Mr Underwoods' have full Labour government support.

 Hoist your Union Flags! Sing three choruses of Rule Britannia! Britain has a ‘world leading British defence industry.’ Yes we can beat Johnny foreigner hands down when it comes to exporting death and destruction. It’s all to defend democracy don’t ya know. What number under the heading, why capitalism needs to be abolished, does this come? Who knows, there are too many to list.

‘From a UK Ministry of Defence (i.e. Ministry of War) press release, 6 September

‘The UK will supply 650 Lightweight Multirole Missile (LMM) systems to Ukraine to boost the country’s air defence capabilities, as part of the new government’s commitment to Ukraine.

The air defence package will be announced by Defence Secretary John Healey MP today at the Ukraine Defence Contact Group (UDCG) meeting at US Air Force Base in Ramstein – his first as Defence Secretary. At the 24th meeting of the group, the Defence Secretary will set out the UK’s ironclad commitment to Ukraine and urge allies to continue to supply Ukraine with vital equipment.

It comes following a bilateral meeting between John Healey and his Ukrainian counterpart Rustem Umerov in London earlier this week, where the pair discussed how the UK will continue to ramp-up support over the coming months. At that meeting, the Defence Secretary confirmed that £300 million worth of artillery ammunition, procured by the IFU, will start to be delivered by the end of this year to support Ukraine’s war effort.

In keeping with the new government’s commitment to speed up deliveries of aid, the first batch of LMM missiles announced today are also expected to be delivered by the end of this year.

Today’s package is part of the UK’s work to help step up UK and European defence production - with today’s £162 million order helping to energise the supply chain for the future. Built by Thales at their Belfast factory, the missiles are highly versatile and can be fired from a variety of platforms on land, sea, and air.

The package is primarily funded through the UK’s £3 billion a year financial package for Ukraine, and contributions from Norway through the International Fund for Ukraine (IFU) and follows the Prime Minister and Defence Secretary’s commitment to stand by Ukraine will continue for as long as it takes.

It comes after the Defence Secretary signed a new Defence Export Support Treaty with his counterpart Umerov in July, during President Zelesnkyy’s visit to Downing Street. The agreement will fire up both the UK’s and Ukraine’s defence industrial bases and increase military hardware and weaponry production. The treaty will enable Ukraine to draw on £3.5 billion of export finance to support its war effort.

Defence Secretary, John Healey MP said:

This new commitment will give an important boost to Ukraine’s air defences and demonstrates our new government’s commitment to stepping up support for Ukraine. 

In recent days we have seen the tragic cost of Russia’s indiscriminate strikes on Poltava and Lviv. These new UK-made missiles will support Ukraine to defend its people, infrastructure, and territory from Putin’s brutal attacks.

With our international partners today, we will show that we are united for Ukraine. And we will discuss how best we can work together to improve support. Because the security of the UK and Europe starts in Ukraine.

Since Russia’s illegal invasion, the UK has provided hundreds of LMM missiles to Ukraine for air defence, destroying hundreds of Russian drones and other air threats.

Travelling at Mach 1.5 with a range of more than 6km, the LMM is highly versatile against a wide range of threats, including Armoured Personnel Carriers, fast in-shore attack craft and Unmanned drones.

This contract with Thales in the UK will further prime the world leading British defence industry to increase production rates, enabling future production to be ramped up.

A Thales spokesperson said:

As a strategic partner of UK Government, Thales is proud to be working with MoD to support defending democracy in Ukraine through the provision of our Lightweight Multi-role Missile, delivered from our Belfast site.

Since the start of the conflict in Ukraine, UK MoD and Thales have worked in close collaboration to support the Ukrainian effort by delivering key air defence systems at pace. We are pleased that this contract is the first to be signed under Task Force Hirst, which has been established to deliver a deeper defence industrial partnership between the UK and Ukraine.

Earlier this week, the Government confirmed a milestone moment in international support for Ukraine, with eight countries from across the world having now joined the UK to provide more than £1 billion to the International Fund for Ukraine (IFU), in a significant show of unity from Ukraine’s allies.

The IFU was first launched by the UK and Denmark in 2022 to provide an efficient way for countries to pool resources to buy equipment and weapons to support Ukraine’s most urgent capability needs. The UK has donated £500 million to the Fund to date.

This is also the first contract approved under Task Force Hirst, a MOD initiative created to ramp up defence industrial capacity and capability, laying the foundation for larger sustained supply of missiles and other key capabilities to Ukraine and, in the longer term, enable industrial cooperation between our two countries.’

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-to-provide-162-million-package-of-air-defence-missiles-for-ukraine-as-defence-secretary-meets-international-partners

Wigan Diggers Festival 7 September Begins 11.15 am

 

WIGAN DIGGERS FESTIVAL

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Event Details

• Date: September 7, 2024 11:15 am – 4:30 pm

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Saturday 7 September, from 11.15 am
Wigan Diggers Festival
Gerrard Winstanley Gardens, The Wiend, Wigan town centre, WN1 1PF
The Socialist Party will have a stall at this event

Socialist Sonnet No. 162

Cultivating the Rose

 

Standing in the Downing Street Rose Garden

Amongst deadheads, the new prime minister

Is making his withering vision clear,

Peering through rich man’s spectacles. Number ten

Is significant, as it’ll be a decade

At least before social democratic

Austerity eases, having done the trick

Of promising progress will have been made

Towards a fairer, wealthier nation.

Meanwhile, more will have to make do with less,

Even as a privileged few prosper. Guess

Who? Such is the dismal situation.

All those who voted for change can be sure

The Rose Garden scent is bovine ordure.

