The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 22nd December 2017
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 22nd December 2017
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 22nd December 2017
THE GOVERNMENT’S new £3.1 billion aircraft carrier has been found to have a serious leak around one of its propeller shafts. Leaks on aircraft carriers are serious issues because the weight of two conning towers is all on one side of the boat. This has to be counterbalanced but vast amounts of unchecked water flowing about inside could easily tip the vessel over.
So new and very expensive repairs must be made. Even then, there are as yet no planes to fly from this giant. It seems we will be buying 48 F-35s from the US arms giant Lockheed Martin by 2025, at a total cost of £9.1 billion.
And there are plans to build another of these giant ships that, once launched, will be mothballed because we cannot afford to run it.
Most of our readers will be wincing at these vast sums of money being poured into what are, at best, the most expensive white elephants in the world and, at worst, will enable imperialist aggression and strife around the world to attack and destroy other countries, bringing death and disaster to their people.
At a time when our hospitals are stretched beyond breaking point, families are being left destitute at Christmas by benefit changes, the growing army of the homeless are freezing to death on the streets and the mentally ill are being asked “why don’t you kill yourself”, the Government’s defence spending is an obscenity.
Why is the ruling class of this country still trying to play at being a great imperial power when we cannot afford to feed our children or keep our old people warm?
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have shown up that our armed forces are under-equipped and regarded as a joke by their United States allies.
But the US government still wants Britain to tag along beside its own vast war machine and to remain on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and pretend that Britain still “rules the waves” to give itself a bit more credibility as its own empire crumbles before our eyes.
And, as in Britain, it is the poor people and working classes in the USA who are starved and exploited to keep the war machine going.
It is time for Britain to pull out, to focus our resources on our infrastructure, to re-invest in industry, to raise living standards and become a quiet, peaceful country more interested in the welfare of its own people than wrecking the lives of people in other countries. It is time to stop propping up the failing US empire. The special relationship is an illusion based on one-way exploitation. The US empire is going to crumble and fall — as every other empire before it has. Prolonging the agony will not help the workers of the USA.
There is a new awakening of working class values in Britain and in the USA, and one way or another the class war is intensifying. The ruling classes on both sides of ‘the pond’ are increasing their attacks on their own workers and on the rest of the world, but resistance to that is also growing.
Governments and the bourgeois media are no longer believed, but the workers still have a long way to go to build their own confidence. This can only be done through the old education, agitation and organisation — with organisation being the most important.
And out of the wreckage of falling empires we hope a better, more peaceful, more co-operative and socialist world can emerge that can fully engage with the growing problems of climate change.
And the leaky-bottomed boat can be sunk somewhere to provide the basis of a new coral reef — teeming with a million fishy life-forms and helping to restore our depleted seas.