Summer books: trade wars, billionaires and global warming

Summer books: trade wars, billionaires and global warming

Here are reviews of a few books that I could not ignore analysing this summer.

Michael Roberts

Let’s start with How to win a trade war by Soumaya Keynes and Chad Bown.  Keynes, an ancestor of the John Maynard, formerly wrote for the Economist and now for the Financial Times.  Chad Bown is an international trade economist at the American Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE).

This is a truly irritating and fallacious book. But it does tell you all you need to know about what the governments of the major Western capitalist economies want to do about China’s rapid rise in manufacturing and trade globally: namely to launch a trade war with sanctions and tariffs.

As Keynes put it in an interview with Keynesian guru, Paul Krugman, “the conceit of the book is that you, the reader, are really interested in fighting a trade war, right? And we are the two nerdy kind of reluctant guides saying, “Uh, if you really want to do it, then, you know, we’ll give you the evidence that you need.”  “After all, we (presumably, the West) is in some sort of trade war, and really China is the part that’s driving this.”  Yes, according to mainstream economic theory, international trade benefits all with economies of scale etc and cheaper and better goods, but “in a world where we’re not friends with everyone and we don’t trust everything”, that does not follow.  We need to find out “new, new ways of protecting ourself against China’s subsidies.”

Bown is particularly dedicated to adopting bans and other sanctions on Chinese exports and companies in this apparently necessary trade war. We must carry out “the really hard task at hand of fighting the real trade war that needs to be fought, which is dealing with these challenges with China… with our partners and allies.”  You can see that the book starts from the premiss that what’s good for Western capital is good for us all; and the ‘enemy’ is China.

Let’s deal quickly with the fallacies of this book’s arguments. First, is the decline in economic growth and manufacturing in the US and now Europe due to some ‘China shock’ caused by unfair trade practices adopted by an overproducing Chinese manufacturing sector?  No.  As Jason Furman, former chair of the US Council of Economic Advisers, argues, the so-called “China shock” is a myth. According to him, “85 to 95% of Americans benefit” from trade with China, and “China has been part of helping [the US economy] work, not hurting it work.” In other words, the narrative that China “stole” American jobs and wages is the exact opposite of reality.

Furman also points out that the majority of what the US imports from China isn’t consumer goods: “more than half of what we import is actually inputs into the manufacturing process itself.” In other words, Chinese imports make US manufacturing MORE competitive as it decreases their input costs. If you were to cut all Chinese imports, you’d cripple U.S. manufacturing as it would no longer be able to compete on price with anyone.  And that applies to Europe as well.

But this notion that China is somehow “stealing” Western jobs and prosperity has become the unquestioned premiss of Western governments and financial media, and in the assumptions of this book. The European leaders’ solution to the so-called China shock is to slap tariffs on Chinese imports, copying Trump’s tariff war.  But is China overproducing at unfair low prices for world markets or is America’s trade deficit really a result of the simple fact that the US buys more than it produces and covers the gap with imports? 

As for Europe, the shift in China’s trade balance with Europe has been truly dramatic.  The deficit has more or less doubled in the years since COVID.

But why has this deficit shot up? German Chancellor Merz says that China is unfairly keeping its currency undervalued. But there is little evidence to suggest any exchange-rate-driven price dumping. The unit exchange value of Chinese exports is on an upward trend and moves closely with those of Japan and South Korea. A large part of the Chinese export surge to Europe is accounted for by green energy goods, which are heavily in demand for Europe’s energy transition. Another large element are chemicals, the production of which has been hit in Europe by high gas prices.  European imports are thus not the result of China’s low valued yuan, but instead from the necessary demand for key products.

Moreover, China’s subsidies for industry are in no way outsized compared to the European Green Deal or Biden’s IRA.  The German car industry got comparable subsidies for reinvestment. But rather than being ploughed back into much needed new investment, these were paid out to shareholders in the form of dividends. In 2023 alone, as the Chinese EV avalanche was already upon them, Germany’s big three automakers, according to analysts at EY, paid out 31 billion euros in dividends.  

