Starmer government doubles down on austerity to fund war spending

Robert Stevens

Prime Minister Keir Starmer will attend the June 24-25 NATO summit, with Secretary General Mark Rutte having already declared its aim is to lift the alliance’s minimum military spend from 2 percent of GDP to 5 percent. At least 3.5 percent must be on “pure” military spending, excluding items such as armed forces pensions. The remaining 1.5 percent is for necessary infrastructure projects.

This dictates the gutting of social spending by member states. As Rutte declared during his pre-summit speech in London last week, “It’s not up to me to decide, of course, how countries pay the bill,” but “if you do not do this, if you would not go to the 5 percent, including the 3.5 percent core defence spending, you could still have the National Health Service, or in other countries their health systems, the pension system, etcetera, but you had better learn to speak Russian.”

To be reached as early as 2032, according to some reports, NATO’s demands would require an increase of up to £40 billion annually in the UK’s military budget to be clawed out of health, education, housing and welfare spending.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Chief of Defence Staff Admiral Sir Tony Radakin and Defence Secretary John Healey meet with Joint Expeditionary Force Chiefs in 10 Downing Street, June 14, 2025. [Photo by Lauren Hurley / No 10 Downing Street / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

A main target for cuts is the £326 billion social security budget, with disability benefits the first to be chopped.

Setting off Sunday for the G7 summit in Canada, Starmer insisted there would be no reversals of the £5 billion of welfare cuts already outlined by Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall. These would be imposed no matter what rebellion is staged by a minority of his party’s MPs when Parliament votes on the cuts in a few weeks.

Asked his thoughts on a potential rebellion Starmer commented, “We’ve got to reform the welfare system… those who can work should work.”

On Wednesday, Kendall published the Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill confirming the plans that will see nearly a million people (950,000) hit by benefit reductions or cut off from the welfare rolls by 2030. 800,000 people will have personal independence payments (PIP) cut and 150,000 will lose Carers’ Allowance. Kendall also confirmed cuts to the sickness-related component of Universal Credit (UC) benefit.

The cuts are to be imposed despite the government’s own impact assessment, conduced in March, showing they could push an extra 250,000 people, including 50,000 children, into poverty. Overall, 3.2 million families could be hit by the cuts by 2030, with an average loss of £1,720 per year.

Any talk of a weakening of the Bill after it is published to appease rebels was quashed, with the Guardian reporting Wednesday, “[T]he government is not expected to make any further changes to the welfare bill after it is published”. It cited a government source who said of Kendall’s cuts, “The £5bn is already spent… Any further tweaks to the bill including on start dates or on criteria or tapering would mean that we start to spend money we don’t have. And this goes far beyond welfare.

“We have to be able to make tough decisions. We have to be able to make a budget add up in the autumn… If we cannot get this through the consequences are far bigger than just this reform.”

Chancellor Rachel Reeves in her Spring Statement announced that welfare spending as a share of GDP “will fall between 2026-27 and the end of the forecast period [2030].”

Due to Labour’s record fall in support for an incoming government, she promised that the National Health Service (NHS) would be protected as “our most treasured public service” after years of Conservative government cuts. But the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), which funds the NHS, was only handed a settlement of 2.8 percent—well below the historical average of a 3.8 percent increases under Labour and Tory governments since its 1948 founding.

Following the Spending Review, the Resolution Foundation think-tank declared that Britain was becoming the “National Health State” because by 2029 almost half (49 percent) of all day-to-day public service spending from central government would go to the NHS. This was an increase by a third from the situation under the Brown Labour government in 2010.

However, the NHS only receives this proportion of central government spending due to the slashing of every other public service department to the bone—a policy Reeves pledged would continue for the next four years. Most departments face lower budgets in real terms in 2028/29 than in 2010/11, so that by the end of the decade spending on public services except for healthcare will fall by 1.3 percent on average.

Local authorities receive just 3.1 percent per year, meaning they will be forced to operate on budgets around 10 percent below 2010 levels. This will not prevent councils, many on the edge of bankruptcy and facing increased demand for services, from going under.

