Trump’s Trade War – or De-Globalization?

Peter Koenig

President Trump’s bold ‘protectionist’ move of introducing import duties of 25% and 10%for steel and aluminum, respectively– and possibly more to come – maybe more than just ‘populism’ and fulfilling a campaign promise. And why is the term ‘populism’ always used with a derogative slant? As if it was way below the intellect of those who deride it as addressing the thoughtless and primitive behavior by the people? Aren’t politicians supposed to work for the people? Educate them with the truth instead of ridiculing them; giving them real news instead of ‘fake news’ – and giving them jobs and decent livelihood? – Is that addressing “populism”?

President Trump, or whoever directs him, may have noticed the steady decline of the American economy into a hollow war and service machine, with rising unemployment at the tune of more than 20% (though the fake statistics pretend otherwise, putting git below 5%); a country gradually choking on junk consumption, anti-Russia propaganda and a rapidly deterioration physical infrastructure and civil society.

This unexpected protectionist decision may also be a genuine move against globalization – which, as we know, is controlled by neoliberal economics and has in fact nothing to do with real economics. It is sheer criminalizing of economics. It has done enormous harm to the 99.9 % and benefitted only the 0.1% (or less). “Make America Great Again” is supposed to address this fallacy. Bring production and jobs back, primarily for the domestic market and second only, for international trade, for trade that doesn’t harm the local economy. This is a recipe which would also suit many European countries – Greece is a case in point, but Spain, Italy, Ireland and even France would fall into the same category. “Local production for local markets” is indeed the model that helped rescuing the US from the depression of the 30’s and Europe, in particular Germany, after WWII.

The so-called Free Trade Agreements (FTA) and multi country Trade Agreements like, NAFTA, TTIP, and TPP – the former being renegotiated and the latter two suspended – are quite different from “local production for local markets”. They all, without fault, favor US corporations’ maximizing profit objective, but not the United States local economy. Insofar Trump is right, when he says that all these trade deals have been bad for his countries. They were and are a bonanza for US corporations, but indeed bad for the US national economy, because they are incentives for more and more outsourcing of production and services into low labor cost countries.

By granting corporations tax breaks and incentives to invest at home rather than in low-wage countries, and by levying import duties, President Trump is taking a decisive step – maybe willy-nilly – to rehabilitate a faltering US economy. Will it work? It might. It’s too early to say. Economy is no precise science, but rather the result of the dynamic interaction between different at times unpredictable elements. True economics are certainly not based on a set of blueprints;they are not black and white, as neoliberal theories would like us to believe. Real economicsdo not fit today’s most popular teachings of ‘modelling’ – a complex linear approach of algorithm which produces desired results for propagating neoliberal ideas – that depart from reality by a long shot. The fact of reestablishing trust in local labor, may have power way beyond that of capital investments.

Trump capitalizes on this momentum and, simultaneously, may set a signal for the rest of the world to follow – and for the end of globalization. Interestingly, he said at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos in January this year, that all the American partner countries should think, “Make my country great again”. Isn’t this a slap in the face of globalization?

Of course, there will be noises of ‘retaliation’ by Europe, China, Japan – so what? – Steps of retaliation may actually trigger a political rethinking of globalized WTO propagated trade. It may reveal who are the winners and losers. It may have taken 30 years to realize that the winners are an ever-smaller corporate elite, while the bedrock of national economies, local labor, is the big loser. That is precisely the direction into which the neofascist West is moving – towards selling the national economy out to corporate profits.The people are understandably unhappy.

Today’s economistsare in shock, whenever somebody dares questioning the mainstream globalizedeconomic models, depicting a linear right or wrong vision of the world. Remember George Bush – “you are eitherfor us or against us”; the phrase that set the eternal war on terror in motion; the war that brought death to millions, intimidation to hundreds of millions and billions of profits to the war industry.

Yet, we were and are still indoctrinated with the neoliberal norm, which consists of open-border trade, limitless cross-border transfer of capital – but very restricted transfer of labor. And worst of all, today and for the last 100 years, is our (western) dollar-based monetary system (born from the Federal Reserve Act of 1913) that shapes and manipulates the western boom – bust economy. Logic would rather dictate a reverse monetary system, where a nation’s economic output is the basis for its monetary system, not the other way around.

This monetary anomality has been driven to extremes with the US-dollar’s offspring, the euro, which has zero connection with the European economy, let alone with the economy of each member country. The western monetary system on which international trade is based is a fraud, a mere house of cards, a Ponzi scheme, the collapse of which is inevitable.

The Donald is a largely unpredictable character. As a war monger, he screams “fire and fury” at North Korea, threatening to wipe out the entire country; yet is willing to sit down to negotiate with Kim Jong-un – under certain conditions – debating whose Red Button is bigger, Kim’s or the Donald’s. At the same time, driven by Netanyahu, the same Donald has only slander and insults left for Iran, threatening the country with annihilating war and imposing more sanctions, knowing quite well that Europe, mainly France and Germany, has established billion euros worth of trade relations since the lifting of the original sanctions after the signing of the ‘nuclear deal’ in July 2015.

So, let’s not get this wrong. Trump is no panacea for the good of the world. By a very long shot. He is aloose cannon, shooting from the hips, he may have hit the target by declaring unilateral import tariffs on steel and aluminum. This may be just the beginning, a trial balloon so to speak, for more protection measures to follow. His neocolonial trained chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, can’t see the logic and quit. Trump is unmoved and stays the course. He knows these tariffs won’t affect consumer prices at home, butthey may be a boost for the US rust-belt – reviving investments, including the local car industry, a key economic indicator, creating thousands of much needed jobs and reestablishing labor’s trust in Washington’s leadership – to “Make America Great Again.”

Gas profits and China fears drive Australia-Timor boundary treaty

Mike Head

Acrimonious disputes are continuing between the governments of Australia and the tiny neighouring state of East Timor despite last week’s signing at the UN in New York of what the media misleadingly called an “historic” maritime boundary treaty covering the oil- and gas-rich Timor Sea.

Continuing its decades of betraying and bullying the impoverished territory’s people, the Australian government is still insisting that the billions of dollars’ worth of gas beneath the sea be pipelined to Australia’s northern city of Darwin, rather than to East Timor.

Finalised after year-long negotiations at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, the treaty essentially concedes that the undersea boundary should be set at halfway point between the two countries, in line with international law, thus placing most of the vast untapped gas reserves within East Timor’s territory.

Nevertheless, the Australian government and the transnational energy giants that control the gas fields remain adamant that the mini-state on the eastern half of Timor cannot have the gas processing operations, and all the associated profits.

After more than 15 years of illegally denying Timorese sovereignty in the disputed zone, two inter-related factors—geo-strategic calculations and corporate profits—drove the Australian government to sign the treaty.

