Britain’s Double Standards in International Affairs

Brian Cloughley

On February 12 it was announced by the UN that a British lawyer had been elected as chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court.  No matter what one might think of the ICC, it is taking steps to investigate war crimes in Afghanistan and Yemen, so it can’t be all bad.  But a major point in this international development is that the person involved, Karim Khan, a brilliant advocate, was expected to be chosen by consensus but as noted by the UK’s Guardian newspaper, there was a last-minute objection by the Indian Ocean island state of Mauritius which “focused less on Karim as an individual, but that he was nominated by the British government. Mauritius had been infuriated that UK ministers had for a second time said they had no need to abide by rulings of international UN courts in the dispute over its sovereignty of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean.

This is one example of the British government flouting international law when it considers such codes to be awkward, and an illustration of its inconsistent and even hypocritical approach to world developments.

***

Hong Kong used to be a British colony and reverted to China in 1997. Since then there have been disagreements between Britain and China concerning governance of the region, and the British government has poked its nose where it has no right to dictate the conduct of affairs.  It claims to have a “moral commitment” regarding a security law applicable to Hong Kong, and in a speech about the region on January 29 the British prime minister, the egregious Boris Johnson, declared that he and his government “stand up for freedom and autonomy.”

It so happens that on the same day as Johnson was preaching about his love of freedom the United Nation’s maritime court in Hamburg announced that Britain has no sovereignty over the Chagos Islands.  As the UK Guardian reported, the Court “criticized London for its failure to hand the territory back to Mauritius and follows the international court of justice announcement last year that the UK’s ongoing administration of the islands was ‘unlawful’.”

Britain’s treatment of the former inhabitants of the Chagos Islands has been disgraceful and entirely at variance with its self-righteous criticism of other countries for their supposed denial of human rights.

The Chagos chain of some sixty islets is in the middle of the Indian Ocean and used to be a paradise for the inhabitants but, as noted by the BBC, “Between 1968 and 1974, Britain forcibly removed thousands of Chagossians from their homelands and sent them more than 1,000 miles away to Mauritius and the Seychelles, where they faced extreme poverty and discrimination.” There are some 3,000 reluctantly resident in Britain and many of the younger ones, born in exile, have been denied British citizenship and live in fear of being expelled.

As I have written in Counterpunch in the past, the Chagos Archipelago was “depopulated” in the 1960s and 70s because Britain had agreed that there should be a US military airfield on the main island, Diego Garcia.  As revealed in 2004, the bureaucrats of Britain’s Colonial Office had written that “The object of the exercise is to get some rocks which will remain ours; there will be no indigenous population except seagulls who have not yet got a committee. Unfortunately along with the Birds go some few Tarzans or Men Fridays whose origins are obscure, and who are being hopefully wished on to Mauritius etc.”

The sneering condescension of that racist bigotry is repulsive, but the attitude remains, and the Chagos Islanders will continue to be victims of that mentality. By various subterfuges, the people of the Archipelago were expelled, in the course of which the colonial governor Sir Bruce Greatbatch “ordered all pet dogs on Diego Garcia to be killed. Almost 1,000 pets were rounded up and gassed, using the exhaust fumes from American military vehicles.” As one evicted Islander, Lizette Tallatte, said in a 2004 documentary, “when their dogs were taken away in front of them, our children screamed and cried,” and then the remaining islanders “were loaded on to ships, allowed to take only one suitcase. They left behind their homes and furniture, and their lives.”

The islands had been a French colony and were handed over to Britain in 1814 by the Treaty of Paris which officially ended the Napoleonic Wars. They formed part of the colony of Mauritius, the much larger island group some 2000 kilometers to the south east.

Then, as Law World records, “In 1965, the UK and Mauritius signed the Lancaster House Agreement, whereby the Chagos Islands were detached from Mauritius and included in a new territory called the British Indian Ocean Territory.  Mauritius later alleged that this detachment was forced, especially due to its vulnerable position as a former British colony. Due to the geographically strategic position of Chagos – equally situated between Indonesia, Australia, Iraq and eastern Africa – the UK and the United States had long been considering it for the installation of a military base.  In 1966, the UK and the US signed a deal for the implementation of such a base on the island of Diego Garcia for an indefinite period . . .”

So the “Tarzans and Man Fridays”, as the inhabitants were regarded by the bigoted smirking Brits, were sacrificed on Washington’s altar of domination which added another military base to the 800 around the globe.  In 2016, the lease for the base was extended until 2036. No mention was made of the islanders who had been forcibly evicted from their home.

On 22 May 2019, the UN General Assembly voted 116 to 6 in favor of a resolution demanding that the United Kingdom withdraw “its colonial administration unconditionally from the Chagos Archipelago” within six months. Only the U.S., Hungary, Israel, Australia and the Maldives backed the UK, but although the result was indicative of world opinion and deeply condemnatory of the US and Britain the resolution is non-binding and will be ignored by those most directly involved — and the islanders will stay poverty-ridden in exile. They are, after all, mere “Tarzans and Man Fridays” and it is no doubt hoped that soon they will all die off and cease to be a problem.

The people who deny the Islanders their human rights are poisonous filth, as made clear in a British 2009 diplomatic cable revealed by Wikileaks (no wonder the Brit establishment detests Julian Assange and is treating him so disgustingly) which stated that the government “would like to establish a ‘marine park’ or ‘reserve’ providing comprehensive environmental protection to the reefs and waters of the British Indian Ocean Territory [BIOT] . . . [which]  would in no way impinge on US use of the BIOT, including Diego Garcia, for military purposes . . . [and ensure] that former inhabitants would find it difficult, if not impossible, to pursue their claim for resettlement on the islands if the entire Chagos Archipelago were a marine reserve.”

