May, 2025 -

Starmer’s Britain – a spectral nightmare of racism, misogyny and transphobia

Europe 27 May 2025

By Paul Moorhouse PRMI in Scotland. 27 May 2025 11 months ago British voters decisively voted to reject the increasingly crisis ridden right-wing Tory party which had been in government since 2010. The incoming Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer claimed that with 411 out of 650 parliamentary seats he had a ‘clear mandate to rule for all four nations’. How does that stack up nearly a year on? Just who is Starmer ‘ruling for’? However, this impressive parliamentary majority never reflected more than lukewarm support in any part of the (increasingly dis-) United Kingdom. Labour contested none of the 18 constituencies in the north of Ireland. Those seats they fought were won mostly because Labour was not the Tories in England and Wales and neither the Tories nor the ruling Scottish Nationalist Party, north of the border. On 33.7% Labour only increased its share of the vote by 1.6% compared with its ‘worst ever’ result in 2019, whilst the Tory vote plummeted by almost 20%. The threat of right-populism Lack of enthusiasm for any establishment parties was demonstrated on the one hand by low turnonout and voter registration, barely half of those eligible too vote did so, and on the other by the election for the first time of the far-right racist Reform UK and a number of independent candidates, opposed to the genocide in Gaza (especially in constituencies with large Muslim populations). Thus Labour’s victory only superficially contradicted the world-wide eclipse of the political ‘centre’. Growing polarisation below the surface reflected popular frustration with the social and economic cost of the crisis of the profit system. Without organised resistance by the oppressed and exploited, this can only strengthen the far right, and fascistic, reaction. The reality of this was brought home barely three weeks after the election when racist riots broke out across England and the north of Ireland targeting asylum seekers threatening to break into and burn down their hotels and hostels. The potential for a mass fightback however was shown when hundreds of thousands joined anti-fascist demonstrations and vigils over the first weekend in August, and in Belfast 15,000 people turned out on 10th August (an equivalent mobilisation in London would be approaching a third of a million). Starmer’s Labour acts in interest of big business The lack of any enthusiasm for Labour stemmed from its anxiety to present itself as a ‘safe pair of hands’ to British and International capital. Before and after the election Starmer and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, fawned on big business and financiers promising to stick to Tory austerity rules and became obsessively anxious to dampen down voter expectations by avoiding ‘unrealistic’ or ‘unaffordable’ pledges in their manifesto. This was bad enough, but the reality however proved far worse. Three weeks after being elected, Reeves told Parliament that Winter Fuel Payments made to 11.6 million disabled and older citizens were to be scrapped for all but the 1.8 million poorest pensioners. The payments, worth between £200 and £600 in the previous two years, were capped at £300 at a time when 6.1 million households were estimated to be in fuel poverty and energy prices were driving a cost of living crisis. A year on, whilst forced by widespread opposition into a promise to ‘review’ these cuts in 2026, Labour has announced swingeing cuts to health and disability benefits which, if implemented, will push 400,000 more people into poverty. 100,000 hospital posts are threatened in England alone in plans announced by Health Secretary Wes Streeting and yet more cuts are certain to be announced when Reeves delivers her spending review on 11th June. Many of these have already been implemented by freezing recruitment, leaving essential posts empty. The potential to resist these attacks is shown by the firm rejection of a derisory 4% pay increase by the doctors’ union the British Medical Association. However, effective action requires a strong united front based on rank and file organisation and accountability in all unions. It was frankly an insult to their members that the right-wing bureaucracy of the biggest health union, Unison, invited Streeting to address its health conference this year. The right-wing “Reform” party wins local elections In view of their shared record of pursuing vicious class war politics, forcing the poorest to bear the brunt of capitalist crisis, it is little surprise that Labour and the Tories both took a beating in council elections across England on May 1st. Both parties lost control of all the councils they had held prior to the elections. However they faced little resistance to their diet of austerity. The closest to an effective opposition came from the Green party, which is largely untested in power in Britain and managed to double the number of seats it holds. In the absence of any real alternative, the biggest gains were made by the racist far-right Reform UK party, which was able to present itself as ‘anti establishment’. In reality ,however, most of the councillors running the 10 local authorities Reform now control are well-heeled business people, many of them (including Sarah Pochin who won the Runcorn by-election, the same day, to become the party’s fifth MP) have defected from the right of the Tory Party. Reform adminstations have set about emulating the ‘slash and burn’ far-right policies of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, on occasion this has an air of farce, for instance their pledge to ‘abolish Low Traffic Neighbourhoods’ – despite the fact that none of their councils have any! Resistance needs to be built Women, trans-people and above all people of colour living in many of the poorest communities have every reason to be very afraid in the face of the racist, misogynistic and LGBTQ+-phobic rhetoric and actions of these suburban mini-Hitlers. It is vital that in every area rank and file union activists, community organisations and user groups establish conferences of resistance and other organs of struggle to build a democratically organised intersectional fight-back against these council attacks and the cuts raining down

