Another global energy crisis is doubly unwelcome given energy prices are slowly stabilising after the last lot of runaway price inflation — sparked by Western sanctions on Russia’s energy — brought new misery.

Where a possible Donald Trump presidency may disturb ruling-class opinion — over which consensus the IMF presides — it resides in the prospect, if he is elected, of a tariff war. Meeting more or less simultaneously to the IMF, the BRICS conference, hosted by Vladimir Putin in Kazan, on October 22 to 24 presented the outlines of a challenge to Western hegemony.

The Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa ensemble now has an additional chorus, with new voices from Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, UAE and Saudi Arabia which signed up earlier this year. Each of these states has an individual interest in asserting their own sovereignty against the hegemonic practices of the imperialist blocs that the IMF and the World Bank represent. Key to the success of the BRICS project is winning a greater measure of independence from the compulsion to use the dollar in their international transactions.

Every energy transaction that takes place in domestic currencies contributes to dedollarisation, while new banking and transaction mechanisms that decouple independent states from the US sphere of influence are real measures towards a greater sovereignty for these states.

Each BRICS country struggles to assert their independence and recover sovereign powers in different contexts. The single context which the Commonwealth countries, meeting in Samoa, share is their more or less recently acquired independence from Britain.

Sir Keir Starmer disgraced himself and dishonoured the British people by the rejection of proposals from the Caribbean states for reparations to be paid in compensation for the exploitation and oppression that slavery brought upon their people.

Arbitrarily dismissing compensation for Britain’s historic role in the slave trade, he said he wanted to address “current future-facing challenges” rather than “spend a lot of time on the past.” But for the people living in Britain’s colonies it is precisely this past that weighs heavy on their present state and on their futures. Each of the candidates to become the next head of the 56-nation Commonwealth have called for reparations for countries that were affected by slavery.

So enormous were the reparations paid to Britain’s slave masters for the loss of their human possessions that the public loan raised to subsidise these already rich has only just been paid off. This enormous wealth — not just the huge sums of “compensation” but also that accruing from the intense exploitation of slave labour and the seizure of colonial land — is not held in common by the British people.

While it is true that even under conditions of capitalist exploitation, British living standards benefited from colonial exploitation, it is also true that no matter how difficult were conditions for British workers, the rate of exploitation and the levels of poverty were greater in a British empire, over which the sun never set and the blood never dried.

The British working class, which in substantial part today can trace its family histories to this history of slavery, capitalist exploitation and imperial oppression, has no collective interest in protecting the wealth and property of our ruling class. That our ruling class in its great majority is rich in money and property precisely because of slavery and colonialism is yet another argument for a tax on wealth and property. (IPA Service)