Posts Tagged ‘politics’
Good Election News from Cymru(Wales) – Caerffili – Victory For Plaid Cymru But Defeat for both Labour and Reform UK
Most recent election news from the British state has been very depressing. A labour party government led by Keir Starmer regularly responds to the electoral rise of the far-right Reform outfit led by Nigel Farage by attempting to be more racist and right-wing than the racists themselves.
This political instability is damaging ancient foundations of the British state – Scottish politics in the 21st century has been dominated by the rise of political separatism – and now Cymru/Wales is following that trend.
This will have, and is having, important side-effects in Ireland.
How do we explain an extremely welcome Plaid Cymru (Party of Wales) electoral triumph in Caerffili?
Geoff Ryan’s interesting report is below – one of the factors he highlights is
The women of the small Ukrainian community played an important role in combatting the lies of Reform.
Link :
Caerffili victory for Plaid Cymru but defeat for both Labour and Reform UK
Caerffili – Victory For Plaid Cymru But Defeat for both Labour and Reform UK.
Geoff Ryan reports from Wales/Cymru on the Caerffili byelection result
Read the rest of this entry »From Ukraine, Galina Rymbu’s Open Letter to Westminster MP Zarah Sultana – a feminist, anarchist and poet delivers a personal and political address to a leader of the British “Your party”
A feminist, anarchist, and poet living in Ukraine delivers a personal and political address to the leader of Your Party, inviting reflection on what contemporary anti-fascism and genuine strategies of solidarity with the oppressed might look like.
Link :
About Galina Rymbu :
Galina Rymbu’s poems employ history as a discursive tool to understand the present—stories of revolution, movement in time and space, life, and livelihood emerge. Rymbu seeks a radical feminist and leftist poetics that does not condescend to the oppressed, but rather embraces the complexity of every emotion and political position, and of language itself. She opens her poetry to the violence of propaganda, biopolitical manipulation, ideological pressures, as well as the violence of personal intimacy. Life in Space is Rymbu’s first full-length collection in English translation and includes poems selected from her three books as well as more recent work.
Dear Zarah,
Recently, several journalists and left-wing activists reached out to me asking for a comment on your position regarding the suspension of political and military support for the Ukrainian people. Whilst reflecting on how to respond, I decided to write you a personal letter instead. As a leftist and feminist activist from Russia who has been living in Ukraine for the past eight years, this seemed more appropriate than offering a dry neutral comment.
I am addressing you personally also because I see how people like you — those who appear on the global political stage — become a source of hope for many of the oppressed, whose voices and cries are still being drowned out by the speeches of dictators and the “pragmatic” calculations of capitalists who prefer to continue doing their dirty, bloody business with them.
For many younger generations of leftist activists, your name is associated with a promise of future and progress, as so many are tired of politics being made behind the closed doors of elite “men’s clubs,” to which we will never be invited. I know how important this is for my comrades in the UK, and during my visit to London on the eve of the pandemic, we spoke a lot about it —reading political poetry in squats and arguing in small bars about the future of our planet.
From birth until the age of 27, I lived in Russia. I grew up in Western Siberia, in the workers’ settlement of Chkalovsky in the city of Omsk, in a poor working-class family of mixed Moldovan, Romanian, and Ukrainian descent. We lived below the poverty line; we didn’t even have money to pay for electricity, so our home was often dark and without food. My parents still live in Chkalovsky, in a place that successful Europeans would probably call “the social bottom.” My friends, classmates, and lovers still live there. I am now 35, and I am still poor. I remain connected to my class and to the people who are losing their minds in this “prison of nations.” Since childhood, I have faced multiple forms of discrimination and persecution based on my ethnicity—simply because of my name, surname, and appearance. Later, I lived in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where I studied literature and then turned to research in the “philosophy of war,” seeking to understand the foundations of the idea of transforming an “imperialist war into a civil one” (a development best traced in Lenin’s Clausewitz Notebook). [1]
Read the rest of this entry »A series of Tributes to the Investigative Journalist Ed Moloney – “A strong voice against censorship: both that of the state and the more insidious self-censorship that had crept into journalism”
A number of tributes to the investigative journalist Ed Moloney are published below.
