Couples and families separated by New Zealand’s border restrictions

Tom Peters

Draconian border restrictions imposed by New Zealand’s Labour Party-led government have resulted in tens of thousands of people being stuck overseas indefinitely. Many are separated from their partners, family members and jobs and livelihoods.

In response to the coronavirus pandemic, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced the closure of the border on March 19 for the first time in the country’s history. Shortly afterwards the country entered a lockdown, which has since been lifted. Only citizens and permanent residents are being allowed into the country, and on arrival are quarantined for two weeks in hotels overseen by the military.

The rundown, under-funded public health system, and lack of testing, contact tracing and quarantine facilities meant that outbreaks of COVID-19 could quickly spread and cause thousands of deaths if such action was not taken.

The border closure, however, is causing significant hardship for migrants, including many who normally live and work in New Zealand but were overseas during the lockdown and are not allowed to return. This inhumane policy is part of a broader attack on immigrants’ rights, including the government’s denial of unemployment benefits to thousands of temporary migrants, and its refusal to process tens of thousands of residency applications.

On July 20, Stuff reported that supermarket manager Harpreet Kaur, her husband Sukhjinder Singh, a dairy farm manager, and their four-year-old son, have been unable to return to their home in the NZ province of Taranaki. They were stranded in India after travelling there in March to visit a sick relative.

“All the family’s personal belongings are in New Zealand, while they continue to pay for electricity, car finance and insurance despite having no income for four months,” the report stated. Their applications to Immigration New Zealand (INZ) for a “humanitarian” exemption to re-enter have been rejected.

A petition presented to parliament this week, with over 2,500 signatures, calls for the government “to lift border restrictions against holders of temporary work visas, like the Essential Skills Work Visa, with existing jobs and lives in New Zealand.”

Former Immigration Minister Iain Lees-Galloway—who was dismissed from the role by Ardern this week following revelations about an affair he had with a staff member—told TVNZ on July 6 that temporary migrants who are overseas would likely be barred for months.

Many partners of citizens or permanent residents (PRs) are also barred, despite an initial statement from Ardern that they would be exempted from the border closure.

The Facebook group “NZ Citizens and PRs Separated from Partners by NZ Border Closure” is promoting another petition, with more than 2,500 signatures so far. It calls on parliament to “urge the government to fulfil their pledge of reuniting NZ citizens and permanent residents with their partners, by directing Immigration New Zealand (INZ) to process Visitor, Work and Resident Visas for partners of New Zealanders stuck offshore.”

A member of the group, Maz, told the World Socialist Web Site that she was stuck in Scotland, unable to return to live with her husband, a New Zealand citizen. After the border closure was announced, with just 12 hours’ notice, Maz booked flights but was turned away when seeking to board at the airport, after airline staff phoned INZ officials.

“According to INZ and the Labour government’s criteria, [partners] should be able to enter the country,” she said. “But they stopped processing offshore visas in March. Some people have been waiting from the beginning of last year for a partnership visa.” INZ’s visa application centres outside New Zealand remain closed.

Partners of NZ citizens can still enter if they travel together as a couple. Some New Zealanders have made expensive international journeys in order to bring their partner back. Maz said her husband would likely have to travel to Scotland to do this.

“One of our members went to Tokyo to get her husband,” Maz explained. “Many people will go offshore to get their spouses and come back because that’s the only legitimate way. That’s why we started this petition to point out the ridiculousness of it.”

Maz said many partners had applied for a “humanitarian” exemption to enter New Zealand. “But it’s almost impossible. We have no idea what the criteria is. There’s no transparency around that whatsoever. There’s one woman whose partner is Cuban and he is going hungry and that’s still not enough for a humanitarian exemption. She’s worried about him, but that is falling on deaf ears,” she explained.

Lees-Galloway told TVNZ there was a “high bar” for such exemptions, and people who had family in their home country were “unlikely” to qualify.

On June 16, Radio NZ reported that Auckland woman Ruth McDowall’s partner Teddy has been stuck in Ghana for almost a year trying to get a visa to come to New Zealand. Teddy has still not met his young daughter.

McDowall said: “Why is my daughter coming up to nine months old and she’s never met her father when we’ve been in a loving and committed relationship for nearly six years? … Our family matters, his life matters, black fathers matter, and we should be allowed to be a family together and also here in New Zealand during this worldwide upheaval of a pandemic.”

Maz told the WSWS the anti-immigrant rhetoric in New Zealand, with an election coming up in September, “reminds me so much of the conversations around Brexit: ‘we don’t want foreigners,’ ‘jobs are for New Zealanders.’ That’s really interesting as an outsider, because I know New Zealanders are hospitable people.”

She continued: “I do think the border is being used to fight the election, as opposed to schools, education, public services… So then you have these thousands of people, myself included, who are being used as pawns.”

Maz criticised the media’s focus on the Ardern government’s supposed “kindness and compassion,” saying: “The way migrants have been treated is shocking. It’s a scandal, and the worldwide media hasn’t picked up on it, or are not aware of it.”

The Labour Party-led coalition includes the Green Party and the New Zealand First Party, a right-wing nationalist party which largely sets the agenda on foreign policy and immigration. NZ First is campaigning to slash immigration to just 15,000 people a year, compared with more than 50,000 last year. The party is receiving campaign advice from British businessman Arron Banks and his associate Andy Wigmore who both played a major role in advising and funding the far-right UK Independence Party’s campaign to leave the European Union.

German chicken processing plant remains open despite coronavirus outbreak

Marianne Arens

A chicken processing plant owned by the German brand Wiesenhof was reported as a coronavirus hotspot as of last Saturday. Mass testing at the facility in Lohne, Lower Saxony, resulted in 66 positive COVID-19 cases. The plant is operated by Oldenburger Poultry Specialists (OGS), which is part of Germany’s largest poultry breeder and processor, the PHW Group.

Precariously employed workers have once again been most affected. Of the 66 positive cases, 48 workers are employed by subcontractors, five by staffing agencies, and one works for an external cleaning company. Only 12 are directly employed at the slaughterhouse. In addition to the infected workers, a further 70 were identified as close contacts and sent into quarantine.