Overall, I have dealt with all these arguments against the ‘China shock’ in this post.   So I won’t go further on this. The real question that this book does not answer: is the solution for Europe and US manufacturers , or more important, for the majority of people in those two continents a trade war, as the authors assume?  I think not.

Inequality expert Gabriel Zucman has got a best seller out, called The need to tax billionaires. Zucman provides the reader with devastating facts about the inequality of wealth globally and its increased concentration in a handful of mega rich billionaires (and now even a trillionaire with Elon Musk).

Zucman shows that just 3000 households have 16% of the world’s total personal wealth and that share is accelerating.

Zucman argues that billionaires often pay a lower effective income tax rate than teachers or nurses because their wealth is tied up in companies and assets, which avoid income taxes unless sold. The billionaires hide much of their wealth in tax havens around the world to avoid paying tax. “This kind of global tax evasion has been one of the linchpins of rising inequality and growing government debt worldwide. It has also led many to lose hope in the very possibility of a fairer society, creating a breeding ground for the reactionary political movements that are thriving today.”

Zucman callsfor a coordinated global minimum tax requiring individuals with a net worth over $100 million to pay at least 2% of their wealth in taxes each year.   That would raise huge sums for governments to use on social needs and restore a fairer tax burden for all.

Zucman dismisses the cry that any wealth tax imposed by governments would actually lead to a loss tax revenue as the billionaires would all leave the country. He points out that if “all France’s billionaires were to flee to the Cayman Islands tomorrow, the loss of tax revenue to the country would be insignificant: around 0.03%.”  Zucman concludes that “it is time to finish what we started with income tax – a major advance for democracy – in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is time finally to bring billionaires, who have never really been subject to income tax, into the fold. Carrying this unfinished revolution to completion is imperative if we wish to live by our most fundamental principles of equality before the law.”

My main criticism of Zucman’s book is it that it proposes only trying to redistribute wealth and income through taxation.  The point really is: why does such inequality arise?  Why are there billionaires in the first place?  It is not due mainly to tax evasion or low taxes; it is to do with the structure of capitalist economies.  The underlying inequality is the concentration of corporate assets in just a small number of companies globally.  In an updated investigation, a Swiss technology team found that just 1318 transnational corporations control the assets of the world’s economy. (Superconnected companies are red, very connected companies are yellow. The size of the dot represents revenue).

“In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 percent of the entire network.” Most were financial institutions. The main shareholders of such companies thus become billionaires.  It is not just a question of properly taxing the billionaires as Zucman proposes, but instead to establish public ownership of the dominant large companies globally.  That would end the world of billionaires and allow governments to plan investment and production for social needs, not the profits of billionaire shareholders.

Public ownership of the world largest companies?  Surely, that’s totally utopian given their power to control governments and with governments that support the capitalist system?  But then expecting to get governments to impose a 2% wealth tax, which might seem a more modest proposal, is just as utopian under the present system.

The climate and accelerating global warming is literally a burning issue as even the Global North is now experiencing extreme heat waves through this summer.  Average global temperatures compared to pre-industrial levels keep breaking new records.  Professor Lord Nicholas Stern is the most venerated climate economist and he has a new book out called The Growth Story of the 21st Century: The Economics and Opportunity of Climate Action

Stern presents a story of optimism that the global warming crisis can be resolved. Moreover, climate action and long-term sustainable growth are not conflicting strategies. His solutions? He advocates massive upfront green investment and international climate finance provided by a partnership between governments and private industry, along with carbon pricing, environmental taxation and cap-and-trade permit systems to make polluters pay.

In other words, these are all the mainstream economic policies that have been around since the Paris Agreement of 2015 to cap global warming  at 1.4-2.0C above pre-industrial levels.  And they have failed.  Fossil fuel production is not being phased out – on the contrary.  And funding for climate action has disappeared. As Brett Christophers has pointed out in his book, profitability for capital stands in the way of any real action on the climate. 

Instead of hoping that the big energy companies, the global banks and industrial combines will ‘see sense’ and invest in climate action as Stern advocates, the answer really lies in public ownership and planning, as economists Paul Cockshott, Alin Cottrell, and Jan Philip Dapprich explain in their book written many lost years ago.