First and foremost were concerns in both Canberra and Washington that Australia’s refusal to abide by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) in settling the Timor border was opening the door for China to acquire greater influence in East Timor and the Asia-Pacific region.

As the Chinese economy has grown rapidly over the past two decades, Chinese agencies and companies have been increasingly active in East Timor, as throughout the region, funding infrastructure and establishing business operations.

In recent years, China has constructed office buildings for Timor’s foreign and defence ministries and Defence Force, as well as the presidential palace. More than a thousand East Timorese civil servants have gone to China for training, Chinese naval vessels have twice visited Timor and the country has acquired several Chinese patrol boats.

More significantly, Beijing has politically exploited Australia’s defiance of UNCLOS to undercut the denunciations from Washington and Canberra of China’s refusal to recognise a US-orchestrated international tribunal ruling in 2016 rejecting China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea.

Following that ruling, China’s state-run Global Times directly attacked Australia’s hypocrisy in an opinion piece, accusing it of “exempting itself from the very conventions it cites in denouncing other nations’ supposed violations of ‘international law’.”

Notably, the US State Department immediately hailed this week’s treaty signing, pointing to pressure from Washington for Australia to end the boundary dispute. Welcoming the adherence to UNCLOS, the department called the Timor treaty “a testament to the efficacy and importance of resolving disputes peacefully and in accordance with international law.”

Echoing that language, in signing the pact at the UN, Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said: “This treaty represents the importance of rules and the benefits of all states abiding by the rules... It is an example to all of how international rules-based order serves our interests.”

As Bishop acknowledged, this “rules-based” order serves definite imperialist interests. In reality, the Timorese government was under enormous political and economic pressure to conclude the treaty, after years of predatory manoeuvres by the Australian ruling class and the corporate gas giants.

Currently, the Timorese state depends for 90 percent of its revenue on the Bayu-Undan gas field, which will be exhausted within four years. As an Australian Financial Review article observed: “Timor-Leste risks going over a financial cliff when the money runs out from the Bayu-Undan field in 2022 and its petroleum fund five years after that.”

The boundary dispute had blocked any commencement on the much larger Greater Sunrise oil and gas field, with an estimated value of $50 billion. The Timorese ruling elite, facing widespread discontent over the population’s poor living and social conditions, desperately needs construction on this project to start immediately.

Even now, the consortium that holds the rights over Greater Sunrise—featuring Australian-based operator Woodside Petroleum and its major partners Shell and ConocoPhillips—is refusing to proceed with the project until East Timor’s demand for onshore processing is overruled. Consortium members issued statements expressing “disappointment” that the treaty failed to adopt its favoured option of a floating LNG plant.

Under the treaty, Timor will get 80 percent of the royalties from Greater Sunrise if the gas is piped to Darwin, but only 70 percent if the processing occurs in Timor. A leaked letter from Timorese leader Xanana Gusmão, who led the country’s negotiations, has accused Australia of colluding with the oil corporations to prevent a Timorese pipeline.

According to the Australian Financial Review, backroom discussions are taking place on either having teams for offshore platforms fly out from Timor rather than Australia, or allowing Timorese workers to be brought to Darwin to work in a processing facility, under a cheap labour scheme similar to Australia’s Pacific Islander seasonal workers program.

The treaty also blocks Timor from seeking compensation for the estimated $5 billion worth of taxes and royalties wrongly obtained by Australia since the Timor Sea gas fields began to be exploited in 1999.

These developments again underscore the fraud of all the claims that Australia intervened militarily in Timor in 1998 to protect its people from Indonesian repression and guarantee “independence.”

Ever since the Whitlam Labor government recognised the Indonesian annexation of the former Portuguese colonial outpost in 1975, the Australian ruling class has been preoccupied only with securing the lion’s share of the undersea resources and keeping a grip over the half island, strategically located at the eastern end of the Indonesian archipelago.

The now-officially abandoned “Timor Gap” boundary, so favourable to Australian capitalism, was originally drawn between the Hawke Labor government and General Suharto’s Indonesian military junta in 1989, in return for Australia’s continued support for Indonesian rule over East Timor.

Once Suharto’s regime collapsed and his successor, B. J. Habibie, agreed to a plebiscite on Timorese separation, Australia intervened to ensure that any resulting statelet was subordinated to its corporate and strategic interests. What followed was relentless brow-beating, intimidation and dirty tricks by successive Australian governments, both Labor and Liberal-National, to maintain that domination.

In 2004, these machinations included the illegal bugging of Timor’s cabinet room during previous bitter talks over the Timor Sea resources. That electronic eaves-dropping was exposed in 2013 by a whistle-blower from the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, known only as Witness K, who was involved in the operation. Foreign Minister Bishop refused to issue Witness K a passport, blocking him from testifying in The Hague against Australia.

Following the signing of the treaty, many issues remain unresolved, including the exact eastern and western boundaries of the new demarcation line between Australia and Timor. The renegotiation of the Timorese border could also trigger an Indonesian attempt to force an adjustment of its adjacent unfavourable border with Australia.

Despite the potential further loss of territory, however, Australia’s ruling establishment has felt compelled to cut a deal with the Timorese leadership, which has provided the essential strategic and military backing for Australian imperialism’s plundering activities throughout the region since World War II.

Australia is under enormous pressure from the US to line up fully with Washington against Beijing on key flashpoints such as the South China Sea. The Trump administration’s National Defense Strategy in January named China as a “strategic competitor” seeking “Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term and displacement of the United States to achieve global pre-eminence in the future.” The US military build-up throughout the region is to ensure continued American dominance through war with China if necessary.

UK: More than a million welfare benefit sanctions imposed against disabled people

Dennis Moore 

New data reveals the relentless attack on disabled benefit claimants in the last decade. The study found that more than 900,000 Job Seeker’s Allowance (JSA) claimants, who reported a disability, have been financially sanctioned since May 2010.

Also sanctioned were 110,000 claimants of Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), a benefit paid to someone who is sick, and placed in the “work related activity group” (WRAG). A further 140,000 sanctions were applied, but later cancelled.

A sanction is applied to someone’s benefit when a claimant is deemed not to have met part of the stated “conditionality” for claiming that benefit. This can include missing an appointment, or not applying for enough jobs in a given time scale.

According to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) own estimates, the state spends up to £50 million a year applying sanctions, and £200 million a year monitoring whether claimants meet the conditions for receiving payments. In 2015, the DWP withheld £132 million from claimants in the form of sanctions.

The report was a collaboration between Ben Baumberg Geiger, senior lecturer at the University of Kent, and the Demos think tank. The four-year study included polling 2,000 members of the public, front line assessors, as well as desk research and interviews with experts across nine countries.

