IN WHAT was described as a ‘historic first’, a UK navy destroyer, HMS Duncan, was placed under the direct command of NATO and ordered to shadow a Russian warship as it passed through the English Channel.
While it is common for UK navy vessels to track Russian ships travelling through the Channel, what made this historic was that for the first time a UK destroyer was placed under the direct command of NATO not the British navy.
Labour’s armed forces minister, Al Carns, said of this unprecedented deployment: ‘The Royal Navy stands ready to respond to any Russian naval activity,’ stressing that handing over control of the British navy underpins the UK’s ‘unwavering solidarity with NATO to counter Russian activity’.
The UK and European members of NATO have been beating the drum for an all-out war with Russia, and decrying efforts by US president Donald Trump to impose a ceasefire deal on Russian president Putin.
Trump’s proposed ceasefire was rejected this week by Russia as it meant most of Ukraine remaining ‘under Nazi rule’ and posing a NATO-backed military threat to Russia.
Trump’s reaction to Putin having the temerity to reject his deal was to immediately impose sanctions on Russia’s two largest oil companies.
Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chair of Russia’s national security council, said: ‘The US is our enemy, and their talkative “peacemaker” has now fully embarked on the warpath with Russia.’
Medvedev added: ‘Now Trump has full aligned himself with loony Europe.’ The European NATO countries, including the UK, have been clamouring for a war under the pretext that Russia is on the verge of invading the entire continent.
Now, they are seizing the opportunity to push Trump, whose attention has been mainly focused on the US’s main rival China, into a military conflict with Russia.
Such a conflict, involving handing nuclear armed Tomahawk ballistic missiles to the Zelensky regime, along with ramping up military confrontations between NATO commanded naval forces, runs the real risk of developing into a world war involving nuclear weapons.
Driving the move towards war, is the impact of a global economic crisis that is crushing world capitalism.
This crisis has erupted into the open in the past week with the collapse of two comparatively small US companies, First Brands and Tricolor.
Immediately, this set off a panic, with Bank of England boss, Andrew Bailey, on Wednesday saying their collapse into bankruptcy has set off ‘alarm bells’ about the massive multi-trillion dollar private credit market which Bailey compared to the 2008 sub-prime mortgage crisis that brought the world banking system to the point of collapse.
The banks after 2008 were bailed out by a programme of money printing and savage austerity imposed on the working class in the UK, US and Europe.
The savagery of this austerity war on workers will be nothing compared to the attacks on wages, benefits and welfare that the capitalist class are preparing to unleash today as the cracks in the capitalist financial system that Bailey is warning about, turn rapidly into a full-scale crash into recession.
A world war on Russia and China to re-impose capitalist exploitation on these nations, accompanied by a class war to the finish against the working class at home, is the only future this bankrupt and rapidly collapsing capitalist system holds for workers and youth.
The powerful working class is refusing to accept this as its future and the demands for its trade union organisations to take action and call general strikes to overthrow the capitalists is rapidly developing across the world.
In the US, over 7 million demonstrated in cities and towns across America in a ‘No Kings Day’ demonstration opposing Trump.
At the rally in Chicago, the city’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, called for a general strike against Trump’s ‘tyranny’, the ‘ultra-wealthy’ and corporate greed.
The burning issue today, is the building of a leadership prepared to organise revolutionary general strikes and to go forward to the taking of power by bringing down their capitalist governments and bringing in workers government and socialism.
This demands the building of sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country!!!