Guilty as Charged: How America and Israel Created the Iranian Nuclear Programme They Now Use as a Pretext for War

Guilty as Charged: How America and Israel Created the Iranian Nuclear Programme They Now Use as a Pretext for War

 

By Lim Tean

 

Lim Tean is the Secretary General of the People’s Alliance For Reform Singapore

Facts For Working People publishes this article for our readers interests and is not affiliated with the Alliance for Reform. on Facebook.

 

The Great Game

 

Ariel Sharon publicly called for IRAN’S VICTORY in 1982. Israel had 100 military advisers living in Tehran throughout the war. America supplied Iran with weapons-grade uranium. Now read what they say about Iran today — and ask yourself who the real rogue states are.

 

The Western narrative on Iran’s nuclear programme is built on a foundational lie — and the evidence to demolish it has been hiding in plain sight for decades. The United States and Israel, who present themselves today as the last guardians standing between a fanatical Iran and nuclear catastrophe, are in fact the two nations most responsible for Iran’s nuclear existence. 

 

They built it. They armed the state they now bomb. And the historical record convicts them on both counts.

 

Let the prosecution begin.

 

COUNT ONE: America Created Iran’s Nuclear Programme

Iran’s nuclear programme began under the Shah in 1957, after the United States and Iran agreed to a civilian nuclear cooperation arrangement known as the Cooperation Concerning Civil Uses of Atoms, through Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace programme. This was no accident of history. According to archival documents, a non-aligned Iran was viewed as a cornerstone in a deterrence strategy against the Soviet Union, and Atoms for Peace served to solidify Iran’s allegiance to the West. Tehran was not given nuclear technology out of benevolence — it was given nuclear technology as a Cold War bribe.

 

In November 1967, the Tehran Research Reactor went critical, initially fuelled with 93% highly enriched uranium provided by the United States. Read that sentence again. Washington supplied Tehran with weapons-grade fuel. The beneficiaries of the Atoms for Peace programme included Israel, India, Pakistan — and Iran, then ruled by the US-backed Shah. The same nations America would later spend decades accusing of nuclear adventurism were all schooled in the nuclear arts by Washington itself.

 

This programme was actively supported by the major Western powers, and the United States, France, and Germany sought lucrative power reactor sales to Iran. Lucrative. The word is important. This was never purely strategic calculation — it was commerce dressed as security policy.

 

COUNT TWO: America and Germany Built Bushehr

The Bushehr nuclear power plant was the idea of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who wanted a national electrical grid powered by nuclear plants. In August 1974, the Shah declared: “Petroleum is a noble material, much too valuable to burn… We envision producing, as soon as possible, 23,000 megawatts of electricity using nuclear plants.”

 

Washington did not object. Washington encouraged it. Preliminary agreements with Siemens KWU and Framatome for four nuclear power plants were signed. In 1975, construction of two reactors was started near Bushehr by Siemens KWU — modelled on Germany’s own Biblis B reactor. Some $3 billion was paid. Around 5,500 German nationals lived at the construction site. There had never been a German construction project abroad on that scale.

 

The Shah also sent dozens of Iranian students to MIT to study nuclear engineering in the mid-1970s, with the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran concluding a formal agreement with MIT in 1975 to provide a specialised master’s programme to train Iranian nuclear engineers.

 

America was not merely permitting this — it was actively shaping Iran’s nuclear scientific class. The engineers who today run Iran’s nuclear installations were trained, in no small part, by the United States of America.

 

Then 1979 came. The Shah fell. Washington’s man was gone. And the entire programme America had constructed — the reactors it had blessed, the engineers it had trained, the fuel it had supplied — suddenly became an existential threat. Nothing about Iran’s physical nuclear infrastructure had changed. What changed was the flag flying over Tehran.

 

This is not nonproliferation policy. This is geopolitics with a moral mask.

 

COUNT THREE: Israel Armed Khomeini’s Iran

Now we arrive at the most spectacular hypocrisy in modern Middle Eastern history.