It found that unemployed disabled people were up to 53 percent more likely to be given a sanction than other claimants. It concluded that conditionality has little or no effect on improving employment chances for disabled people.

The government intends to push a million more disabled people back into work over the next decade, leading to many more disabled people being treated unfairly and burdened with enormous hardship. It has consistently defended the system of sanctions as a way of encouraging people to find work, and falsely claims the public supports the idea of sanctions.

Despite decades of government-led media hysteria denouncing welfare “scroungers,” the public is more concerned that disabled people are being unfairly denied benefits. More, 45 percent versus 22 percent, thought it was more important to support benefit claimants than to root out fraud, and those who did support sanctions felt that they should be weaker than those the government use at present.

Mark Atkinson, chief executive at the Scope charity, said, “Punitive sanctions can be extremely harmful to disabled people, who already face the financial penalty of higher living costs. There is no clear evidence that cutting disabled people’s benefits supports them to get into, and stay in work.”

Conditionality and sanctions are increasingly being linked to deteriorating physical and mental health in claimants with disabilities. Many are left worrying how they will survive once sanctioned, and in some tragic cases, this has led to death.

Jodey Whiting, a 42-year-old disabled mother of nine children from Teesside, died last year after taking her own life when her benefits were stopped. When concerns were raised, police broke into her home, where she was found dead with a suicide note.

Whiting was a shop worker before ill health forced her to retire. She had problems with ongoing pain leading to her having to taking up to 23 tablets a day, including the powerful painkiller morphine. She had been plagued by physical and mental health problems throughout her life, including a brain cyst and a curved spine. At times, this meant she could barely make it through the front door.

As part of meeting conditionality for ESA, Whiting was expected to attend the Work Capability Assessment (WCA). Under the sanctions system, if a claimant does not attend, benefits stop. Jody had missed a routine ESA assessment, as she had not seen the letter informing her that she had to attend the meeting and was therefore unaware of the assessment.

Following her death, Whiting’s family received another letter from the DWP confirming the benefit cut, despite the family having already told staff at the DWP that she had died. At the inquest, the family accused the DWP’s actions of being the trigger that led to Whiting taking a fatal drugs overdose. The inquest heard she had overdosed before, but the “extreme stress” inflicted by the DWP pushed her over the edge. Grieving mother, Joy Dove, spoke out after her death, saying, “I blame the DWP for her death. They have blood on their hands over my Jodey”.

DWP officials are being rewarded with bonus payments for meeting sanctioning targets. At a time when many welfare claimants are being sanctioned, struggling to pay for food and having to resort to the use of food banks, pay roll data published by the DWP for the years April 2016 and March 2017 showed that the department paid out performance-related bonuses to staff totalling £41.3 million. These included payments of £5.3 million on “in month bonuses” and £36 million in end of year bonuses. 240 senior DWP officials pocketed a total of £760,000.

Sanctions are now used much more frequently against welfare claimants across the board, with the severity of sanctions increasing. According to Dr. David Webster at the University of Glasgow, around 350,000 people a year are currently facing sanctions. This is expected to rocket with the introduction of the Universal Credit (UC) system nationally as one million more people in low-paid work will be on the radar for benefit sanctions. “The amounts of money people lose through sanctions are actually larger than the amounts of money people get fined in the magistrates’ courts,” Webster told the BBC.

An example of the extreme harshness of the sanctions regime was cited by a report on the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire show. Garreth Forrest, from Preston, normally receives a benefits allowance of just £705 a month. For an “offense” he disputes, he was sanctioned with his benefit slashed by £503. The sanction may last four months, and he was left with just over £200 a month, making it impossible to cover all his outgoings, including rent, utilities and food.

Under UC, the use of conditionality is being applied to groups that were once exempt, including the disabled and lone parents. Figures released by the DWP revealed that:

• The percentage of Universal Credit (UC) claimants with a drop in payment due to a sanction was 4.7 percent.

• From August to October 2017, 38 percent of all UC decisions resulted in a sanction.

• 73 percent of UC decisions to apply a sanction in August to October 2017 occurred due to failure to attend or participate in a Work-Focused Interview.

Demos became one of the most influential New Labour think tanks under Labour prime minister Tony Blair. The 1997-2010 Blair/Gordon Brown government adopted a “work first” and “work for all” approach that included the monitoring of JSA claimants’ job searches, backed up by benefit sanctions in cases of non-compliance. In 2008, Labour introduced ESA to replace Incapacity Benefit. ESA contains the Work Capability Assessment medical—a critical instrument used by successive governments for removing people from welfare entitlement.

The Geiger/Demos research is not aimed at ending the inhumane and hated system WCA, but at refurbishing it and tailoring it more towards the requirements of the economy. They propose the government “overhaul the WCA descriptors, so that they transparently reflect the British labour market…” They recommend that “government could collect data on the functional requirements of British jobs—i.e., the specific capabilities that people need to be able to do each job.”

Anger mounts after Paris tries to crush general strike in Mayotte

Alex Lantier

Strikes erupted afresh on the Indian Ocean island of Mayotte and the return to school was delayed on Monday, after French military police tried and failed at 4 a.m. on Sunday to crush strike pickets outside the port at Longoni. Police used the trade unions’ calls to temporarily halt the general strike for a cooling-off period to launch a surprise attack and attempt to smash the strike. This has failed, and anger against state repression is spreading across the impoverished island.

French Overseas Territories Minister Annick Girardin has reportedly decided to travel to the island, supposedly for negotiations. However, Mayotte media are reporting that strikers oppose talks with Girardin, and panic is mounting among union officials as the strike rapidly develops into a confrontation between the workers and the French state.

The island’s trade union alliance was compelled to admit Girardin’s visit “is clearly not welcome.” It added that strikers would only be satisfied by the visit of an official whose promises the government would feel obliged to keep, like the president or prime minister.

While almost totally blacked out in French media, strikes have spread rapidly since February 20 following assaults in the island’s badly overcrowded schools and amid rising anger over the failure of Mayotte’s incorporation into France in 2011 as an overseas department to improve social conditions.

The poverty rate stands at 84 percent, and little has been done to assist refugees arriving from the nearby Comores. The population has quadrupled over the last 30 years, and students are able to spend only half a day in school and are forced to work on their teachers’ desks due to the lack of space.

Strikers’ demands include, according to France Info-Mayotte, “ending overcrowding in the schools and making the entire area a priority zone for education. Strikers are also demanding a ‘limit on the number of unaccompanied minors’ in Mayotte, and that these refugees could also be taken to cities in metropolitan France.” Strikers also call for better health and social services.