Treasury documents accompanying the spending review assume that council tax will rise by 5 percent a year, adding £359 to an average band D household bill and pulling in £7.5 billion in extra revenue. The cost of an increase in police funding touted by Reeves will also be added to council tax bills.

Education will receive an extra £4.7 billion a year by 2028-29, with the Treasury claiming an average annual real-terms per-pupil rise of a paltry 1.1 percent. Institute for Fiscal Studies director Paul Johnson explained, “Strip out the cost of expanding free school meals, and you get a real-terms freeze in the budget.”

Reeves trumpeted “the biggest cash injection into social and affordable housing in 50 years.” But this works out at an average of less than £4 billion a year, when there are over 350,000 people without a permanent place to live.

The money given to construction companies in return for building a percentage of “affordable” units will not substantially help people to buy a home. What Labour and Tory governments deem “affordable”—capped at 80 percent of the extortionate market rate—is way out of reach for millions of workers, especially young people.

Above all, Reeves’ economic agenda is based on Labour’s existing plans—challenged by Rutte—to increase military spending to 2.7 percent of GDP by 2027-28 and to 3 percent by the end of the next Parliament in 2034. And it was laid out before Starmer announced that UK military assets, including fighter jets, had been sent to the Middle East in support of Israel’s war against Iran—with Britain already spending tens of billions on backing Ukraine in NATO’s proxy war against Russia.

In response to the Spending Review, the mouthpieces of the ruling elite insisted the Starmer government hold firm to its cuts agenda and increase military spending further. The Financial Times editorialised, “The government must now ensure the cash is spent wisely, and restrain its rising costs. The UK’s welfare and pensions expenditure remains on an unsustainable path…”

The Times warned that Reeves “offered no firm indication of when the government’s promised target of 3 per cent will be met, stuck in the ambiguous timeline of the next parliament. Plus even these vast sums may be too little too late: Nato has already warned its members they should be aiming for 3.5 per cent or even 5 per cent if they are serious about staving off the threat from Russia.”

Argentina’s Peronist former president sentenced to house arrest and lifetime political ban

Rafael Azul & Andrea Lobo

Cristina Fernández de Kirchner greets supporters, June 7, La Cámpora, Buenos Aires [Photo: @CFKArgentina]

On June 10, Argentina’s Supreme Court upheld a six-year jail sentence against Peronist former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK). She, along with many other defendants, had been found guilty of fraud on December 6, 2022, following a lengthy trial on roadbuilding contracts awarded illegally for a number of years to a firm owned by multi-millionaire businessman Lázaro Báez in Santa Cruz Province. The court also barred CFK from running for office for the rest of her life, following her announcement of plans to run for a legislative post in Buenos Aires Province.

Fernández was found guilty of accepting bribes and payola in road building contracts in Santa Cruz Province, between 2003 and 2015, during her late husband Nestor Kirchner’s one term in office and CFK’s two terms. Nestor Kirchner died in 2010, after a long political career in Santa Cruz and the presidency.

The Supreme Court granted CFK several days to turn herself in at the headquarters of the Federal Criminal Court in Buenos Aires—the Comodoro Py building—for final processing.

In concluding remarks at this hearing, Cristina Fernández described the long process and the court’s decision as “lawfare,” the intentional abuse of the legal system for political purposes. More than lawfare, the ex-president declared: “This is a firing squad.”

The political ban on Fernández, who remains the de facto political leader of the most important bourgeois political tendency in the country, Peronism, represents a major escalation in the turn by the Argentine ruling class and the administration of fascist President Javier Milei toward the criminalization of political opposition and the establishment of a police-state dictatorship. Milei openly defends the crimes of the last military dictatorship.

This operation is being directed in unison with the Trump administration, which had already barred CFK from entering the United States in March, accusing her of being involved in “significant corruption.”

Already in September 2022, a far-right Brazilian gunman tied to far-right circles connected to Milei’s movement attempted to assassinate CFK.

Milei’s Peronist predecessor, Alberto Fernández, and his vice president, CFK, oversaw a brutal social austerity regime dictated by the International Monetary Fund, setting the stage for Milei to win the elections despite promising an even more aggressive economic “shock therapy.” As the nominal “opposition,” the Peronist legislators, governors and union bureaucracies have given his legislation votes and negotiated some of his most radical attacks on social institutions and democratic rights.