 

Israel supported Iran throughout the Iran-Iraq War to provide a counterweight to Iraq, to re-establish influence in Iran lost with the overthrow of the Shah, and to create business for the Israeli weapons industry. Israel sold Iran $75 million worth of arms in Operation Seashell in 1981, including antitank guns, TOW missiles, and spare parts for tank and aircraft engines. 

 

Arms sales totalled an estimated $500 million from 1981 to 1983. Other experts placed the true figure at more than $500 million per year, with internal US government reports suggesting total Israeli arms sales to Iran approached $2 billion annually in the early 1980s.

 

This was not marginal, deniable activity. There were never less than around one hundred Israeli advisers and technicians in Iran at any time throughout the war, living in a carefully guarded camp just north of Tehran, where they remained even after the ceasefire. While Iranian leaders called for Israel’s destruction at Friday prayers, Israeli military personnel were embedded in the Islamic Republic’s war machine.

 

And what did Israel say about this arrangement? Israeli Defence Minister Ariel Sharon told the Washington Post in May 1982: “Iraq is Israel’s enemy and we hope that diplomatic relations between us and Iran will be renewed as in the past.” Four months later, he told a Paris press conference: “Israel has a vital interest in the continuing of the war in the Persian Gulf, and in Iran’s victory.”

 

Israel’s most celebrated military strategist — the man later to become Prime Minister — was publicly calling for Iran’s victory and hoping for renewed diplomatic relations with the Khomeini government. He was not some rogue voice. Israel’s participation in the arms transfers was approved by Prime Minister Shimon Peres. This was state policy, authorised at the highest level.

 

COUNT FOUR: Washington Covered for Israel While Publicly Blockading Iran

By 1982, it was evident to the US State Department that Israel was routinely selling American-made military material to Iran without Washington’s case-by-case consent, as was part of the original agreement between Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Secretary of State Alexander Haig. The Reagan administration’s response? It replenished Israel’s weapons stockpile — even as American weapons were visibly flowing to Tehran.

 

This wilful ignoring of Israel’s arms sales occurred despite the fact that the Reagan administration began in 1983 an aggressive public campaign, known as Operation Staunch, to stop worldwide weapons sales to Iran.

 

Operation Staunch — publicly strangling Iran’s arms supply while privately allowing Israel to sustain it. The cynicism is breathtaking.

 

THE VERDICT: Power, Not Principle

The prosecution rests. Let us state plainly what the evidence establishes:

America launched Iran’s nuclear programme in 1957. America supplied it with highly enriched uranium. America trained its nuclear engineers at MIT. America and Germany built the Bushehr reactor to near-completion. Israel armed the Islamic Republic throughout an eight-year war, with hundreds of its own personnel embedded in Tehran, while its Defence Minister publicly called for Iran’s victory.

 

Then — the moment Iran ceased to serve Western and Israeli strategic interests — the same programme became an abomination against civilisation. The same nuclear infrastructure became proof of genocidal intent. The same nation they had armed, trained, and enriched became the supreme threat to regional order.

 

What changed was not Iran. What changed was the calculus of domination.

Today, as Israel prosecutes a war that its own strategic class has long sought — the destruction not of Iran’s weapons but of Iran as a functional state, a war aimed at cementing Israeli military supremacy from the Nile to the Euphrates — we are asked to accept the framing that this is about nonproliferation. That this is about protecting the world from nuclear catastrophe.

 

It is not. It never was.

 

The rules-based international order has always been a legitimacy laundering operation — a mechanism by which the powerful dress their interests in universal principle. The history of Iran’s nuclear programme is among the most complete indictments of that system ever assembled. It was built by the West when Iran was useful, condemned by the West when Iran became independent, and is now being bombed by the West in service of a regional hegemony project its architects dare not name openly.

 

The architects of Iran’s nuclear existence are now its executioners. History will record the rank hypocrisy. When you hear Trump declare repeatedly that Iran will never have nuclear weapons, bring to his attention the facts I have set out in this post and laugh at him in his face!  

 

Lim Tean is the Secretary General of the People’s Alliance For Reform Singapore 

Social Democrats Win Big in New York City Democratic Primaries

Source: NPR

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

Anyone who reads this blog, and my occasional contributions to it, knows that I have long argued that the era of domination by the two major capitalist parties over U.S. political and economic life is drawing to a close.

