Predictions of the break-up of the UK may be reaching a crescendo, but they are scarcely new. In 1707, Jonathan Swift wrote a poem deriding the Act of Union between England and Scotland, which had just been passed, for seeking to combine two incompatible peoples in one state: “As if a man in making posies/ Should bundle thistles up with roses”. He goes on to say that political differences would inevitably sink the whole enterprise, as “tossing faction will o’erwhelm/ Our crazy double-bottomed realm”.
Swift was confident that the ramshackle project would founder, but it has taken 313 years for his prediction to look as if it might come true – and even then the split may not be quite as imminent as some imagine.
It is true that the last 20 opinion polls show that most Scots now favour independence, but the shift against the union is only a few years old, as is the dominance of the Scottish National Party at the polls.
Compare this short span with the Irish struggle for home rule, which was at its height from 1885 to 1918, when those seeking self-rule through constitutional means were replaced by Sinn Fein and unilateral secession. Many of the arguments used against Irish separatism – the most notable being that it made no economic sense – are now used against the Scots and are likely to be equally ineffectual.
The downplaying of Scottish self-determination on the grounds that it is less important than bread-and-butter issues by Boris Johnson during his one-day visit to Scotland on Thursday sounds absurdly hypocritical, coming as it does from a prime minister who only has the job because he promoted British sovereignty above all else in leaving the EU. Doubtless he and his advisers recognise this contradiction all too well since the purpose of his trip to Scotland in the middle of the pandemic was evidently to rebrand Johnson in Scottish eyes as “Mr Vaccine” rather than “Mr Brexit”.
It is a measure of just how rattled the British government must be by Scottish separatism that it should hope that the appearance of Johnson in a white coat claiming, contrary to the evidence, that Scots voters consider independence to be “irrelevant”, would help turn the political tide. He claimed self-destructively that giving priority to self-rule over economic benefits is “like saying you don’t mind what you eat as long as it is with a spoon”.
Catchy phrases like this must have the SNP leaders rocking with secret glee, as Johnson’s patronising words serve only to remind Scottish voters of the two main reason why they are more inclined towards secession today than in the referendum of 2014: Britain’s departure from the EU and Johnson’s shambolic response to coronavirus last year, compared to that of the competent-looking Nicola Sturgeon.
Johnson and his Brexiteer government are being force-fed the same political lesson that they once taught to others, which is that once a nationalist movement has gained momentum, become a mark of identity for people, and is a vehicle for social and economic grievances, then it is very difficult to stop it.
Yet self-rule comes in different shades of practical independence. Even if Scotland and Northern Ireland shift significantly further away from direct control by the UK government, the degree to which they can freely go their own way will be dictated by the underlying balance of power, as the Brexiteers have been discovering to their cost.
Competing pressures for union and disunion are normally analysed in the context of the UK alone, but it is more realistic and illuminating to look at them in relation to the British Isles as a whole.
Ireland gained a large measure of independence in 1921 and was neutral in the Second World War, but stayed to a surprising extent in the British sphere of influence because of the disparity in political and economic strength and the common labour market. But the British exit from the EU, while Ireland stays inside, made the two countries much more equal when it came to negotiations, particularly when there is a US administration sympathetic to the Irish.
One of the many things that Arlene Foster and her Democratic Unionist Party failed to understand was that no British leader wants to quarrel with Brussels and Washington in order to go along with the wishes of one million unionist/Protestants in Northern Ireland. A sign of the times is that few in the rest of the UK were much concerned that a chunk of their country, in the shape of Northern Ireland, remains bizarrely inside the EU and the commercial EU/UK frontier now runs down the Irish Sea.
Yet this does not necessarily mean that Irish unity is around the corner, or even the corner after that. Demography may be changing but, just as the unionist/Protestant community could not monopolise control when they were the majority, the same will be true of the nationalist/Catholic side as they become more numerous. Whatever the outcome of a border poll, in the unlikely event of it taking place in the near future, communal allegiances will stay the same. The basic premise of the Good Friday Agreement remains correct – both communities must have a veto over radical constitutional changes they do not like, if peace is to be preserved.
Ireland, north and south, is full of ominous warning for Johnson and his cabinet as they try to block and reverse the Scottish move towards independence. There are delicious ironies in watching them repeat, almost word for word, the old Remainer arguments about the advantages of economic union with a larger entity, which they once denounced. In an early period, the Conservatives had likewise failed “to kill home rule by kindness” by social and economic reform in Ireland.
These measures may have mitigated historic hatreds but had little lasting impact as the Home Rulers went on winning elections. It was frustration at the failure to win home rule by constitutional means, despite repeated endorsement at the polls, that handed the initiative to those advocating unconstitutional methods. In addition to the armed uprising of 1916, the newly elected Sinn Fein MPs left the Westminster parliament and established their own in Dublin.
Practical secessionism like this may still be over the horizon in Scotland, but nationalist movements everywhere in the world almost invariably respond to the path towards self-determination being closed off by becoming more rather than less radical.
The legitimacy and the visibility of the Scottish demand for self-rule will be confirmed if the SNP wins a majority in the Scottish parliament in the election in May. But Johnson’s dash through Scotland – his precise itinerary concealed to avoid protesters – highlights a crucial change in the political landscape of Britain that is already under way.
“The Scottish Question” now occupies the place once held by “the Irish Question” as a divisive issue that will dominate the political agenda of the UK for decades to come. After all those years, Swift may turn out to have been right.
Budgets are political visions with economic planning based on resource allocation and revenue generation to face the crisis, fulfil the needs and desires of citizens, and shape the path towards future prosperity of society. Modi’s Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s budget speech and her budget documents in the tablet made by a South Korean company and backed up in a tablet made by a Taiwanese company does not develop digital infrastructure. The presentation of budget in a tablet does not make digital India. The higher investment in health and education can only shape both agrarian and industrial revolution for digital India.
The abysmal social spending makes this budget as one of the worst in independent India. It shows lack of priorities and commitment for the people and their everyday needs. The government shows no commitment to invest in the people of India. The Modi led BJP government has failed the people of India yet again in the Budget 2021-21. It is a document of apathy. The budget lacks missions and visions to move India and Indians in the path of economic growth and human development. The budget has failed to ensure health, education, employment and other essential welfare service to the people of India. The half-hearted documentation of data, time gaps, fictional accounts with dubious presentation in the budget makes it more as a propaganda document than a serious and trustworthy economic exercise to revive India’s growth story. But the budget doesn’t reveal the amount that Mr Narendra Modi is going to spend for his advertisements and propaganda.