Facing a constant upheaval of mass strikes and protests that the Peronist-led union apparatus is finding increasingly difficult to contain, the ruling class’s decision to turn on CFK is not because it sees Peronism as a threat to its onslaught against the working class, but rather that it seeks to set an example and criminalize all opposition from below.

On Wednesday, June 18, a Federal Court in Buenos Aires accepted CFK’s petition to serve her sentence in her home, under strict conditions; in addition to restrictions on who may visit her, it is not yet clear if she will be able to step onto the balcony of her US$300,000 apartment in Buenos Aires. Argentine law allows convicts older than 70 to serve their sentence at home.

The court, however, upheld her ban from running for political office.

On the morning of the ruling, crowds of thousands began to assemble at Buenos Aires’ central Plaza de Mayo square to protest. Groups organized by the Left and Workers’ Front Coalition (FIT-U) marched in from the Obelisk Plaza and in downtown Buenos Aires. Mass protests also took place in the industrial city of Cordoba, the port of Rosario and other major cities.

Bureaucrats from the CGT and CTA union federations, supporters of the Campora Peronist Movement (led by the ex-president’s son Máximo Kirchner), CFK’s Justicialista Party, and other Peronist groups were joined by significant numbers of workers and students.

The ruling and ban against CFK have been exploited by the long-time apologists of Peronism in the pseudo-left parties of the middle class to present her as a political martyr. As the WSWS wrote at the time, the election of Milei proved that, “as far as workers are concerned, the Peronist apparatus is composed of a mob of corrupt officials and union bureaucrat thugs who conspire to enforce the diktats of the corporations and banks.” Now, Peronism’s pseudo-left partners are using every possible opportunity to help rebuild credibility and support for this bourgeois party.

Put frankly, these efforts can only help disarm the working class politically in the fight against fascism and dictatorship, similarly to how these same tendencies disarmed workers ahead of the brutal dictatorship of Gen. Rafael Videla (1976-83).

Myriam Bregman, legislator for the Morenoite Socialist Workers Party (PTS), which leads the FIT-U, has issued several statements that communicate unconditional, political support for CFK. Speaking to reporters of the corporate media, she said:

In a capitalist democracy as restrictive as the one we live in, the Supreme Court arrogates to itself even more rights, the right to decide who can and cannot be a candidate. We believe that there must be mass mobilizations throughout the country, that measures of struggle must be undertaken so that no one can be distracted because this goes beyond the immediate case. This is a political message of an anti-democratic attack, which like all anti-democratic attacks, as the history of our country has shown us, ends up inevitably being against the people.

CFK’s remarks at the hearing were then endorsed by Jorge Altamira, the founder of the pseudo-left Partido Obrero and leader of its dissenting faction Política Obrera, in a recent interview. Altamira rejected the judgment, describing it as a political frameup similar to that against Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who, in 2014, was convicted for being involved in the Odebrecht Scandal (Operaçāo Java Jato), facilitating the election of the fascistic Jair Bolsonaro.

Also interviewed in a radio program was Partido Obrero leader Gabriel Solano, who also belongs to the FIT-U. Solano spoke along the same lines, accepting that CFK was guilty of fraud, but insisting that “everybody commits fraud” and that the attack on her is political. “It is evident that this is a case of political persecution,” said Solano. Solano then explained that the PO does not support Kirchner, citing the complicity of members of the CFK administration in the murder of PO member Mariano Ferreyra on October 20, 2010, during a protest by contingent rail workers of the Roca Railroad attacked by Rail Union goons, protected by the police. Ferreyra and two others were shot down. Ferreyra died at a hospital.

The partial privatization of Argentine rail lines, which had been nationalized under the first Peron regime, took place under the administration of Néstor Kirchner with the collaboration of the government, trade unions and private companies. It allowed for the hiring of contingent low-wage “temps” under conditions of fierce over-exploitation. Benefiting from this was the Rail Union, a full partner in the Roca Railroad that hired the goons that attacked the workers on October 20, 2020.