The failure by the police to crush the strike with a sneak attack, exploiting the demobilisation of the struggle by the trade unions, has escalated the conflict. Hundreds of strikers came to repel the police attack on port workers, and the pickets are now refusing to let anyone through, after having initially obeyed union orders to allow both medical and transport vehicles to cross picket lines. Trees have been cut down to block major roads, and trade union officials warned Le Monde that workers at a nearby gas station are also stockpiling explosive materials.

Strikers’ demands for jobs and social services, and for immigrants to be allowed into France place them in a political struggle against President Emmanuel Macron’s government. Macron is determined to slash social benefits in order to offer tax cuts to the rich and funnel €300 billion into the military over the next five years. He is preparing for large-scale wars between the great powers in which Mayotte, strategically located in the Indian Ocean, could well be involved.

His government has also presented a law drastically attacking the right to asylum, and he will bitterly oppose any moves to welcome Comoreans in France.

The critical question is unifying workers in Mayotte and the overseas territories together with workers in metropolitan France against Macron’s right-wing agenda of militarism, austerity, and attacks on democratic rights and immigrants.

Workers in France and across Europe must take the police assault on workers at Longoni as a very serious warning. After French police ruthlessly attacked protests against the regressive labour law in 2016, and Spanish police assaulted voters to try to suppress the Catalan independence referendum last year, it is clear that the main purpose of the police-state build-up in Europe is political repression. Strikers in France now routinely face requisition orders and attempts by police or military agencies to force them back to work.

Together with their allies like the Unsubmissive France (LFI) movement and the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA), the unions are again proving their reactionary character. They are all participating in negotiating Macron’s labour decrees, privatisations of the railways and in the public service, and plans to reinforce the French military. And as they help formulate Macron’s right-wing agenda, they are looking on in silence at the police assault on workers in the overseas territories who are opposing Macron.

The way forward for workers is to take the struggle in Mayotte out of the hands of the unions and their political allies, setting up their own organisations of struggle independent of the unions, and mobilising broader political opposition among workers in Europe, where strike activity is on the rise.

The role of the union bureaucracies in Mayotte is not fundamentally different than that of the national confederations. They are issuing bankrupt pleas to Macron to avoid an all-out confrontation. Saïd Hachim of the French Democratic Labour Confederation (CFDT) warned, “If we lose control here, the entire island will explode, the situation could become uncontrollable.”

Significantly, they have sought to frame their demands in terms of call for law-and-order, allowing the state and the French media to cynically portray the deployment of police to the island to crush the strike as an attempt to respond to strikers’ demands.

The unions’ “table of demands” addressed to the government makes “insecurity” the main issue in the strike, declaring, “Insecurity is a growing problem that no longer has to be proven. … Its magnitude, which already defies comprehension, seems to be only comparable to its barbarism.”

This rhetoric was echoed in the official French media yesterday, which is pushing aggressively for a police build-up on the island that would in fact only facilitate a crackdown. Le Monde declared, “It is first of all insecurity that is at the beginning of the movement,” warning that “delinquency and violence have attained dramatic levels.”

This is a political fraud. Strikers are demanding not the right to be assaulted by even more police, but solutions to the enormous social problems in Mayotte. School violence and insecurity are but one expression of basic social problems—unemployment, poverty, the lack of a future, and the danger of war—that afflict not only Mayotte but the entire region, as well as France itself.

The allies of the workers in Mayotte in this struggle are their class brothers and sisters in France, mobilised in struggle against the repressive agenda of Macron and the European Union.

UK prime minister delivers ultimatum to Russia, heightening war danger

Laura Tiernan

British Prime Minister Theresa May told the House of Commons that Russia was “highly likely” to be responsible for deploying “a military grade nerve agent” against double agent Sergei Skripal, which she declared “an indiscriminate and reckless act against the United Kingdom.”

May’s speech followed a meeting of the National Security Council to discuss Britain’s response to the poisoning of Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, just over a week ago.

“It is now clear that Mr Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia. This is part of a group of nerve agents known as Novichok,” May claimed.

Her speech follows a wave of anti-Russia hysteria unleashed by the media, political and military establishment, including the mobilisation of 180 military personnel in the cathedral city of Salisbury.

May did not provide a shred of evidence to support her claims that Russia had developed the chemical agent used in Salisbury. She simply asserted that because Russia can produce such a chemical, and because of “Russia’s record of conducting state-sponsored assassinations; and our assessment that Russia views some defectors as legitimate targets for assassinations…the government has concluded that it is highly likely that Russia was responsible for the act against Sergei and Yulia Skripal.”

May said, “there are therefore only two plausible explanations for what happened in Salisbury on the 4 March. Either this was a direct act by the Russian State against our country. Or the Russian government lost control of this potentially catastrophically damaging nerve agent and allowed it to get into the hands of others.”

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson had “summoned the Russian Ambassador to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and asked him to explain which of these two possibilities it is…”

The government has imposed a 24-hour ultimatum, ending midnight today, for the Russian Federation to “provide full and complete disclosure of the Novichok programme to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.”

The May government’s reckless actions are dragging the UK to the brink of war with Russia.

She framed her stance as a response to “a well-established pattern of Russian State aggression” throughout Europe and in the Middle East. “Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea was the first time since the Second World War that one sovereign nation has forcibly taken territory from another in Europe,” she declared. She accused Russia of “foment[ing] conflict in the Donbas, of “repeatedly violat[ing] the national airspace of several European countries” and of “a sustained campaign of cyber espionage and disruption” including “meddling in elections and hacking the Danish Ministry of Defence and the Bundestag, among many others.”

“During his recent State of the Union address,” May continued, “President Putin showed video graphics of missile launches, flight trajectories and explosions, including the modelling of attacks on the United States with a series of warheads impacting in Florida.”

She told the House that on Wednesday her government would “consider in detail the response from the Russian State. Should there be no credible response, we will conclude that this action amounts to an unlawful use of force by the Russian State against the United Kingdom. And I will come back to this House and set out the full range of measures that we will take in response.”

Just hours before May’s speech, Rear Admiral Alex Burton, former commander of the UK’s Maritime Forces, who also commanded NATO’s “high readiness” naval forces, said Britain was threatened with losing its status as a “credible military power.” Citing the threat from Russia, he called for a major boost in military spending to at least 2.5 percent of GDP—an extra £7.7 billion a year.

The dangers posed are underscored by statements from Russia’s embassy in London, which accused the British government of playing “a very dangerous game,” which “bears the risk of more serious long-term consequences for our relations.”

May’s remarks will have been drafted in the closest collaboration with powerful sections of the military and political establishment in the United States, centred on the Democratic Party, who have been pushing for a confrontation with Russia against a degree of resistance from the Trump administration.

In response, last week US Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told a Senate armed services committee hearing he had not seen evidence of Russia trying to meddle in the 2018 midterm elections, but that it is “highly likely” Moscow will try to do so. He expected the US Treasury to announce sanctions on Russia as soon as this week. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin made a similar announcement, insisting that Trump is “fully supportive” of the actions.