Already in late June, 45 workers tested positive at a Wiesenhof plant belonging to the same company in Wildeshausen, Lower Saxony. At the time, the plant was closed for two weeks. This time around, local council leader Herbert Winkel (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) told a press conference on Sunday that there was no need to close the facility. He claimed that the infections largely took place due to private contacts, even though the rapid spread of the disease to 66 workers makes transmission within the plant all but certain.

In the slaughterhouse, “no particular infection hotspot” was identified, apart from the packaging area of the plant, where workers congregate during breaks. They probably “failed to observe social distancing,” said the council leader.

The claims by the local CDU official are in line with the racist tirades of North Rhine-Westphalia’s Minister President Armin Laschet (CDU). The massive coronavirus outbreak at a Tönnies slaughterhouse had nothing to do with the easing of coronavirus restrictions because “Romanians and Bulgarians travelled and that’s where the virus came from,” Laschet stated a month ago. “That’s what will happen everywhere.” The common message is: workers are responsible for all of the hotspots because they have dragged the virus into otherwise perfectly functioning businesses.

As with the outbreaks at Tönnies, Vion, Westfleisch and other slaughterhouses, the politicians’ main concern is keeping production running so profits continue to pile up. By contrast, nothing is to be done to alter the systematic super-exploitation of the workers. However, it is precisely the brutal working conditions, characterised by low wages, stress, overwork and terrible living conditions, that encourage the spread of the virus. There remains no vaccine for the highly contagious virus, which is spread via aerosols. Workers in particular, who carry out strenuous labour side by side for hours on end, have no way to protect themselves.

The social dimension of the COVID-19 pandemic can no longer be denied. Apart from elderly care homes and hospitals, the main hotspots have been located in slaughterhouses, mail distribution centres and refugee accommodation centres, as well as schools and apartment blocks in working-class neighbourhoods and impoverished city districts. One of the latest outbreaks, detected in the district of Uelzen on Monday, reportedly impacted 13 people at a school, including families who “live in close proximity to each other,” as the official announcement put it.

It is the working class above all that is bearing the heaviest burden due to the pandemic. Workers bear the brunt of the job cuts, plant closures and wage cuts currently being agreed on by the corporate bosses and union heads. But workers also pay a much higher price than the privileged layers of society when it comes to living conditions and the impact on health and well-being.

This is made particularly clear by the case numbers in the health care sector. Doctors and medical personnel account for 10 percent of all infections globally, a report last weekend noted. Although the pandemic is spreading comparatively slowly in Germany, the Robert Koch Institute noted in its statistics that 20 doctors and other medical professionals, seven teachers and five employees “in the meat packing industry or the kitchens of restaurants” have died. These figures are undoubtedly incomplete.

On Monday, the World Health Organisation reported a new daily record for infections, with 260,000 new cases. Total infections have now risen to over 15 million, with more than 600,000 deaths. While the worst figures come from the United States, Brazil and India, large parts of Europe have also been hit hard by the pandemic.

Figures for Europe are certainly comparable with those in the United States. In the European economic region, including Britain, 1.6 million people have been infected with the virus; over 180,000 have died. The death tolls in the five largest economies (Britain 45,400, Italy 35,000, France 30,000, Spain 28,500, and Germany 9,000) amount to 148,000, more than the official death toll in the United States. Deaths from the coronavirus totalled nearly 144,000 on Thursday, according to Johns Hopkins University.

The German federal government and leading state politicians have no intention of effectively protecting workers from the disease. Following the maxim “profits before health and life,” the main priority is to get the economy up and running at full speed. This was made clear on Sunday by Helge Braun (CDU), the head of Angela Merkel’s Chancellor’s Office.

In an interview with the Bild am Sonntag newspaper, Braun declared that currently it can be said that “In Germany, we have the coronavirus under control.” The government will not only ensure that “schools run largely as normal after the summer holidays,” but “the football stadiums no longer need to be empty, I think.”

The head of the Chancellor’s Office added the obligatory rhetoric about maintaining the wearing of masks and other hygiene measures, such as handwashing. But the Bild largely ignored this, with its headline, “Encouraging discussion with Chancellor’s Office head Helge Braun: Fans should return to stadiums after the summer, children can go to school as normal!”

The government has apparently decided to adopt the policy for schools imposed by the state government in Saxony for the entire country. A study was presented last week in Saxony to justify the unrestricted reopening of schools and childcare facilities. According to its conclusions, children are “more of a brake” on the pandemic.

This dangerous assessment stands in stark contrast to a series of serious studies recently conducted. The Süddeutsche Zeitung reported on a study in South Korea that examined close to 60,000 people in contact with someone infected with coronavirus. It found that few children under the age of 10 passed on the infection to others. However, children under the age of 19 infected contacts above the average rate, including for adults.

There have also been large coronavirus outbreaks in Israeli schools. A second coronavirus wave is threatening Israel, with the premature opening of schools being blamed by many for this development.

The claim that children are “actually a brake” on the pandemic and are not at risk from the disease is contradicted by a case reported on the World Socialist Web Site from Texas. Eighty-five babies aged 1 or younger were infected in Nueces County.

The infection rate in the county has risen dramatically in July after it had previously declined. A health care director warned the public on Saturday about the infections among babies. One of the babies died on July 6; it was less than six months old.

UK manufacturers warn of “jobs bloodbath”

Paul Bond

A report by manufacturers’ trade group Make UK warns of a “jobs bloodbath” over the next six months. Hundreds of thousands of jobs have already gone in the first six months of the year, with millions more jobs at risk across automotive, aerospace and other industries.

Yesterday, household appliance manufacturer Dyson—owned by Britain’s richest man, Sir James Dyson—announced it would shed 900 jobs from its global workforce of 14,000 in a cost-cutting operation. Six hundred jobs will go among its 4,000-strong UK workforce and a further 300 worldwide.

Make UK, which represents 20,000 manufacturing companies, is calling for an extension of the job furlough scheme—under which the government pays 80 percent of the wages of those unable to work during the pandemic—in the face of a likely second COVID-19 outbreak later in the year.

Make UK’s fifth COVID-19 Manufacturing Monitor survey of 170 companies between July 3 and July 14 revealed that pessimism about a return to normal trading conditions “has increased substantially again” after recent hopes of recovery. Nearly 42 percent of firms believe it will take more than a year for any return to pre-pandemic normality, the highest figure Make UK has yet recorded. A further 3.5 percent said they will not return to normal.