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Trump, big business and the fascist menace

Trump looms over protesters with placrds

Workers' struggle and solidarity, Questions of oppression 22 May 2025

By Laura Fitzgerald, Socialist Party Ireland. 22 May 2025 This article was first published in ‘Socialist Alternative’ № 19, magazine of the Socialist Party Ireland Real life in 2025 reads like the plot of a dystopian miniseries. We’ve seen the richest man in the world perform Nazi salutes at the US President’s inauguration; that President’s first weeks have seen a torrent of ‘executive orders’ chock full of outlandish conspiracy fuelled reaction, targeting migrants, trans folk, people of colour, disabled people; the unelected billionaire Elon Musk heads DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), making swingeing cuts to thousands of public jobs and whole departments; the words ‘anti-racism’, ‘Native American’, ‘disability’, ‘biased’, ‘Black’, ‘climate crisis’, and ‘women’, are among hundreds of others that have disappeared from official US government websites (1); a Palestinian green card holder who led protests in his university against the genocide of his people was arrested and given a deportation order by ICE (2), while misogynist extremist and proponent of rape Andrew Tate is flown in(3). At once terrifying and absurd – and there’s plenty more that could be mentioned – this nightmare is unfortunately all too real for everyone that Trump’s politics threatens inside and outside the US. Trump’s second term is both coinciding with, and giving huge impetus to, a broader authoritarian, far-right shift politically across the world. The AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) in Germany received 20.8% in federal elections in February 2025, as part of a wave of electoral successes for far-right forces across Europe, which has resulted in far-right parties being represented in government, and even far-right heads of state, from Meloni in Italy, to Viktor Orban in Hungary. Modi, in power for more than a decade in India, has a band of fascists on the ground in the BJP supporting him. A capitalist system ensconced in a profound and multi-faceted crisis provides the backdrop to the system’s unfolding reactionary turn. But how far in a rightward direction can things be pushed? Is fascism once again on the horizon, heralded by Trump? And what can we do to stem the rising fascist tide? Reactionary ideology Far-right politics are always extremely nationalistic and chauvinistic. They lean into and seek to mobilise every existing supremacy within capitalist society, and deepen every corresponding oppression. This means that the far right are deeply and actively racist, misogynist, queerphobic, ableist etc. And of course it means that far-right politics stand for the class supremacy of the capitalist class, and the consequent deepening of the exploitation of the working class, the poor, and the environment. Far-right politics are reactionary – ultra-conservative – and they have been growing everywhere, including within and without the traditional political parties of capitalism. All of this poses a threat to the rights of exploited and oppressed groupings, and furthermore creates fertile ground for the growth of specifically fascist organising – the most extreme and dangerous of all far-right politics. In order to approximate answers to the questions posed about the fascist menace today, it’s worth looking back at when fascism rose in Europe in the inter-war period and took power in Italy and Germany, to determine its particular qualities, to help us understand developments today and of course to act accordingly. In his study of fascism, Marxist historian David Renton has written how: “Fascism is a reactionary ideology. Reactionary here is not used to mean that fascism sought to turn back the whole course of history, although there was a sense in which fascism sought a return to the past. Fascism was reactionary in that it aimed to crush the organised working class and to eradicate the reforms won by decades of peaceful struggle. Fascism did not exist to restore a mythical rural idyll, but to solve the problem of working-class hostility to capitalism.” (4) Fascism: the radical far right Fascists are always deeply hostile to socialists, to all organisations and movements of the left, including the trade union and worker movements. Fascism’s anti-communism / anti-socialism was one of its central tenets in the inter-war period. A defining feature of fascist politics is its enactment of physical violence against marginalised groupings. This violence is also concentrated heavily against the conscious expression of working-class politics, and the solidarity and unity of all the exploited inherent in it. The fascist takeovers in Italy and Germany represented a violent destruction of powerful socialist and working-class movements in both countries – movements that had mounted mass revolutionary uprisings in preceding years, threatening a liberatory alternative to capitalism and war. Fascist takeovers were not slow or creeping – they came at times of profound crisis for the system and represented the most brutal smashing of the threat posed to capitalist interests – by working-class struggle and organised socialist forces. Fascist violence in Italy amid Mussolini’s seizure of power was most virulent in industrial areas as opposed to rural ones, and within this, in districts that had had the strongest organised socialist presence in the workers’ movement.(5) There was a definite dual feature of the context of fascist victories in Italy and Germany: profound economic and political crises for the capitalist system was combined with the connected threat to that system of an organised and arisen socialist movement. This duality was the context in which the capitalist class rowed in behind the fascists’ counter-revolutionary takeover. Once in power, both the Mussolini and Hitler regimes ‘radicalised’, with their heinous politics and policies becoming more extreme. Both regimes affected each other and encouraged this process – as seen, for example, in how the anti-semitism in Italy, which descended into a genocidal massacre of Jewish people there, only became a central feature of the regime after Hitler came to power in Germany. A social movement Of course notable is that these fascist takeovers then meant that a dictatorship had taken grip. There were no more elections in Italy under fascism after 1924 or in Germany after 1933. So fascism always means dictatorship, and an extinguishing of any remaining semblance of democracy. Moreover, such a regime cannot tolerate and