Also included is an account of how Ed published sensational evidence about the role of William Stobie (at one time a quarter-master in the loyalist paramilitary Ulster Defence Association), in the political murder of Belfast human rights lawyer Pat Finucane. The British state’s unsuccessful attempt to obtain details of the journalist’s confidential sources were defeated.
It is refreshing to read tributes about about a man I knew well that are kind, affectionate, and that do not pretend Ed was a saint.
He had a short fuse!
Political Nonsense Expressed by British MP Zarah Sultana of the new British left organisation “Your Party” – she attacks Volodymyr Zelensky to justify scabbing on the Ukrainian workers – Critics say : “it is perfectly possible to support a people’s struggle for national freedom while opposing the govt or political leadership currently at the head of that struggle”
The British Ukraine Solidarity Campaign is a growing force.
It recently won the support of the UNITE trade union, which also organises in Ireland.
UNITE the Union votes overwhelmingly for strong solidarity with Ukraine
But some parts of the British left offer policies which pretend to be anti-imperialist, but they stink.
It reminds this writer of bad old days in the 1960’s and 1970’s when many left organisations – from the Labour party to Official Sinn Féin and the Communist party – refused to practice solidarity with comrades in the six-county part of Ireland because they disagreed with the policies of Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the main republican organisations which had a mass following.
We can not do anything about political mistakes made in the past – but we can learn from them and do better in the future. One big positive example from those days was the formation of the National H-Block-Armagh.
Readers interested. who like to burrow into useful political history, are invited to read this book review :
Smashing H Block:The Rise and Fall of the Popular Campaign Against Criminalization
In the meantime, congratulations to the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign in Britain.
John Meehan October 28 2025
From Ukraine Solidarity Campaign
We take no joy criticising a young left-wing UK political figure who has often spoken up for workers’ rights and progressive causes. But these barely coherent comments from Zarah Sultana on Ukraine sum up much of what is wrong with her wing of the left: www.instagram.com/reel/DQT62ysjFKK
First up – yes, Zelensky is no friend of Ukraine’s working class in the sense that his government pursues right-wing, neoliberal, anti-worker economic policies.
Unlike Zarah Sultana, we actually know something about this, since we are connected to Ukraine’s unions and have been actively involved in helping them fight these policies.
Read the rest of this entry »“If Northerners had a vote, Catherine Connolly would be our next president” – Justine McCarthy’s interesting comment on the 2025 Irish Presidential Election
This article was published in the September 26 2025 edition of the Irish Times.
If Northerners had a vote, Catherine Connolly would be our next president
Northerners have a vested interest in an election portrayed as seminal for the abolition of partition. But they don’t have a vote
Catherine Connolly’s presidential election campaign would be a stroll to the park if Ireland honoured all its citizens’ rights. Instead, the Independent candidate is being accused of lip service by two parties that have ensured the exclusion of hundreds of thousands of potential voters from choosing their head of state.
Irish citizens living in Northern Ireland are allowed no say in an election that is being billed as crucial to their future constitutional status. Sinn Féin insists the next president must “champion a united Ireland”. Fine Gael says its candidate, Heather Humphreys, as a Presbyterian from a Border county, would symbolically unite the island. Fianna Fáil presents its candidate, Jim Gavin, as being Border-blind due to his involvement with the all-island GAA. Yet those living in the North’s six counties are silenced in the election. Their continuing exclusion reduces them to nominal citizens.
Addressing his party’s annual conference last weekend, DUP leader Gavin Robinson rebuked the Republic for what he called its “institutional intolerance of Protestant culture and heritage” but the southern State’s starker prejudice is against its own citizens in the North. Under the 1956 Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act, affirmed by the 1998 Belfast Agreement, people in Northern Ireland are entitled to choose to be citizens of Ireland. As such, the Irish President is their president. Ever since Mary Robinson’s election to the Áras in 1990, the office’s holders have striven to represent them with their presence and their utterances. But across the Liffey in Government Buildings the realpolitik means that extending voting rights to Northern citizens would be electoral hara-kiri, virtually handing Sinn Féin the presidency on a plate.