The previous optimism followed May’s still small 1.8 percent growth in GDP, although the report acknowledges that the rise made little impact on the 20.3 percent decline recorded in April. The latest report comes when 99 percent of respondents are trading, albeit with varying levels of staff furloughed. More than half of companies reported a decline in sales and orders over the fortnight covered. Only 15 percent of companies are operating at full capacity.

Earlier this month, economists were pointing to likely job losses despite a tiny increase in factory production. The IHS Markit/Cips manufacturing purchasing managers’ index (PMI) survey in June had already noted that part of the increase was attributable only to clearing logistics backlogs. Economics research consultant Samuel Tombs warned, “The recovery will lose momentum before long.”

Make UK commented on this “gloomy perspective for the industry’s confidence in its own recovery.” It says bluntly that “the prospects of a quick V-shape recovery, as believed so strongly by some, remain bleak.” The possibility of a recession once GDP figures for the second quarter are released “remains likely.”

The result will be devastating job losses. More than half the companies (53.3 percent) said they will make redundancies in the next six months, with a further 20.1 percent saying they might. Two months ago, only a quarter of companies were talking of redundancies.

Dave Atkinson, UK head of manufacturing at Lloyds Bank, warned a few weeks ago of a spike in factory job losses in the second half of the year, with manufacturers “bracing themselves…in the knowledge that a reckoning looms.”

Make UK’s report states that nearly a quarter of companies will lay off up to 5 percent of their workers. Around a third are looking to lay off 6 to 10 percent of their workers, and a similar percentage talk of dismissing up to a quarter of their workforce. Nearly 8 percent will lay off between a quarter and a half of their workers.

Layoffs have accelerated in recent weeks. June’s fall in manufacturing employment, the fifth consecutive monthly decline, was one of the sharpest in the 28 years of the PMI.

To give some idea of how bad the situation is, when Lontra recently announced 10 new assembly line jobs at an industrial machinery plant in Birmingham, it received 15,000 applications. Job vacancies in the city have fallen by more than two-thirds because of the pandemic. This week, a restaurant in Manchester received nearly 1,000 applications for a front-of-house position.

Since the Conservative government finally introduced lockdown late in March, around 12 million people have been paid under the furlough scheme—9.4 million employed by firms and 2.7 million self-employed. According to the Make UK report, 30 percent of manufacturing companies have between half and three-quarters of their staff on furlough.

As part of plans to enforce the back-to-work agenda, forcing millions to work in unsafe conditions, the furlough scheme will be scaled back from August and withdrawn completely at the end of October. Bank of England rate-setter Jonathan Haskel noted “a great deal of uncertainty” as to how many furloughed workers would be able to return to their jobs.

The Make UK study reveals how little confidence exists in the government’s medical and scientific claims, even among the corporate sector equally desperate to resume profit-making. When Prime Minister Boris Johnson was announcing an end to support for home working, the Financial Times reported business leaders being warned to prepare for another wave of the pandemic. It noted that “many bosses privately doubt Mr. Johnson’s hopes for a return to normality in time for Christmas.”

While Johnson ruled out any further national lockdown, the government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, was warning, “Come winter, the challenges will be very much greater and there is a risk that this could also need national measures.”

The fact that companies are recognising the realities and implications of Vallance’s comment underscores the murderous criminality of the government’s policy. The report’s conclusion is that the furlough scheme must be extended by another six months in strategic industry sectors to prevent job losses “on a scale not seen since the 1980s.”

While describing redundancy plans by firms as “very painful reading,” one of the services Make UK offers its members is advice on how to “plan and project manage a redundancy process effectively, saving…time and money.”

If redundancies are likely because of the pandemic, and specifically because of the end of the furlough scheme, they write, “employers should start considering next steps now to ensure that their plans are as cost-effective as possible.” Make UK will shortly hold a webinar on “Redundancies in the Context of Covid-19.”

According to Make UK’s forecasts, the automotive sector will lose 34 percent of its Gross Value added this year. The category Other Transport—aerospace, predominantly—is forecast to be down 15 percent.

Employers view the mounting economic crisis in the context of continued uncertainty over post-Brexit trade deals. Economics research consultant Tombs pointed to this additional factor in limiting manufacturing recovery. Brexit uncertainty will “likely build,” he said, “as the December 2020 deadline for a trade deal with the EU nears without material progress.”

Make UK emphasises that the sector-specific support they seek is equivalent to measures taken by European competitors in bailing out corporations as trade war escalates globally. Make UK calls for a National Skills Taskforce, “involving the trade unions and other key stakeholders to ensure key skills are retained and redeployed within manufacturing.”

The employers know who their allies are when it comes to cutting jobs. The trade unions have demonstrated repeatedly that their primary concern is not resisting such attacks but retaining their position as chief negotiator of workers’ livelihoods.

The struggle to defend jobs and wages, and to ensure that any return to work is conducted only under safe conditions, requires the working class to take up an independent struggle. This means forming rank-and-file action committees in workplaces and neighbourhoods as part of an international struggle for socialism.

Huge Australian budget deficits mean intensified assault on workers

Mike Head

The global COVID-19 pandemic, coming on top of an already slumping world capitalist economy, is producing by far the biggest federal and state budget deficits in Australia since the issuing of war bonds to finance the military operations in World War II.

Already, governments and the corporate elite, in partnership with the trade unions, have begun extracting the cost from the working class, via job destruction, pay cuts and freezes, and attacks on working conditions, as well as social spending cuts. But much more is to come.

The federal budget deficit hit almost $86 billion last financial year, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg revealed yesterday in an “Economic and Fiscal Update,” and will more than double to $184 billion in the current 2020–21 financial year.

That deficit will equal almost 10 percent of gross domestic product, or more than twice the proportion recorded during the global financial crisis of 2008-09. State governments have begun reporting similar impacts.

All the Liberal-National Coalition government’s repeated claims to have brought the budget “back in black” after a decade, with a projected 2019–20 surplus of just over $5 billion, have been torn to shreds. Gross federal government debt is expected to reach $852 billion in 2020–21.

The yawning deficits are not only the product of the worst worldwide crash since the 1930s Great Depression. This has produced mass unemployment globally, which, in Australia, is reflected in a projected $63.9 billion decline in income tax revenue this financial year.