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Three thousand march to demand trans rights in Belfast

Head of trans-rights protest in Belfast with banner reading "No going back"

LGBTQIA+, PRMI, Europe 22 May 2025

By Ann-Katrin Orr, Socialist Party Ireland. 22 May 2025 On Saturday, 17 May, Belfast was filled with a 3,000–strong March for Trans Rights. It was initiated by ROSA, the Socialist Feminist movement and backed by various organisations across the LGBTQIA+ sector, trade unions and political organisations, including the Socialist Party. The march took place in response to the recent brutal attacks on trans rights. The mood was angry, determined and filled with deep solidarity. The main banner held at the beginning of the march was a Pride Progress Flag with the words “No Going Back!” – which summed up the sentiment that there is no acceptance of the attempts by the political establishment in Stormont and Westminster, by the courts or the far right across the UK or internationally to drag us back when it comes to our rights. “Go Piss Girl”, “Fight the real enemy” and “Support all sisters not just cis-ters” were some of the slogans on hand-drawn placards that accompanied colourful banners and pride flags as the march made its way from Writers’ Square to City Hall. Referencing the Stormont ban on puberty blockers as well as how some MLA’s including Executive Members have welcomed the UK Supreme Court Ruling, with Paul Given, the DUP’s Education Minister, for example stating he would be amending guidelines for schools in to be in line with the judgment the crowd chanted: “Stormont you’ve picked your side – We don’t want you at our Pride” and “We know you can – lift the ban”. Other chants were against homophobia, racism and misogyny. The slogan of no going back was a reference to the examples in the North of people standing united in the face of division as it was adopted by trade union and socialist activists in the past to stand against pressure and influence of paramilitaries and sectarian forces intent on dragging society back towards open sectarian conflict. At its core this slogan is about the ability of ordinary people to stand together in solidarity and struggle and Saturday’s demonstration was a clear example of that. A counter-protest also took place at City Hall with 150 – 200 people. The call for this came also from figures connected to the far-right, leading to United Against Racism mobilising also in a protest which was also supported by the Socialist Party, ROSA and many other organisations. That the far-right mobilised in opposition to trans rights, shows again the importance of a struggle now for trans rights and why all who seek to challenge the far-right and racism must take an active role in fighting for LGBTQIA+ rights also. Speakers included ROSA activists and spokespeople from Mermaids NI, Trans Pride NI, The Rainbow Project and a speaker from Unite the Union’s Irish Regional LGBT+ Committee who pointed out that the trade union movement is not a bystander but a vital line of defence and force for progress. ROSA organiser and Socialist Party Keighley spoke about the urgent need to organise a socialist feminist struggle and quoted the trailblazing socialist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg words – “those who do not move do not notice their chains” before concluding with this powerful call to action: “Because when we move on the streets, when we move in our workplaces, when we move in our communities; when we move together, in solidarity with one another against our oppressors and against this system of profit and greed and violence then we will finally break free of our chains. The fight for trans liberation, and the fight for the liberation of all, is a Socialist Feminist fight! And this fight needs you! Because we are not going back!”