 

D. A.

Labour shed Crocodile tears à plenty

A Socialist writes: 

‘The Labour Party has sent us an email from Sir Keith Starmer addressing us, rather presumptuously, as “Friend”.

Here are some extracts:

“Frankly, things will get worse before they get better.”

“I’ll have to turn to the country and make big asks of you as well. To accept short term pain for long term good. The difficult trade-off for the genuine solution. And I know that after all you’ve been through, that is a really big ask …”

Actually it’s a bloody cheek.

How many times have government asked workers to put up with pain on the promise that things will get better? That before we can reach the sunny uplands we have to pass through the Valley of Austerity? Or that if we tighten our belts today we’ll get Jam Tomorrow?

It’s the standard government line when the state of the capitalist economy forces them to give priority to profit-making over meeting people’s needs.

As of course is for an incoming government to blame the outgoing one rather than capitalism.’

Are the Sir Humphries having a joke?

Sometimes one is driven to use intemperate language as an antidote to the otherwise detrimental effect upon the body’s blood pressure.

There is B_________ and then there’s the B__________ that politicians come out with.

The latest example comes from Lucy Powell who is a Labour (sic) MP and Leader of the House of Commons.

In an interview she said, that was no alternative to removing the Winter Fuel Allowance from millions of Pensioners and the government was ‘really sorry’. She could at least have said that it was ‘really, really sorry.’

As justification for the saving of one and a half billion pounds a year she iterated that if such a step had not been taken disaster would have overtaken British capitalism with financial markets losing confidence, government borrowing costs going up, a run on the pound and the pound crashing. Sure Jan.

‘There is no alternative’ was a favourite saying of Margaret Thatcher.

‘Thatcherism’ was a political style: abrasive; uncompromising; and ruthless. It was unapologetic. ‘There Is No Alternative’ she said and hammered the words home again and again. Her message was simple and accurate. Capitalism runs in accordance with its own laws and, despite the assertions of many politicians, offers little choice to those who claim to run it. TINA cut back on government spending, opened the nationalised industries to the discipline of the market, allowed unprofitable businesses to fail and sank her teeth into the miners. She was very, very thorough.’

Socialist Standard Thatcher, the Icon. May 2013

The most charitable reason which SOYMB can come up with for the nonsense which Powell expressed is that the Sir Humphries of the Civil Service laid a bet with each other other as to who could get the most outrageous and stupid remarks made in public by a Labour politician.

The joke, however, is on us. The continued support of the majority class in electing pro capitalism politicians, of whatever hue, to pretend that reformism will benefit said class, is of benefit only to the capitalist class.

The benefits of a socialist society where quality goods and services are produced for use, not profit, goes far beyond the economic. Lives which under global capitalism are lost to wars, poverty, stress and all of the ills visited upon the majority everyday will no longer be lost.

As Billy Connolly said, ‘“The desire to be a politician should bar you for life from ever becoming one.”

When The Socialist Party puts forward candidates in elections it is with the aim of furthering socialism, not to shill for capitalism.

Brazil attempt to shut down free speech: Suggested responses.

 

Excuse the military comparison; during World War Two when asked to surrender by German forces at the Battle of the Bulge, American General McAuliffe simply replied ‘Nuts.’ Far be it from us to tell capitalists what to do but perhaps Elon Musk should reply to the Brazilian capitalist executive committee with a similar response.

Alternatively he could use the response that Private Eye used in response to a legal threat, Arkell versus Pressdram, 1971. Reader discretion advised.

Brazil isn’t the first State to try and shut down free speech and it won’t be the last. This is a free speech issue and is important to everyone who resents and resists attempts by governments to control even more than they do the dissemination of ideas and opinions which threaten the status quo.

‘Alexandre de Moraes of the Supreme Court of Brazil has ordered the operations of X (formerly Twitter) to be “immediately suspended” and threatened draconian fines against anyone trying to sidestep the ban.

De Moraes demanded that X censor several accounts that “spread disinformation” by criticizing him, but the platform’s owner Elon Musk refused.

On 29 August the judge ordered the platform banned in Brazil, giving Google and Apple five days to remove X from their app stores. He also threatened a fine of around 50,000 Brazilian real (approximately $8,874) a day for anyone using a virtual private network (VPN) to get around the ban.

“Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes,” Musk said in response to the order.

Musk also called de Moraes “an evil dictator cosplaying as a judge” and accused President Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva of being his “lapdog.”

On Thursday, de Moraes froze the accounts of Starlink, a subsidiary of Musk’s SpaceX, saying this was needed to ensure the payment of fines levied against X for failing to appoint a legal representative. Musk objected to the “absolutely illegal action” taken without any due process, pointing out that X and SpaceX are “two completely different companies with different shareholders.”

According to X’s Global Government Affairs team, de Moraes “threatened our Brazilian legal representative with imprisonment. Even after she resigned, he froze all of her bank accounts.”

“Our challenges against his manifestly illegal actions were either dismissed or ignored,” the company said, pledging to make public all the related court filings in the interest of transparency. “Unlike other social media and technology platforms, we will not comply in secret with illegal orders.”

The US embassy in Brazil said only it was “monitoring the situation,” adding that “freedom of expression is a fundamental pillar in a healthy democracy.”

The dispute began earlier this year, when de Moraes ordered X to suspend the accounts belonging to several supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro, calling them “digital militants” who spread “disinformation” about himself and the court. Musk refused, calling the order a violation of Brazilian laws.’

Socialist Standard 1441 September 2024 Now Online

 

https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2020s/2024/no-1441-september-2024/