Much more, the deficits are the result of the biggest corporate handouts in history. Since March, the federal, state and territory governments have handed out more than $300 billion in “stimulus packages.” The lion’s share has gone to big business, including via JobKeeper wage subsidies that have so far kept millions of their employees on the job, generating profits.

At the same time, more than 2.5 million workers—or nearly a fifth of the labour force—have been thrown into unemployment or under-employment. Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government yesterday announced that this toll will deepen by the end of the year, with another quarter of a million jobs expected to be eliminated.

Yet, the government declared that the burden must be borne by workers through “industrial relations reform”—a code phrase for slashing jobs, wages and conditions—and fast-tracked pro-business “deregulation.”

Frydenberg insisted that the “first cab off the rank” for the government would be entrenching changes to workplace laws, agreed by the unions in March as part of the JobKeeper laws. Almost one million businesses must get permanent powers to change workers’ hours, duties and location, the treasurer said.

This issue will be discussed when Industrial Relations Minister Christian Porter and Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) secretary Sally McManus resume talks next week. In March, Porter called McManus his BFF (“best friend forever”) when the ACTU agreed to impose these “flexibilities” on millions of already low-paid retail, hospitality and clerical workers.

For the past two months the unions have been involved in five tripartite “working groups” with the government and employer groups in devising further industrial relations “reforms.” What is being prepared is another wholesale restructuring of economic relations at the expense of the working class.

Frydenberg also foreshadowed bringing forward historic income tax cuts previously legislated for the next several years. This will be another bonanza for the wealthy. Those receiving above $200,000 a year—that is the top 5 percent of income recipients—will benefit to the tune of some $33 billion over five years.

Simultaneously, as announced on Tuesday, the government is slashing the JobKeeper wage subsidies and JobSeeker unemployment benefits on which about 5 million workers and their households depend to survive.

According to Frydenberg, such measures are essential to halt the “free fall” in business investment. The government and the corporate oligarchs are exploiting the economic breakdown of their own system to demand far greater “incentives” to invest and chase profits.

At the same time, the collapse of investment exposes the government’s predictions that economic growth will suddenly soar to 2.5 percent in 2021 after contracting 7 percent in the current June quarter.

Business investment is expected to plunge 12.5 percent this financial year, driven by a collapse in non-mining investment of 19.5 percent. Housing investment is forecast to drop 16 percent. These statistics point to a steep and prolonged recession.

The government’s forecasts are not simply optimistic. They are based on continuing the deadly economic “reopening” drive, despite the COVID-19 surge in the two most populous states, Victoria and New South Wales. The financial calculations assume that Victoria’s partial shutdown will last only four more weeks, that no new safety shutdowns will occur anywhere else in the country, and that international travel will resume from January 1.

Frydenberg admitted that the situation could deteriorate due to the coronavirus outbreak in Victoria, where 13 deaths and almost 1,200 new cases have been reported in the past three days.

The government’s estimates are based on cutting pay levels too. Predicted wage growth has been revised down to 1.25 percent for 2020–21, the lowest since official records were kept. This average figure disguises the outright cuts inflicted on many low-paid insecure and casualised workers.

The treasurer said the staggering budget deficits “reveal the real cost to the budget of protecting lives and livelihoods as result of coronavirus.” That is a barefaced lie. Lives and livelihoods are being destroyed as a result of a bipartisan profit-driven policy.

As the WSWS warned, the return of large-scale infection is a predicted consequence of the decision by the “national cabinet,” consisting of Morrison and the state and territory leaders, both Labor and Liberal-National, to lift limited shutdown measures in May. This de facto national unity government did so in order to push workers, including school teachers, back into workplaces for the sake of corporate profits.

Even based on the government’s assumptions, Treasury forecast that the jobless rate could hit 10.75 percent by December. This is a vast underestimate of the real loss of jobs and working hours, especially among young workers. The Grattan Institute has estimated that nearly 12 percent of the jobs worked by those under 30 have disappeared in the past four months.

Some corporate economists, such as Chris Richardson from Deloitte Access, have promoted the illusion that the economy can “grow” out of the deficits over time, as happened during the post-World War II years. But that period was fundamentally different, based on the international boom that eventually followed the victory of the US and its allies.

Today, the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered and accelerated a protracted economic breakdown in US and world capitalism. Moreover, in the 1950s, the rich were compelled to help pay off the debt, via high marginal income tax rates that began at 75 percent in 1951 and then 67 percent from 1955 to the 1980s. Then the Hawke and Keating Labor governments began to slash them to today’s top rate of 45 percent, and the company tax rate from 49 to 33 percent (soon to be 27.5 percent).

As for the financial elite, its message is blunt. Today’s editorial in the Murdoch media’s Australian told the government that its “policy marketing” had to shift. It was time to “break the news” to the population about the need for “hard reforms.” The Australian Financial Review called for the revival of “the supply-side revolution of the 1980s and ‘90s.”

That “revolution”—a brutal restructuring on the back of the jobs, wages and conditions of the working class—was implemented by the Hawke and Keating Labor governments, backed to the hilt by the unions. Labor is just as committed to satisfying the new requirements of the ruling class. In response to the budget deficit announcement, the opposition shadow treasurer Jim Chalmers mainly criticised the government for allowing the deficits and debt to grow before the pandemic—in other words for not being sufficiently austere.

Reports on Twitter hack confirm existence of admin tool used for social media censorship

Kevin Reed

News reports published in the week since hackers breached Twitter security and hijacked dozens of high-profile accounts have confirmed that administrators working for the social media company use a dashboard to blacklist and censor content down to the level of specific users and their individual tweets.

A report in the New York Times on July 17 confirmed that a screenshot, originally shared by Motherboard on the day of the hack and reported previously here on the WSWS, is authentic and shows that Twitter’s backend administrative tool includes several buttons including “Search Blacklist,” “Trends Blacklist” and “Notifications Spike,” among others.

Along with these features—showing clearly that Twitter employees have the ability to “throttle” or “shadowban” tweets or users on their platform—the tool also can be used to modify email addresses associated with accounts. This latter function enables the transfer of a Twitter account from one person to another and is one of the features of the dashboard that the hackers used to gain control of the high-profile accounts.

Screenshot shared by hacker “Kirk” as proof that he had breached Twitter secutiry and accessed the backend admin panel of the social media platform.jpg

On the afternoon and evening of July 15, anonymous hackers accessed Twitter’s internal employee dashboard and hijacked the accounts of major public figures—including Barack Obama, Kanye West, Bill Gates and Elon Musk—each of which have tens of millions of followers.