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How the Fourth International fought World War Two

Montage by Diego Rivera to commemorate founding of Fourth International

Theory, History, Imperialist conflict and war 6 May 2025

As the anniversary of the end of World War Two is celebrated, the world’s leaders are again recruiting soldiers and arming them with horrific new weapons in preparation for new conflicts, and possibly yet another, even more brutal world war.
This article examines how Trotskyists worldwide struggled, ‘despite all hazards’, to build the slender forces of the Fourth International (FI), intended to assist the working class to overthrow capitalism, and the bureaucratic, Stalinist elite in the USSR and replace them by genuinely democratic, international socialism to end poverty and war forever.

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Review: Severance created by Dan Erickson

Reviews 6 May 2025

By Sam Casey, Socialist Party, Ireland 6 May 2025 The popular Apple TV series Severance recently returned for its second season. One of the most watched shows across various streaming services, Severance is a psychological, sci-fi thriller that depicts the lives of a group of workers at the giant tech corporation, Lumon Industries. We follow four workers from Lumon’s ‘severed floor’, where all the workers have undergone a neurological procedure to split their consciousness and memories in two. This effectively means that, once they enter work, they are an entirely different person with no memories of their outside self. And once they clock out, they transform back from their “innie” into their “outie”, with no memory of the work-day. The “innies” live their entire lives within the walls of the ‘severed floor’, a maze of drab white walls resembling a mid-century corporate office. The second they enter the elevator to leave work, they reawaken the next day in the same elevator returning to the office. This allows Lumon to completely dominate their workforce, controlling every aspect of their lives. The workers’ split consciousness becomes the central pivot of the show’s ever-unfolding mystery – as both the “outies” and the “innies” struggle to find out what Lumon is up to, beginning to band together in a striking metaphor for workers unionising. Similar to Black Mirror, Severance uses dark-comedy to investigate aspects of modern capitalist society. It forces us to ask questions about corporate power, workplace alienation and where the billionaire tech-oligarchs of our own world may be leading us. It is a show about workers rebelling against corporate overlords. Its massive popularity reflects a growing disillusionment and unease with work under capitalism. While none of us are ‘severed’, most working-class people can relate to the feeling that the time they spend in work isn’t really their own. That time belongs to the boss, because under capitalism workers are forced to sell our labour-power to companies that exploit us for profit in order to survive. Even the term “work/life balance”, which is hardly a reality for most workers forced to work long hours for low wages, is itself an acknowledgement that somehow “life” must end where “work” begins. Lumon is not so dissimilar to the massive tech corporations that dominate our own world. Ironically, Severance is the flagship show of Apple TV – precisely the kind of company that the show is skewering. And the show’s concept doesn’t take too much suspended disbelief, given