Trump hoggs the headlines but Burns points the way ahead

EDITORIAL by Ken Ferguson •

As 2025 unfolds and the era of Trump 2.0 begins crisis confronts us on every hand with the now openly flaunted power of the likes of Musk thrown behind not just his US allies but openly backing the likes the Neo Nazi AFD in Germany and their co-thinkers in Reform in the UK.
Yet as wealthy reactionaries go on the offensive the evidence of the failure of the planet trashing poverty generating system is all around.

Perhaps the latest most dramatic example is the firestorms sweeping Los Angeles not just because of the sheer scale of the thousands of acres aflame but the fact that they are consuming homes worth billions of dollars owned by the fashionable super rich.

The paradox is, of course, that those who have seen homes burn and had to flee the flames, while now temporary refugees aided by the US Red Cross, are among the sections if society who have lived well on the people and planet trashing policies of the US and its regime of world plunder.

Not for them threat of mass military-backed deportations planned by Trump as he threatens economic and possibly military pressure against lands as diverse as Greenland, Panama and Canada as US federal, state and local governments fall over themselves with pledges of aid to the fire victims.

Surely a graphic contrast to victims of Israeli planes dropping US bombs on Gaza
There is saying that those who ignore history are fated to repeat it and this is eerily echoed in the current growth — backed by the billionaires and their propaganda — of the growth of Fascism, Nazism and war in the 1930s.

Super-rich still funding fascism
Just as the super-rich now bow and scrape before Trump, bankroll his politics and feed his increasingly deranged policies, the same was done for the previously derided Hitler, as big corporations such as Thyssen and Krupp weighed in with cash and material in support of the supposed “Thousand-Year Reich.”

Without overstating the parallels we should recall that, like Hitler and his junior partner Mussolini, Trump is already making “territorial demands” even before he takes office. Sadly we now know where that led and the cost in lives and money of WW2.

As the Tories are pushed rightwards by the charlatans if Reform it us worth remembering that the organised fascists led by former Labour MP Sir Oswald Moseley as well as marching with their hatred — remember Cable Street — also had great influence on the Tories if their day.
The most famous example of this was provided by Viscount Rotheremere owner if the Daily Mail who launched a campaign supporting Moseley’s British Union of Fascists in January 1934 under the banner headline “Hurrah For The Blackshirts “signed by himself.

The reality, then as now, is that there is social and political overlap between the hard right and the “mainstream” Tories as evidenced by the baying of Tory leader Badenoch — instigated by the increasingly unhinged Elon Musk — around the grooming issue.

Faced with a politics moving right both here and abroad we might expect a robust pro working class response but sadly, with Starmer Labour the reverse is the case. Since winning the general election last summer Labour has launched attacks on pensioners heating allowances, child benefits and, infamously the WASPI women.

Regular Voice readers will be well aware that, in our view, it is the long march of supposed workers’ parties such as the US Democrats, UK Labour, German Social Democrats and French socialists towards pampering business, backing privatisation of key industries and denouncing collective ownership lies at the heart of their collapse across the industrial word.

In this long process the winners have been the far right who now wield power in the US and Italy and are challenging in a clutch of countries including for considerable interest if not power here in the UK presenting us with a menace that must be met. But how?

Opinion survey after opinion survey shows that the basic ideas of the Left a functioning publicly owned NHS, mass building of modern social housing, public ownership of energy to curb the profiteers, action to end the scandal of poverty and real workers’ rights score favourably with voters.

However if we are to get beyond hand wringing appeals to either Labour or the SNP we need to weld such ideas into a programme that can be taken onto the streets and into workplaces and colleges as a natter if urgency. This is essential if the superficial and quasi racist so called common sense of the right is to be defeated.

Such an approach can both counter the growth of right wing populism and open the way to a break with government support — by whichever party — for the current failed market led approach and by action to serve the needs if both people and planet. It’s a winning formula.

This Voice is appearing on the eve of the birthday of Scotland’s National Bard, Robert Burns whose warmth and humanity has won him affection not just in Scotland but across the world with its support for the oppressed and for democratic rights.

In his poem Why Should We Idly Waste Our Prime, Burns calls for people to rise against their royal and lordly rulers and offers a vision of the likely result:

The golden age we’ll then revive
Each man will be a brother
In harmony we all shall live
And share the earth together
In virtue trained, enlightened youth
Will love each fellow creature
And future years shall prove the truth
That man is good by nature
Then let us toast with three times three
The reign of Peace and Libertie

Good advice for this New Year.

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