-decomposing tendencies that resulted. I would now focus on the corruptive effects on mass narcissism at both societal and individual levels.

I suspect those still locked into the far left of the 70s and 80s will go ahead and form a new left party. The vast majority of Old Flames will steer clear. There’s no real base for this right now.

But lots of us would welcome some kind of Coalition of the Movements, where people who mainly work, say, on ecological or trade union or women’s or black people’s issues meet together with the thousands of independent socialists in order to think better and strategise more effectively. And we’d see this developing more effectively if there was a socialist government in Parliament, so we would not turn our backs on an activist, non-sectarian socialist party with real roots.

We’re meeting around this book at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford on 6th February, and then at May Day Rooms in London in March. Events in Sheffield and Bristol are being planned. One of the ways that Big Flame tried to curb the power of men was by insisting that no-one spoke for more than three minutes. Kevin and I will probably speak for a bit longer than that, but not much, and the emphasis will be on discussion, with no gurus involved. Everyone who enjoys the respectful exchange of ideas and experiences is welcome

 

Nicaragua’s reality: For the many not the few

HubMP2012

JANUARY 20, 2025

Last month, Labour Hub published an article by Mike Phipps, entitled “Nicaragua’s blanket of repression”, which described how the Ortega-Murillo regime has betrayed the legacy of the Sandinista Revolution and makes a US-led neoliberal takeover more feasible. Louise Richards, Director of the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign Action Group, requested the opportunity to reply and below is her response. While we would strongly contest her version of events and her characterisations, we publish this article in the spirit of pluralist left debate.

The Sandinista government is the only government in Nicaraguan history that is implementing well-integrated poverty reduction policies that address the interests of the majority.

As in the 1980s, the US is doing everything possible to oust an elected government by undermining these commitments whether through sanctions (illegal coercive measures) or conducting a policy and propaganda war against Nicaragua.

In his article in Labour Hub (17th December 2024), Mike Phipps has chosen to condemn the Sandinista government, using only sources linked to Nicaragua’ s fractured, incoherent opposition which is backed by US interests.

His article also ignores the wider regional and global context and the long history of US attempts to exploit Nicaragua and shape the country in its own image.

As does much of the mainstream press, Phipps seems unaware of the profound achievements of the Nicaraguan government and its commitment to poverty reduction – not just in theory but in practice. This is based on recognising the economic, social and cultural rights of the majority, the rights to food, education, health care, housing, and gender equality.

Just one example of US interference in Nicaragua’s internal affairs is the violent attempted coup in 2018, inspired and funded by the US, who pumped millions of dollars into NGOs and other opposition groups in an attempt to oust the country’s democratically elected government.

In attributing the ‘initial attacks’ to the Nicaraguan government, Phipps is again light on the facts. The three months of violence during the attempted coup actually began with three deaths, none of which were caused by the Nicaraguan government.

One of those was a police officer: 21 more police would be killed, several after being tortured, in those three months, and 400 more were injured. The violent attempted coup was part and parcel of a decades-long campaign by the US to gain control over Nicaragua and bolster its ambition to impose its neo-liberal model on the whole of Latin America.

For three months, opposition thugs, financed and supported by the US, unleashed a campaign of violence and terror on Nicaragua – public buildings, including schools and hospitals, were burned to the ground. Sandinista supporters were targeted, their houses being marked with paint, some were kidnapped, tortured and murdered whilst others were also subject to threats from armed delinquents who manned the roadblocks set up by the opposition across the country and who terrorised whole communities. Social media played a major role in spreading misinformation and lies that fanned the flames of the violence.

In his article, Phipps lionises Dora Maria Tellez, a hero of the revolution who, sadly, has become very much its opponent over the last twenty-five years. She was one of the main organisers of the violence in the city of Masaya, handing out the payments to those carrying it out, and bringing in supplies of food, drugs and ammunition to keep them going.

Tellez broke with the FSLN (Sandinista National Liberation Front) to become a founder of the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS) in the mid ‘90s and then drifted steadily towards the US-backed right wing, collaborating extensively with the US government and holding regular meetings with US officials as revealed here.

Gioconda Belli, also quoted by Phipps, was also one of the founder members of the MRS and part of the opposition group, Civic Alliance.

It is a great pity that Phipps makes only a cursory mention of the tremendous achievements and social progress that have occurred in Nicaragua since 2007. Just to give one example – Nicaragua now has more public hospitals even than its richer neighbours like Costa Rica and Panama – and many of them are newly built.

The human rights of all Nicaraguans have now been enshrined in the new constitution, a fact that Phipps ignores. These include the rights to health, education, housing together with women’s rights and the rights of Afro-descendant and indigenous peoples. It is also based on a principle of non-discrimination against any group.

In the conclusion to his article, Phipps states “the gains of the Sandinista Revolution were real, and some remain so. But if they are to be successfully defended, the corrupt dynasty that has betrayed the Revolution’s great achievements – and persecuted so many of its bravest militants – will have to leave the stage”.