tech billionaires like Elon Musk are themselves developing dystopian-sounding products like the “neuralink” brain microchip. In addition to its strong writing, the show is being hailed for its incredible filmmaking. It is so meticulously detailed that the viewer can find meaning in everything from the creative cinematography, to the brilliant score by Theodore Shapiro, and the intricate differences in the actors’ performances as their “outies” and their “innies”. Season 2 contains what many have claimed to be one of the best directed episodes of TV ever. Severance brilliantly satirises the mind-numbing drudgery of office work. Throughout Season 1, it wasn’t clear exactly what Lumon Industries even does. The four central characters – Mark S (Adam Scott), Helly R (Britt Lower), Dylan G (Zach Cherry) and Irving B (John Turturro) – work in the ‘Macro Data Refinement’ department. They spend all day looking at a series of shifting numbers on a computer screen. Every so often some of these numbers begin to stir deep emotions in them; feelings of fear, dread, disgust etc. When this happens, they simply file the numbers away. What does it all mean? Many workers can relate to the feeling of doing a job that they have no control over and that seemingly holds no real value to society, part of what Marx described as the alienation of work under capitalism. In Season 2, the workers begin to uncover the mystery behind their own labour, and the full extent of their exploitation is revealed. Where Severance really hits its stride is in its cringe-inducing depiction of corporate culture. The managers, Ms. Cobel (Patricia Arquette) and Mr. Milchik (Tramell Tillman), act as the face of the shadowy, unseen “Board”. Milchik in particular perfectly encapsulates the worst kind of corporate manager. Always with a grin on his face, he enforces Lumon’s oppressive, prison-like rules on the severed workers while constantly acting as though this is all one-big-happy-family. He goes between torturing workers for insubordination to giving them meaningless rewards, like the “5-minute music dance experience”. Tillman’s performance is hilarious and genuinely creepy at the same time. As they live their entire lives on Lumon’s terms, the company uses elaborate propaganda to influence the “innies”. Its internal culture is eerily anachronistic, with outdated language and visuals that are reminiscent of the Gilded Age of American capitalism. It all centres around Lumon’s “visionary founder” Kier Eagan, similar to how CEOs are venerated as supposed “geniuses” in our own world. Lumon’s “Compliance Handbook”, which contains “the word of Kier”, is drilled into the workers, who are told lies about times in the past when workers from other departments violently attacked their fellow workers – a classic example of the ‘divide and rule’, union-busting tactics used by capitalism to dominate workers. Despite this, a revolutionary spirit begins to break through, as the severed workers band together to take Lumon down. In this way, it is fitting that Season 2 was delayed due to the Writer’s Guild of America strike in 2023, which pitted the show’s writers against Apple TV and the other Hollywood studios that were attempting to use AI to make it impossible to make a living as a working writer. Just one example of many of how the world of Severance isn’t so far from life under capitalism in the 21st century.

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What is behind Trump’s tariffs?

Featured article, Global economy 6 May 2025

By Conor Murray, Socialist Party Ireland. 6 May 2025 What is a tariff? A tariff is a tax on importing goods from abroad. The tax is paid by the business which imports the goods, however, in order to maintain their profits they will typically pass this cost on to consumers by increasing prices. By making imported goods more expensive, tariffs can function as a type of subsidy to domestic corporations by insulating them from international competition. Why are Trump’s tariffs so significant? Many countries already have tariffs, including the US. However, Trump’s have a much bigger scope and scale. On 2 April, Trump announced tariffs of at least 10% against every country on earth, much higher in many cases. This threatened to seriously disrupt global trade and supply chains and sent stock and bond markets into crisis. The reaction of the capitalist markets seems to have forced Trump to make a limited retreat, reducing tariffs on all countries other than China to a still significant 10%, to be reviewed after 90 days. Meanwhile, tariffs on China were raised to a prohibitive 145%, with China reciprocating with its own tariffs. There is now a significant trade war between the US and China, with trade between the world’s two largest economies likely to virtually cease unless there is a climbdown or a deal. What is the background to these tariffs? Much of the coverage will focus on Trump’s personality, which is certainly erratic and bizarre. He also has a long record of advocating tariffs. In his first administration, Trump tended to be influenced or hemmed in by more traditional elements of the political establishment, but in his second term, Trump is surrounded by ideological co-thinkers, influenced by nationalist fantasies about returning to America’s past. They harbour hostility even towards US-allied countries, such as those in Europe, and seek to force them into an even more subservient relationship. However, these tariffs are also a reflection of the struggle for global influence, markets and resources between the US and China, the two main rival imperialist powers in the world today. Tariffs against China began in Trump’s first term but continued under Biden. The US capitalist establishment has been seeking to end its reliance on China, particularly for key strategic industries by moving manufacturing to the US or to ‘’friendly nations”. Trump’s tariffs are massively accelerating this broader process. What will this mean for working-class people? The tariffs are bad news for working-class people in the US and worldwide. They will mean even more inflation and possibly even shortages in goods. Workers will face layoffs, cuts in hours and in pay. While the ups and downs of the stock market may seem very removed from our lives, unfortunately, many workers’ pension funds are being gambled on those markets. In the Global South, tariffs could be even more devastating with many poorer countries reliant on exporting commodities or cheap manufactured goods to the US. In Ireland, the state’s reliance on US multinationals to drive growth could be in crisis as global trade contracts, already there are fears for jobs at Intel and other companies could follow. Can tariffs bring well-paid manufacturing jobs to the US? Whatever his real motivations, Trump has been publicly promising a return of well-paid manufacturing jobs to the US, where many areas have undoubtedly been devastated by deindustrialisation. It is an empty promise. Developing an industrial base will not just be achieved by tariffs but would require massive investment in infrastructure, skills and training, constructing new factories etc. There is no indication that either US big business or Trump’s administration is willing to do this – they are actually preparing massive austerity and US capitalism has been focused on increasing profits through speculation. Meanwhile, many existing US manufacturers are dependent on importing parts from China and other places. Nor is it guaranteed that manufacturing jobs would bring security or high wages for workers. While the manufacturing jobs of the post-war period often did, this was a result of strong trade unions, high taxes on the wealthy and other things which Trump vehemently opposes. When Trump talks about bringing manufacturing back to the US, he consistently refers to the 19th century when millions of US workers toiled in factories with low wages, unsafe conditions and virtually no labour rights. Is returning to ‘Free Trade’ the solution The era of ‘Free Trade’ (or neoliberal globalisation) from the 1970s onwards was marked by attacks on the working class around the world, including privatisation, deregulation, assaults on unions and public services and a huge growth in inequality. In the Global North, it eliminated the relative economic security that some workers had achieved and replaced it with precarious work, increased indebtedness and housing crises. This model was discredited by the 2008 economic crash and the resulting austerity. In the Global South, much has been made of the alleged benefits of globalisation; however, with the exception of China, industrial development has actually stagnated or gone into reverse and many countries have been simply exploited as sources of commodities for the rich countries. Free trade and protectionism are just different methods for capitalist governments to pursue the interests of their country’s corporate and big business interests at the expense of workers and the oppressed. While clearly opposing these tariffs, socialists should not be advocates for either model. How can working-class people respond? First, working-class people did not create this crisis and must not pay the price for Trump’s tariffs or for any disputes between the different capitalist powers. This means organising to resist pay and job cuts, price rises and austerity. The trade unions in Ireland and internationally should be preparing a serious campaign of resistance, including strikes and workplace occupations where necessary. Second, this poses the need for an alternative to the current economic model based on multinationals. We need a socialist industrial policy based on public investment and ownership geared to producing the things we need: housing, infrastructure, green energy etc. Finally, the tariffs are just

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