In spite of all limitations, the Budget 2021 shows its unflinching commitment to neoliberal economic policy prescriptions shaped by the corporates and for the crony capitalist classes in India and abroad. The budget also shows the hollowness of so-called economic nationalism of RSS and BJP. The idea of deception is written within ideological narratives and political strategies of Hindutva quackery. There is neither anything bold nor any cure in it. The budget is a Hindutva quackery’s guide to economic recovery where the corporates profits and mass miseries are ensured.
This budget is another shock therapy to Indian economy and society to deepen the crisis further. There is no plan to fight poverty and unemployment in this budget. It truly upholds Mr Narendra Modi’s idea of minimum government for people and maximum support for his crony capitalist friends. He returns the favour to his corporate friends who support him with election expenses through electoral bonds. It is a corporate budget devoid of democratic accountability to the electorates. Like quacks, people still believe in Hindutva quackery and their aggressive propaganda that ruins India and Indians.
The budget will neither inspire demand nor fuel production and distribution. It will further intensify crises of availability and accessibility of essential goods and services. This budget will further marginalise people and ensure the deepening of poverty, food insecurity, unemployment, illiteracy, ill-health and economic crisis. These conditions of crises are essential requirements for the sustainability of Hindutva quackery. A combination of crisis trap created by conditions of poverty, ignorance and illiteracy produces Hindutva quackery in Indian politics, culture and society. The RSS trained Hindutva quacks hide their deceptive practices and ignorance by shouting aggressively about their power and skills in crowded streets, marketplaces and in remote villages. The Hindutva quacks use every opportunity to promote themselves as only alternatives.
The quacks hypnotise their victims by the sugar-coating propaganda skills driven by organisational networks and fear mongering propaganda. The RSS and BJP follows dictums of quackery in letter and spirit. The corporate mass media is their biggest asset to hide the arrogance and ignorance of Hindutva quackery. Indian population in hopeless conditions believe in Hindutva quacks led by Mr Narendra Modi. Indians are seeking relieve from their immediate pain and sufferings. But Hindutva quackery does not want people to recover from pain and sufferings. The path of peace, prosperity, good health and education, scientific ethos, social harmony, secured employment and conscious citizens are perennial threats to very existence of Hindutva quackery in India. Therefore, Hindutva quacks shaped and led by the RSS and BJP are using every opportunity to stop the path of economic growth and social development in India. The indefinite conditions of crisis is a perfect condition for the Hindutva quacks to control, manipulate and dominate India and Indians for a long time.
History has witnessed to the limited life span of all quacks. All their quackery always bites the dustbin of history. It ends as soon as mass consciousness spreads. Mass consciousness and mass struggle against Hindutva quackery is the only hope for peace and progress in India. The future of Hindutva quackery will be no different in India. This budget reflects that Modi led BJP government is ignorant about basics of Indian economics, democratic politics and inclusive culture in India. The defeat of Hindutva quackery looks immanent and nearer.
The green revolution has been widely discussed and its different aspects have been highlighted by various observers according to their own understanding of emphasis and priorities. To this writer the essence of the green revolution seems to lie in the following tendencies, all the more significant because these seem to be shared by technological changes in other sectors of rural development spread by the same forces.
Firstly, the green revolution seeks to draw, for better or for worse may be debated later, the peasantry of even very remote rural areas into the pressures and influences of the international market. As long as the farmer continued to grow his traditional varieties with very meager or even nil quantities of agrochemicals, diesel or machinery, he was least affected by what happened in the oil, fertilizer and other related industries of the world, or of the relation of the domestic industry producing these inputs to the industry of other countries, but now all this suddenly became quite important for millions of farmers in the form of the price and availability of fertilizers, pesticides, diesel, tractors etc.
Secondly the propaganda on behalf of the green revolution emphasizes its suitability for small farmers and in a technological sense there is nothing to stop a farmer from growing the new seeds. Seen in the reality of Indian rural conditions and indeed in the conditions of many other countries-the new seeds requiring expensive inputs in large amounts are most likely to trap the low-resource, poor farmer in a debt trap, while those endowed with a good resource base in rural areas are able to take advantage of the several new opportunities, not necessarily in agriculture but more likely in trade or ‘agri business’ – which the green revolution seeds and their related inputs bring.
A related issue is the very narrow way in which the green revolution concerns itself with the basic problem of hunger. In Indian conditions it was evident that to effectively tackle the problem of hunger food production should not just grow but grow specifically on the fields of the poorest farmers in backward areas. On the other hand by emphasizing concentration of resources in the already well endowed regions and at least initially on the better-off farmers the green revolution follows an opposite pattern. By so doing it makes it possible to collect a lot of ‘marketable surplus’ of grain from a relatively small area to enhance the government’s stocks of grain which, however, by itself cannot ensure that this food reaches the hungry. Thus the green revolution takes a cynical view of the pain of hunger – flaunting grain stocks and asking where is the problem, while doing nothing effective to really increase the ability of the hungry people to eat better.
Lastly it should be pointed out that the green revolution strategy has been promoted and supported at various levels by the foundations and aid organizations based in western countries, as also the multilateral aid organizations in which these countries are dominant.
If these are accepted as some of the most important features of the green revolution, however, the technological changes in other areas of rural development-dairy-development, fisheries and forestry for instance can be seen as exhibiting much the same tendencies.
In the case of dairy development the increasing scale of milk product imports and the setting up of dairy infrastructure based on this, the increased dependence of several towns and cities on imported milk products and the dependence on milk product imports to keep running a cost-heavy dairy infrastructure – all these linked up dairy producers in remote parts of the country to the dairy sector of the EEC countries during Operation Flood Project. The dairy development strategy of this project put more emphasis on the technology of crossbreed cows which is better suited for more resourceful dairy farmers. By emphasizing the availability of plenty of milk and milk products in cities for those who have the purchasing power for this, the ‘white revolution’ also adopts a cynical attitude towards the problem of malnutrition, being concerned with only the product and not who gets it. Lastly, this dairy development strategy and its showpiece the Operation Flood project have clearly been supported and promoted by western (or western dominated) aid-giving agencies.