Yesterday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked repeatedly about the Salisbury incident at a press conference in Washington DC. She refused to say whether the US agreed with May’s attribution of Russian responsibility and did not mention Russia by name. Clearly dissatisfied, the journalist questioned whether the US was pointing the finger at the Putin government, with Sanders replying, “I think they’re still working through even some of the details of that, and we’re going to continue to work with the UK.”

That same day, the European Union said it had extended sanctions against Russia, imposed following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, for another six months.

Responding to May, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said the whole house condemned the “deeply alarming attack” in Salisbury and that a full account was needed from Russian authorities.

He urged May to introduce tougher sanctions on Russian oligarchs hiding their money in the UK, noting that there has been over £800,000 worth of donations to the Conservative party “from Russian oligarchs and their associates.”

Whereas he issued no challenge to May’s warmongering accusations, Corbyn cautioned the government, “We need to continue seeking a robust dialogue with Russia on all the issues dividing our countries, both domestic and international—rather than simply cutting off contact and simply letting tensions and divisions get worse, and potentially more dangerous.”

His diplomatic caveat met with cries of “shame!” and “disgrace!” from the Tories and was too much for the warmongers in his own party.

A procession of Labour MPs, including Yvette Cooper, Chris Leslie and John Woodcock, joined with the Tories to demand a “united response”, echoing Tory Iain Duncan Smith who had condemned “appeasers” while denouncing Corbyn for “playing party politics.”

Ex-Labour shadow chancellor Chris Leslie insisted it is “just not appropriate” to take “party political differences” when “our country is potentially under attack.”

His colleague Mike Gapes insisted that “all MPs must stand together,” as he branded the Salisbury poisoning “an act of terrorism.”

Former Labour chief secretary to the treasury Liam Byrne said, “The Prime Minister should know that if by Wednesday she concludes we are indeed embattled, she’ll find both unity and resolve across this House in facing down a common threat.”

Former shadow transport minister John Woodcock, who has previously stated he could not support Corbyn as prime minister, suggested that the Labour leader in Number 10 would threaten the UK’s national security.

“The level of resilience voiced by the Prime Minister in the chamber today has been many years in coming but it is hugely welcome,” he said. “Indeed, it would put our national security at significant risk if we were led by anyone who did not understand the gravity of the threat which Russia poses to this nation.”

Stephen Doughty, Labour MP for Cardiff South and Penarth, stated, “Can I urge the prime minister to speak with the secretary of state for culture, media and sport to look at reviewing Russia Today’s [RT’s] broadcasting licence. And to speak to the House authorities about blocking their broadcasts in this building itself.”

Former Labour minister Chris Bryant, MP for the Rhondda, demanded: “Can we just stop Russia Today just broadcasting its propaganda in this country?”

Rising anger over aid delays in Papua New Guinea’s catastrophic quake disaster

John Roberts 

Unrest is growing in Papua New Guinea’s highlands provinces over the inadequate official response to the massive human and environmental disaster created after a magnitude-7.5 earthquake hit the region on February 26.

The full extent of the catastrophe is still unknown. However, the documented death toll already exceeds 100 and hundreds of thousands of largely impoverished people are in desperate need of food, water, shelter and other assistance.

The quake was the biggest in PNG for 100 years, according to seismologists. There have been more than 100 aftershocks, including a 6.8-magnitude tremor on March 7. Mountain sides have collapsed, rivers have been filled by landslides, and roads, bridges and airports have been destroyed or damaged. In remote areas, whole villages have disappeared under landslides.

A BBC report on March 10 noted that nearly two weeks after the February 26 quake, PNG officials still did not know the damage and casualties in the worst-affected areas. UNICEF worker Karen Allen said that of the half million people affected in the provinces of Hela, Southern Highlands, Western and Enga, 275,000 were in need of urgent aid, and 300,000 were without shelter.

Allen said there were real concerns about diseases breaking out as unvaccinated children are brought together in poorly maintained camps. About 16 percent of PNG children were already acutely malnourished, she said, while only a fifth had access to a toilet.

Scott Waide, deputy editor at local news organisation EMTV, spoke to the BBC after visiting an informal camp in a village called Huiya, on the border of Hela and Southern Highlands provinces. More than 2,000 people had gathered there.

“They call it a care centre—it’s offering support but there’s very little food and water,” Waide said. “When people get a mobile phone signal they are sending texts to the authorities saying: ‘We have 2,000 people here and no food or water—can you send help?’”

People who have watched as oil and gas companies rapidly built up their industrial infrastructure over recent years asked why the same speed was not being applied to provide aid. Waide reported: “At the airfield when we flew in, people were waiting outside the fence asking: ‘Why are we not seeing aircraft landing with supplies? Why are we not seeing people being evacuated to Tari?’”

By Friday just over 100 people had been identified as having been killed. But officials could not say if anyone had survived in isolated mountain areas, where homes were built on stilts and all have collapsed.

Many of these areas have never had road connections. Now even the jungle tracks have been wiped out, forcing survivors to trek with children and belongings over very difficult terrain, under constant fear of further aftershocks.

They are heading toward towns and small hospitals that are already overwhelmed. As of the middle of last week, Tari, the largest town in Hela province, had received no new supplies of food or medicine because of the damaged roads and airport, according to provincial Governor Philip Undialu. Before the quake the small town only had three doctors.

An article in the Guardian on March 8 described villagers in Hela province, where landslides have buried whole villages, attempting to recover bodies and injured people with the use of machetes, spades and bare hands. Their former food gardens, one villager said, were “now a grave site.”

Anger is widespread over the government’s slowness in the relief effort and the lack of information reaching people in desperate need. The disaster relief agency has proven to be totally unprepared for such a crisis, despite PNG sitting on the unstable seismic Pacific Ring of Fire and having a long history of earthquakes.

Prime Minister Peter O’Neill has warned there will be “no quick fix” and the damage will take “months and years to be repaired.” He declared a state of emergency in the four highlands provinces in order to deploy police and the army to deal with any unrest. In the past, discontent has often erupted over the rapacious operations of the mining, oil and gas companies in the drive for profits.

The operators of the $20 billion LNG gas project in the quake area—the American giant ExxonMobil—as well as the Australian-based Oil Search and Santos corporations, have assured their shareholders that the gas and profits should be flowing again within eight weeks. ExxonMobil managing director Andrew Barry said the company’s safety infrastructure and mobilisation of technical experts had prevented major damage.

For public relations purposes, the corporations announced humanitarian aid—$US1 million from ExxonMobil, $5 million from Oil Search and $A200,000 from Santos. These are paltry sums compared to the human need, and to the billions of dollars these companies have extracted from the country, while leaving it improvised and unable to cope with any disaster.

