There is a long history behind the West’s objective of destroying the government in Syria. The long campaign of military action and sanctions which eventually led to Assad’s defeat. His overthrow will have a profound impact on future prospects for Syria and the region, including the Palestinians whose cause has been weakened by these events. The West backs the terrorists who now control the country and who are oppressing and killing people from ethnic and religious minorities and women from all groups. Meanwhile the United States is still involved and Israel and Turkey are vying to carve up bits of Syria for themselves. The future looks grim for Syrians.

The threat from China to the US and the West is real but it is not a military one, as the media would have us believe, which is used as the pretext for increased arms spending. In fact, it is the US that has threatened to annex Canada, take over Greenland, take back the Panama Canal (which it has partly succeeded in) take over Ukrainian mineral resources and redevelop Gaza ethnically cleansed of Palestinians. By contrast, what China has been doing is developing its technology and industry so that it is now a leading force in hi tech and green industries. This came into sharp relief with the success of DeepSeek’s new artificial intelligence system. This is what motivates Trump. He wants to focus on the serious challenge that China poses to the United States status as the world’s one superpower.

Although Trump is notoriously erratic, beneath the surface of this and his egregious, insulting behaviour there are consistencies. One is that he will continue to support Israel as the bastion of US interests in the Middle East and Palestinians who continue to suffer from Israel’s genocidal actions both in Gaza and the West Bank. One bright spot in a rather grim political landscape in Britian has been the unified and determined campaigning by activists in solidarity with Palestine. In particular we can learn from the past success of the boycott of South African apartheid to mobilise people to boycott Israeli apartheid now.

Trump is motivated by a desire to ensure US supremacy in the face of China which is developing rapidly. No other country poses such a threat and he wants to clear the decks for that fight, hence his attempt to end the war in Ukraine on terms favourable to the United States. Other aspects of Trump’s imperial agenda – his designs on Greenland and Panama and also relate to his desire to prevent China challenging US power.

Although Trump is notoriously erratic, beneath the surface of this and his egregious, insulting behaviour there are consistencies. One is that he will continue to support Israel as the bastion of US interests in the Middle East and Palestinians who continue to suffer from Israel’s genocidal actions both in Gaza and the West Bank. One bright spot in a rather grim political landscape in Britian has been the unified and determined campaigning by activists in solidarity with Palestine. In particular we can learn from the past success of the boycott of South African apartheid to mobilise people to boycott Israeli apartheid now.

The Labour government has made reform of the planning system central to its efforts to increase growth. There are problems with the system which has become increasingly fragmented and dominated by the private sector in recent decades. However Labour's response does not address the central problems and some of its proposals are quite negative, like changing the designation of green belt lad so that it can be built on. It seems to entirely have forgotten its own history where previous Labour governments took a broad visionary approach to planning which was in the hands of national and local government. Pioneering work was done in those times. Current proposals fall very far short of these past ambitions to ensure that people had good environments to live and work in.

On a recent visit to Russia this commentator found a society that was functioning well with decent services and a sense of social cohesion. There was a sense of normality despite the war. Although people did not talk a lot about it, he found that people wanted peace, but not at any price.

Russia is routinely accused of interfering in democracy in other countries. While these accusations have been insubstantial, there is a growing body of evidence of Israeli interference in British politics. Both in the United States and in the UK pro-Israel groups have channeled cash into defeating pro-Palestine law-makers and funding a wide range of Members of Parliament. In the UK some of these groups have close working relationships with the Israeli embassy and have arranged for trips to Israel by MPs. This funding and these relationships are being used to further the interests of a foreign power and undermine British sovereignty as well as subduing criticism of Israel's genocide against the Palestinians.

The current homelessness crisis can trace its roots back 40 years to the "right to buy" policy of the conservative Government that took council housing out of public ownership and into private hands. Subsequent governments have done nothing to reverse this trend and additionally a lot of social housing has been hived off to housing associations. Increasingly individuals and families find it hard to afford homes of a decent standard. When council housing was widely available it acted as a break on rent increases and standards were higher. Organising tenants to put pressure on landlords and government is vital, but a task made harder by the fragmentation of housing stock where neighbours will have different landlords - private, housing association and maybe even the council. Above all we need more council housing.

State intervention and planning are not capitalism’s preferred ways of working, yet the need for state and globally agreed action is essential to tackling global warming. Yet if there is no viable planet then there is no capitalism either. Could this existential threat force capitalism to deal with the climate crisis? Having posed the question and put forward demands for achieving progress, we certainly shouldn’t just wait for this to happen, nor can we afford to wait for socialism to rescue us either. We need to campaign today to make governments act to halt the continued warming of our planet. We can also join with the developing world which is seeking climate justice. These are the countries often most affected by climate change, but they are not the ones which caused it. They demand that the industrialised countries who made their wealth from polluting the planet pay for the transition to a green future.