In the area of forestry, massive aid for forestry projects has been accompanied by increased orientation of forestry officials towards forestry practices and policies to predominantly satisfy the need of industries. Emphasis on supporting the growth of mainly those species which industry finds useful, at the expense of the trees needed by tribals and other villagers, has played havoc with their lives and specially with their access to free food available in forests (which was specially useful in lean agricultural season and in drought years).
In the area of marine fisheries also the fisher folk communities of coastal areas have become linked to international fisheries scene based on factors like the size and price of marine exports and the import and charter of trawlers. Rising exports of fish have been accompanied by declining local per capita availability of this staple protein. And the quest for boosting exports has disrupted the livelihood of poor fishermen, impoverishing them while enriching the resourceful late entrants to marine fisheries.
This extension of the important features of green revolution, as also the thinking underlying this technological change in agriculture, to other areas of rural development may be called the greater green revolution.
Hence following the commonly used description of green revolution in the context of agriculture, the greater green revolution may be defined as the extension of similar thinking and technology in animal husbandry and dairying, fisheries, forestry and other related activities which lead to a disruption of traditional practices and the related wisdom of many , many generations, accompanied by the imposition of technologies and inputs which break self-reliance and impose exploitative linkages which are harmful for sustainable development, nutrition, environment protection and animal welfare, while leading to increased business for industrial interests.
A fire at the Napier barracks in Kent has shone a light on the barbaric conditions in which the Conservative government is holding hundreds of asylum seekers.
The fire broke out Friday afternoon, destroying a building and leaving roughly 300 people housed in the barracks without electricity, heating or drinking water. Many of the asylum seekers suffering these conditions are sick with COVID-19, following a massive outbreak in the barracks in January which saw at least 120 people test positive. Only a limited number of those falling ill were transferred to hotels.
Conditions in the camp were ripe for an explosion of infections. There are 16 housing blocks at the camp which house dormitories of up to 28 people, with only hanging sheets to divide the beds. Each block has two toilets and showers, and the men eat in a communal canteen at which 13 people at a time gather around two tables.
The fire breaking out at the Napier barracks (credit: Care4Calais)
Residents have repeatedly raised concerns about hygiene and lack of access to healthcare, including psychological services. They have reported several attempted suicides and cases of self-harm. Most have been living in these conditions for four months, having originally been promised their asylum claims would be processed within a month.
In a recent confidential report for the government, the Red Cross described similar appalling conditions at Penally barracks in Wales, home to more than a hundred asylum seekers.
Dozens of humanitarian and migrant rights organisations, legal and medical professionals have demanded the closure of the barracks. Asylum seekers have carried out repeated protests against the inhuman conditions. Some residents have been on hunger strike and others have slept outside, in freezing temperatures, rather than risk infection in the crowded dormitories. Last December, a man at Penally had to be hospitalised as a result of his hunger strike.
Several demonstrations have warned of the risk of a COVID outbreak. Napier resident Jafar, from Iran, said in early January, “The danger of the virus spreading in here is huge.”
When infections took hold, the government responded by blaming the asylum seekers and locking them in the camp. Residents were told “not to leave the site under any circumstance”, on pain of arrest. The canteen was closed but the men were required to queue for food, switched from hot meals to sandwiches. Nothing was done to alter the dormitories.
Minister for immigration compliance, Chris Philip, made the reprehensible statement, “It is incredibly disappointing that prior to this a number of individuals refused tests and have been either refusing to self-isolate or follow social distancing rules, despite repeated requests to do so…”
The asylum seekers responded with an open letter, which stated, “When we are becoming more and more mentally vulnerable and physically ill due to the Covid outbreak in Napier Barracks, the Home Office, specifically its secretary, Priti Patel, and the minister for immigration, Chris Philip, are intentionally ignoring us and trying their best to cover up the disaster which is happening in this army camp.”
It continued, “We are all sharing the same space, we breathe in the same room, and there is no way we can practice social distancing.”
The letter concluded by drawing attention to the asylum seekers’ position as oppressed workers: “no one chose to leave the country that they were born in, no one chose to leave their family and loved ones behind. We came to this country to save our lives…
“There are fathers, sons and husbands here. There are nurses, teachers, engineers and talented people and yet we have been treated like criminals or prisoners.”
The fire has been met with a vicious government response. Kent police say it started following a disturbance at the barracks. Riot police were mobilised alongside firefighters on the Friday afternoon and fourteen people have since been arrested. Volunteers attempting to deliver food and blankets over the weekend say they were turned away by police officers, who said they were treating the site as a crime scene.
Home Secretary Priti Patel delivered an outraged nationalist rant, declaring, “The damage and destruction at Napier barracks is not only appalling but deeply offensive to the taxpayers of this country who are providing this accommodation while asylum claims are being processed.
“This type of action will not be tolerated and the Home Office will support the police to take robust action against those vandalising property, threatening staff and putting lives at risk.
“This site has previously accommodated our brave soldiers and army personnel—It is an insult to say that it is not good enough for these individuals… I am fixing our broken asylum system and will be bringing forward legislation this year to deliver on that commitment.”
Clare Mosley, founder of refugee charity Care4Calais, told the Guardian, “For a British home secretary to accuse and castigate ordinary people when the facts of this incident are not yet even known is shocking and disturbing. It shows a senior government minister operating at the gutter level of gossip and hearsay, and at a time of heightened anxiety and tension across society, she should be ashamed of herself.
“But make no mistake, this not simply a careless, off-the-cuff emotional response. It is a misleading, opportunistic smoke screen concocted to deflect attention from the multiple warnings she has had about what was clearly going to happen at Napier barracks.”
Patel’s comments are another example of how the Tory party is basing itself politically on far right, fascistic forces. Internal Home Office documents seen by the Independent regarding the use of disused army barracks to house asylum seekers state that they are “not analogous” to British citizens in need of welfare. They argue that providing “less generous” accommodation to these vulnerable people is “justified by the need to control immigration” and to not “undermine public confidence in the asylum system”.