Read the rest of this entry »“Businessman behind smears against Jim Gavin previously spread false claims about rival” – Irish Times report on Kieran Kelly, far-right targeter of Irish presidential candidate
Far-right activist Maria Steen, who failed to secure a nomination for the 2025 Irish presidential election, agrees she spoke with Kieran Kelly.
The 2025 Irish presidential election is toxic and dirty, and that is going to continue, TrumpSteen or no TrumpSteen.
“When contacted by The Irish Times on Monday, (Kieran Kelly) declined to share any evidence for the claims, saying it would be made available at a later date.
Mr Kelly said online that he had a call this month with Maria Steen, the conservative campaigner trying to enter the presidential election.
Ms Steen confirmed the call during a press conference on Tuesday.
She said: “As you can imagine, I’ve been getting calls from lots of different people who I have never met before and have never spoken to before.
“I had a call with Kieran Kelly. He mentioned nothing about Jim Gavin or any other candidate to me. He talked about, I think, that there’s an organisation called the Wild Geese, of Irish people abroad, who are taking an interest in Irish politics.
“That was the sum total of the phone call. I listened to what he had to say, and that was it.”
- Cormac McQuinn and Pat Leahy Irish Times, September 23 2025
The left-wing candidate Catherine Connolly needs to promote a positive anti-racist message.
The absence of Steen from the presidential ballot paper is tempting government coalition partners Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to play the racist card in support of their candidates Jim Gavin and Heather Humphreys.
Read the rest of this entry »Dark Comedy Show : Will Maria Steen be a Far-Right Frankenstein Candidate on the Irish Presidential ballot? – It is odds-on, a racing certainty
Let’s have a little fun regarding the nomination campaign of the conservative far-right, anti-choice and racist candidate Maria Steen; Steen is a veteran or Ireland’s anti-choice movement; readers can stay up-to-date here :
“Independent Ireland is expected to make a decision tomorrow or Wednesday morning.
Their decision could influence whether other TDs or senators – rumoured to include a small number on the conservative wing of Fianna Fáil – would lend her their vote before the presidential nomination deadline of noon on Wednesday.” (RTÉ News Report).
The entire Fianna Fáil organisation is conservative – although occasionally it makes gestures towards the left. Between 2011 and 2018 the party leadership realised it had to dump a too close association with Catholic Church anti-feminism and the vile crime of institutional child abuse. It is continuing this tactic by nominating the high-profile Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) figure Jim Gavin to be President of Ireland. Gavin states he is pro-choice, pro same-sex marriage, and voted to lift the constitutional ban on abortion in 2018. These statements make him totally unacceptable to the Irish far-right, which includes Maria Steen and the Aontú party led by ex Sinn Féin TD Peader Tóibín, who is in charge of the Maria Steen bingo card. It is a racing certainty Steen will be on the presidential ballot – she has the nominations of 13 or 14 Oireachtas members plus 4 from the Irish Independent party.
Read the rest of this entry »Britain : “Your Party is Our Party – stop wrecking this opportunity!” Anti-Capitalist Resistance Statement
Britain badly needs a new mass left party. A new organisation temporarily called “Your Party” – headed by Westminaster MP’s Zarah Sultana and former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn – looked promising. It has descended into chaos.
The article below by Anti-Capitalist Resistance suggests a way out. Let’s hope political sanity takes over.
Link :
Your party is Our Party – Stop Wrecking this Opportunity
AntiCapitalist Resistance welcomed the announcement by Zarah Sultana of a new left party involving herself and Jeremy Corbyn. When 800,000 people signed up to the mailing list it confirmed a huge appetite for a left voice at elections but also in our communities and workplaces.
The events of the last few days however have been chaotic and exposed deep splits in the organising group of Your Party. The regular leaks to the capitalist press had already shown there were divisions but the membership launch fiasco and the threats to call in lawyers and the Information Commissioners office is hugely damaging.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tomás Ó Flatharta 