In what Twitter described as a “coordinated social engineering attack,” the hackers repeatedly published tweets from the breached accounts as part of a scheme to dupe the public out of money in the form of Bitcoin cryptocurrency.

Messages posted by the hackers said, in the case of Barack Obama’s account for example, “I am giving back to my community due to Covid-19! All Bitcoin sent to my address below will be sent back doubled. If you send $1,000, I will send back $2,000!”

On that day, Twitter management responded in its own tweets that it was aware of the attack and was working to “fix it.” However, after hours of struggling to regain control of their own platform, Twitter was forced to block all verified accounts from posting any tweets.

In subsequent reports from Twitter, the company admitted that the hackers gained control of 130 accounts and had downloaded data from at least eight of these using the “Your Twitter Data” user tool. In a corporate blog post on Saturday, Twitter reported that the hackers “manipulated a small number of employees and used their credentials to access Twitter’s internal systems … the attackers were able to initiate password reset, login to the account and send Tweets.”

In an update to the blog post on Wednesday, the company reported, “We believe that for up to 36 of the 130 targeted accounts, the attackers accessed the DM inbox, including 1 elected official in the Netherlands. To date, we have no indication that any other former or current elected official had their DMs accessed.” DM stands for direct messaging which is private communications between individual Twitter users.

Finally, Twitter said, “We’re embarrassed, we’re disappointed, and more than anything, we’re sorry. We know that we must work to regain your trust, and we will support all efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice.” The day after the event, Twitter’s shares fell 4 percent, wiping out $1.3 billion in value.

The Times story on Friday included interviews with four individuals who participated in the hacking operation. The report said, “The interviews indicate that the attack was not the work of a single country like Russia or a sophisticated group of hackers. Instead, it was done by a group of young people—one of whom says he lives at home with his mother—who got to know one another because of their obsession with owning early or unusual screen names, particularly one letter or number, like @y or @6.”

Although the Times published a screenshot of the Twitter admin dashboard, the journalists and editors focused entirely on the fact that someone named “Kirk” transmitted it to the youthful hackers as proof that he had breached Twitter security and gained access to the backend tool and did not raise a single question about the functionality that is clearly displayed in the image.

By not raising any questions about the admin panel, the Times is essentially functioning as a PR operation for Twitter. Far from providing an explanation of the blacklisting and account manipulation features of their backend tool, according to The Verge, Twitter has been busy “removing images of the screenshot from its platform and in some cases suspending users who continue to share it.”

Other tech news sites have also raised questions about the admin panel such as Reclaim the Net, which published an article on July 15 entitled, “Leaked screenshots appear to show internal Twitter tool that can blacklist users from search and trends.”

Referring to such practices as “shadowbanning,” Reclaim the Net reporter Tom Parker wrote, “At the start of the year, Twitter officially made shadowbanning, a controversial practice that involves limiting the distribution or visibility of user posts in a way that’s difficult to detect, part of its terms of service. Now new leaked screenshots from Motherboard appear to show an internal Twitter user administration tool that can be used by Twitter staff to blacklist user accounts from search and trends.”

Parker continued, “In June, the pop culture satirical news account Price of Reason documented how Twitter had shadowbanned one of its viral tweets that made fun of HBO Max’s controversial decision to stop Bugs Bunny’s hunter adversary Elmer Fudd using a gun in its Looney Tunes remake.

“The account owner noticed a drastic slowdown in engagement after his tweet had started to go viral and discovered that he was being blacklisted from Twitter search, causing both his account and the tweet to be scrubbed from search results. ‘It’s as if neither it or I ever existed,’ Price of Reason told Reclaim the Net.”

Another story on Telecoms.com by Scott Bicheno on July 15 said, “We don’t know exactly what being blacklisted entails, but the name of the tools strongly implies accounts can be prevented from appearing in searches and trending lists, even while they’re still otherwise active. We’re also not aware of any precedent for accounts being notified when they are placed on one of these blacklists, which adds weight to claims that Twitter seeks to manipulate conversation on its platform through the means of ‘shadow banning.’”

These revelation about the details of Twitter’s methods for manipulating the account activity of users—either by shadowbanning or by deleting accounts entirely—shows that censorship is a top level activity and priority of the social media company.

On Tuesday, Twitter announced that it had removed 7,000 accounts allegedly active in spreading far-right QAnon conspiracy theories. The essential views of the QAnon “movement” are the belief that Donald Trump is waging a secret war against an elite cabal of devil worshiping pedophiles who rule the world.

QAnon also claims that the Democratic Party is behind international crime rings and that “deep state” figures are waging a war against Donald Trump. The group’s content has spread widely on Facebook, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube.

In a tweet from Twitter Safety, the company said, “We’ve been clear that we will take strong enforcement action on behavior that has the potential to lead to offline harm. In line with this approach, this week we are taking further action on so-called ‘QAnon’ activity across the service.”

According to a report in Reuters, Twitter will roll out the account suspensions this week and are expected to impact about 150,000 accounts globally. It said the initial 7,000 accounts were removed for “violating the company’s rules against spam, platform manipulation and ban evasion.”

The mass shutdown of Twitter accounts is a blatant act of censorship by the social media platform. It is not the responsibility of the giant tech monopolies—Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.—to determine what is authentic or truthful information and what can be seen or read by the public.

The use of advanced software tools to throttle tweets or ban groups such as the far-right QAnon proponents is part of a much larger effort by the corporate and financial elite and capitalist state to gain control of online and social media information and communications. Under conditions of growing working class struggles, these measures are ultimately aimed at blocking and shutting down the dissemination of revolutionary socialist ideas among masses of people all over the world.

Catalan politicians’ phones hacked by government-grade spyware

Alice Summers

The phones of two senior Catalan politicians and at least two other pro-independence campaigners were hacked using “government-grade spyware,” according to a joint investigation by the Guardian and El País. The software, known as Pegasus and developed by Israeli cyber-espionage firm NSO Group, was used to tap the mobile phones of Roger Torrent, president of the Catalan parliament, and Ernest Maragall, former regional foreign minister, over a two-week period in April-May 2019.