By “public confidence”, the Home Office means the support of Britain’s far right. The decision to use the barracks as asylum centres came less than a month after the government apologised for an “operational failure” for placing asylum seekers in a hotel. This came in response to former United Kingdom Independence Party, Brexit and now Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage posting a video outside the hotel claiming “illegal migrants” were living there.
Farage’s action was part of a campaign of fascist intimidation in which groups like Britain First stormed hotels thought to be housing migrants to interrogate and harass the residents.
Around the time the barracks were being established as asylum residences, Labour peer Lord West, a retired Royal Navy Admiral, said migrants should be put in “a concentrated place, whether it's a camp or whatever”.
The government’s destruction of basic human rights and embrace of fascistic politics is coupled with an escalating campaign of censorship. One day before the fire, journalist Andy Aitchison took photos of a protest held outside the barracks where fake blood was thrown at the gates and demonstrators held signs reading “Close Napier now” and “There will be blood on your hands”. The photos were shared widely online.
Six hours later, Aitchison was arrested by five police officers at his home, on suspicion of criminal damage. His phone and camera memory card were seized, and he was held at the police station for seven hours before being released on bail. He has been told not to return to Napier until the case is concluded.
Aitchison told the Independent, “It feels like a light has been shone on them and they’ve got the sledgehammer out. It’s censorship: if you don’t toe the line, we shut you down.”
This is not the first attempt to suppress information about what is happening at Napier. Last November, volunteers at the barracks were told to sign confidentiality agreements, underpinned by the Official Secrets Act, preventing them from speaking about conditions they observed.
There is huge popular opposition to the government’s treatment of asylum seekers. A petition from campaign group Freedom from Torture, “Close asylum camps, save lives”, has received more than 21,000 signatures.
Defending migrants and refugees requires the construction of a socialist movement in the working class. The attack on asylum seekers is part of a global turn to fascist forms of rule, of which the January 6 attempted coup in America is the highest expression. This turn is bound up with the pandemic crisis, which has drastically worsened social inequality, seen workers all over the world thrown into poverty and necessitates a fresh savage assault on living conditions.
Only the combined force of the international working class can confront these dangers and advance the right of all workers to a good standard of living in whatever country they choose.
The fire that engulfed San Borja Hospital, one of the major hospitals in Santiago this past Saturday, bears the hallmarks of decades of underfunding and under-resourcing of the public health system by right-wing and “left” governments alike. Amid an alarming escalation of COVID-19 cases that has national intensive care units at 92 percent occupancy, such avoidable catastrophes can only speed up the collapse of an already debilitated health system.
It is due both to good fortune as well as the decisive action and dedication of health professionals and emergency services that no one was injured. Around 300 firefighters, 40 fire engines and emergency vehicles battled the blaze after the alert was raised at around 7 a.m. In less than two hours, health staff evacuated the majority of patients, some 300 in total, to safe areas of the hospital to determine who could be discharged and to transfer others, including ICU patients, to already stretched health facilities across Santiago.
A San Borjan doctor from the pediatric wing movingly described how he and other health personnel, some of whom were on vacation, quickly responded to the news that their hospital had caught on fire: “I received the news, got dressed and went to the hospital ... the pediatric staff behaved impeccably. There were 19 hospitalized children, all of them were brought down in a calm manner, all of them in order, all of the staff knew what to do, everything as we always learned about transfers. It was a marvel, the commitment of everyone.”
San Borja Hospital in flames. (Credit: bomberos de Chile)
It remains unclear the exact trigger for the fire that started in the boiler room; an investigation is ongoing. The initial report indicated an electrical fault. What is certain is that with years of financial neglect, insufficient maintenance and obsolete equipment, such incidents are bound to happen.
This is the conclusion that millions in the country have drawn. A video has gone viral of an angry San Borja worker confronting the Health Minister Enrique Paris while he was giving a press conference in the vicinity. “You have done nothing! You come for the TV and for the photo op, nothing else,” he said as he was moved along.
Film of four hospitals being inundated with rainwater only 24 hours later also went viral. The worst hit was the El Pino Hospital, located in the San Bernardo district. A hospital communiqué stated that the “facility suffered several incidents in its installations. For the most part, these are minor leaks and filtrations. But around 4:00 p.m. there was a major incident in the Maternal Emergency Service (where) the false ceiling broke due to the accumulated water that exceeded the capacity of the rainwater filtration systems.”
Heavy rains in the Metropolitan Region on Sunday also affected the Buin Hospital, the Padre Hurtado Hospital and the San Borja Hospital.
Iván González Tapia is an architect who was involved in an inquiry into the state of the public system under the military dictatorship that was commissioned by the then incoming civilian government in 1989. The center-left “Concertación” Coalition, which included the Socialist Party and was supported from the sidelines by the Stalinist Communist Party, held consecutive power from 1990 until 2010.
Referring to the tragedy at San Borja, Gonzalez raised in an opinion piece that fires in urban buildings are never the result of unforeseeable natural events:
“The causes that produce them are, always, what we have been permanently claiming for these and other catastrophes: the lack of planning, management and maintenance. This, which should seem obvious, is not attended to in Chile with the dedication and provision of minimum indispensable means to avoid the risks and catastrophes that adequate planning will always be able to anticipate.”
The commission Gonzalez had been involved in 1989 verified that in the 17 years of military rule most of the urban buildings had fallen into utter disrepair.
He wrote: “Among them, the health area stood out for its enormous deficiencies, since out of a minimum budget for their replacement and maintenance, not even half of what was required had been invested. We are not surprised, then, by what happened in San Borja … which today does not even have the necessary means to attend to the patients it receives.”
This is a significant admission from someone aligned to the center-left Concertación (today the Nueva Mayoría) and an indictment of the entire parliamentary left political caste that has sought to lay the entire blame for the unpardonable state of social and public infrastructure solely on the military dictatorship and its free market economic policies. In reality they intensified these same policies by providing a miserly 4 percent of GDP to the health budget, creating among the worst staff-to-patient ratios in the OECD and a resource and infrastructure-starved public health system.
This is the background to the San Borja disaster under conditions where COVID-19 cases are rapidly rising in Chile, today reaching the high incidence rates of last winter in the middle of the summer period. The number of daily cases being reported has reached 4,000. As of January 28 the total number of confirmed and suspected cases reached 821,130, along with 24,429 deaths according to the Health Ministry’s latest report.