 

It has been a long time coming. Americans are so disgusted with both the Democratic and Republican parties that in national elections tens of millions simply opt out, convinced that neither party represents their interests. It is important to recognize that even in the last presidential election, a little over 30% of eligible voters (including those that opted out) voted for Trump.

 

The statistics bear this out. A 2023 Gallup poll found that 63 percent of U.S. adults agree that the Republican and Democratic parties do such a poor job of representing the American people that a third major party is needed.

 

The desire for change extends beyond dissatisfaction with the political system. 

 

Around two-thirds of Americans believe that government should ensure health coverage for all. How this should be achieved varies, of course, and we have to take into account the decades-long propaganda campaign against any form of socialized service in the United States. When I arrived in this country 52 years ago, many workers told me they opposed a national health care system like that in Britain because they had been convinced it was communist and inherently inefficient.

 

Similarly, more than 80 percent of Americans believe that housing should be made more affordable. I could go on, but you get the picture.

 

Against this backdrop, Tuesday's Democratic primary elections in New York City amounted to a political earthquake. In addition to Zohran Mamdani's victory in the mayoral primary, the three congressional candidates backed by Mamdani all won their respective races.

 

The significance of these victories should not be underestimated. They reflect the declining authority of the Democratic Party establishment and the growing appetite for alternatives. Investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein summarized the scale of the defeat for the party leadership:

 

"In New York, the Democratic Party's heaviest hitters — all from the state — lost big. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries endorsed the incumbents and campaigned hard against the Mamdani slate. Chuck Schumer, the other great power of New York Democratic politics and Senate Minority Leader, said almost nothing about his own party's candidates, which tells you how eager he was to distance himself from the fight. Governor Kathy Hochul lined up behind Representative Dan Goldman in Manhattan.

 

Between the three, they couldn't deliver a single race."

 

All three victorious congressional candidates are members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), an organization that has grown substantially since Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign in 2016.

 

There is no denying that these results represent a major rebuke to the Democratic Party leadership and to policies that have failed to address the needs and aspirations of large numbers of Americans. Nor is this sentiment confined to New York City as some pundits have argued. Across the country, people are demanding change, and both parties of capitalism are widely distrusted. So it’s also possible that these results foreshadow broader gains for insurgent and progressive candidates elsewhere. 

 

However, I still do not see the Democratic Party as the vehicle through which major reforms can be won. Sanders had an opportunity a decade ago to break from the party and attempt to build an independent left reform alternative. Whether such a project could have succeeded is impossible to know, but his campaign demonstrated that there was a substantial audience for it.

 

Who might have joined such an effort is also impossible to say. Perhaps Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, perhaps Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib—politicians who have shown considerable courage at various points. Ocasio-Cortez has since become a rising star within the Democratic Party and is unlikely to return to the position she once expressed when she observed that only in the United States would she and Joe Biden belong to the same political party.

 

The larger question concerns the limits of reform in the era of late-stage capitalism. I do not believe that major reforms can be won, nor that a genuinely independent working-class political alternative can be built, without a mass movement capable of confronting the capitalist offensive in a serious and sustained manner.

 

Such a movement would inevitably seek its own political expression. In my view, any durable independent working-class political force is more likely to emerge from mass struggle, organization, and collective action than from electoral maneuvering within the framework of the existing parties. 

 

It is from such movements that an independent political alternative will ultimately arise.

Editorial: what will a Burnham leadership mean?

L Keir Starmer R Andy Burnham

From the UK Socialist Website Left Horizons

Editorial: what will a Burnham leadership mean?

24 June 2026Posted by Editor

Short of an unexpected natural disaster, it looks like Andy Burnham will be Labour leader and new Prime Minister, perhaps be the end of July. Labour conference looks like being a coronation, there being little likelihood of any right-wing opposition to Burnham from the parliamentary Labour Party, most of whom are only too happy for a chance to salvage their political careers under a new leader.