The hacking occurred under the premiership of Pedro Sánchez of the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE), which has been ruling since June 2018, now backed by the pseudo-left Podemos.

Two other pro-independence campaigners, Anna Gabriel and Jordi Domingo, also had their phones hacked. Gabriel is a former member of the Catalan parliament for pro-independence party Popular Unity Candidacy (CUP). She has lived in self-exile in Switzerland since fleeing Spain after being called before the Spanish Supreme Court to give evidence about her role in the 2017 Catalan independence referendum.

Domingo, a pro-independence activist, believes he may not have been the intended target of the cyberattacks, instead suspecting that the hacking targeted a well-known lawyer by the same name, who helped to draft a Catalan constitution.

NSO Group was long held by the San Francisco, US-based private equity firm Francisco Partners. Its spyware, which NSO says is sold “exclusively” to governments to “detect and prevent terrorism and crime,” infected the phones of its targets via the messaging platform WhatsApp. The hacking software’s operator places a WhatsApp call to the target, after which the device is infected with Pegasus—even if the target did not pick up their phone.

According to a US lawsuit by WhatsApp against NSO Group, Pegasus exploited an existing “vulnerability” in the messaging service, which could give the hackers access to everything on the target’s phone—emails, text messages and photos. The malicious software could also turn on the phone’s microphone and camera, enabling the operator to listen to and watch everything their targets were doing.

The attacks against Catalan politicians are only the tip of the iceberg. WhatsApp estimates that 1,400 users had their phones breached in this way during the two-week period last year. Victims of the malware attacks included unspecified “senior government officials,” diplomats and human rights activists. Indian journalists, Rwandan dissidents and Moroccan human rights campaigners also allegedly were targeted. NSO Group software has been implicated in numerous anti-democratic spying operations, including targeting Mexican journalists, lawyers and opponents of then-President Enrique Peña Nieto in 2015–16.

The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) is unequivocally hostile to the programme of the CUP and of the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) of Torrent and Maragall. The pro-capitalist, bourgeois-separatist agenda of the Catalan nationalists promoted a nationalistic programme to divide workers on the Iberian Peninsula. Their support for pro-austerity Catalan regional governments underlines their hostility to the working class.

But the spying and intimidation campaign against the CUP and ERC must be opposed. The phone-hacking is a brazen violation of democratic principles, establishing a repressive apparatus aimed fundamentally against the working class. It underscores that governments around the world are moving towards police-state repression in response to an upsurge of the class struggle.

Catalan parliament President Roger Torrent denounced the hacking attacks as being part of the Spanish state’s “dirty war” on its political opponents and pointed to the role of the PSOE government in these anti-democratic manoeuvres. “The [PSOE-Podemos] government we have now claims to be the most progressive that we’ve had historically,” said Torrent. “But these kinds of actions have happened under a PSOE government.”

Torrent and Maragall will take out legal action against former chief of Spain’s National Intelligence Centre (CNI), Félix Sanz Roldán, who headed the CNI when their phones were targeted last year. The CNI said in a statement that it acted “in full accordance with the legal system,” but did not specifically comment on the use of Pegasus spyware.

The Spanish Interior Ministry denied involvement in the spying operations, telling the Guardian and El País: “Neither the interior ministry, nor the national police, nor the Guardia Civil [paramilitary police] have ever had any relationship with the company that developed this program and, as such, have never contracted its services.”

While the identities of those who spied on Torrent and Maragall remain unclear, the Spanish state’s denials cannot be taken at face value. These revelations come after vicious police repression in Catalonia since the 2017 independence referendum. Spanish police violently cracked down on voters in that referendum, wounding over 1,000 people as voters responded to police beatings at the polls with mass civil disobedience. Since then, Spanish courts have jailed nine separatist leaders involved in the referendum on trumped-up charges of “sedition.”

In 2018, it emerged that Spanish police spied on CUP officials for over a year, with officers monitoring CUP headquarters and those entering and leaving the premises.

Podemos, meanwhile, has postured as an opponent of these police-state measures; its leader, Deputy Prime Minister Pablo Iglesias, declared the use of the spyware “unacceptable in a democracy.” Podemos and the ERC have called for a parliamentary commission to investigate the spying as part of a broader inquiry into the so-called “sewers of state” and allegations of police corruption and media collusion.

This show of opposition is entirely cynical. Podemos has long supported the PSOE, under whose government the hacking attacks were carried out, and entered into coalition with it this January. In March, Iglesias was integrated into the Intelligence Affairs Commission, which directs, supervises and controls the activities of the CNI spy agency.

El País insisted that they would support electronic spying on legal political activity, as long as a judge approved it. “It is imperative to know whether the alleged espionage had a legal basis,” it wrote in an editorial which speculated that Torrent and Maragall might have aimed to “destroy the constitutional order, threatening the majority will of the citizens, using the aid of foreign powers with dubious democratic credentials, like Russia.”

The revelations of spying on Catalan officials is the result of a coordinated campaign by major European media outlets, revealing information gleaned from the operations of giant corporations and state intelligence agencies. Moreover, these revelations emerged suddenly in publications, like El País, that were vitriolically hostile to the Catalan nationalists during the 2017 referendum.

Other forces outside Spain’s borders are likely implicated in the spying on Torrent, Maragall, and others via the Pegasus program. Spain, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, the United States, France and the United Kingdom have all been identified as users of Pegasus software. The scandal is being followed not only in these countries, but also in others, including India and Turkey, that were victims of NSO Group operations.

Last October, WhatsApp launched legal action in the United States against NSO Group after Francisco Partners sold its stake in the Israeli firm, alleging that NSO was responsible for a series of sophisticated attacks that violated US law in an “unmistakeable pattern of abuse.” In April, WhatsApp’s court filings alleged that NSO Group was “deeply involved” in hacking 1,400 users. WhatsApp claimed that servers controlled by NSO Group, and not its government clients, were vital to executing the phone tapping.

NSO Group’s defence argues that WhatsApp has “conflated” its actions with those of its “sovereign customers,” stating in its legal filing that “Government customers [make] all [the] decisions about how to use the technology.” Lawyers for NSO claimed: “If anyone installed Pegasus on any alleged ‘target devices,’ it was not [the] defendants [NSO Group]. It would have been an agency of a sovereign government.”