Just a few days before the quake, ExxonMobil announced a deal with the French firm Total to spend $13 billion on an expansion of the LNG operation to double its capacity and profits.

The Australian ruling class bears most responsibility for the inadequate response to the quake disaster. PNG was an Australian colony until 1975 and since then Canberra has constantly intervened in the country to ensure that international and Australian companies are able to exploit PNG’s natural wealth.

The indifference to the suffering created by the earthquake was expressed in the Australian government’s initial grant of $A200,000 to the relief effort. After the China-PNG Friendship Association donated over $500,000, Australian Foreign Minister Bishop announced that Australian aid would be increased, to just over $1 million.

Canberra and Washington have waged a determined campaign to block China’s political and economic influence in PNG and the rest of the Asia-Pacific, especially since 2011. Australia supported O’Neill’s installation as prime minister in 2011 after his predecessor Michael Somare adopted a “look north” policy to seek Chinese aid and investment.

New Zealand’s “Pacific reset” aims to reassert imperialist dominance

Tom Peters

A five-day tour by New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of four small and impoverished Pacific island countries has been seized on by the corporate media to once again glorify the Labour Party-led government.

From March 5 to 10, Ardern visited Samoa, Tonga, Niue and the Cook Islands, accompanied by deputy prime minister and NZ First leader Winston Peters, coalition partner and Green Party leader James Shaw, and opposition National Party foreign affairs spokesman Gerry Brownlee.

TVNZ reporter Barbara Dreaver said Ardern “really shined” and was “liked enormously by the locals.” Peters was supposedly “greeted like a hero.” Newshub’s Lloyd Burr gushed that Arden showed “the incredible ability to captivate audiences by firstly disarming them with charm and then killing them with kindness.” Small sums of aid were announced, including an extra $10 million for Tonga’s rebuilding after Cyclone Gita, which left thousands homeless last month.

The predictable and sickening media frenzy could not conceal the purpose of the high-powered tour: to reassert New Zealand imperialism’s dominance in the southwest Pacific and push back against China. In recent years, Samoa, Tonga and other Pacific countries have received hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, infrastructure investment and loans from Beijing, outstripping that provided by Australia and New Zealand.

Four days before the Pacific tour, Peters delivered a speech at the Australian strategic think tank, the Lowy Institute, declaring that the Labour-NZ First-Greens government would “embark on a new, re-energised Pacific strategy.”

The Pacific, he warned, was “an increasingly contested strategic space, no longer neglected by Great Power ambition, and so Pacific Island leaders have more options. This is creating strategic anxiety.” He called for New Zealand and its allies Australia, the European Union and the United States, to “better pool our energies and resources to maintain our relative influence” against “external actors and interests.”

In other words, the imperialist powers that have ruthlessly exploited the Pacific for more than a century must work together to push back against China and Russia. New Zealand’s “Pacific reset” dovetails with Washington’s militarisation of the Asia-Pacific region, threats of war against North Korea, and trade war measures, aimed primarily at economically isolating China.

Peters indicated that New Zealand and its allies must prepare for a major war. He stated twice in his speech that “there has never been a time since 1945 when Australia and New Zealand need to work together more closely in the Pacific.” During World War II, Pacific islands were turned into bloody battlefields where the US, Australia and New Zealand fought Japan for domination over the region.

New Zealand is an imperialist power. It occupied Samoa from 1914 to 1962 and brutally oppressed the country’s inhabitants. Along with Australia and Britain, New Zealand capitalists profited from the looting of phosphates from Nauru and Banaba, in Kiribati. The Cook Islands and Niue are effectively still New Zealand colonies, with limited independence, while Tonga and Samoa depend heavily on NZ and Australian aid.

The NZ First leader declared that New Zealand had a “shared destiny” with the “family” of Pacific countries and “our national security, and our prosperity are inextricably linked.” While hypocritically stating that New Zealand recognised Pacific countries’ “clear wish to manage their own international relations,” Peters complained that “some Pacific leaders are attracted to easy sources of funding,” and that “the seductive experience of travelling in some parts of the world … is mind-bending for some young politicians.”

Peters said he and Ardern would “share perspectives” with Pacific leaders “on the strategic environment facing the Pacific, including the proliferation of external actors.”

Tensions surfaced during a March 4 joint press conference with Ardern and Samoan Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sa’ilele Malielegaoi. The latter rejected Peters’ suggestion that Chinese activities in the region were not “transparent,” saying: “It’s all out in the open … nothing was hidden.”

Tuilaepa added that over the next five years China had earmarked $US2 billion for grants and a further $2 billion in “soft loans” for Pacific countries. He brushed aside questions about Samoa’s total debt to China, saying he did not recall the figure.

During her visit Ardern announced just $NZ9.5 million in extra aid for Samoa, mostly in the form of grants for businesses.

The visit to Tonga took place amid intense political intrigue, and economic chaos exacerbated by Cyclone Gita. Ardern met Prime Minister ‘Akilisi Pohiva, but not Tonga’s head of state King Tupou VI, who was in China for talks with President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang. Tonga is a kingdom in which the royal family and nobility wield significant political power and the parliament is only partially elected.

Tonga and other Pacific countries joined a “strategic partnership” with Beijing in 2014 and China has loaned tens of millions of dollars to the country, mainly for infrastructure projects and government buildings. China is expected to play a major role in rebuilding following last month’s cyclone.

On March 1, shortly before Ardern’s visit, Tongan police arrested Lord Tu’ivakano, a noble member of parliament who was prime minister from 2010 to 2014. Tu’ivakano is one of many figures in the Tongan ruling establishment accused of being part of a scheme to sell passports to wealthy Chinese individuals. He also signed the 2014 strategic partnership with China.

On March 4, Internal Affairs Minister ‘Akosita Lavulavu and her husband ‘Etuate were also arrested on corruption charges relating to alleged forgery of documents.

The arrests and their timing raise questions about New Zealand’s involvement. Tonga’s police commissioner Stephen Caldwell, who ordered the arrests, is a New Zealander, whose position is financed by the NZ government’s aid program. The police and justice system is largely funded by New Zealand.

Police Minister Mateni Tapuleluelu, reportedly angered by the arrests and the amount of power wielded by Caldwell, offered to resign on March 1, but this was rejected by Prime Minister Pohiva.

Far from respecting the independence of the Pacific island nations, the regional imperialist powers are actively preparing to intervene with military force. Since 2012, New Zealand has hosted biennial military exercises called Operation Katipo, involving Australian and US troops, specifically designed to prepare troops to invade a Pacific nation and suppress the local population.

