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Here’s what we said on the outbreak of the WW2 where one of the sides was more “totalitarian” than Russia today:
“The Socialist Party of Great Britain is fully aware of the sufferings of German workers under Nazi rule, and wholeheartedly supports the efforts of workers everywhere to secure democratic rights against the powers of suppression, but the history of the past decades shows the futility of war as a means of safeguarding democracy.”
”One of the problems with the ‘peace at all cost’ argument (i.e. Russia ‘winning’) that some are touting is the long-term ‘totalitarianising’ effect of this and the consequent closing off of any possibility of the free exchange of ideas which is essential for the socialist case to be heard and spread.”
What does this mean? What are implications of “peace but not at any price”?
That we should abandon our policy (principled gesture, if you like) of calling for a stop to killings and destruction immediately and unconditionally in order to save working class lives from being sacrificed in an armed conflict that doesn’t concern them, just because in the particular case of Ukraine it would leave the Russia state in control of nominally Ukrainian territory?
That we should be prepared to pay the price (in terms of working class deaths and injuries) of continuing the war a little longer?
That we can’t call Starmer, Macron and the others “warmongers” for wanting to keep the war going till the Ukrainian state is in a better bargaining position?
That we should be prepared to countenance supporting a war against “totalitarianism”?
Any of these would be a betrayal of our long and proud tradition of opposing all wars on the ground that they are not worth the shedding of a single drop of working class blood.
Here is the result of the third local by- election we leafletted that took place yesterday.
Syon and Brentford Lock, Hounslow
Independent (Dennison) 615 (33.48%)
Labour 603 (32.83%)
Greens 218 (11.87%)
Conservatives 150 (8.17%)
Reform UK 149 (8.11%)
Liberal Democrats 102 (5.55%)
Turnout 1837 20.97%
Electorate of 8775, 3 spoilt papers.In view of the small number of rejected votes we can’t claim to have any effect in this respect. However, we did get some publicity and discussion of our leaflet on a local online news site.
As with the local by-election in Islington we contested in December, this one too this made the national news;
https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/2023939/george-galloway-ally-byelection-labour
On the other hand, Reform welcomed the election of Dennison and claimed to have helped to bring it about:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/brentfordtoday/posts/1855494291878991/
Dennison was originally billed as a left-of-Labour candidate on the basis of his participation in George Galloway’s by-election campaign in Rochdale, but here he campaigned as a middle of the road Brentford anti-Labour localist.
Basically, he seems to have been an ordinary opportunist politician who was prepared to gather votes where he could.
How far are they going to push this hysteria over a war the US is sick of?
They will rearm and put guns before butter to do this. This will be — in fact already is being — accompanied by an intense propaganda barrage to try to persuade voters to go along with it.
Here’s an extract from an article written for next month’s Socialist Standard:
‘National security’, admirals, generals and air chief marshals are telling us, is ‘the first duty of any government’. In a sense they are right. The first duty of a government is to ensure security, though not of the population it rules over; it’s the security of its capitalist class, to protect them from being taken over by the armed forces of a rival capitalist state.
To do this, the government has to equip, train and maintain a military force armed with the most up-to-date weapons of individual and mass destruction that it can afford. This has to be paid for out of taxes that ultimately fall on the profits of the capitalist class. As the government’s ’first duty’, such spending takes priority over other government spending, as summed in the saying ‘Guns before Butter’.
The background to that news story is that the current pro-NATO government in Rumania is trying to stop a pro-Russian candidate from winning the upcoming presidential elections there:
Both sides are interfering trying to bring about an outcome that favours them. This is happening not just in Rumania but in other countries in the region such as Moldova, Slovakia, Hungary, Georgia and Armenia. At the moment Hungary, Georgia and Slovakia have elected pro-Russia governments while the Rumania, Moldova and Armenia have pro-NATO ones.
The situation is like it was before and between the two world wars with the “Powers” employing all sorts of intrigues to bring about a government favourable to them in the countries of the region.
This won’t necessarily provoke a war, even though the intrigues in Ukraine eventually did.
The new US administration is now admitting what has been obvious all along — that the Ukraine war has been a proxy war between the US and Russia. In other words, that the Ukrainian armed forces have been US proxies.
One contributor here described Trump as “maniacal”. But that’s not a rational, let alone a socialist, analysis. Even the capitalist press can do better than that. For instance, in yesterday’s Times, Roger Boyes, one of their war-mongering correspondents, has an article headed “Kiev is collateral in Trump’s showdown with Xi” and subtitled “US leader wants swift denouement in Ukraine so he can pivot to main business of his presidency”.
In the article Boyes argues that the Trump administration sees the war in Ukraine as a distraction and so is seeking some rapprochement with Russia, even in the hope that they can detach it from its alliance with China. This latter might not work (Boyes doesn’t think it will) but this at least shows that there is a logic, in terms of the US’s geostrategic interests, in what Trump is doing.
https://labourlist.org/2025/03/spring-statement-welfare-cuts-reeves-obr/
Yet again, a Labour government is forced to be the “party of austerity” after less than a year in office.
It’s all very well them blaming “economic headwinds” for blowing them off course but up to and during the election they were claiming that they could control the capitalist economy and be make it “grow”. They have found out very quickly that they can’t.
It remains to be seen how “fierce” the opposition of some Labour backbench MPs is going to be to their government’s new policy of “guns before butter”.
That’s quite good and not too long. Even if he is a bit vague and even misleading as to what Marx and Luxemburg meant by socialism. I thought I heard him say at one point “statified property” and at another “state control”.
What would be the party’s position on Trump’s peace proposal
Our general position is set out in the opening paragraph of the editorial in this month’s Socialist Standard
Hopefully the war in Ukraine will end quickly. Ideally, it should end immediately and unconditionally — in the interest of humanity in general and the working class in particular, the killing and destruction should just stop .
As we said in our manifesto issued in June 1917 during the first world slaughter:
Every Socialist must, therefore, wish to see peace established at once to save further maiming and slaughter of our fellow Workers. All those who on any pretext, or for any supposed reason, wish the war to continue, at once stamp themselves as anti-Socialist, anti-working class, and pro-capitalist.
In saying that the war could have been avoided Trump has virtually admitted that it was provoked by the actions of previous US administrations who pursued the policy of expanding NATO right up to the frontiers of ex-USSR Russia. The expansion to include Ukraine turned out to be an expansion too far.
The alternative explanation that the war was caused simply by a mad dictator bent on expanding his domain has been shown to wrong and those who accepted it have been left with egg on their face.
UK £2.26bn loan will be used in Ukraine for weapons, Zelensky says
Starmer could end up like Blair. Remembered only as a war-monger. There’s a chance of the killing and destruction in Ukraine coming to an end but he wants to keep the war going.
The Conservatives easily won the Vincent Square by-election taking the seat back from Labour:
https://www.westminster.gov.uk/media/document/declaration-of-results-of-vincent-square-by-election
Turnout was 29.07% which is not bad for a local by-election. There were 10 rejected ballot papers, 5 for being blank or having something written on them.
This compares with 18 and 15 in the May 2022 council elections. The figure of 15 is likely to be explained by there being no Green Party candidate then and some die-hard Greens taking the advice of their candidate this time not to “vote rubbish”.
If so, interesting that some Greens took the same principled position as us in not voting for something they don’t want.
We were only able to distribute 600 rather than the planned 1000 leaflets here due to so many electors living in apartment blocs without access:
“In the 2021 census Vincent Square ranked number 8 of all the wards in England and Wales for flats or apartments, which make up 97.0% of households here.”
No, WEZ, you are not the only one here enjoying seeing the European “Atlanticists” running around like headless chickens.
The pro-NATO Rumanian government, not content with annulling an election in which a pro-Russian candidate emerged as the front runner have now arrested him;
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c70eky7l6pxo
This shows that the issue in the Ukraine war never was about “defending democracy” but defending a pro-Western government.
What a bunch of hypocrites the European NATO leaders are.
