FOOD RETAILERS complain that they have been hit by a major increase in shoplifting as workers struggle to put food on the table for their families.
However, they say that there is a different kind of thief around, and that some old age pensioners have been forced to steal food to live, that is to stay alive, in capitalist Britain, the home of the Welfare State where workers after 1945 brought in a society where nobody would go hungry or have to sleep on the streets.
Now poverty and hunger are stalking the streets in all of the major cities in the UK.
Workers and pensioners are being forced to consider stealing to live, in a bankrupt society that should have been got rid of generations ago.
This, of course, is not a moral issue, it is a class issue concerning a defunct ruling class that should have been removed and replaced by proper workers’ governments years ago, not the current halfway house bankrupts of the Labour Party.
This is not the only phenomenon that has emerged out of the past.
Former members of UK special forces have broken years of silence to give BBC Panorama eyewitness accounts of alleged war crimes committed by colleagues in Iraq and Afghanistan, and no doubt Northern Ireland.
The veterans described seeing members of the SAS murder unarmed people in their sleep and execute handcuffed detainees, including children.
‘They handcuffed a young boy and shot him,’ recalled one veteran who served with the SAS in Afghanistan. ‘He was clearly a child, not even close to fighting age.’
Killing of detainees ‘became routine’, the veteran said. ‘They’d search someone, handcuff them, then shoot them’, before cutting off the plastic handcuffs used to restrain people and ‘planting a pistol’ by the body.
The new testimony includes allegations of war crimes stretching over more than a decade, far longer than the three years currently being examined by a judge-led public inquiry in the UK.
The SBS, the Royal Navy’s elite special forces regiment, is also implicated for the first time in the most serious allegations – the executions of unarmed and wounded people.
A veteran who served with the SBS said some troops had a ‘mob mentality’, describing their behaviour on operations as ‘barbaric’. ‘I saw the quietest guys switch, show serious psychopathic traits,’ he said. ‘They were lawless. They felt untouchable.’
The eyewitness testimony offers the most detailed public account of the killings to date from former members of UK Special Forces (UKSF), the umbrella group which contains the SAS, SBS and several supporting regiments.
Panorama also reveals for the first time that the then Prime Minister David Cameron was repeatedly warned during his tenure that UK Special Forces were killing civilians in Afghanistan.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, because of a de facto code of silence around special forces operations, the eyewitnesses told the BBC that the laws of war were being regularly and intentionally broken by the country’s most elite regiments during operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Those laws state that on such operations people can be deliberately killed only when they pose a direct threat to the lives of British troops or others. But members of the SAS and SBS were making their own rules, the eyewitnesses said.
‘If a target had popped up on the list two or three times before, then we’d go in with the intention of killing them, there was no attempt to capture them,’ said one veteran who served with the SAS, referring to people who had been previously captured, questioned and then released.
‘On some operations, the troop would go into guesthouse-type buildings and kill everyone there,’ he said. ‘They’d go in and shoot everyone sleeping there, on entry. It’s not justified, killing people in their sleep.’
Intentionally killing wounded people who do not pose a threat would be a clear breach of international law. But the SBS veteran told Panorama that wounded people were routinely killed. The killings were ‘completely unnecessary’, he added. ‘These are not mercy killings. It’s murder.’
The testimony, as well as new video evidence obtained by the BBC from SAS operations in Iraq in 2006, also supports previous reporting by Panorama that SAS squadrons kept count of their kills to compete with one another.
Now these forces are to be unleashed in the UK. Clearly the time is here for the organisation of the British socialist revolution to put an end to capitalism and bring in socialism worldwide.
There is not a moment to lose!