The death of Mariano Ferreyra triggered mass protests. Nine years ago, the movie ¿Quién Mató a Maryano Ferreira? (Who killed Mariano Ferreyra?) exposed the crime and the Kirchners’ complicity. In minute 1:06:00 through 1:10:00 of the movie, Rail Union leader Pedraza, the organizer of the goon squads, speaks of his relationship with the Labor Ministry and with Néstor and Cristina Kirchner.

Solano declared, “We have ‘pending business’ with CFK … however, we will defend her right to run.”

Altamira and Solano insist that their tendency’s participation in these marches does not signify political support for CFK or Peronism. That is a fraud: If right-wing former president Macri or fascist Milei had been in Cristina’s shoes, they would refrain from protesting on their behalf. These movements promote CFK as a lesser-evil capitalist alternative for the working class.

Behind the FIT-U’s criminal refusal to create a genuine, working class alternative is their petty-bourgeois class orientation hostile to the working class, which explains their ready adaptation to the personality cult of a “who’s who” of enemies of the working class: Juan Domingo Perón, his first wife Evita, Carlos Menem, Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández, doing all they can to turn the Argentine working class away from social revolution and to the bourgeois, nationalist programs of the above and their phony anti-imperialism.

There is little doubt that the Kirchners participated in, and profited from, a payola scheme involving public works together with others.

In truth, fraud and corruption have been a hallmark of capitalist governments and is intrinsic to the operation of capitalism, with government officials taking advantage of privileged information and corporate connections to enrich stockholders, corporate CEOs and themselves (as in the infamous Enron Scandal of 2001). These corrupt practices are continuing today across the world, under Milei, who eliminated the agency investigating his participation in a crypto scam, or for that matter the administrations of Netanyahu, Trump and Pedro Sanchez of Spain, all now embroiled in growing corruption scandals.

UBS Wealth Report 2025 exposes exponential growth of inequality internationally

Kevin Reed

A homeless man pushes a shopping cart full of his belongings across an intersection in the Skid Row area of Los Angeles. [AP Photo/Jae C. Hong]

The recently released UBS Global Wealth Report 2025 provides an irrefutable statistical indictment of global capitalism through documenting the accelerating accumulation of vast fortunes by a tiny minority within the financial oligarchy.

The 51-page report offers “insights into personal wealth across generations, genders and on a regional level, analyzing 56 markets globally, which are estimated to represent over 92 per cent of the world’s wealth.”

Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) is a global financial services firm that offers wealth, asset and investment services to assist the capitalist ruling elite in the management and investment of its wealth. It is headquartered in Switzerland and operates in over 50 countries worldwide, serving individual, corporate and institutional investors. 

UBS publishes its annual Global Wealth Report to provide insights into the dynamics of wealth accumulation by the ultra-rich and to bolster its role as a leading financial services firm.

This year’s headline finding in the report is that “global wealth grew by 4.6 per cent in 2024, after a 4.2 per cent increase in 2023, continuing a consistent upward trend.” This continuous upward trend in global wealth is emphasized in the report’s “at a glance” summary, which states: “The world became richer again in 2024 but it’s a mixed picture,” while clarifying that “the speed of growth was far from uniform across the 56 markets analyzed.”

Revealing the disparity between rich countries and poor countries—a fundamental feature of capitalism in its imperialist stage—this growth internationally was not evenly distributed. The report reveals the dramatic geographical tilt in wealth accumulation, stating, “The Americas overall accounted for the majority of the increase, with more than 11 per cent, driven by a stable dollar and buoyant financial markets,” while “Asia-Pacific (APAC) and Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) were lagging behind, with growth rates of below 3 per cent and less than 0.5 per cent respectively.”

This represents a marked shift from 2023, when “the rebound in wealth was led most strongly by growth in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).” In 2024, “wealth growth was tilted strongly towards North America, driven by a stable US dollar and upbeat financial markets.”

The report notes a “significant gap in wealth per adult persists between North America and Oceania on the one hand, and the world’s other sub-regions on the other.” In 2024, adults in North America were the wealthiest on average ($593,347), followed by Oceania ($496,696) and Western Europe ($287,688). Despite Western Europe’s position, it “trails far behind North America and Oceania.”