The disaster is compounded by the fact that regional hospitals are sending their critical patients to Santiago as they have no more bed spaces. This is the case for the region surrounding Valparaíso, Chile’s second largest city. Both the Carlos Van Buren hospital and the Gustavo Fricke hospital reached 100 percent occupancy, while the mining region of Antofagasta was forced to turn to the Military Hospital due to lack of personnel.
Throughout the pandemic the overriding concern of the ultra-right government of President Sebastian Piñera has been to keep profitable sectors of the economy open. His former health minister, Jaime Mañalich, who was forced to resign after caught providing false coronavirus figures to the general public, implemented a “dynamic” quarantining regime that allowed the mining and other export-oriented industries to remain open for business. This led directly to COVID-19 spreading to other regions, especially those with a mining workforce.
Where quarantining was implemented, no meaningful assistance was provided to the millions that, either due to being furloughed without pay or working in the informal sector, were forced to break curfews for food or work. This created the conditions for the virus to rapidly spread in the densely populated working-class suburbs and shanty towns of Santiago, Valparaíso and elsewhere.
The latest health minister, Enrique Paris, has intensified the government’s criminal “herd immunity” policies that directly contributed to the present second wave. Late last year, the government made the extraordinarily reckless decision to open the country to international tourism.
In this whole process, the right-wing government has been aided by the parliamentary left and the Communist Party and Frente Amplio-dominated corporatist unions which agreed to nonessential export industries remaining operational. They accepted a freeze on collective bargaining, wage cuts and the furloughing of workers for the benefit of employers, and they have point blank refused to call any industrial action against poverty, hunger, insecurity and evictions impacting the working class.
An indefinite strike called by the health unions late last year was ended as quickly as it began once a sellout deal was stitched up. One of the key demands—the payment of a paltry COVID Bonus of 200,000 pesos (US$275), reduced from the 500,000 pesos (US$650) originally pledged by the Congress earlier in June—has yet to be paid.
A study published last week by the nurses association evaluating variables—such as the number of new cases, mortality rates, the characteristics of the second wave in Europe, the government’s mismanagement and the vaccination processes—concluded that cases could quadruple by the winter period. But even under this impending cataclysmic scenario they refuse to mobilize the working class.
With this track record of criminal negligence and callous indifference on the part of the entire political elite, the working class needs to draw critical lessons and intervene with its own agenda. It must break with bourgeois politics, especially the Stalinist PCCh, the pseudo-left Frente Amplio and the establishment left who are all wedded to parliamentarism and defend capitalist private property. It must reject the domination of the corporatist unions and create new organs of political power that are comprised of and controlled by the rank and file.
A Moscow court has sentenced Russian oppositionist Alexei Navalny to a prison sentence of three-and-a-half years. He was found guilty of violating terms of his probation, which stems from 2014 fraud-related charges. The court counted several months that Navalny has already spent under house arrest towards his latest sentence, so that his imprisonment term was reduced to two years and eight months in a penal colony. His defense team will appeal the sentence.
Navalny returned to Russia in January, after having spent five months in Germany, to which he was flown after falling ill on a flight from Siberia to Moscow in August 2020. Navalny, along with the United States and European Union, insists that he was poisoned with Novichok on behalf of the Kremlin. These claims have been riddled with contradictions from the start. Navalny, who was warned by the Kremlin that he would be arrested upon returning to Russia, was detained by the police on January 17 upon his arrival in Moscow.
Alexei Navalny talks to one of his lawyers during a hearing in the Moscow City Court in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, Feb. 2, 2021. (Moscow City Court via AP)
In the courtroom, Navalny argued that the charges against him were illegitimate. He denounced Putin as “the poisoner of underpants,” referring to one of the latest versions of the story according to which he was nearly killed by the Russian government. Navalny claims an elite FSB unit planted Novichok in his underwear.
The courthouse where the trial was held was surrounded by a massive police cordon, and at least three hundred protesters were arrested. There was also a heavy police presence in other parts of the country, where pro-Navalny demonstrations took place.
The previous two weekends have seen tens of thousands of people in Moscow, Petersburg and dozens of other cities take to the streets in defense of Navalny. The Kremlin has responded with violent crackdowns and thousands of arrests. Several of Navalny’s main allies are now under house arrest.
After the verdict was announced, the National Guard was mobilized in Moscow and the square in front of the Kremlin was shut down for visitors and tourists. The US-backed liberal opposition parties PARNAS and Yabloko announced that they would organize protests in support of Navalny this weekend.
The oppositionist also enjoys the support of broad sections of the pseudo-left in Russia. According to press reports, the Stalinist Communist Party of Russia (KPRF), long a key prop of the Putin government, is on the verge of a split over Navalny, as a substantial wing of the party is now backing him.
The verdict prompted an immediate outcry by the imperialist powers. French President Emmanuel Macron, whose government has brutally suppressed social protests in recent years, declared the verdict “unacceptable” because “political disagreement is never a crime.”
German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken both called for the immediate release of Navalny. British foreign minister Dominic Raab denounced his sentencing as “perverse.”
The political tensions erupting domestically and internationally around Navalny are an expression of a broader crisis. The coronavirus pandemic has profoundly destabilized society in Russia and around the world. It has claimed tens of thousands of lives in the country, and thrown over one million people into unemployment and many millions more into destitution. The Russian economy contracted by 3.1 percent last year.
This follows years of economic slump, triggered by the conflict over Ukraine and sanctions imposed by the US and EU. The Russian oligarchy has shifted the full burden of this conflict onto the working class. Real wages had been in steady decline for six years even before the pandemic hit. Incomes fell again by 3.5 percent last year, while inflation stands at 4.9 percent.
Three decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, social inequality in Russia is among the highest of any major economy. In 2017, the top 10 percent owned 89 percent of the country’s wealth. The vast majority of workers have to survive on a few hundred dollars a month, while the ten richest Russian oligarchs own a combined wealth of $151.6 billion.
Navalny has sought to tap into this social discontent with a video exposing what is allegedly a palace built for Putin on the Black Sea. The video has been watched over 100 million times. The Kremlin is now arguing that the palace is owned by a close ally of Putin, the oligarch Arkadi Rotenberg. A 24-year old protester told Al Jazeera on January 23 that she was shocked by the video, given the poverty wages medical workers receive who have been on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic, noting sarcastically, “I can imagine what kind of bonus doctors get: about 17,000 roubles ($223).”
The political crisis gripping Russia and manifesting itself in the tensions erupting around Navalny is a symptom of the breakdown of world capitalism more broadly. The bitter internecine conflicts within the Russian oligarchy are fueled, above all, by escalating class tensions.
Terrified of mounting class anger in Russia, Navalny and his backers are seeking to channel such sentiments behind a reactionary agenda. Navalny, who maintains well-documented ties to the far-right, speaks for a layer of the oligarchy that is oriented toward more direct cooperation with the US. Sections of the American ruling class view the fueling of separatist sentiments within Russia as a means to extend US domination over the region.
It is for this reason that the issue of Putin’s wealth has been presented as one of personal corruption, a basis upon which the most reactionary forces, including monarchists and ultra-nationalists, can be mobilized. Meanwhile, any mention of the term “capitalism” has been banned by the political forces dominating the protests, from Navalny himself to his backers in the Pabloite Russian Socialist Movement.
The conflicts within the Russian ruling class are also driven by the geopolitical tensions which it confronts and the failure of its foreign policy. Having emerged out of the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, which was carried out hand-in-glove with US imperialism and the German ruling class, Russia’s oligarchy is highly dependent on world imperialism both politically and economically.
For many years, the Putin regime sought to counterbalance Russia’s growing encirclement by US imperialism by deepening its ties with a substantial section of the German ruling class. Economic ties between the two countries, especially in the energy sector, have remained close, despite the fact that Germany backed the 2014 anti-Russia coup in Ukraine, supported anti-Russia sanctions and escalated the military build-up against Russia.
With the Biden administration packed with figures associated with an aggressive policy toward Russia, German-Russian relations have now become a central focal point of the growing tensions between the US and Germany. The starkest expression of this is the conflict over the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. The pipeline is set to deliver more Russian gas directly to Germany, circumventing Ukraine.
The US, which has historically opposed all German-Russian pipeline initiatives, has sanctioned Nord Stream 2 with bi-partisan support in Congress, effectively blocking its construction for the past year. Several major companies, including the Zurich Insurance Group and the German construction and engineering group Bilfinger SE, have now pulled back from the project.
Clément Beaune, the French minister for European affairs, called on Germany to end the project on Tuesday, the first time that Paris has raised such a demand. However, the German government so far insists on its support for Nord Stream 2. In the German press, there is heated debate about the project in the context of the Navalny case.
Events in Western Australia (WA) this week show how quickly the global COVID-19 pandemic can spread because of inadequate government quarantine facilities and other basic safety measures.
On Sunday, the WA Labor Party state government revealed that a young security guard in the capital, Perth, who worked in a quarantine hotel for oversees travelers, had tested positive for the coronavirus, marking the first locally acquired case in the state in almost 10 months.
Western Australian Premier Mark McGowan (Credit: ABC News)
The government later confirmed that the guard had contracted the UK variant of the virus, which is up to 70 percent more transmissible. The quarantine hotel where he worked currently has two confirmed cases of the UK variant and one case of the South African strain, which is also considered highly infectious.
It reportedly took officials more than 11 hours to inform the federal and other state authorities, reflecting the unpreparedness of the public health system to manage COVID-19 outbreaks.
Even as he announced a limited five-day lockdown of Perth and surrounding areas, WA Premier Mark McGowen tried to quell public concern by saying that the worker had used his government’s SafeWA app to record his movements.
But Dr Andrew Miller of the Australian Medical Association told the West Australian, “I think the government here has been doing its homework in the car on the way to school. We’re still not getting QR codes mandatory on the Safe WA app for another couple of weeks at many busy places in our community… the quarantine is not a proper quarantine system because you’re still combining it with hotels, you’ve been slow at getting sewerage testing done… and all these other things, and now we’re paying the price for it.”
Although no further cases have been detected so far, testing levels remain low. On Sunday, just 3,171 tests were conducted. Lines of cars stretched for hundreds of metres at testing clinics, with some people waiting three or more hours for a test. Then clinics closed at 10pm. The tests increased to 16,000 on Monday, but similar lengthy wait times were reported.
The state government declared a state of emergency and a five-day lockdown, from Sunday until Friday, in the Perth metropolitan area and the adjacent Peel and South West regions, covering about two million people. Given that the coronavirus incubation period is 14 days, this measure is patently inadequate.
The lockdown involves the closure of schools, which were due to reopen on Monday, as well as universities and technical college facilities, indoor sporting venues, large religious gatherings and beauty therapy services. But workers classified as essential are exempt, including construction workers and those in the lucrative mining industry.
People quarantining at the hotel where the security guard tested positive were told that they would remain there until they had returned an additional negative COVID test, and travelers who left the quarantine hotel after January 25 were ordered into self-quarantine until they received a further negative test.
The crisis is another demonstration of the failure of the hotel quarantine system. The events in Perth bear similarities to viral escapes in other Australian states—Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia and Queensland—which have seen coronavirus outbreaks stemming from hotel quarantine. Despite this, there are no national standards for hotel quarantine.
The hiring of private security guards who are not trained to manage coronavirus patients has been identified as a factor in each outbreak, along with poor ventilation, improper personal protective equipment (PPE) and a lack of staff testing.
Many hotel quarantine staff are employed on a casual contract basis and therefore have to work multiple jobs, which facilitates the spread of the virus. The Perth security guard, who is in his 20s, had been working a second job as a ride-share driver, although the authorities said he had not worked while infectious.
Although daily testing for all hotel quarantine staff had been agreed to in a “national cabinet” meeting on January 8, it was not until January 29 that daily testing was begun in all WA quarantine hotels.
The young worker tested negative for the virus on January 15, January 17 and January 23. He was not tested again until two days after he developed symptoms, allowing him to be infectious and in the community for around five days. Contact tracers have identified some 151 close contacts he had, plus 68 casual contacts through venue tracing.
Moreover, there are no clear guidelines as to the use of PPE in hotel quarantine. In a press conference, WA Health Minister Roger Cook said security guards working in Perth’s nine quarantine hotels do not have to wear a mask at all times. “There are particular circumstances in which they are required to wear PPE,” he said. “At other times they may not be.”
When Cook was asked if he expected that hotel quarantine staff would be required to wear a mask if they were working on the same floor as a person who had tested positive to the virus, he said: “Not necessarily.”
In a bid to shift the responsibility from itself for the virus escaping from the quarantine hotel, the government has ordered WA police to conduct an investigation into how the security guard contracted the virus.
The Labor government also announced a review of the state’s quarantine arrangements, yet the failures of hotel quarantine have been known for months and were already the subject of an official inquiry in Victoria after a hotel-sourced outbreak killed 768 people last year.
The impact of the COVID emergency is now being compounded by a massive bushfire engulfing areas just to the east of Perth, destroying more than 70 homes and blanketing the city with toxic smoke, reminiscent of last year’s national bushfire disaster.
In response to even the limited lockdown in WA, media outlets representing the interests of big business have denounced the measures and downplayed the threat of the virus.
A comment by Adam Creighton in the Murdoch-owned Australian newspaper called the lockdown “the biggest overreaction in health policy history.” He wrote: “My economic advice is that the health advice is increasingly unsustainable, given doubts about the efficacy of forthcoming vaccines, and even illogical. Last week the International Monetary Fund said the pandemic had cost governments $US14 trillion. Here, combined federal and state government debt is on track to rise from the equivalent of 42 percent of GDP in 2018 to 74 percent by this year—a much bigger increase than any other major country.”
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian, who has rejected calls for lockdowns during recent coronavirus outbreaks, responded to the WA crisis by denouncing any strategy for eliminating COVID-19. She also attempted to blame individual workers for community transmission from hotel quarantine. “You cannot prevent people who work in the quarantine system from going about their daily lives,” she said, “and whilst people do the right thing most of the time a slight lapse for a minute can cause the disease to spread.”
The response of Berejiklian and the corporate press demonstrates the commitment of governments and the financial elite to preventing any measures, however necessary, to stop the spread of the pandemic and save lives, that cut across the generation of profits.
On January 29, New Zealand’s immigration minister Kris Faafoi announced that the approaching cruise ship Le Lapérouse had stopped just outside the country’s exclusive economic zone and was being advised to “turn around,” after officials denied work visas to 61 of its 90 crew members.
Faafoi said the ship, which was not carrying passengers, could dock in New Zealand for maintenance, but the 61 workers, including waiters, chefs, bartenders, entertainers and housekeeping staff, would have to leave the country immediately or be “detained until they are able to leave.” The “best course of action,” he said, would be for the ship to “turn around before they get here.”
Le Lapérouse cruise ship (Source: Wikipedia)
Stuff reported that staff from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment had “told the ship’s owners to dump the hospitality crew in New Caledonia, before proceeding onto New Zealand.”
The owners, French firm Ponant, decided to turn Le Lapérouse around and anchor off the coast of Noumea, in the French Pacific island territory of New Caledonia. With a cyclone approaching and the ship running low on fuel, potentially endangering the crew, Noumean authorities allowed the ship to dock last night.
The fate of the crew, who are from several different countries, remains highly uncertain. Given the global collapse of the tourism and cruise ship industries, they will undoubtedly struggle to find other jobs if they cannot work on Le Lapérouse.
The episode underscores the draconian character of the Labour Party-Greens coalition government’s border regime. Under the guise of keeping the country safe during the pandemic, the government is stoking nationalism and xenophobia to divide the working class and prevent any unified struggle against austerity and job cuts.
Thousands of migrant workers and foreign students who have visas entitling them to live in New Zealand, are stranded overseas and have been denied the right to re-enter. Many have been separated from family members. Tens of thousands of migrants living in New Zealand are facing endless delays in the processing of their residency applications.
Faafoi told a press conference: “New Zealand takes its border security extremely seriously, especially given the threat of COVID-19,” implying the cruise ship workers posed a health risk. However, the crew of Le Lapérouse had tested negative for the coronavirus on four occasions and were aboard the ship for 27 days to fulfill isolation criteria.
New Zealand company Wild Earth Travel had chartered the vessel to provide cruises to sub-Antarctic islands. Le Lapérouse had been cleared by NZ’s Ministry of Health to enter New Zealand well before it departed from Indonesia on January 10. Ponant believed that this approval implied its crew would be granted visas.
Cruise ships were banned in March 2020 due to the pandemic, but the government allowed the industry to restart late last year. Numerous media articles published in December and January welcomed the return of Le Lapérouse, which has operated in New Zealand for seven years. The government apparently did not warn the ship’s operators that two thirds of its crew would be barred from entering the country.
Faafoi admitted to Radio NZ that the crew did not pose a health risk, but said New Zealand’s border closure in late March 2020 meant only citizens, residents and workers granted an exemption to fill “critical skills shortages” could enter the country. Immigration NZ informed Le Lapérouse that 61 crew did not meet the criteria only days before it was due to arrive.
Far from defending the crew of Le Lapérouse, who have been prevented from earning a living solely because of their nationality, New Zealand’s trade union bureaucracy applauded the government’s ban.
Maritime Union (MUNZ) assistant secretary Craig Harrison said the cruise ship jobs should have been reserved for “young New Zealanders… struggling to get positions.” He said “workers that have been displaced at Air New Zealand,” the national airline, could have been employed on Le Lapérouse. He urged the ship operator to enlist the union to act essentially as a recruitment agency and find local staff to replace the 61 foreign crew.
The Merchant Service Guild (MSG) suggested that the entire crew of Le Lapérouse, including the 29 technical crew who were granted visas, should be replaced by New Zealanders. MSG vice-president Ian McLeod told Radio NZ the ship’s “non-resident crew can stay onboard for a couple of weeks to train New Zealanders,” and then return home. All ships should be “using New Zealand people with New Zealand crews,” he said.
Migrant workers are not responsible for unemployment, which has soared in New Zealand as in every country, amid the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Official figures show 4.9 percent of working age people in NZ are unemployed, up from 4 percent a year ago. The “underutilisation rate,” including part-time workers who want more hours and people not actively looking for work, is much higher at 11.9 percent.
The unions are scapegoating foreigners for the lack of decent jobs to divert attention from the fact that they have enforced mass sackings, wage cuts and other attacks on the working class. These organisations do not represent workers. They are a privileged middle class bureaucracy working hand-in-hand with big business and the state to defend the interests of New Zealand capitalism.