On March 9, New Zealand Defence Minister Ron Mark, a member of NZ First, held talks in Wellington with his Australian counterpart Marise Payne. In a joint statement they declared that “we today face an ever-more contested and competitive world, characterised by rapid change.” The statement emphasised that the two militaries would cooperate closely to maintain “stability” in the Pacific as a “high priority.” Payne also stressed the importance of the two countries’ alliance with the US, including collaboration in the ongoing war in Iraq.

Significantly, the leading role in New Zealand’s Pacific strategy is being played by NZ First, the most overtly anti-immigrant and nationalist party, which the Labour-led government handed a large amount of power. NZ First has called for greater military spending, while seeking to whip up anti-Chinese xenophobia. Peters has demanded an inquiry into National Party MP Jian Yang, alleging he is a Chinese Communist Party spy.

Ardern recently ordered an investigation by the intelligence agencies into alleged Chinese “interference.” A similar anti-Chinese witch-hunt, aimed at preparing the population for war, is underway in Australia.

UK motorists sue Volkswagen over diesel emissions fraud

Stephen Alexander

Almost 60,000 UK motorists are suing German auto giant Volkswagen AG (VW) over its central role in the “Dieselgate” emissions scandal that engulfed the car industry in 2015.

The case will commence this month at the High Court in London and will be one of the largest class action corporate lawsuits ever brought before British courts. A separate lawsuit is pending at the High Court in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where up to 70,000 VW drivers could be entitled to compensation.

In total, VW sold 1.2 million diesel vehicles in the UK fitted with the now infamous “defeat device” software designed to fool laboratory emissions tests. VW sold 11 million rigged vehicles worldwide between 2008 and 2015, of which nearly 9 million were sold in Europe.

Several VW models have been affected, including the Golf, Beetle, Jetta and Passat, as well as VW-manufactured Audi, Porsche, Skoda and Seat vehicles equipped with the firm’s Turbocharged Direct Injection “clean diesel” engines.

Independent road tests measuring real driving emissions revealed that the engines pump out lethal levels of Nitrogen Oxides (NOx) that exceed by as much as 40 times the legal limit in the United States (US), where VW’s emissions cheating was initially exposed.

New revelations emerged this year from a similar lawsuit in the US, exposing that the firm, together with German automakers BMW and Daimler, had financed pseudo-scientific diesel exhaust tests on humans and monkeys to counteract growing suspicions of emissions cheating in 2014. VW settled the class action last month for an undisclosed sum.

NOx, the main gaseous component of diesel exhaust fumes, is one of the principal ingredients in the formation of ground ozone or smog, and has been linked to several cancers, including lung and bowel cancer, as well as asthma, bronchitis and emphysema.

The diesel emissions fraud is in sync with the systematic flouting of air pollution targets by European Union (EU) member states. According to the Guardian, “23 out of the EU’s 28 countries and 130 of its cities” consistently breach legal air quality thresholds. This includes 16 UK cities, with London, Glasgow, Birmingham and Leeds among the worst polluters.

An estimated 40,000 premature deaths occur in the UK every year due to air pollution, which is also responsible for a staggering £20 billion in public health costs.

As with the Grenfell Tower Fire last June that killed 71 high-rise residents, the emissions scandal is yet another devastating expression of the human toll exacted by decades of pro-big business deregulation policies imposed by successive UK governments, Conservative and Labour alike, in collaboration with EU authorities.

The EU Parliament’s Directorate-General for Internal Policies carried out a self-incriminating study in response to Dieselgate. It concluded that European regulations are “more adapted to the task of ensuring that Member States do not use vehicle emissions legislation to penalise manufacturers from other Member States,” and promote “the free circulation of vehicles on the European market,” rather than serving to “optimise the effectiveness of environmental legislation.”

Indeed, nearly every major manufacturer and model of diesel vehicle has now been implicated in the emissions fraud.

Independent road emissions tests overseen by the International Council on Clean Transportation found that the Volvo S60, Renault’s Espace Energy, the Nissan X-Trail and FCA’s Jeep Renegade were among the highest polluters on the road and exceeded EU legal emissions—which at 80mg/km is double the US threshold for NOx fumes—by a factor of ten or more.

The engine management system containing the “defeat device”—manufactured by German engineering and electronics multinational Robert Bosch GmbH—is widely supplied across the industry.

Bosch is now fighting multiple class action lawsuits in the US over 1.5 million vehicles manufactured by VW, Daimler, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) and GM. Ford also faces a lawsuit over the sale of some 500,000 pick-up trucks fitted with Bosch software that conceals NOx emissions more than 50 times the US legal limit.

Yet, only VW has been indicted by any government, and only in the US. VW reached a settlement with the US Department of Justice early last year, involving $4.3 billion in criminal and civil penalties and the prosecution of a handful of engineers and low-level executives. The firm has also agreed to buy back and fix 480,000 vehicles, at a cost of approximately $18 billion.

While this ruling is unprecedented in its severity, much of this money has already been recouped through tax write-offs and VW’s ongoing onslaught against jobs, wages and conditions across its global workforce. The firm’s profits doubled in 2017.

To place this in context, GM reached a token $900 million settlement with the Obama administration Justice Department in 2015, over an ignition switch fault, which killed 124 and injured 275, and affected 29 million vehicles across North America. The firm covered-up the defect for more than a decade and escaped criminal prosecution entirely.

The singling out of VW over Dieselgate is bound up with the sharply escalating trade war between America and the EU, particularly Germany. The global tariffs on steel and aluminium imports recently announced by President Trump represent only the latest salvo in this conflict, which is increasingly being fought out in terms of “national security” and backed by rival military build-ups. The car industry has emerged as a major target this week, with Trump threatening to “apply a tax” on cars manufactured in Europe if the EU retaliates with barriers against US exports.

In this context, the EU and its member states have stood firmly behind VW from the outset of the emissions scandal, shielding it from either criminal or civil penalties within Europe.

If comparable levels of liability were to be recognized across the Atlantic—where diesels accounted for 53 percent of new cars sold in 2015, compared to less than 1 percent of the US market—damages could reach the equivalent of many hundreds of billions of dollars and irreparably damage the strategic position of the entire European auto industry on the world markets.

The European Commission has asked only that Volkswagen repair the tainted diesel vehicles as a “commercial gesture” to help “counteract efforts to lodge civil claims for damages in member states.”

VW has already received thousands of complaints over drastically reduced engine performance, fuel economy and even engine failure after the removal of the defeat device. According to confidential sources cited by EUObserver, preliminary tests conducted by EU scientists have revealed that emissions are in fact made worse by the software update.

The response of capitalist authorities in Europe and North America has been totally inadequate in addressing both the health crisis and financial costs to drivers. Besides VW, no other firm has been asked to recall or replace their cars.