The report further highlights the increasing concentration of wealth into a very few hands and geographical areas. “The US and mainland China also jointly account for more than half of the entire personal wealth in the sample.” The United States alone holds “almost 35 percent of the entire wealth measured in USD,” due to a combination of high wealth per adult and a large population. Mainland China, primarily due to its massive population, accounts for “almost 20 percent of personal wealth.” The remaining 54 countries in the sample share the remaining 46 percent of global wealth.

The “wealth distribution” section of the report further details this grotesque disparity. The world’s USD (US dollar) millionaires—those with assets of $1 million or more—now “own nearly half of the entire personal wealth identified in our sample.” While the wealth bracket of $100,000 to $1 million is “nothing short of vast,” accounting for 40 percent of the world’s total wealth, the true focus of capitalist triumph lies higher up the pyramid.

The number of dollar millionaires globally increased by 1.2 percent in 2024, adding “more than 684,000 people.” The United States leads this surge, creating “over 379,000 new millionaires” in 2024—an alarming fact that translates to “more than 1,000 a day.” The US now accounts for “almost 40 per cent of global millionaires,” counting “almost 24 million of them,” which is “over four times as many as the number two, mainland China, and more than the latter, France, the UK, Germany, Canada, Japan and Australia put together.”

Even within the millionaire category, a distinct sub-group has emerged: the “Everyday Millionaires (EMILLIs)” with investible assets of between $1 million and $5 million. This segment is “a growing, yet often overlooked, category of investor.” Their numbers have “more than quadrupled since 2000, reaching around 52 million globally by the end of last year,” and they now control “about $107 trillion in total wealth,” approaching the $119 trillion held by individuals with over $5 million in assets. This growth is largely fueled by “rising real estate prices and exchange rate effects.”

At the apex of this pyramid, the number of USD billionaires increased from 2023, reaching 2,891 individuals. Most of these billionaires possess fortunes between $1 billion and $49 billion, with only a minuscule 31 individuals holding more than $50 billion. The report also notes the increase in billionaires’ children from 4,136 in 2015 to 6,441 in 2024, and multi-generational billionaires from 582 to 805 over the same period, indicating a deepening of dynastic wealth.

Although the UBS report acknowledges that “wealth inequality... changes greatly from one country to another and, often, over time,” it admits that “overall, equality has diminished marginally since the turn of the millennium, by 0.4 percent” as measured by the Gini coefficient. The Gini coefficient, where a higher score indicates greater inequality, ranges from “0.38 in Slovakia, the most egalitarian score in our sample, to 0.82 in Brazil” and Russia.

The report notes that, “Average wealth per adult consistently outstrips median wealth per adult, across our entire sample, and significantly so, often even by a factor of two.” Showing that a disproportionately small number of individuals possess most of the wealth.

In contrast to the ballooning of wealth at the top of the world capitalist pyramid, the conditions of life for most of humanity are dramatically worsening. Among the most striking features of this inequality is the increase in hunger.

The Global Hunger Index (GHI) 2024 report provides an account of these worsening conditions. Despite rhetorical commitments to human rights and development, the report says, “adequate food is out of reach for billions of people,” and “both the human right to adequate food and international law are blatantly disregarded by those in power.”

The GHI score of 18.3 in 2024 is “little changed from its level in 2016” (18.8), demonstrating a marked stagnation in progress on a critical indicator of mass suffering under world capitalism.

The GHI report says, “Globally, 733 million people—significantly more than a decade ago—lack access to sufficient calories, and 2.8 billion cannot afford a healthy diet.” The report grimly states that “acute food insecurity and the risk of famine are on the rise, and starvation is proliferating as a weapon of war.”

Nowhere is this more the case than in Gaza, where the US-Israeli project of ethnically cleansing Palestinians from the strip is being perpetrated by a deliberate policy of mass starvation.

In 2023, “281.6 million people in 59 countries and territories with sufficient data faced crisis-level or worse acute food insecurity, a number that has been on the rise for five consecutive years.” This includes “a surge in people at risk of starvation in a number of states and territories, including Gaza, Sudan, Haiti, Burkina Faso, Mali and South Sudan.”