Nicaragua has suffered decades of violence and trauma, a consequence of US interference direct and indirect. The insurrection against the US backed Somoza dictatorship, was followed by the contra war in the 1980s and then the neglect and abandonment of those most impoverished during a series of US-backed neo-liberal governments in the years 1990- 2006. For many, the violence of the 2018 attempted coup triggered painful memories of previous decades.

In this context above all what the majority of Nicaraguans want, whether they support the Sandinista government or not, is peace and stability, not US inspired chaos.

Phipps fails to mention that there is overwhelming electoral support in Nicaragua for Daniel Ortega and the FSLN and it is for the Nicaraguan people, and the Nicaraguan people alone, to decide through the ballot box who their government should be. If Phipps’ wish should come true it is more than likely that the FSLN government would be ousted and replaced by a US-backed neo-liberal government. Nicaraguans only have to look to neighbouring countries, where poverty is deepening and violence is more prevalent, to see what this might mean.

When the Sandinista government returned to power in 2007, it overturned sixteen years of governments backed by the US – during this time, health and education were privatised and trade union rights were decimated. The social and economic rights of the majority, particularly in the countryside and on the Caribbean Coast, were completely neglected.

Since 2007, Dora Maria Tellez and other ex-revolutionaries have supported neo-liberal candidates who were part of that 16-year attempt to reverse the revolution’s achievements. Nicaraguans have bitter experience of betrayals by figures like her – reinforced by memories of the violence in 2018, from which the country is now, thankfully, recovering. The imperative now is to withstand the likely renewed US pressure coming from Trump and his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and ensure that further attacks on the revolution’s achievements are repelled.

The NSCAG website is http://www.nscag.org.uk.

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jordidemiguel/8304990768. Sandino. Loma de Tiscapa, Managua (Nicaragua) Author: Jordi de Miguel Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Deed

Why Labour Can’t Fix the UKs Polycrisis

Kenneth Surin

January 22, 2025
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Photograph Source: Kirsty O’Connor / No 10 Downing Street – OGL 3

The UK’s decrepit first-past-the-post electoral system virtually guarantees a two-party grip on parliamentary power. Since WW2 the two parties in question have been the Conservatives and Labour, with the Conservatives enjoying 3 long spells in power,1950-64, 1979-1997, and 2010-2024, countered only by Labour’s Blair/Brown ascendency in 1997-2010.

Labour’s single term in power from 1945-1950, however, saw the momentous creation of the UK’s welfare state, which started to erode as a policy choice when Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in 1979– a phase that was also coterminous with the onset of the neoliberalism of which she was a devotee.

The UK has been in a long-term polycrisis: a chronically weak economy since the 1970s; increased inequality while the crippling outcomes of Tory austerity and Brexit remain overlooked and unaddressed; lip-service in dealing with climate breakdown; catastrophic underfunding of the NHS; a corrupt and chumocratic Establishment (massive Tory Covid contracts handed out without oversight to cronies and pals; as well as Starmer’s Freebiegate, where he and several ministerial colleagues accepted significant donations for vacations and clothing); crumbling schools and teacher shortages; systemic racial injustice; police and prisons at barely-functioning levels; lies and distortion ingrained by a media largely owned by rightwing billionaires domiciled overseas; and an imperial-level Ruritanian monarchy, replete with gold carriages and multiple palaces and castles, all glaringly at odds with Ukania’s post-imperial decline; and so forth.

Since it came to power in July 2024 Starmer’s Labour has lurched from one misstep to another.

Two ministers, unsurprisingly from the party’s right wing, who should never have been appointed by Starmer, have been forced to resign.

Louise Haigh was transport minister until she quit this position when it emerged that she was made a minister by Starmer despite having a criminal conviction Haigh said she had revealed to him before he appointed her. In 2014, the year before she entered parliament, Haigh had pleaded guilty to fraud by false representation when she reported to police that her work phone had been stolen while it was still in her possession. Allegedly she thought her insurance would pay for an upgraded replacement phone.

Tulip Siddiq, the niece of Bangladesh’s deposed despot Sheikh Hasina, resigned as Labour’s anti-corruption minister after she was named in 2 corruption probes linked to a plot of land her family received from Hasina’s government.

Starmer had pledged repeatedly that Labour would restore trust in government after 14 years of Conservative sleaze and corruption, and his swift reneging on this undertaking has propelled Labour downwards in the opinion polls.

Labour’s first few months in office have been a catalogue of missteps, exposing a lot more than a taste for gorging at troughs filled with the finer things of life.

An inheritance tax that had hitherto excluded farms will now include them, and is projected to raise £520m/$632m annually, a relatively small amount in the bigger economic scheme of things. This will have a severe impact on hard-pressed rural families, even as continuing unclosed tax loopholes allow the super-wealthy to multiply their riches.

The much-criticized chancellor of the exchequer/finance minister, Rachel Reeves (who delights in the sobriquet “the iron chancellor”), abandoned the policy of granting all pensioners a fuel payment every winter—under her new rules, only those in receipt of a pension credit will be eligible for the winter fuel payment. Many pensioners, who have contributed to the exchequer for decades during their working lives, now face a possibly crippling financial burden, as they have to choose invidiously between having enough to eat or not dying from hypothermia.

