All my life I have opposed wars. As a pimply teenager I took to the streets with others condemning the Vietnam War. I was so proud that our then PM, Harold Wilson refused American pleas for British troops to wage war in South East Asia.

In those days the Labour Movement were very opposed to war. This was another thing Blair changed when he transformed the Labour Party into a Tory Lite Party. The Labour Party of Wilson’s day would never have participated in a Gulf War!

Wilson’s motives though might have been more pragmatic than idealistic. He was not so morally opposed to the war or thought the war was intractable, it was more because he was concerned about the likely impact of U.S. actions on his own domestic power base. The left of the Labour Movement were very opposed to Vietnam, and indeed wanted Wilson to go further and condemn the American aggression. He steadfastly refused to do so despite massive pressure from the grassroots Labour supporters.

When his own cabinet turned on him and asked why he wouldn’t criticise the Americans, he reportedly snapped, “Because we can’t kick our creditors in the balls!”  As I have indicated in previous articles post WWII until the discovery of Scottish Oil the UK was skint and relied on heavy loans from the US and IMF to survive. This more than anything explains Wilson’s tightrope walking over Vietnam.

From that time I have opposed all wars. Also as a fact most of the wars since have involved the US and on occasions their poodle the UK. I also opposed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The Soviets invasion of Afghanistan in 1979-1989. The Gulf Wars, the NATO invasion of Afghanistan. I have been outspoken about the conflicts in Palestine, Yemen, Syria. The bombings of Libya, Syria and Serbia.

I oppose wars on moral grounds. War is either the result of the failure of diplomacy or as a tool of imperialism. It is my opinion that NATO is nothing more than an extension of US Foreign Policy. When in the SNP I opposed the move to change Party policy on joining that organisation. Should I remain a member of any political party and should that topic be up for debate I will be on the side of the dissenters. I agree with our Irish cousins. Scotland too should be a neutral country. Since Roman times Scotland has had wars. Over the last 315 always in the name of English imperialism. I say enough! Neutrality from hereon in, leave war to the rich and greedy and let their internet fools get out of their safe armchairs and go into the trenches.

While my objection to war is a moral objection there are also practical reasons to oppose war. They are very expensive to wage. The UK is a classic example of that. At the height of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1900, Britannia did indeed rule the waves. The sun never set, etc. Britain was awash with imperial money. All stolen of course, exploited from its colonies who were told they were too poor, too stupid and too weak to survive without Mother England.Meanwhile, their natural resources and sometimes their enslaved citizens were being placed on British ships and sent to wherever the goods could be sold for profit for the few and the Treasury in London.

Cue the 20th century,The Boer War, two world wars and by 1945 UK needed bailed out by the US. Up until Scottish Oil was discovered, the UK staggered from one financial disaster to another.
By the 1970s the UK economy was tanking. In 1976 UK Sterling Crisis was a balance of payments or currency crisis which caused James Callaghan’s Labour government to borrow $3.9 billion ($18.6 billion in 2021) from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), with the intention of maintaining the value of the pound. Without doubt Scottish Oil saved the UK. Denis Healey the Chancellor that went cap in hand to IMF admitted as much decades later.

Here we are in 2022 and another war rages in Europe. The Russian authorities have instructed their entire nation not to refer to it as a war or an invasion. It is to be called a ‘Special Operation.’

In a statement by Russia’s internet censor board, Roskomnadzor, it warns that referring to the ongoing military campaign as an “invasion”, “attack” or “declaration of war” will lead to the offending website being blocked. I do not know if they think this legitimises their illegal invasion. To me it is an invasion and yet another war where the perpetrators are trying to justify their actions by twisting words.

We have heard it time after time from preventing the ‘Domino effect’ ‘Restoring democracy’ Removing Weapons of Mass Destruction. (That never existed.) Destroying terrorist havens! Nothing in my book justifies killing on an industrial scale. In normal circumstances when a human approaches another human and shoots him dead it is called murder. In war when innocent civilians are shot or bombed to death it is referred to as ‘collateral damage.’ War is just legalised murder and brings out mans most primitive instinct to kill.