The GHI identifies a “state of permacrisis arising from widespread conflicts, the increasing impacts of climate change, economic challenges, debt crises, and inequality.” These “successive and overlapping challenges... have the severest impacts on the world’s poorest countries and people,” exacerbating existing structural inequalities. 

“More than 115 million people globally are subject to internal displacement or forced migration as a result of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations, or civil disorder, and many more have been displaced by weather-related disasters.” The “wars in Gaza and Sudan have led to exceptional food crises,” pushing these regions to the brink of famine.

Meanwhile, hunger remains “alarming in 6 countries: Burundi, Chad, Madagascar, Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen,” and “serious in another 36 countries.” All these statistics are a confirmation of the terminal crisis of world capitalism. While a tiny segment of the world’s population rapidly accrues unimaginable wealth, with the US alone minting over 1,000 millionaires a day, billions are simultaneously plunged deeper into poverty and hunger.

The exponential growth of wealth for the few amidst an exponential suffering for the many is not a malfunction of capitalism: it is its fundamental operating principle.

These figures powerfully underscore the fundamental contradictions that validate the analyses of Marxist theory. Capitalism, by its very nature, is driven by the accumulation of capital, leading to the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a parasitic ruling class. The reports vividly demonstrate that the wealth of the billionaires and millionaires is not simply a reward for their “innovation” or “entrepreneurship,” but is derived from the exploitation of the working class on a global scale.

The stagnation, and even worsening, of global hunger, displacement and acute food insecurity for billions are the direct, inevitable consequences of a system that prioritizes private profit over human need.

Loyalist anti-migrant pogrom in Northern Ireland

Steve James

Five nights of anti-migrant protests, riots and attacks on property has left the streets of several Northern Ireland towns littered with debris and burnt out cars. At its height, following protests involving hundreds of far-right thugs, migrant houses were set on fire and a leisure centre, in which migrants where thought to be sheltering, petrol bombed.

The riots followed an alleged sex attack on a teenage girl in the town of Ballymena on Saturday, June 7. Two Romanian teenagers have been arrested and have denied charges of attempted rape in Coleraine Magistrates’ Court.

A protester stokes a barricade fire in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, as people protest over an alleged sexual assault in the Co Antrim town, June 11, 2025 [AP Photo/Peter Morrison]

Ballymena is a Protestant-dominated industrial town in County Antrim, home of the unionist dynasty of the late Reverend Ian Paisley. It registers some of the highest deprivation indicators in Northern Ireland, having lost a number of major employers over the last few years. Those that continue are increasingly dependent on migrant workers to fill low paying jobs.

The Ballymena attack, as in the UK following the 2024 stabbing deaths of three children in Southport, and in advance of any facts being established, was seized on as a pretext by far-right forces for a large demonstration on June 9. Estimates put numbers at several hundred to 2,500 people who assembled in the Harryville area of the town.

The demonstration, undoubtedly with the approval of loyalist paramilitary groups, and amplified on social media, moved toward the Clonavon Terrace area where a number of migrant families live, and rapidly became a pogrom. A section of the demonstrators broke off and set up barricades against Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) Land Rovers and riot police who were blocking access to Clonavon Terrace.

Over several hours, six houses were attacked, four of them set on fire. Shops were also damaged. One family with young children barricaded themselves in an attic. Rioters threw petrol bombs, bricks and fireworks at PSNI vehicles.

The next day, Romanian residents of the street told the Irish News, “We didn’t expect the riots to happen last night, we tried to get out of the house and go to a safe place around 7 p.m. I’ve lived here 15 years... I have so many friends from here, we got so much support. Everyone was texting us to ask if we are ok.”

A Filipino factory worker, employed at the nearby Wrightbus factory, who shared a house with other workers at the factory told the Belfast Telegraph, “They were screaming outside... after a minute, they trashed our door and stole our bikes. They got something from our garage and… came and smashed our windows, trying to get in. But we locked the door and then they were screaming outside. They told us to come out. They threatened to kill us.”

