A version of this article by SSP Trade Union Organiser Richie Venton first appeared in the National on 03/02/2026.Below is an expanded edition of that article.
THE UNHINGED DONALD TRUMP REGIME has unleashed racist class war on its own population whilst escalating its imperialist bullying abroad.
Just days after kidnapping the Venezuelan president, Trump’s masked, armed thugs of ICE murdered Renee Good in Minneapolis. Since then, events in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St Paul’s — and 300 other cities where solidarity protests have erupted — have moved with lightning speed.
Abroad, Trump has threatened new wars on Iran and ordered the Venezuelan government to halt all oil supplies to Cuba, to strangle the economy and overthrow the Cuban Revolution. The apparently crazed and limitless warmongering of Trump is the product of US imperialism — the biggest and most vicious military power on the planet — violently adjusting to a world where its economic power is in relative decline.
For a brief spell after the downfall of the Stalinist governments of the USSR and eastern Europe, the US enjoyed unipolar world dominance. No more; the Chinese economy has almost caught up, and Putin’s Russia remains a powerful military rival.
As their November 2025 National Security Strategy document spells out, US capitalists want to consolidate their ruthless, unchallenged control of the entire western hemisphere. To achieve this, they must also crush opposition at home. Foreign policy is an extension of domestic policy, after all. War is an extension of politics by violent means.
And class war on the domestic front is taking an increasingly violent form.
The US ruling class have unleashed thuggish invasions of neighbourhoods and workplaces in their hunt for undocumented immigrants — with at least 3,000 already kidnapped and deported from the Twin Cities airport alone — in an attempt to divide and rule the US working class, amidst prolonged failure by the capitalist rulers to provide decent jobs, pay or public services.
Lessons from Minneapolis
The response of the people of Minneapolis is a source of inspiration to all of us who wish to build resistance and defeat not only the far right, but their creators, the capitalist ‘centre’ parties, and the profiteering employing class whom they seek to prop up.
Neighbourhood mass meetings have formed rapid response units; tailed the ICE agents; formed barricades and mass protests to stop them invading homes and arresting people without warrants; organised in several workplaces to barricade themselves against incursions by ICE agents seeking to lift co-workers; and above all, marched in their tens of thousands in unbearable low temperatures.
Days of action on 23 and 30 January saw many schools, campuses and businesses shut down. Tens of thousands of workers stayed away from work. Several issues emerge of invaluable note to working-class people in Scotland and internationally.
The capitalist system ultimately relies on violence to impose its exploitation of our labour power for profit. Once awoken by events, the potential power of the working class in action is a force no dictatorial ruler can overpower. Regardless of which political party they are in, politicians of the capitalist camp will attack the masses; the US Democrats deported more than Trump, and the Minneapolis mayor and Minnesota state bodies — both Democrats — paid lip service to the people’s rage against ICE but then appealed for calm, de-escalation of the protests, drafting in the National Guard to repress the very people bravely confronting ICE — as the Democrats did to suppress the 2020 Minneapolis revolt after the murder of George Floyd.
Trade unions & political independence
Of critical importance too is the role of trade union leaderships. Whilst thousands call for a general strike in Minneapolis and across the US — the only social power and scale of action capable of achieving the demonstrators’ demand ‘ICE OUT’ — most senior union leaders plead that a general strike is illegal. They rely instead on the Democrats for help.
The need for an independent workers’ party to challenge the capitalist duopoly of Republicans and Democrats screams out like never before.
Back on this side of the Atlantic, we have the grotesque spectacle of a Labour government cowering at the feet of imperialist bully-boy Trump. Britain no longer rules the waves, but they are quite prepared to waive the rules to help US imperialism in successive wars: armaments supply, active military operations and murderous sanctions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza and Iran.
What Scotland can learn
Starmer remains silent over the brazen kidnapping of Venezuela’s president, and about the ICE executions of Renee Good or ICU nurse and trade unionist Alex Prettie. So much for his talk of upholding the rule of international law.
Shackled to the interests of British capitalism, Starmer is sure to meekly support wars and starvation sanctions by Trump and his allies. But rather than wallow in despair, the uprising in Minnesota should fuel the optimism of trade unionists and socialists in Scotland that even the most authoritarian regimes can be challenged by mass action.
However, in fighting job losses, pay cuts, decimation of public services and the shredding of democratic rights by the rightward-charging Starmer regime, we must also draw other conclusions from the American workers’ experiences.
