TUC general secretary PAUL NOWAK speaks to the Morning Star’s Berny Torre about the increasing frustration the trade union movement feels at a government that promised change, but has been too slow to bring it about

ONE of the puzzling phenomena in world capitalism today is the bellicosity displayed by Europe vis-a-vis Russia. The claim that Russia has imperialist designs towards Europe, which the European ruling circles keep repeating, is clearly absurd.
It is Nato that moved eastwards, in violation of a promise made by the US administration to Gorbachev, and provoked Russia; and it is Nato members, notably the US and Britain, that torpedoed the Minsk agreement reached between Russia and Ukraine which would have prevented the war.
Nato’s objective clearly was to subjugate Russia and control its rich natural resources, by recreating the relationship that Western imperialism had developed for a while with that country when Boris Yeltsin had been its president. The claim that it is Russia that wants to overrun Europe, like the earlier cold war claim that it was the USSR that wanted to subjugate Europe, is so absurd that it is almost childish.

PRABHAT PATNAIK details the epochal shift of political power from Western neocolonialists to the people