Labour also refused to repeal the Tory policy that limited the child tax credit to 2 children, thereby acknowledging implicitly that only the relatively well-off are “entitled” to have more than a couple of offspring, which looks suspiciously like eugenics through the back door.

These and other policy decisions are not the products of a cast-iron necessity, but are political choices pure and simple. Labour pledged repeatedly to address the needs of the less well-off who suffered from 14 years of Tory austerity and misrule, but has done little of this so far.

The latest Labour stumble is its panicked response to a 10-day turbulence in the UK bond market which raised the price of government borrowing. Historically bond markets worldwide have tracked their US counterpart, and this is exactly what happened here—if the US is up, other bond markets go up, and if the US is down other markets follow suit. A potential cause for real concern occurs when there is more to bond market turbulence than the mirroring of US price patterns.

Reeves and Starmer should have said they would be vigilant with regard to this market instability while not adopting any hasty measures as a response. Instead, they’ve promised a March mini-budget with spending cuts targetted primarily at the civil service and sickness benefits.

To deal with the UK’s sagging economy, Reeves offers a “plan for growth” with 2 pillars: a focus on private-public partnerships in dealing with the NHS crisis and climate breakdown, as well as investment in AI. Reeves has probably not read Brett Christophers, The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet, who argues that transitioning to renewable energy is simply not sufficiently profitable for the private sector for it to have a significant enough impact on this transition.

Likewise AI will almost certainly be a key part of the “state capture” projects that are already being mounted by the rightwing Silicon Valley tech billionaires Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg. Notions of the common good play no part in these rightwing projects. AI will likely result in a considerable restructuring of labour markets, and the tech billionaires are no friends of organized labour. The faith placed by Starmer and Reeves in AI will certainly be tested if the just-mentioned scenarios materialize.

For now it is difficult to give much credence to the thought that managerialist technocrats like Starmer and Reeves have the wherewithal and strategic vision to deal with the UK’s polycrisis.

Kenneth Surin teaches at Duke University, North Carolina.  He lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.

London’s transport chief urged to shake up funding to spark climate action

JANUARY 22, 2025

Fare Free London has this week appealed to Seb Dance, London’s deputy mayor for transport, to “consider a major shift in the way that public transport in London is funded”, so that London can “play its fair part in tackling the climate emergency”.

Fare Free London, which is supported by community groups, climate campaigners, transport workers’ trade unions and others, was set up last year to advocate free public transport in the capital.

In this week’s letter, Fare Free London reminded Seb Dance that it is three years since Mayor Sadiq Khan announced that, to address the climate emergency, London would endeavour to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2030.

To decarbonise the transport sector, the Mayor committed to a target of reducing vehicle traffic (measured by vehicle-kilometres driven) by 27% between 2018 and 2030.

Independent research conducted in universities suggests that a much greater reduction in vehicle traffic is needed: in 2023, a team based at Imperial College concluded that London should aim to cut vehicle traffic by more than two thirds.

But things are going in the wrong direction. While transport sector emissions fell during the Covid pandemic, they have been rising since then.

And while we have seen welcome investments in public transport, such as in the Elizabeth Line, the car-centred character of the capital’s transport is being reinforced by projects such as the Silvertown Tunnel, which will open in April.

The above-inflation increase in tube and rail fares, due on 2nd March, will hit low-income households hard, and further discourage the shift from cars to public transport.

If London’s car-centred transport policies continue unchanged, “talk of prioritising public transport, reducing car traffic and decarbonising transport will be no more than empty words”, Fare Free London said to Seb Dance.

The group pointed to Transport for London’s own current Business Plan, which expresses the aspiration to “reduce our reliance on fare income” – while at the same time envisaging that income from fares will increase by 47% between 2022/23 and 2026/27.

Fare Free London believes that zero-fare public transport would open the city to all. It is a social justice measure, that supports low-income households struggling with bills. The health benefits are well researched and convincing.

Combined with other policies to reduce car traffic, free public transport can also help to cut greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution.

Zero-fares transport could be “the sort of bold, inspiring policy shift that will make a tangible difference to climate targets”, Fare Free London said to the deputy mayor in its letter.

Free public transport would require a new financing model. In a campaign briefing published last year, Fare Free London listed ways that London could build on methods used in other big cities, where the transport systems are already far less dependent on fares than London’s.

Central government policy also matters, as it could both expand the Greater London Authority’s revenue-raising powers, change its own transport spending priorities, and move towards free public transport nationally.

“Free public transport is 100% do-able”, said Pearl Ahrens, speaking for Fare Free London. “Public transport is free in 118 municipalities in Brazil, several cities in the USA, and European cities and towns including Montpellier in France, Tallinn in Estonia and Luxemburg. What is needed is a bold vision, that prioritises social justice, and effective action on climate change and air pollution.”

More information at farefreelondon.org.

Image: 1967 Stock train at Finsbury Park in 2010. Creator: Tom Page  Copyright: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic