Liverpool defending the Asylum Centre - Photo: Jon Super AP Picture Alliance

The disturbances on the streets in a number of towns and cities in the wake of the tragic stabbing attack in Southport in which three young girls were killed, and ten others, including eight children, were injured, have seen the rhetoric of immigration to Britain being a problem, hammered home by those in government, summed up in "stop the boats", incited to be acted on in the streets. This has been called "thuggery" and the actions as those of the "extreme right". But the question must be asked, who is responsible?

Unity Rally, Oxford

The blame must crucially be placed on those in power. The spontaneous organisation of the anti-immigrant actions has been but a short step from all the hysteria promoted by those in power that immigration must be curtailed, asylum seekers deported, and refugees considered a threat to "British values", and that is what the people must fight for. Migration itself is a fact of life, which is evident throughout society, including those in power. Refugees and asylum seekers are the direct responsibility of those in power in countries such as Britain, the US, and others, not only through the wars, aggression and intervention of the big powers, but in the refusal to take action against climate change which is devastating many parts of the world.

Despite all the media coverage of the actions of the "far right", the unity of the people in defence of the rights of immigrants, whether "legal" or "illegal", has been the overwhelming response. Many unity demonstrations involving thousands of people have taken place from Newcastle to Bristol to Birmingham, London and Brighton, in places forming human shields to protect asylum centres, and displaying placards such as "refugees welcome" and "reject racism, try therapy", representing that the rights of all must be defended.

The violence, often involving young teenagers, which has melted away, cannot be said to represent a deep-going "clash of civilisations", a conception put forward by the ideologue Samuel Huntingdon. Now, as forty years ago when he was denied the right to speak by the student movement at Sussex University, this has mainly been put forward as a justification for aggression and intervention against "terrorist" states, identified as revolutionary, communist or Islamist.

Unity Rally, Newcastle

To take the matter further, the people must adopt the vantage point of defending the rights of all, and not leave the question simply as one of goodwill, or building a "united Britain". It is dangerous to see Keir Starmer and others demanding swift and longer jail sentences for those involved in "far-right extremism", and a crack-down on social media, in response to the violence. Rather than tackling the problem of disenfranchised youth, investing in social programmes, and tackling the inequality arising from ensuring that the rich get richer, Starmer and others are taking a "strong" line against violence, strengthening police powers, and using "hate crime" and "extremism" to control the political space. Keir Starmer is set to use the events to reverse the lack of credibility and legitimacy of his government. But he faces problems in that the prisons are already nearly full, and his backing for the violence of the Zionist state of Israel is second to none.

The basic problem of posing the issue in these terms, rather than as a concerted attempt to promote an anti-immigrant movement, is in how "violent extremism" and "hate" are defined and by whom. Coming from those in power, these definitions tend to be self-serving, suited to some immediate need of narrow private interests to silence a section of the population. This may not appear to be immediately evident when "extremism" is equated with racism and fascism, but the underlying issue of definition and how this definition is implemented is crucial for the rights of all citizens and those seeking asylum.

The rulers are themselves ideologically motivated to maintain and defend the existing system and its institutions of governance. This and repeated experience makes them not credible when they say they are not presenting ideologically motivated criteria, or that their criteria does not condemn people because of their ideological views and opinions or that it does not deprive them of their civil liberties. This argument is blown out of the water when it is noted that the deliberate massacres that the "Israel Defence Force" are carrying out in Gaza are not considered by the Westminster government to constitute violent extremism or hate crimes.

Swansea, Wales

In this respect, the crimes the US and Britain have committed in the name of eliminating extremists, including torture, inhuman treatment of prisoners, brutal targeted assassinations and revenge killings, must be taken into account. Every effort is made to link "hate," and "hate crimes" with extremism, something to be feared and punished. How to eliminate the usurpation of power by narrow supranational private interests by creating mass democratic transitional forms of discussion, deliberation and decision-making is the problem the working class and people need to take up for solution by actually working out and creating those forms with a mass character.

In addition, much is being made of disinformation and hate being spread on social media. It is being posed that legislation is needed to increase the ability of the state to potentially shut down web pages and social media accounts they decide are "hateful", and penalise the people involved, including jailing them. The Sunak government came up with an "updated" definition of extremism in March of this year, a definition which it said was "narrower and more precise than the 2011 Prevent definition". It more specifically targets activity which it says aims to "undermine, overturn or replace the UK's system of liberal parliamentary democracy and democratic rights".

Unity Rally, Newcastle - Photo RM

As the journalist Craig Murray wrote: "In particular the announcement that the already deeply worrying Online Safety Act will be amended, to give the state still greater power over information sources like the one which you are currently reading, could signal a massive blow to internet freedom. Publication of 'misinformation' is to be criminalised - which means the official narrative will be enforced on social media. Given that, for example, the government has relentlessly promoted the demonstrably false stories of mass rape by Palestinians on October 7, while studiously failing to notice the vast amount of unquestionable evidence in the last fortnight of systematic rape of Palestinian prisoners on a vast scale by the Israeli Defence Force, no reasonable person can fail to understand the danger of the enforcement of state-approved 'truth'."

It is worth mentioning that the evidence at the ongoing Undercover Policing Inquiry, while exposing the injustice of the state's intervention in people's political associations and campaigns, has shown how the state is focused on whether or not organisations sought to overthrow "parliamentary democracy". What might be called the exception in the 1970s and early 1980s of immoral or amoral "spycops" infiltrating organisations which were deemed to be dedicated to "public disorder" can be seen to be the rule in its present form of enabling the state to intervene in every aspect of the people's activities. Laws concerning "extremism" and "hate" in Britain, as is happening also in the US, are bringing "extremism" and "hate" to the fore as the problem, in another attempt to justify what cannot be justified. It is convenient that these "new" definitions are ready to hand to use against "groups or individuals who attempt to advance extremist ideologies that negate our fundamental rights and freedoms and overturn the UK's system of liberal parliamentary democracy".

The reality is that this "liberal parliamentary democracy" is responsible for its own dysfunctionality and the insistence that everyone must fend for themselves, that to make claims on society is out of the question. In this vein, and to avert civil war, King Charles also called for peace, unity and the "community spirit", in order to shore up contradictions as the person of state at the apex of "shared values of mutual respect and understanding [that] will continue to strengthen and unite the nation".

Southall, London

It is the promotion of the problem as being of "extremism" which is itself the diversion from the solution, which is to fight to defend the rights of all. It keeps open the door to the state's opposition to "left-extremism", as though the government was occupying the centre ground, or the "centre-left".

This "centre ground" has as its banner the promotion of core British values and forging a unified national cultural identity. This cannot be allowed to stand. Citizenship and the rights of citizens cannot be conflated with cultural identity, nor with nationality, national background. This is at the heart of the promotion that immigrants are unwelcome, that there is something alien which needs to be challenged in order to unite everyone around so-called core British values.

The events after the tragic Southport stabbings, events which have been a desperate attempt to promote an anti-immigrant movement, have demonstrated the urgent need to involve the mass of people, particularly the youth, in working out solutions to the problems they face which favour them. The refusal by those in power to deal in a human-centred fashion with the direction of the economy and society, favouring instead narrow private interests, is blocking the people as one taking the future into their own hands. In opposition, the mass of the people have shown that the future lies with defending the rights of all by virtue of their humanity, and that the overwhelming sentiment is to oppose the stand of the governments, past and present, that immigration presents a problem for working people.

Defend the rights of immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees!
Defend the rights of all!

The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) an "independent" organisation in partnership with the British Army held this year's annual two-day conference "Pulling the Future into the Present" on July 22-23 at Church House Deans Yard, Westminster, London. Sponsoring the conference were BAE systems, Lockheed Martin, Babcock and many other war industries. Many of them are supplying weapons and military support to the Israeli war of genocide in Gaza and to NATO's proxy war in Ukraine against Russia.

Although few people have heard of it RUSI claims to be "the world's oldest and the UK's leading defence and security think tank" founded 190 years ago in the days of British colonialism. Speaking at this conference were Britain's top generals. There were 29 speakers listed [1] from the military and military circles together with executives involved in weapons production, logistics and military research. Speakers included Admiral Tony Radakin, Chief of the Defence Staff, and the Army's newly appointed Chief of the General Staff (CGS) [2], General Sir Roland Walker KCB DSO ADC who brought the conference to a close. Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine's former commander-in-chief, was also given his first public speech in his new role as his country's ambassador to Britain.

Although there are scant reports of the conference, reports published revealed further the well-known fact that Britain's land warfare arrangements no longer have the pretence of giving any priority to defending Britain's shores against attack or defending the interests of the British people. General Sir Roland Walker made that very clear in his published concluding speech, "Pulling the Future into the Present" [3]. He declared "a bold ambition" to "double the Army's fighting power in three years and triple it by the end of the decade" and that "our offer to the joint force [NATO] must be based around three configurations of employment and two of command and control, none of these are exclusive, and all are NATO first and national second." [our emphasis] He said that they all involve command and control in Europe and beyond, "making other peoples' mass more lethal" and form "partnerships in places that matter... and by illustration will include our forward land forces in Estonia and Poland, as well as the global deployments of the Land Special Operations Force, as well as our wider global footprint." [4]

He made further points on the need for British "Reaction Forces, designed for speed to react quickly to cauterise crises when they flare and where their fighting power comes from velocity, not mass", and "Response forces, ultimately organised and optimised to fight in wars at scale..." He said, "Devastating destruction from ever greater distance is the aim."

Also, whilst these headlines of the conference as stated were claiming that Britain would "double the Army's fighting power in three years and triple it by the end of the decade", General Walker tried to emphasise that this was about force and not numbers. He talked about his struggle to shake "the 'big Army' mindset, where some still believe that raw troop numbers alone determine fighting power". However, he replaced this mindset with an even more dangerous illusion of the Anglo-US NATO alliance's capacity to win against superior forces. He advocated that enemies "would be met with such devastating lethality that they would be decisively defeated in the first battle and would be denied a strategy of a quick war". The only conclusion that can be drawn is that this is about wars of mass destruction and the continued criminal use of weapons of mass destruction against peoples, countries and rival powers. In other words, the dangerous warmonger mindset of these imperialists of devastating destruction from ever greater distance is indeed their aim to inculcate in their military circles.

A report on Zaluzhny speech at the conference by Tarik Cyril Amar, a German historian, [5] also picked up this significance. He said that the genocidal slaughter committed by Israel in Gaza is more likely to leave a deeper imprint on the future of Britain's and NATO warfare methods than that of Valery Zaluzhny's presentation on warfare in Ukraine. Pathetically, Zaluzhny, in serving the interests of NATO, tried to claim at the conference that the "changes which were invented on the battlefields of the Russian-Ukrainian war" were very likely to "determine the outlines of wars and the art of war in the 21st century". Zaluzhny advocated in what he said that Ukrainians can keep dying, while the West can field-test new military technologies. Amar remarked; "And there you have it. Ukraine's real future, according to Zaluzhny, is one where more Ukrainians will be fed into the meat-grinder of a losing war, but on the upside, the meat-grinder will be constantly modernised and updated with the newest ways of killing and dying, compliments of the West." [5]

Protestors at Newquay Airport, October 2022 - Photo: Phil Green and Peter Burt

Addressing the representatives of the war industries at the conference, the Chief of the General Staff said: "But I'm not just appealing to industry. Capital is flowing into the Defence sector. Obviously, there is self-interest at play in the form of profit, but that's how our system works. But investors also recognise that a lot is at stake and we share mutual values in the rules-based system as well as mutual interests in maintaining it." In other words, this is a future that threatens. It is the mutual mass destruction of countries and peoples for the profits of war industries, as well as other oligopolies and billionaires whose "rules-based system as well as mutual interests" aim to conquer all markets globally and to destroy what they cannot control.

What was revealed by Britain's top General at this conference, if this desperate stuff is adopted in these military circles, is a future rooted in hankering after Britain's colonial past, its wars of invasion and occupation across the globe in India, Africa and Asia. In recent times, it has meant the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and its support for NATO's expansion in eastern Europe and into Ukraine, provoking and escalating a proxy war with Russia. It has meant Britain's support for and arming the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. In other words, Britain's land warfare conference must be seen as their attempt to pull those in military circles into this anachronistic and bankrupt NATO warmongering mindset and actions for the future, tying Britain to NATO's war chariot. Nothing has been learned by this mindset about the need to resolve conflicts in the world peacefully. This could have been done so many times before the Ukraine war started and through the whole history of Israeli crimes in Palestine. Only division, escalation and war are NATO's stock in trade. The integration of the British armed forces into the NATO command firmly places them as an aggressive force, tied to the global war aims of the US, with no pretence that they are an independent force for the defence of British soil.

Our responsibility, the responsibility of the working class and people of Britain, is to fight for peace in the present and future and bring forward the new movements for changing society including in military circles. Such vital questions have to be sorted out by new arrangements in society where the people are empowered to make the decisions. Such new arrangements will be able to end these pro-war government arrangements as well as the pro-war government itself. There is a need for peaceful solutions to the conflicts in the world as well as resolving the many problems faced by society and humanity on all fronts.

Britain Must Withdraw from the Aggressive NATO Alliance!
No to NATO! Yes to Peace!

Notes
1. https://my.rusi.org/events/rusi-land-warfare-conference-2024/speakers.html
2. The Chief of the General Staff is the professional head of the British Army. General Sir "Roly" Walker took up his post on June 15 this year, his appointment having been announced in December 2023. See: https://www.gov.uk/government/people/roly-walker
3. Pulling the Future into the Present, Rusi Land War Conference, 2024 - The British Army
https://www.army.mod.uk/news-and-events/news/2024/07/pulling-the-future-into-the-present-rusi-land-warfare-conference/#:~:text=The%20two%2Dday%20conference%2C%20which,the%20UK%20and%20its%20allies.
4. Britain Takes the Lead Role In Enhanced Forward Presence. The army is currently deployed in over 80 countries around the world. Deployments vary in strength from single military advisors to full operational deployments - MOD
https://www.army.mod.uk/
5. Meatgrinder 2.0: General Zaluzhny Recommends Regular Upgrades for the Slaughter in Ukraine. Tarik Cyril Amar, a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory. First published in RT, 25 July 2024
Accessible on the substack: https://substack.com/home/post/p-147037924

The Kings' Speech on July 17 announced the Starmer government's legislative programme [1]. Several bills set out the economic policy, the version of the neoliberal direction that the government plans to take.

National Wealth Fund

A central pillar of the programme is the National Wealth Fund Bill. It appears that this is an initiative of new Chancellor Rachel Reeves and former Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney [2], who is being brought back into the fold of British politics as a member of the National Wealth Fund Taskforce along with the CEOs of Barclays and Aviva [3].

This is a multi-billion-pound pay-the-rich scheme to provide public funds to private interests. The fund will use the existing UK Infrastructure Bank and British Business Bank to generate public-private financing arrangements for industry, ports, and renewable energy. The Fund is presented as crucial to solving environmental, infrastructure, and investment problems, but it is the latest iteration of public-private partnership schemes, which have become the main neoliberal economic arrangement and a key factor in the politicisation of private interests. The financial institution is being established to organise new public-private partnerships, continuing the anti-social offensive, and giving it new impetus by further changing the state's arrangements directly around private interests.

Reeves uses the well-worn slogan of "investment with reform" [4]. In the past, this was used to declare that social programmes would only receive investment to the extent that they were opened up to capital and market forces. Now it is being used to declare that state investment in general - in particular for infrastructure - will only come with restructuring the state itself. The new Fund is to be used to enforce this.

Infrastructure projects

One key function of the fund will be to support infrastructure projects and house building, as the owners of capital demand a safe place to invest, especially during times of economic uncertainty. The government's shift from ostensibly small to overtly big government is evident in the announced Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which will increase the police powers of the state and enforce building projects. The bill will also streamline the planning process, allowing local communities to determine "how, not if" homes and infrastructure are built. The government aims to grant new powers to public bodies to use compulsory purchase orders to acquire land without ministerial authorisation [5].

Control over energy

Alongside house building, the main infrastructure project is the other central pillar of the economic programme: "clean" energy, principally in the form of wind turbines and nuclear power.

The Great British Energy Bill will establish Great British Energy, a state-run company to be headquartered in Scotland that will operate various large-scale power projects. The Crown Estate, the public estate of the monarch, with its £16 billion portfolio of hereditarily held land and property, along with financial connections, will collaborate with the new company to bring in an aimed £60 billion of private investment [6]. The Crown Estates Bill has been introduced for this purpose.

It is therefore again a kind of public private partnership, which, in the government's own words, means "investing in energy projects alongside the private sector" and "will see the public sector taking on a new role undertaking additional early development work for offshore wind projects. This will ensure that future offshore wind development has lower risk for developers..." [6]

The government dreams that Britain will achieve so-called energy independence and, in the process, become a "clean energy superpower", with Britain a key hub in the global energy corridors, and where wind power is controlled from Britain. Building supply chains across the country is therefore listed as a key function of GB Energy. Similarly, the Sustainable Aviation Fuel Bill introduces a new pay-the-rich scheme dressed as decarbonising air travel but likewise aimed at "energy independence" and making Britain an energy superpower [7]. This latest rehash of "making Britain great again" is part of the pro-war programme; there is nothing green about it.

Indeed, the previous Sunak government earlier this year proudly declared that Britain will be the first European country to produce high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU), in a direct challenge to Russia's dominance of the nuclear fuel market [8]. The US are also investing in this new fuel. The Starmer government is in no way abandoning this programme, a competition for £70 million of funding currently underway [9]. This is despite warnings that this type of uranium has theoretical weapons potential [10].

Enough is Enough

The government's economic programme is entirely directed to these empire-building aims. It will require massive public funding and bearing of the risk that the private interests it backs will not accept. "Growth is now our national mission," declared Reeves [4]. Meanwhile, a massive budget shortfall has been announced, leading to the prospect of cuts in, for example, road and rail projects [11]. Pensions will be targeted, for which the Pension Schemes Bill, facilitating the consolidation of pension pots, is part of preparing the ground [12]. The plan is to use private pension money to invest in unlisted companies [13], while changes to increase the tax on pensions are being floated [14].

The way the government poses the problem is that what is holding back growth is a lack of investment, and investment requires pay-the-rich schemes. The workers, on the other hand, do not see paying the rich as the key to investment in what society needs. Instead, they have been fighting for their individual, collective, and social claims, developing a movement under the banner of Enough is Enough! Their independent programme is to stop paying the rich and increase investments in social programmes.

In reality, the government's economic programme is a stepping up of the anti-social offensive. Despite attempts to divert and block the movement, such as through the Employment Rights Bill, the crisis of legitimacy of ruling circles is only set to deepen. Workers will take up the problem of who controls the economy, the social product, and who makes decisions that affect their lives, determined to change the direction of the economy to meet their needs and those of society, bringing an end to pro-war government and its national chauvinistic aims.

Notes
1. "The King's Speech 2024", July 17, 2024
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/the-kings-speech-2024
2. "Canadian Foreign Influence in British Election Considered a Good Thing", Hilary LeBlanc, TML Monthly Supplement, July 2024
https://cpcml.ca/Tmlm2024/Articles/MS54413.HTM
3."What a national wealth fund is and why Chancellor Rachel Reeves has launched one in the UK", Sarah Taaffe-Maguire, Sky News, July 9, 2024
https://news.sky.com/story/what-a-national-wealth-fund-is-and-why-chancellor-rachel-reeves-has-launched-one-in-uk-13175622
4. Rachel Reeves, Speech at 1 Horse Guards Rd, London, July 8, 2024
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/chancellor-rachel-reeves-is-taking-immediate-action-to-fix-the-foundations-of-our-economy
5."UK overhauls planning rules in race to build new homes", Jim Pickard, Joshua Oliver and Peter Foster, FT, July 17, 2024
https://www.ft.com/content/1cc1d7d0-a0d8-4fbf-9602-dd272090a140
6. "New Great British Energy partnership launched to turbocharge energy independence", Government press release, July 25, 2024
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-great-british-energy-partnership-launched-to-turbocharge-energy-independence
7. "Sustainable Aviation Update", Secretary of State for Transport Louise Haigh, Statement made on 22 July 2024
https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-statements/detail/2024-07-22/hcws16
8. "UK first in Europe to invest in next generation of nuclear fuel", Claire Coutinho and Rishi Sunak, May 8, 2024
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-first-in-europe-to-invest-in-next-generation-of-nuclear-fuel
9."The U.S. and U.K. are both investing in HALEU. How do the programs compare?", Nuclear Newswire, August 1, 2024
https://dev.ans.org/news/article-6260/the-us-and-uk-are-both-investing-in-haleu-how-do-the-programs-compare/
10. "The weapons potential of high-assay low-enriched uranium", R. Scott Kemp et al., Science 384, 1071-1073 (2024)
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado8693#tab-citations
11. "Chancellor Rachel Reeves to axe projects after review of finances", Faisal Islam and Lucy Hooker, BBC News, July 28, 2024
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c724g07qwdwo
12. "King's Speech 2024: 'surprise' pension schemes bill unveiled", Alina Khan, FT, July 17, 2024
https://www.ftadviser.com/pensions/2024/07/17/king-s-speech-2024-surprise-pension-schemes-bill-unveiled
13. "Still 'early stage' of UK efforts to tap pension pots for growth", Huw Jones, Reuters, July 30, 2024 \
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/still-early-stage-uk-efforts-tap-pension-pots-growth-2024-07-30
14. "Chancellor urged to tax pension savings", Grace Gausden, i News, July 24, 2024
https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/money/pensions-and-retirement/chancellor-urged-tax-pension-savings-what-mean-you-3186877