It is no coincidence that it is the citizens of the US that have worst health care cover of all the nations in the developed world. Over 45 million out of the 350 million Americans either have no health insurance or are under insured.

Medical bills are reported to be the number one cause of U.S. bankruptcies. One study has claimed that 62.1% of bankruptcies in the US were caused by medical issues. Over 2 million American people are adversely affected by their medical expenses.

In 2015, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that medical bills made 1 million adults declare bankruptcy. Its survey found that 26% of Americans age 18 to 64 struggled to pay medical bills. According to the U.S. Census, that’s 52 million adults. The survey found that 2%, or 1 million, said they declared bankruptcy that year.

https://www.thebalance.com/medical-bankruptcy-statistics-4154729

I could produce similar figures for tertiary education, homelessness, poverty, premature birth deaths and life expectancy. The US the richest nation, the world has ever seen yet it lags behind the rest of the civilised world in all of these vital life factors. Where they lead the world and by some distance is in defence or in their case offence spending.

In 2020, the U.S. spent $778 billion on military equipment and personnel, more than the next nine top-spending countries combined. Indeed, the US spending on military-industrial items is 39% of the world’s total expenditure on weaponry. Those other 9 countries include China and Russia the so-called bad guys spend 13%, 3.1% respectively. Indeed, the present bad guys, Russia according to the US and their western allies and media spend a fraction of what the US spends.

You have to try and put your logic head on and ask which nation poses a bigger threat to world peace, the nation that spends 39% of the entire global expenditure on weapons or the nation that spends 3.1%. Incidentally, that is just 0.1% more than UK expenditure. Do you think that UK is ready to reclaim its empire with such spending? However, the US and their idiotic dumb cheerleaders on line are trying to tell you that Russia will invade Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia next and reclaim the Soviet Union!

Even if Putin is the latest Hitler, incarnate that western media and politicians would have you believe he does not have the practical or military means to do it! Stop allowing yourselves to be conned by the same media that told you the Tories are the best party to run the economy. That Sadaam had WMD. That Scotland’s oil was running out in 2014. That the only reason your life is generally shit was because of the EU and Johnny Foreigners. That the only reason wages were so low in UK was because Polish plumbers worked for less money than you British plumbers would. That brown people and illegal immigrants are clogging up the NHS that is why the NHS is not as efficient as it should be and why it needs privatised. Not that it has been starved of investment for decades. That your school does not have enough books or teachers because there are too many asylum seekers taking up resources.

These same people tell you that it is only laziness that makes you poor. They try to tell you that poverty is a life choice not as a result of government policies. A wiser man than me famously said, “Poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we cannot satisfy the rich.”

The only thing there is always enough money for is waging wars.  Indeed, the most hated tax ever, Income tax was first implemented in Great Britain by William Pitt the Younger in his budget of December 1798 to pay for weapons and equipment in preparation for the Napoleonic Wars.

The only people that benefit from war are the rich! They sell the guns and get paid with your taxes. They get the contracts to rebuild the infrastructure that the bombs you paid for destroyed.The poor are the ones doing the fighting. The poor are the collateral damage. The Rich are the ones pretending to care while making the profit, the poor always pay the bill and do the fighting!

The only war we should be waging, is the class war. That is the only war the elite fear and the only war where the rich will pay a price. Time to mobilise for that struggle!

The Ukraine war is wrong, it is bad, it is illegal, it is immoral. I have said from day one the only innocents in this conflict are the civilians.They are the ones paying the highest price. The politicians of both sides and the western politicians trying to escalate and prolong the war along with their tame media are all bad faith players.

Do not let yourself be duped into believing there are good guys and bad guys in this conflict. All the players have skin in the game, except the poor civilians caught in the middle. Those of you sitting in the comfort of your homes demanding more weapons and more deaths should be ashamed of yourself. You are OK with Ukrainians fighting to the last man woman or child while you gorge on war porn. Shame on you! A ceasefire now and a negotiated peace is the only decent solution!