Thomas Scripps, 28, is the assistant national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party in the United Kingdom. Scripps joined the SEP in 2012, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash. Over the past decade, he has written hundreds of articles for the World Socialist Web Site and delivered speeches and lectures across the UK and Europe.
With the class struggle suppressed and Labour in power, opportunity has been given to the far-right to scapegoat migrants for the deep social grievances of the working class.
Keir Starmer owes his “landslide” victory entirely to the hatred of the Tories, the thoroughly undemocratic first-past-the-post system, and the fact that widespread left-wing sentiment has found no organised socialist expression.
Starmer’s paragraph on Thatcher also praises how Tony Blair “reimagined a stale, outdated Labour Party into one that could seize the optimism of the late 90s”.
Where the Socialist Campaign Group’s John McDonnell has criticisms of the Labour Party, it is solely out of concern that its leadership is unnecessarily alienating workers and young people who might otherwise be lured into supporting the party.
At this critical juncture, it is urgently necessary to unite the fight against war with the struggle to free Julian Assange.
The UK High Court is greenlighting a prosecution, in open defiance of the American constitution and international law, of a journalist for exposing monstrous criminal wrongdoing by the US government and military.
Plots of imperialist violence and assassination, once organised through accomplices, kept closely under wraps and strenuously denied, are now carried out in ever more open fashion.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been subjected to more than a decade of vicious uninterrupted persecution by the imperialist powers. He is currently in London’s Belmarsh maximum-security prison, fighting extradition to the US.
Today the toll of the pandemic is viewed by leading figures in the ruling elite as a supposedly natural “check” on sections of the population considered a drain on profits.
Sabisky’s resignation is meaningless and all the questions now being raised in the media about “vetting processes” are irrelevant.
We are posting today the speech by International Youth and Students for Social Equality member Thomas Scripps at a June 9 public meeting in Cambridge, England on the eugenicist Noah Carl and the far right in academia.
It’s time to return to the revolutionary politics of Marx, Engels,
Lenin and Trotsky—and turn to the Fourth International, led today by the International Committee and represented in the UK by the SEP.
Our world movement sees our campaigns in the European elections, the American presidential election and the British general election as linked fronts in a single global offensive for socialism.
The Labour Party has been careening to the right for decades; nothing has halted it, including the election and five years of leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, who only served to confirm the total impotence of what passes for the party’s left.
The following lecture was delivered by Tom Peters, a leading member of the Socialist Equality Group of New Zealand, and Thomas Scripps, a leading member of the Socialist Equality Party (UK), to the SEP (US) International Summer School, held between July 30 and August 4, 2023.
The British ruling class is deepening its offensive against the working class because they are highly conscious that this social force can and increasingly must oppose their wars abroad.
The International Committee of the Fourth International bases its response to the NATO-Russia conflict on the understanding that the same conditions which give rise to war give rise to social revolution, bringing the international working class onto the field of battle.
The Murdoch press’s Sun newspaper understood what was afoot, declaring. “We couldn’t be happier” and that Starmer was” living the Tories’ dream.”
When the European powers speak of the end of the “international rules-based order,” they are preparing for a return to the pursuit of their own imperialist interests by force of arms.
Fender gives voice to a generation of working class youth which has grown up after the collapse of the Soviet Union, amid a prolonged suppression of the class struggle and a rotten “left” culture of barely disguised liberalism, actively hostile to class politics and to Marxism, concerned with the micro-policing of language and the selfish advancement of rival “identities”, leaving millions of people politically at sea.
Whatever attempts at a compromise are made and whatever the difficulties posed to London, Paris and Berlin, the direction is toward open conflict with Washington.
Amid the self-congratulatory commentary in the British media on Starmer’s successes in schmoozing Trump, there are guarded acknowledgements that not very much was, in fact, achieved.
These parties have reacted with glee to Donald Trump’s election as US president, recognising that they now have an extremely powerful ally across the Atlantic with whom they can press a reactionary agenda already substantially adopted by European governments.
The media has been reporting the figure of $500 billion-worth of critical minerals demanded by Trump, but a leaked document seen by Britain’s Telegraph newspaper shows the reality is even more extreme.
The leadership required is one which can mobilise an international socialist struggle of the working class against imperialism and its client states—including the complicit Arab regimes.
It is the rich and the corporations who will take the lion’s share of the benefits from Labour’s and all airport expansions, while the poorest around the world pay the costs.
Pictures bear comparison only with the scenes of devastation in the aftermath of the Second World War. According to the United Nations, 92 percent of dwellings are either destroyed or severely or partially damaged.
Repeating the tactics used in its criminal war of genocide in Gaza, Israeli forces have surrounded the Khalil Suleiman governmental hospital. Residents in several Jenin neighbourhoods were ordered to leave their homes, and the city, by loudspeaker.
These 78 workers were murdered by the ANC government. Its barbarous actions are a devastating indictment of bourgeois nationalism and all the forces who have backed the ANC historically, including the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions.
Starmer reiterated in an interview Monday, “Yes, we will be ruthless, as we have been ruthless in the decisions that we’ve taken so far. We have got clear fiscal rules, and we are going to keep to those fiscal rules”.
This is a revolting crime of South African capitalism. Comparisons are already being drawn in the country to the Marikana Massacre of 2012, where police under the command of the ANC killed 36 striking workers at the Lonmin platinum mine.
With the class struggle suppressed and Labour in power, opportunity has been given to the far-right to scapegoat migrants for the deep social grievances of the working class.
The most that senior Labour cabinet minister Wes Streeting would say of Musk’s actions was that “some” of the criticisms were “misjudged” and “misinformed”. He continued, “But we’re willing to work with Elon Musk… If he wants to work with us and roll his sleeves up, we’d welcome that.”
For all the liberal complaints directed towards the draconian record of “the last government”, the fact is that the Tory and Labour parties have passed the baton of anti-democratic legislation seamlessly for decades.
We are publishing the speech introducing the resolution “War, the class struggle and the tasks of the Socialist Equality Party” at the Seventh National Congress of the SEP (UK) given by Tom Scripps, its assistant national secretary. The resolution was passed unanimously. Scripps was re-elected to his position by the Congress.
The UK defence secretary said, “The year may be ending, but the war is not. This is the time to step up further in Ukraine on every front.”
The health secretary declared that regulators have the power, “to set conditions that a healthcare professional must work under, suspend them, or strike them entirely from the medical register."