The E tū union, for example, refused to organise any resistance in the working class to more than 4,000 job cuts by Air New Zealand, which is majority-owned by the government and received a loan of $900 million from the state to keep it afloat.
While issuing occasional pleas to minimise redundancies, E tū called on the airline to cut its foreign workforce to reduce costs. On September 16, 2020, the union stated that “there is no operational reason for Air New Zealand to retain a crew base in Shanghai” and demanded that the airline end its agreement with a crew hire company in the Chinese city.
E tū and MUNZ are both affiliated to the Labour Party and urged workers to re-elect it in the last year’s election, despite Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s government handing out tens of billions of dollars to major corporations, while overseeing soaring social inequality, homelessness and poverty. MUNZ donated more than $40,000 of union members’ money to Labour’s election campaign.
Stellantis’ (formerly Fiat Chrysler) Sterling Stamping Plant (SSP) has been a center of COVID-19 infections in recent weeks. The plant, located in the northern suburbs of Detroit, is the largest stamping plant in the world, with some 2,100 employees. The Sterling Heights Assembly Plant Rank-and-File Safety Committee reported last November that infections were spreading out of control at the plant. Since then, dozens of new infections have been reported to workers.
While Stellantis and the other automakers claim that they are taking precautions to prevent outbreaks in their plants, autoworkers have reported for months that even the token measures implemented after the restart of production last May have been progressively abandoned.
Inside the massive Sterling Stamping Plant (SOURCE: YouTube. The Wheel Network)
However, the personal protective equipment (PPE) which the automakers provided workers was inadequate from the very beginning. In spite of repeated advice by public health experts that workers at risk of infection should wear N95 masks, which provide a higher level of air filtration, workers have only been provided with generic surgical masks at the start of their shifts.
However, even as the virus continues to kill 3,000 people per day in the United States, and Dr. Anthony Fauci has called on people to wear two masks when out of their homes, Stellantis management at Sterling Stamping has stopped giving out even the surgical masks it had been previously providing. Instead, the company is providing workers with new masks that appear to offer much lower levels of protection.
The new masks lack the water-resistant blue out layers which are normally used with surgical masks, and have a texture that is highly absorbent and transparent and that workers have compared to tissue paper. They carry no safety rating whatsoever, either from the government of China, where the masks were produced, or by the American ASTM (formerly known as American Society for Testing and Materials).
A worker shows the WSWS the increased liquid permeability of the new masks.
The masks are “Much thinner ... three ply, yet the outer two layer are transparent,” a Sterling Stamping worker told the World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter. “This appears to be the result of cost cutting. Less cost, Less filtration, and an increase in new variant infections. This is what it looks like to me.”
The new masks appear to be only “applicable to daily life to filter pollen, willow wool, bacterial particles and block nasal or oral exhalation or ejection of pollutants to wear protective masks,” the worker continued. “I believe we have a problem. This Identification is ONLY on the outside of the shipping box!”
The masks are produced by a Stellantis subsidary, Comau LLC, based in Southfield, Michigan. The company, which operates dozens of facilities throughout the world, including North America, Europe and China, specializes in robotics and automation. It has no background at all in producing medical supplies or PPE. The masks themselves come in boxes branded with the FCA company logo.
Disclaimer on the packaging for the new masks.
The new masks have not been approved for use by the Food and Drug Administration. Instead, they have been authorized by the government for use on an emergency basis under the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, which provides for temporary authorizations in cases of public health emergencies. This is indicated by a disclaimer on the packages that the masks are shipped in, which are not provided to employees themselves.
The packages also include the following disclaimer: "Not recommended for: 1. Use in any surgical setting or where significant exposure to liquid, bodily or other hazardous fluids, may be expected; 2. Use in a clinical setting where the infection risk level through inhalation exposure is high; 3. Use in the presence of high intensity heat source or flammable gas.
Last Tuesday, Harvard public health professor Joseph G. Allen penned an editorial for the Washington Post calling for ASTM rated N95 masks to be used by the general public: “A typical cloth mask might capture half of all respiratory aerosols that come out of our mouth when we talk, sing or just breathe. A tightly woven cloth mask might get you to 60 or 70 percent, and a blue surgical mask can get you to 70 or 80 percent.
More disclaimers on the shipping box.
“But there’s no reason any essential worker—and, really, everyone in the country—should go without masks that filter 95 percent.
“The masks I’m referring to, of course, are N95s. These are cheap—pre-pandemic they cost about 50 cents—and easy to manufacture. Yet our country has failed to invoke the Defense Production Act to produce enough masks for health-care workers and other essential workers. That needs to change, as my colleagues at Harvard Medical School have written.”
Stellantis’ apparent cost-cutting measures on such a basic necessity as facemasks give the lie to their perfunctory statements of concern “to protect employees, their families and the surrounding communities.” In reality, management at Stellantis as well as the other automakers have been colluding with the United Auto Workers union for months to cover up the spread of the infections and to force workers to endure record levels of overtime to make up for absences and lost production earlier last year.
For much of the past year, the auto industry has boasted, to considerable acclaim from the corporate press, about its decision to divert a small portion of its industrial capacity towards the creation of ventilators, face shields and other safety equipment. The most bombastic promotion has come from the Detroit Free Press, which compared it to the measures during World War II to mobilize the entire economy of the country to produce bombers, tanks and other weapons of war. In reality, this was always first and foremost a public relations ploy by the auto companies, meant above all to facilitate the reopening of auto plants after a wildcat strike forced the industry in North America to close last March.
Fiat Chrysler/Stellantis announced last March that it would begin producing face masks for US healthcare workers out of one of its plants in China. It is unclear at this point whether the masks at Sterling Stamping are of the same design which the company is producing for healthcare workers.
Regardless, autoworkers must be provided with N95 masks or better. However, even if higher quality masks are distributed, there are no conditions under which the auto industry and other nonessential industries can be operated safely. Workers must demand the closure of nonessential production as well as schools, with full compensation for laid-off workers, to prevent further infections and death. This requires as well full support by autoworkers for the struggle of Chicago teachers, who are resisting demands by the administration of Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot for a return to in-person instruction.