Before considering the implications of Burnham ascendancy, it is worth noting that he will be the seventh Prime Minister in ten years – a record for the British capitalism state and one that marks it out as the least stable in western Europe in recent times. Moreover, the dumping of a Labour Prime Minister, less than two years into the parliament has never happened before in more than a century of Labour history.

Starmer’s resignation speech was a master-class in self-righteousness, lies and hypocrisy. He claimed to have inherited a party “that was politically, financially and morally bankrupt”. In fact Labour was the biggest party is western Europe, awash with money from its membership dues. Starmer squandered this money on pointless litigations over alleged antisemitism.

As for “morally” bankruptcy, Starmer glossed over ditching his “ten pledges” as soon as he was elected, and the tens of thousands of pounds-worth of “gifts” he received from rich backers immediately on coming into office. And there was no greater absence of morality in helping empower Netanyahu in his genocidal attack on the people of Gaza.

The key question that faces socialists

The key question that faces socialists today is this: to what extent will the Labour Party revive under Andy Burnham? If the Labour Party is pretty much a moribund organisation now, with few activists and largely demoralised or  quiescent membership – not to mention the plague of CLP suspensions and closures – will it revive again in the future, and will it once again, a place where real socialist ideas can be aired and get a hearing? The answer to that, as we will explain, is a heavily qualified‘yes’. Qualified, only because the scale of change and the pace of change are impossible to predict.

There is a spectrum of opinion on the left as to what difference Burnham will make. On one end of the spectrum is the Marathon to Snickers view: the name and wrapper was changed, but the content was exactly the same. On the other end of the spectrum, some on the left think that Burnham will ‘save’ the Labour Party from a defeat at the hands of Reform. The truth probably lies somewhere in between, but where precisely it lies on that spectrum remains to be seen.

In times of social and economic crises, class conflicts and struggles are sharpened to a higher degree, through strikes, demonstrations, occupations and even riots. As economic uncertainties and insecurities intensify, so also do political reactions to them. But clash of opposing class interests is always reflected inside the labour movement – in the trade unions and the Labour Party – in the form of more bitter and angry conflict between left and right, over what is the correct course of action.

Such is the period that is opening up at the present time. We can more or less identify the pressures that will be put on Andy Burnham from both right and left, once he takes the keys of Ten Downing Street.

The worst Parliamentary Labour Party in its history

Burnham will be under the sway of a Parliamentary Labour Party which is the worst in the Labour Party’s entire history – nine-tenths of ‘Labour’ MPs with little connection to working class people, and out only to further their own careers and prestige.

Burnham, let us remember, has been adopted by the PLP right wing as the only hope of saving their careers. Josh Simons, who stood down as Makerfield MP to let Burnham stand, is an arch right-winger. He was the director of Labour Together, that toxic factional organisation that spent hundreds of thousands of pounds to undermine Jeremy Corbyn and then promote Starmer for the leadership. (See analysis of that by-election, here)

Much of the huge sums of money given to Labour Together was illegal – not declared to the Electoral Commission, for which the organisation was fined – but as director, Josh Simons spent tens of thousands more to put private detectives onto the journalists who were researching that illegality. (On this, see the excellent book Fraud, by Paul Holden).

This PLP of carpet-baggers and chancers only want Burnham to save their necks. But in the process, they will also push him towards ‘moderation’ and against too much ‘radicalism’ – like the rest of Labour’s right-wing, they have no understanding of real politics and their political horizons cannot see beyond the capitalist system.

In pushing from the right, the PLP will be backed up by the media and the establishment in general, including the civil service, the judiciary and the defence procurement monopolies who want to make billions more in profit from an expanded defence budget.

The biggest of these pressures on Burnham, however, will be the insistent and remorseless pressure of the market system itself. Over recent months, even the smallest threat of Starmer’s resignation led to the bond markets being in a panic, pushing up interest rates. There is a constant threat from this quarter that ‘unfunded’ government expenditure will lead to a massive rise in interest rates – as happened under the ill-fated premiership of Liz Truss – and an economic crisis.

The imperatives of capitalism – more austerity

The consensus in all the representative journals of capitalism – like the Financial Times and the Economist – is that there need to be strict controls on government expenditure and that increased spending on defence comes out of spending on welfare. For capitalism, these policies are an imperative.