Diesel bans, or charges have been proposed for a handful of cities, including London, Stuttgart and Düsseldorf in Germany, as well as Paris, Athens, Madrid, Copenhagen and Mexico City, in what effectively amounts to a massive subsidy to the auto industry at the expensive of the working class.

Millions, even those with relatively new cars, face either a drastic curtailment of their mobility or the considerable out-of-pocket costs and indebtedness involved in upgrading to a vehicle with the latest Euro 6 emissions standards (introduced in September 2015). In Germany, for instance, just 2.7 million of the 15 million diesel cars on German roads meet this standard. Resale values for diesels are also expected to plummet.

In the face of government inaction, European motorists have been forced to engage private law firms on a “no-win-no-fee” basis. The London trial has already been delayed for more than a year as rival law firms have fought for the lucrative right to represent claimants in UK courts.

Law multinationals, such as Australian firm Slater and Gordon, which is representing most claimants in this trial, together with third-party financiers, stand to benefit overwhelmingly from any forthcoming compensation. As the Financial Times recently explained, “a 150 per cent to 300 per cent return on investment from a successful case is considered typical.”

Increase in social deprivation hits tens of thousands of children in UK

Liz Smith

Hundreds of thousands of children and their families in some of the UK’s largest cities are suffering from staggering levels of social deprivation.

New data released by the End Child Poverty coalition, on which they base a “Child Poverty map of the UK,” demonstrates that “some of the most deprived areas of the UK have seen the biggest increases in child poverty since the coalition’s last local child poverty figures for December 2015.” The coalition adds, “Increases of 10 percentage points in some areas demonstrate the growing crisis of child poverty in the UK.”

The map shows that there are constituencies where more than half the children are growing up in poverty. The average population of a constituency in England is 72,400, in Scotland 69,000, in Northern Ireland 66,800 and in Wales 56,800.

A child is classed as in poverty if they are in a family living on less than 60 per cent of median household income. According to the latest official statistics, 60 per cent of median income, after housing costs, was around £248 per week.

The map breaks down its data into figures for separate local authorities and wards within them. The child poverty local indicators cover the period up to September 2017.

The top four constituencies with the highest levels of child poverty are in the UK’s two largest cities, London and Birmingham. In Bethnal Green and Bow in east London 54.18 percent of children are in poverty, in Ladywood, Birmingham (53.06 percent), in Poplar and Limehouse, London (52.75 percent) and Birmingham, Hodge Hill (51.46 percent).

The ten constituencies with the most child poverty are in the east end of London, central Birmingham, central Manchester, Bradford and Oldham West. The remaining 15 include other London and Birmingham boroughs and constituencies in Leeds, Newcastle, Leicester and Blackburn.

The UK local authorities with the highest levels of child poverty, after housing costs, are in London. Tower Hamlets at 53.40 percent has the highest level of child poverty in the UK. Child poverty is rocketing in many other cities, including Oldham, Leicester, Blackburn, Bradford, Middlesbrough, Nottingham—all in the top 15.

Fourteen of the 20 constituencies with the fastest growing child poverty also have poverty rates in the top 20—with the increase from December 2015 as high as 11 percentage points.

When the analysis is broken down to a more local level, there are 87 electoral wards where more than 50 percent of children live in poverty after housing costs. This figure has quadrupled since 2015 when only 21 wards had at least 50 percent. In terms of households, this is an increase overall from 2.3 million in 2014 to 2.7 million in 2016. Coldhurst ward in Oldham West, in the northwest of England, has a staggering 62.11 percent of children in poverty.

The authors were able to gain a more accurate picture of the prevalence of child poverty as researchers have changed the way it is estimated. Historically, this was calculated on HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs) figures, which in more recent years have been distorted by over-counting out-of-work poverty and undercounting in-work poverty. According to the Household Below Average Income research, the latter group has 63 percent of children in poverty whereas HMRC would estimate this at 21 percent.

The End Child Poverty researchers point out that the relative share of in-work poverty has grown from under a half to nearly two thirds in the past decade.

Professor Donald Hirsch of Loughborough University, who carried out the End Poverty Coalition research, said it pointed to an even greater growth in poverty to come. He told the Guardian, “Child poverty is going up tremendously in the next three years, and areas which have high dependency on the state income are going to be really, really hit.”

The largest group living in relative poverty is the “working poor.” While children living in households where no one works are five times more likely to be living in poverty, the low-wage economy means that the greatest proportion of poor children now live in families with one wage earner.

This was highlighted last month by a Trades Union Congress report estimating that one in seven children of public sector workers will be living in poverty by the end of this month. This translates to 550,000 children, mainly due to the pay freeze since 2010 and cuts to in-work benefits. Most affected were workers in the southwest, northwest and east Midlands regions of England.

The distress this causes for millions of children and their families is an indictment of the trade unions and the Labour Party. Labour was in office in 2008 and carried out a £1 trillion bailout of the banks. To claw this back, they began the mass austerity programme that has been continued by the Tories.

That so many are in poverty is a result of the unions’ refusal to oppose successive governments, as they have enforced their austerity and pay freeze agendas without any serious challenge.

A central factor in the surge of child poverty has been the gutting of children’s services—which support children and families in distress. These have seen their budgets slashed and even destroyed entirely.

A recent survey by three children’s charities, Action for Children, The Children’s Society and the National Children’s Bureau, revealed that, since the start of the decade, referrals to children’s services increased from 603,700 in 2010 to 646,120 in 2017. The number of children in need (resulting from an assessment) increased by four percent. Children subject to child protection plans saw a 31 percent increase in their number from 39,100 in 2010 to 51,080 in 2017. This increase was in areas that almost mirror the areas most affected by child poverty increases.

A joint report produced by The Children’s Society, Action for Children and National Children’s Bureau charities, Turning the Tide, draws attention to the fact that “the most deprived areas have seen the highest fall in early intervention funding across any quintile.” Due to government cuts in the first part of the decade, local authority spending power fell by around 24 percent in real terms. Funding has been reduced by £2.6 billion. Turning the Tide states: “The most deprived LA’s [Local Authority] have seen a fall in spending on children and young people’s services more than 6 times as large as the least deprived councils. This reduction in spending by levels of deprivation mirrors wider trends. More deprived LA’s have seen higher reductions in spending than the least deprived areas across council services.”

Poverty among children causes ill health from an early age. Last December, the Nuffield Trust—a health policy research body—published research showing that children from the poorest areas are consistently more likely to go to A&E (Accident and Emergency department) and to need emergency hospital treatment.

It found that the most deprived overall were 58 percent more likely to go to A&E with infants, 50 percent more likely with pre-schoolers and 70 percent with teenagers. The report points out, “Deprivation is linked to higher incidence of poor health. Like A&E attendances, overall emergency hospital admissions are correlated with inequality.”