As US-European Union (EU) relations collapse amid mutual trade war policies and the COVID-19 pandemic, and war tensions mount in the Middle East, this case is emerging as a political football in the European ruling establishment. The anti-democratic record on the Catalan question of the Spanish bourgeoisie, backed by all the NATO powers, is a warning. Only the mobilization of the working class can halt the growing resort to state spying and police-state policies, which are supported by the entire ruling elite.

Greek, Turkish warships nearly clash in Aegean over Mediterranean gas fields

Alex Lantier

A Turkish naval expedition to escort oil-drilling vessels in the Aegean Sea off the Greek island of Kastellórizo this week nearly escalated into war between NATO allies Turkey and Greece.

This came amid mounting divisions inside the imperialist alliance over the civil war in Libya triggered by the 2011 NATO war that toppled Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime. Backed by France, Egypt voted to approve military deployments into Libya against Turkish-backed forces, only weeks after Turkish intelligence officers were wounded in a bombing of Libya’s Watiya airbase. It is ever clearer that conflicts unleashed by decades of imperialist war in the Middle East and the Mediterranean now threaten to blow up the NATO alliance.

Turkey announced that the research vessel Oruç Reis would set sail Wednesday for oil exploration with a naval escort. While Turkish F-16 fighter jets were intercepted by Greek jets in Greek airspace near Kastellórizo, a group of 18 Turkish warships prepared to escort the vessel into waters that Greece claims as part of its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). Analyst Vassilis Nedos told the Greek conservative daily Kathimerini that Greek forces had also detected Turkish drones and Special Forces units operating in the area.

A Greek Navy Ship at Malonas Bay, Rhodes. (Credit: Flickr.com/seligmanwaite)

After 12 Turkish warships set sail with the Oruç Reis, the Greek government responded by placing its entire armed forces on full alert, recalling Greek Chief of Defense Staff General Konstantinos Floros from Cyprus, and preparing to dispatch a Greek flotilla against the Turkish vessels.

Greek naval officers made threatening statements to the press. “We are ready to deploy even more warships in the wider area as soon as we are given the appropriate instructions,” one told the daily Pentapostagma. “The morale of the Fleet’s teams is high. The time has come.” He added that Athens was prepared to cross “the red line” over Kastellórizo.

Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman Hami Aksoy reacted by flatly dismissing all the objections to the Turkish operation. He said, “Greece raised objections to the current survey activity and claimed that the survey area is within its own continental shelf. Greece bases this claim on the presence of remote islands far from its own mainland, most notably Kastellórizo. This maximalist continental shelf claim of Greece is contrary to international law, jurisprudence, and court decisions. … We therefore reject these unjustified assertions of Greece.”

At this point, Berlin intervened to halt an all-out military escalation in the region. German Chancellor Angela Merkel had already called Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan the day before, while German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas was visiting Athens. Merkel then telephoned Erdoğan and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to avert an armed clash between the Turkish and Greek navies.

Initial reports on the talks emerged in the German newspaper Bild. “A situation was developing that could have led at any time to escalation between the two NATO countries,” it wrote. “Then Merkel intervened.” The paper added that the Turkish fleet changed course after Erdoğan took the phone call from Merkel.

German government spokeswoman Ulrike Demmer later confirmed the Bild ’s account. She said Merkel and Erdoğan discussed “various issues, especially the situation in Libya and the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean, as well as various bilateral issues.” Asked directly whether Turkish drilling was an issue, Demmer said: “I can confirm that the issue was the Eastern Mediterranean. Our position on the principle of drilling, on the issue of maritime borders and the exploitation of natural resources in the Eastern Mediterranean, is well known.”

Tensions remain high, however, and the Greek military is still on alert monitoring Turkish warships in the area after the Turkish naval vessels turned away from escorting the Oruç Reis.

There was panic in Greece yesterday when many people received a text message, purporting to be from the Greek Defense Ministry, telling them to “mobilize” in response to a “military incident.” Police ultimately sent out their own mass text message instructing the public to disregard the text. Greece’s Cyber Crime Prosecution Directorate was tasked with investigating who sent the text.

Conflicting positions emerged from NATO imperialist capitals on the Greek-Turkish dispute. While French President Emmanuel Macron issued a statement declaring his solidarity with Greece and calling for sanctions on Turkey, the US State Department called on Turkish authorities “to halt any plans for operations and to avoid steps that raise tensions in the region.” However, it surprised Athens by calling the waters off Kastellórizo “disputed.”

Attending an event at the American Hellenic Institute where he attacked Turkish claims on the divided Mediterranean island of Cyprus, US Senator Robert Menendez criticized the State Department statement. He said, “Let’s be crystal clear—the only country ‘disputing’ these waters is Turkey. These waters belong to Greece, and the State Department must unequivocally and publicly recognize that Turkey alone is responsible for the tension over them.”

This further adds to tensions in the Eastern Mediterranean, which has been thoroughly destabilized by the 2011 war in Libya. Divisions have grown inside NATO over which Libyan militia to support in Libya’s decade-long civil war, even as the failure of the US-led proxy war for regime change in Syria dramatically intensified geopolitical rivalry between the major world powers.

After Washington threatened but ultimately backed off going to war against Syria in 2013, a number of major powers turned to a more active or aggressive foreign policy. Germany began the re-militarization of its foreign policy, China launched its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to build infrastructure across the region, and Russia and Iran prepared to intervene directly to support the Syrian regime against US-backed militias.

Significantly, when US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Greece last year to open new military bases, he cited China and Russia as the main targets of this initiative.

The discovery of massive undersea natural gas reserves in the Eastern Mediterranean has only intensified these conflicts, which increasingly threaten to escalate beyond the control of the powers involved. With France’s Total and Italy’s ENI locked in a bitter rivalry for energy resources across the region, bloody military conflicts are becoming intertwined with inter-imperialist rivalries inside NATO.

The Egyptian Parliament voted unanimously Monday to approve “the deployment of members of the Egyptian armed forces on combat missions outside Egypt’s borders to defend Egyptian national security ... against criminal armed militias and foreign terrorist elements.” Its resolution said the deployment would take place on a “western front,” which was widely taken as a reference to Egypt’s western neighbor, Libya.