These, therefore, will constitute the pressures that will push Andy Burnham in the direction of the Marathon/Snickers metaphor – a new label, but the same confectionary underneath. In response to hints about public spending, Burnham has already been making some suggestions that he will abide by the same ‘fiscal rules’ – ie limit public spending – as has Rachel Reeves.

But on the other hand, what will be different for Burnham, as compared to Starmer, is that expectations are different. Burnham has been catapulted into high office precisely because there is a perception within the labour movement that he will represent working class people better. To some extent, although often vaguely, he has articulated the needs of working class people – for example, by talking about “forty years of failed neo-liberalism” and the need for public ownership of utilities.

Most trade union leaders, with a few honourable exceptions, cravenly supported Keir Starmer heaving the Labour Party to the right. With the assistance of the then general secretary, David Evans, the left was attacked mercilessly. Labour conferences – with the support of right-wing union leaders – backed constitutional changes that shifted the balance of power to the right wing. Corbyn was isolated and not allowed to stand. MPs were suspended for supporting measures like abolition of the two-child benefit cap (a measure Starmer was eventually dragging kicking and screaming into doing away with) and thousands of members were expelled or walked away.

For the 2024 general election, scores of right-wing candidates were parachuted into seats over the heads and usually against the wishes of local party members, and all of this was accepted by most of the trade union reps on Labour’s NEC.

TULO showing signs of life

That may no longer be the case, however. The organisation of affiliated trade union members, TULO, has so much clout in the Party and on the NEC that it could lift its little finger and make the Party leadership jump. They are supposed to represent four million affiliated members but in the Starmer years, TULO misrepresented them.

Now, however, TULO seems to be waking up. In its recent statement it said, in part, “Labour’s affiliated unions are deeply concerned by the Party’s catastrophic election results. They show a stark disconnect between this Labour Government and the working people.”

How can it be otherwise? The trade union leaders understand – even though they may sometimes pretend not to – that the surge of votes for Reform, which threatens the careers of MPs and the rights of workers in general, is not due to a wave of millions of voters become racist. It is due to the overwhelming gut feeling of millions of workers that their economic prospects are getting worse year on year.

Andy Burnham will be under enormous pressure to deal with these very real concrete issues. Working families are less secure. The services on which they rely, especially the NHS, is falling apart in front of their eyes. Their children and grandchildren are getting married but there is no decent affordable housing available. Good, well-paid jobs exist only for a few, while most jobs do not provide enough to live on week by week. Reform UK and the rag-bag assortment of racists and xenophobes have no answers – socialists are well aware of that – but it is easy to understand why so many voters are seduced into thinking that ‘someone’ else, ie migrants, are getting more resources than them.

To take one more relevant example, The Guardian published a story only yesterday about child poverty. “Four hundred thousand children in the UK”, it reported, “were supported by baby banks in 2025, an 11% increase from the year before, prompting warnings from charities that they “cannot continue to absorb the impact of child poverty on this scale” without government support”. And this is under a ‘Labour’ government.

What we need to understand is this: it was not due to parliamentary chicanery or manoeuvres in the corridors of power that Starmer is being booted out. It is due to the bread and butter issues that face millions of working class families and the impact these have had on electoral politics.

And it is in this respect that there will be expectations put on Burnham that were not put on Starmer – in the streets, in the workplaces and in the communities. There are expectations that he will have to provide some answers, something different, even if it means challenging the wealth, power and privileges of the billionaire-class.

If, as seems likely, the right wing of the parliamentary party is not willing to stand a candidate against Burnham, it is because they know that their candidate – Darren Jones, or Wes Streeting, for example – would be utterly crushed in any contest. That is a measure of the feelings of the Labour and trade union grass roots.

Left Horizons believes, therefore, that the Burnham leadership and premiership will mark a new stage in the life of the Labour Party, a small beginning of change, but only a beginning. It does not mean a return to the old conditions, where the two-party system dominated utterly and Labour was the only serious party on the left. The Green Party, with a radical leader and policies as left as Corbyn’s ever were, is here to stay in the short and medium-term at least. It is a party with many good socialist members, thousands of them driven out of Labour by Starmerism.