Early Tuesday morning a petrol bomb was thrown at the home of another Filipino factory worker in the village of Cullybackey. His car was burnt out and family traumatised. Reports suggested a Facebook page was broadcasting addresses of these to be targeted.

On Tuesday evening, conflict flared up in the Clonavon Terrace area with riot police, Land Rovers and a water cannon deployed. The police also fired plastic bullets. Many house windows were smashed in the street despite foreign residents putting Union Jacks on the doors and windows to save their homes from attack. Protests were reported in loyalist areas of Belfast, Lisburn, Coleraine and Newtonabbey, while bottles and masonry were thrown at police in Carrickfergus.

On Wednesday evening, Larne Leisure Centre was attacked by masked individuals, windows smashed and the facility set on fire following reports that it was being used to house migrants displaced from Ballymena. According to Mid and East Antrim Borough Council the leisure centre had been opened as an emergency rest centre, but by the time it was attacked any displaced people had been moved. A brick thrown through a window interrupted a yoga class.

The Irish News reported that on Thursday, in the town of Portadown, a local housing association warned that a planned demonstration in the town “could lead to an unsafe situation and we would recommend that you stay with family or friends during the protest.” A sinister post circulated on social media by a group calling itself the Loyalist Edgarstown Bonfire called for migrant owned businesses, houses and hostels accommodating migrants to be targeted. Some 400 loyalist protesters confronted large numbers of police, rocks were thrown and fires lit. Further conflict took place on Friday evening, while Ballymena was reported as quiet.

Elsewhere on Thursday, a family with three children were forced to leave their Coleraine home after it was set on fire, and bricks were thrown through house windows in Avoniel Road, Belfast. In total just 15 people have been arrested so far, and three teenagers charged with riotous assembly. The Northern Ireland Housing Executive reported that around 50 families have received assistance following the Ballymena attacks, 14 of which needed emergency accommodation. As many as 63 police are reported to have been injured.

The political response to the riots has been muted. The power-sharing Northern Ireland Executive, with ministers from Sinn Fein, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), the Ulster Unionist Party and the Alliance Party issued a pro forma statement, June 11, appealing for calm, calling for justice to take its course, and criticising those “weaponising the situation in order to sow racial tensions...”

Most heat was generated when Sinn Fein First Minister Michelle O’Neil—supported by the Labour government’s Northern Ireland Secretary, Hilary Benn—called for the resignation of DUP Communities Minister Gordon Lyons after a social media post in which Lyons pointed out the use of Larne Leisure Centre as a refuge for immigrants shortly before it was petrol bombed. Lyons claimed the information was already in the public domain. DUP leader Gavin Robinson insisted that Lyons was “doing a good job” and had been “fundamentally misrepresented”.

O’Neil made clear she wanted to move on to business as usual, covering for the far-right xenophobes of the DUP by insisting that all the Executive were “on the same page.” Seeking to restore confidence and stability, she told the British-Irish Council, “We have a job to do and I am committed to continuing to lead in that Executive to work with colleagues in the area, particularly to get us through this period that we’re in now.”

The hardline unionists gave the anti-immigrant riots, led by their loyalist base, a seal of approval. Jim Allister, Westminster MP for Traditional Unionist Voice complained of “unchecked migration” and insisted that “those who came onto the street last night in the main had a perfectly legitimate purpose and cause of being there.”

Various Loyalists outfits—which operated as paramilitary forces to carry out the dirty work of British imperialism for decade—are a ready-made fascistic force which, as these events show, can be mobilised to terrorise immigrants as the spearhead of attacks on the wider working class.

The riots follow repeated similar outrages across Ireland over the last two years. Last August, far-right forces went on a rampage in Belfast, smashing windows, throwing petrol bombs and attacking migrants in their homes, cars and businesses. In the Republic of Ireland around the same period, far-right anti-migrant protests took place in the Coolock area of Dublin against plans for a migrant hostel in the area. Other hostels were targeted, while asylum seekers forced to camp out in Dublin were attacked by masked men with knives.

In both sections of partitioned Ireland, as in the UK itself, the fascistic right is continually bolstered by the anti-migrant rhetoric spewing from governments and the major capitalist parties.