This could lead to a direct clash between the Turkish and Egyptian armies. While Cairo and Paris have backed warlord Khalifa Haftar’s forces in Libya, the Erdoğan government backed by Italy has armed the rival Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli. Cairo has blamed Turkey for transporting Islamist fighters from Syria to back the GNA in Libya, and French and Turkish vessels nearly fired on each other when Paris tried to search Turkish merchant ships bound for Libya. Cairo has also purchased Russian anti-ship missiles that can hit Turkish warships in the area.

The fact that Greek and Turkish warships came close to a direct clash in the Aegean this week is a warning. A century after the outbreak of World War I, the anarchy of the nation-state system again threatens to push the entire region—in the absence of the independent intervention of an anti-war movement of the working class—towards the eruption of major regional or even global conflicts.

Parents oppose dangerous UK nursery and pre-school reopening

Charlotte Salthill & Joyce Smith

A survey by the Sutton Trust into the impact of COVID-19 on early years education has revealed enormous levels of anxiety among parents over sending their children back to regular nursery and childcare settings.

Before the national lockdown in March, 68 percent of parents accessed formal early education or childcare, defined in the report as a preschool, nursery, a childminder or school. By June, 83 percent of these parents had not sent their children back.

Almost half of surveyed parents cited concerns about the increasing transmission of coronavirus and of it being brought back home. Most remaining parents cited worries that they were unable to access a place, with providers closed or on reduced staff. Two thirds of parents without childcare are feeling stressed, worried or overwhelmed.

Children have breakfast at the Little Darling home-based Childcare after nurseries and primary schools partially reopen in England after the COVID-19 lockdown in London, Monday, June 1, 2020. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)

In May, the Johnson government directed all nursery and early years primary classes to open their doors on June 1, as the first step in a criminally reckless “phased” reopening of schools. The youngest children, including babies and toddlers, would be sent back first, despite the impossibility of social distancing, with the sole aim of pushing their parents back to work.

Close social contact is an integral part of early years education. Play, social co-operation and interaction, both with staff and other children, are necessary for a child's vital social and emotional development.

On July 2, the government announced its final guidance for all school children to return full-time in September. It included changes to previous instructions for early years settings, removing the requirement to keep children in small consistent groups, known as “bubbles.” This change took effect on July 20.

Parents have every right to be fearful of a return to nursery under these conditions.

On the same day as the Conservative government’s new guidance was issued, schools throughout Leicester closed as a “local lockdown” was imposed. COVID-19 infection rates in the city of 329,000 people had increased by over 70 percent over a two-week period.

Health Minister Matt Hancock cited an increase in the number of under-18-year-olds testing positive for coronavirus as one of the main reasons for imposing the city-wide lockdown. Dr Nick Phin, Public Health England (PHE) incident director, said those under 19 testing positive in Leicester rose from 5 percent in mid-May to 15 percent.

Outbreaks of COVID-19 at nurseries and pre-schools have led to wider community transmission. At the Acorn nursery in Milton Keynes, England, nine children, four staff and 10 family members tested positive for coronavirus last month. In the US state of Texas, at least 1,335 people tested positive from childcare facilities between May and June. Of those infected, 894 were staff members and 441 were children.

At the same time, research is continuing into ways that COVID-19 may be linked to a range of serious conditions in young children.

This month, the Lancet reported key findings from 78 cases of Paediatric Inflammatory Multisystem Syndrome (PIMS-TS) in the UK between April 1 and May 10. Cases of PIMS-TS occurred at double the normal rate and were reported by 21 of 23 Paediatric Intensive Care Units, coinciding with peak COVID-19 hospital admissions. The median age of patients was 11 years.

A potentially fatal syndrome known as Kawasaki Disease, which can cause severe heart complications, has also developed during the pandemic among a small number of children in the US and Europe.

The Sutton Trust’s report exposes the bogus and completely cynical character of the government’s pretence that they are reopening pre-schools and nurseries out of concern for children’s social, educational, and emotional development and welfare.

The report highlights the devastating impact of decades of austerity by Tory and Labour governments, with the pandemic triggering an existential crisis. A staggering one quarter of settings reported they were unlikely to still be operating next year, rising to one third of providers in deprived areas.

Even before the pandemic, the report explains, the early years and childcare sector were “struggling and in crisis in the face of rising costs, unstable workforce supply and insufficient government funding.”

September will be the litmus test for the long-term survival of childcare provision, the report warns.

In deprived areas, 42 percent of providers say they are likely to make redundancies in the next year. The report stresses, “The impact of the pandemic on the early years workforce has been enormous. In Birmingham, the survey revealed high levels of staff anxiety throughout the crisis… A picture has emerged of a highly stressed and worn down workforce whether they had been open or closed during the lockdown.”

A substantial percentage of the 90,000-strong early years workforce are over 55 years old, placing them at heightened risk from COVID-19.

In the last 10 years more than 1,000 Sure Start centres—that provided a wide variety of services designed to support children's learning skills, health and well-being—have closed due to Tory austerity cuts enforced by Labour controlled councils, forcing the poorest families to rely on volunteer provision run by charities and the church. The authors note that, “Cuts to Children’s Centres over recent years have removed a vital source of support for both children and families, which could have played a valuable role during this time.”

The Sutton Trust has appealed for an urgent support package of £88 million focused on the most disadvantaged areas. But this is a drop in the ocean and will do little to address the massive needs throughout the sector for parents, children, staff or providers. Local Authority childcare is only partially funded from central government, providing just £3.5 billion a year, leaving an estimated annual shortfall of £55 million made up by charging parents.

Earlier this week, Labour Leader Sir Keir Starmer made clear his party’s total support for the Johnson government’s homicidal campaign to lift social distancing measures and reopen the economy, “to reopen our society and economy safely and successfully, we need the public to have confidence in the governments advice ... we need proper support for children to learn and for parents to get back to work.”

Parents and early years teachers and support staff must unite together and form rank-and-file committees to fight the austerity agenda of the Tories and Labour. Billions is needed to finance free and universal provision of high-quality early years nurture and education for children. The thousands of qualified early years staff paid a pittance should receive salaries commensurate with their critical role in society.

Parents with young children should not be forced back to non-essential work. They must be provided with a living wage so that they can look after their young children during the pandemic if they so choose.

For those key workers who rely on nurseries, additional support must be available to enhance the cleaning and safety of all preschool and nursery facilities. Staff must receive full personal protective equipment and regular testing, with a fully qualified nurse on site at all times.