Trade union leaders who chain themselves to a capitalist political party are bound to restrict collective action by their members. Just as it is false of the AFL-CIO leaderships to put their faith in Democrats to rescue communities and workers from the armed violence of state agencies, so too those in the British and Scottish trade union movement who rely on Labour are doomed to betray their members’ interests.
We only need look to the year-long strike of Birmingham bin workers against the Labour council to witness the strikebreaking, treacherous role of modern Labour. Or the succession of attacks on welfare, pensioners, WASPI women, child benefit and planned mass privatisation of our NHS to illustrate which side of the growing class divide Labour stands.
They may have conducted fourteen U-turns so far in the face of people’s fury, but that doesn’t change the principles they stand by. Labour is a nakedly capitalist party which no self-respecting trade unionist or worker should trust.
A socialist alternative
Nor should the trade unions continue their affiliation to Labour; the days of trade unionists and socialist pioneers founding Labour out of bitter experience of their false friends, the Liberals, was 130 years ago and is no longer applicable.
Since our formation, the Scottish Socialist Party has fought in the trade unions to break the link between unions and Labour’s New Tories, advocating instead that union funds and resources should be deployed to build a socialist alternative. And we have fought to construct a working-class socialist alternative to the array of big business parties. We have consistently advocated and sought to organise mass action against all cuts to living standards and democratic rights, regardless of whether it is Tories, Labour or SNP in office. We know which side of the class divide we stand.
That cannot be said of most senior trade union leaders, who continue to hitch their wagon to Labour, doling out members’ money on affiliation fees and donations. From 2010-15, for instance, they gave Labour £65m. During the 2024 general election, trade unions threw £2.4m into Labour’s coffers.
A more recent trend reinforces the SSP’s call for unions to make the break from capitalist Labour: an ever-increasing share of Labour’s funding comes not from the unions, but from super-rich individual capitalists and companies — two-thirds of the total in 2024.
Lord Sainsbury gave them £2.5m of the total £10m they received in pre-election donations. And of course, it is well documented that private healthcare profiteers have been generous to figures such as NHS minister Wes Streeting. He who pays the piper calls the tune.
TUs & Labour – deeper than cash
Trade union affiliation to Labour goes deeper than cash; the whole philosophy of social partnership preaches the utterly false and dangerous lie that the interests of profiteering capitalist companies and those of the workers whose unpaid labour provides those profits are identical.
The iron logic of this outlook is to applaud Starmer’s increased investment in the war industry — to give the ‘defence industry’ its proper name — and end up colluding with wars on Gaza and other victims of imperialist plunder, as Britain acts as a minor partner to the marauding might of US imperialism.
Working-class people in Scotland should gain courage and encouragement from Minneapolis; we can indeed defeat the far right, and the capitalist politicians who feed the racist divide-and-rule poisons of Farage and his Tory 2.0 party. But we also need to look at other lessons from across the Atlantic. Trade unions need to be independent of capitalist parties, not funding them and putting faith in them for salvation.
In calling for an end to union-Labour affiliation, the SSP has never agreed that trade unions should be ‘non-political’. There is no such thing. We need the organised working class of Scotland to force its own leaderships — or replace them — into decisive action for socialist change. Instead of a few press releases and media articles with often accurate critiques of the ruling parties, the STUC and national unions need to go into the workplaces, agitate and educate workers on the ABCs of class politics, mobilise them around fighting demands on wages, job creation, public ownership, workers’ control and socialism.
They should support Holyrood parties and candidates whose policies match the socialist aims written into the rule books of every trade union. The SSP offers such a pro-worker socialist alternative. We plan to stand in all eight regional lists to win votes for socialist MSPs who will live on the average skilled worker’s wage — not the £75,000 pocketed by the rest. We will advocate people not profit; taxation of the rich; democratic public ownership of energy, transport, construction, banking and big industries; and a Socialist Green New Deal that could create 350,000 new green jobs by building 100,000 council houses, a free public transport service and clean, affordable energy.
SSP’s working class candidates
To match our principles, we have already selected SSP candidates who are from across the working class: people who work in nursing, local government, education, the NHS, retail, the fire service, printing, admin jobs and the third sector, members of UNITE, UNISON, USDAW, GMB, FBU and other unions.
Scotland may not yet have reached the fever pitch of Minneapolis. But a working-class socialist party is just as necessary to provide principled leadership to workers and their communities as we face a system that breeds war and death, sanctions and scarcity, state violence and repression at home and abroad.