THE political shift to the ‘populist’ hard right, both in this week’s latest Italian results and other European elections last year, plus Brexit’s xenophobia and Trump’s US triumph in 2016, is yet another worrying blow to middle and working class people, unless counteracted by renewed green socialist campaigns to reverse this onslaught.

Politics’ left-right battle suddenly has re-emerged: public ownership and services for us all, against private property, profits and power for the super-rich few.

History, when not dominated for centuries by all powerful monarchies, coupled with fear-of-god personalised idolatrous religions, always has been a faltering story of the fight for public good against private wealth and power. Via long struggles of unity and solidarity, public good advanced, especially during the last century, albeit often a step back followed by two forward.

Currently, we appear in the step-back phase, although progress forward can be regained with young people’s green-left resurgence, as evidenced in recent big support for Jeremy Corbyn’s and EU’s international green socialism, similar to my early sixties university days. 

The big danger still, is working people taking historical gains for granted and assuming they no longer need fighting for. 

How wrong can you be? Best demonstrated by recent big lost battles to sustain our public services and welfare benefits against systematic hard-right Tory government austerity.

Dismantlement of our local council services by year-on-year withdrawal of government revenue support grant, from some 65 per cent of total spending to zero by 2020, plus the privatisation of local authority ownership of schools into the hands of ‘academy quangos’ controlled remotely from Whitehall, have happened without real resistance.

Not one councillor from either Taunton Deane or the county council, elected to maintain our services, has had the courage at their recent annual meetings to lead any telling fightback against the repetitive Tory government lie that our national debt crisis (inherited from Labour via the multi-billion pound public funds bail-out of crashed banks and corrupt bankers) only can be solved by massive cuts, now ironically accompanied by the nonsense of big hikes in regressive council tax, rather than uplift in fairer income and capital wealth taxes.

Surely it’s time for this SOS (Save Our Services) to rebuild big protest for restoration of our public services, including council housing, community ownership of development land and essential utilities: for common good, not private profit.

ALAN DEBENHAM
Taunton