This week the BBC is broadcasting an interview with ex- football pro, Gary Lineker. In it, he's asked about his suspension as presenter of Match of the Day, last year, because of his tweet on X that the government's asylum policy was "immeasurably cruel" and that the Sunak/Braverman official video used language that was "not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 1930s".

    Lineker answers that he does not regret what he said "because I was right". The irony is that the supposedly "neutral" BBC which penalised him for not being "politically neutral" was de facto acting in defence of this far-right Tory policy!

    Today, there's a lot of this 1930s-style talk to be heard. Especially from the other side of the Atlantic, where, for example, Donald Trump claims that immigrants are "criminals"... never mind that modern America was built almost entirely by immigrants!

    Just like Gary Lineker, most British people rightly found the Tories' "deportation to Rwanda" plan both absurd and inhumane. But Trump has managed to trump it. Not only are migrant US workers being deported in chains to Colombia, etc., but hundreds of mostly Venezuelan migrants have been sent to El Salvador's Cecot (Terrorism Confinement Centre) mega-prison. With a knowing smile and handshake, El Salvador's autocratic ruler, Bukele Ortez was one of the first of a series of far-right fellow-thinkers invited to the Oval Office to be thanked by Trump for his "help" in this respect.

Cooper's Rwanda in the Balkans!

So, as far as ultra-right - or plainly fascist - talk goes, it's not just US officials today, or Tories like ex-Home Secretary Suella Braverman yesterday, who want to clamp down on immigrants (or the right to protest against Netanyahu's slaughter of Palestinians!)

    No, indeed. Yvette Cooper, Starmer's Home Secretary, is following in Braverman''s footsteps, in her now frequent dalliance with Italy's PM Giorgia Meloni. Who, one should not forget, is a former member of the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano, founded in 1946 to keep alive the memory of il Duce, the by then, strung up and executed fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini. Meloni is also a good friend of Donald Trump...

    Cooper is keen to see how the anti-immigrant, anti-working class, anti-gay, etc., closet racist Meloni has been dealing with the refugees who manage to survive the treacherous Mediterranean crossing and land on Italy's shores...

    And it seems that she has been inspired! Because she has announced that she is going to create "third country return hubs for failed asylum seekers". And never mind how or why these asylum seekers may have been failed by her system or any other - or that the Refugee Council has proclaimed the hubs as "unworkable and a waste of taxpayers' money"...

    The hubs, we're told, would have to be approved as "safe" by the UN. And although Cooper hasn't announced the details, they could be located, like Meloni's own "hub", in Albania, or perhaps North Macedonia, or another dirt-poor Balkan country, whose government does not feel it can refuse.

    As for the "safe and legal routes" which are the only way to end the precarious choices made by refugees and end their exploitation by smuggler-gangs... so far, Cooper has proposed absolutely nothing.

So, was the pope a marxist?

Of course it's no coincidence that Labour has reiterated its anti-immigrant policies - a la Meloni and Trump - since local elections loom next Thursday and the polls suggest that Farage's Reform might take hundreds of seats from both Labour and the Tories.

    Yes, this is the gutter level that politics sink to, in the hands of these degenerate politicians who reflect so "well", the decay of the crisis-ridden capitalist system.

    So yes, it was indeed good to be reminded of Gary Lineker's reaction to quasi-fascist policies against asylum-seekers. Just as it was "good" that the media had no choice but to mention that the late Pope Francis had always stood up for refugees and for the people of Gaza.

    Of course, a Pope, even if he sits on the vast Vatican fortune, cannot change anything in the US-led imperialist order today. He cannot open borders nor stop a war. And no ballot box will change anything, either.

    So let us repeat: only the working class, organised in its own party, armed with a political programme to abolish the profit system and plan the economy on a world scale - by eliminating borders completely - can guarantee humanity a future.

    These ideas are, yes, based on those of Karl Marx. And no, despite the many accusations, the late Pope Francis was no Marxist. It is on the basis of consciousness, acknowledging "neither god nor master", and by collective struggle, that the working class can and will change this world!