Labour is today a desert, but things might change

But the idea that the Labour Party is near ‘death’ is a long way from certain. In fact, that argument has been made and proven too many times in the past, and at least at the moment it still rests on the affiliation of four million trade union members.

If an early period of promise and hope under Burnham eventually gives way to a period of disappointment, because of the pressure of capitalism and his inability or unwillingness to resist that, even then that will not necessarily mean the end of that party.

Such disappointment in the present circumstances is far more likely to lead to a revolt within the affiliated unions, and through that, to a revolt in the Labour Party in general. Where the Labour Party is today a political desert, with little activity and discussion, Burnham’s accession to power represents the very early beginning of a change, at first particularly inside the unions.

We live in a period whereby the crisis of the capitalist system is more demanding and intense than it has been for generations. Socialist ideas – the programme of democratic control and management of the commanding heights of the economy and a rational economic plan in the interests of all – are more relevant today than at any time. Such ideas will find a far greater echo in the future, but particularly in the organisations where workers and youth gather to discuss left-wing politics.

Labour has not been such an organisation for some time, but that could be about to change. How much it changes, and how quickly, we cannot say, but in the life of this very important political party, Burnham’s rise could mark an important turning point. 

Opinion: Marco Rubio embarrasses himself — and America — on Iran

Marco Rubio embarrasses himself — and America — on Iran

Lim Tean *

06-23-26

On Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/PeoplesVoiceSingapore

 

The US Secretary of State has just told the world that Iran’s foreign policy is driven by “pure theology” and that “no one has ever been able to do a successful deal with Iran.”

 

Both claims are demonstrably false. Both reveal a man profoundly unqualified for the office he holds.

 

Abbas Araghchi is one of the finest diplomatic minds operating in the world today. A career diplomat of thirty years, he was the technical architect of the JCPOA — mastering every clause, every verification mechanism, every sanctions schedule across eighteen months of gruelling negotiation with the world’s major powers. He does not need briefing notes. He is the briefing note.

 

When Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner sit across the table from him to negotiate, the contrast is almost painful to witness. Here is a man who has spent three decades studying the granular architecture of nuclear nonproliferation, sanctions law, and regional security arrangements — facing two real estate developers from New York who cannot tell a centrifuge from a footnote. 

 

Araghchi has every detail at his fingertips: the technical specifications, the legal precedents, the diplomatic history, the red lines and their rationale. His American counterparts are essentially improvising.

 

This is not negotiation. This is a doctoral examiner sitting down with students who have not read the syllabus.

 

Iran has concluded deals — repeatedly. The 2015 JCPOA was negotiated with five permanent Security Council members plus Germany. It was verified by the IAEA. It worked. It was America that tore it up.

 

And then there is Rubio himself. Anyone who has watched him testify before Congress will know exactly what I mean. What you witness is not statecraft. It is a man who has made a career of spouting propaganda and ideological talking points — recycling neoconservative slogans in place of analysis, substituting bluster for knowledge, and confusing belligerence with strength. He has never demonstrated a serious understanding of Iran’s political structure, its factional dynamics, its strategic doctrine, or its negotiating history. 

 

The words in that image are not merely wrong — they are terrifying in what they reveal about the man now simultaneously occupying the offices of Secretary of State and National Security Adviser. That such extraordinary concentration of foreign policy power should rest in hands this ignorant is one of the most alarming facts about American governance today.

 

What Rubio is actually revealing is not Iranian irrationality. He is revealing Washington’s own incapacity — its inability to honour commitments, sustain agreements, or treat adversaries as strategic actors deserving of serious engagement.

 

The most dangerous diplomats are not the radical ones. They are the ignorant ones — those who mistake their own ideological blinkers for geopolitical insight.

 

In my assessment, Rubio is the most ignorant and incompetent Secretary of State the United States has produced since the Second World War. That is not hyperbole. It is a considered judgment from someone who has studied American foreign policy across eight decades.

 

The world deserves better. So, frankly, does America. 

Lim Tean is Secretary General and founder of the People's Voice Party of Singapore