The inhabitants of Hong Kong, on the other hand, are more highly regarded in London, and on  January 29 the British government announced satisfaction about “the UK’s historic and moral commitment to the people of Hong Kong who have had their rights and freedoms restricted.”  The UK has, after all, declared it wishes to “defend human rights across the globe.”

In November 2016 the Financial Times reported extension of the lease for the US base on Diego Garcia for another twenty years and noted that “the Foreign and Commonwealth Office said that the Chagossians would not be allowed to return “on the grounds of feasibility, defense and security interests, and cost to the British taxpayer”.  It was also announced that the evicted Islanders would receive 40 million pounds in compensation.

But on  January 31 it was revealed that less than £12,000 of that forty million has been directed to helping the exiled islanders and their families.  Henry Smith, the UK Member of Parliament in whose constituency many Chagossians now exist, stated bluntly that “it’s outrageous that next to none of this funding has actually been utilized . . . [it is] another failure of Foreign Office promises over half a century to the Chagossian community.”

The “defense of human rights” by the government of Boris Johnson is a charade, and the treatment of the Chagos Islanders is indefensibly cruel and loathsome. But the government and their little helpers in London think it’s such an unimportant matter that it will simply fade away.  Like the islanders.

Alas, they are probably right.  And we will see yet another victory for duplicity over morality, illustrating Britain’s double standards in international affairs.

From Rich Diversity to Narrow Genetic Base in Agriculture

Bharat Dogra

One of the most creative endeavors of farmers all over the world but even more so in tropical countries has been to protect , promote and nurture a diversity of crop varieties. They continued to do so for thousands of years and for well over a hundred generation.

As a result of this , over a period of around five thousand or more years humankind was able to create something very beautiful and even more useful—a collection of hundreds of thousands of varieties, sub-varieties and cultivars of various crops found suitable for various kinds of soil and land, weather and climate, season and place, or cherished for their taste and flavor, scent and aroma, cooking quality and nutrition, yield of grain or fodder, medicinal or other special attributes.

Genuine progress for thousands of years in this particular context led to farming communities becoming very self-reliant in terms of their most important need of diverse kinds of seeds for diverse kinds of land and soil. Within various farming communities there were some who had exceptional talents, creativity, wisdom and aptitude for protecting and nurturing diverse varieties. Such farmers got more respect and their help was often sought. As they grew old they imparted more of their knowledge to others or made a few simple rules so that the protective practices could be followed more easily . Many women in particular were found to be particularly skilled and creative, and also very protective. The practice of selecting more healthy and bountiful plants in each harvest and obtaining seeds from them was carefully followed. If some of the plants were affected by pest or disease, the genetic diversity helped to check the spread. In addition farmers carefully observed the plants that escaped harm, and obtained seeds from them for the next harvest . At the same time as varieties grown naturally in various conditions were protected and improved, varieties found to be growing well in the wild or on margins were also incorporated into the range of cultivated varieties. In this and numerous other ways, integrating and adding to the wisdom of earlier generations, real progress in terms of a rich genetic diversity of crop varieties was ensured. What was achieved was something uniquely beautiful, useful and creative. It was based on the wisdom and contributions of countless farmers of so many generations, women and men, elderly and young.

This progress based on the cooperation and sharing of countless farmers for a few thousand years continued to enrich world farming and food systems. Then about a hundred years back, or perhaps a little sooner or later, a few influential and powerful persons started believing that they knew better than the combined wisdom of farmers of many generations. These few select persons felt that instead of farmers evolving and protecting various crop varieties on their millions of fields, a few select persons would be able to find the most suitable varieties in their labs and experimental fields and then, as these select persons knew best, the varieties found by them should be spread to be grown on fields of farmers over vast areas.

For sometime this absurd notion of replacing or even uprooting one of the most evolved systems of human progress and cooperation, a system based on voluntarism and local talents which ensured the availability of the most important input to all farmers as per their specific needs without any cash expenditure and trouble to anyone , did not carry much interest and being more of a whim did not cause much harm either. But then even more powerful persons and businessmen started realizing that there is a lot of money to be made from this new notion, and this is when the trouble started, as these businessmen also had the money to influence governments.

These rich businessmen argued among themselves that it is precisely because the farming communities tend to be self-reliant in meeting their needs that we cannot make money from them. To make money from them their self-reliance must be broken. What better way of breaking the larger self-reliance than to first break the self-reliance in terms of seeds, as the entire farming basically starts with seeds? When many big businessmen started thinking in these terms then the notion of a few select persons claiming to create more productive varieties appealed to them. Ah! Let us get these select men to give us some varieties which can perhaps be shown to get some higher grains for some time by using some of the surplus chemicals manufactured by us. Let us get all our media friends to shout more and more about the real or imagined higher yield. Then we will have the right conditions to ask our collaborators in the government to concentrate on promoting only these seeds. Hence the self-reliance of farmers in terms of the most basic requirement of seeds will be broken and in addition we will be able to sell loads of surplus chemicals as well. Once this happens the entire sector will get opened to us for the one who controls the seeds controls the rest of the farming as well.

This is the basis of how the modern era in farming started and the green revolution started. At field level its most immediate consequence was that several hundred thousand varieties and sub- varieties and cultivars of crops , the result and the achievements of the efforts of millions and millions of farmers over hundreds of generations, started getting displaced from farms and were eventually lost to farmers. This was repeatedly announced from the housetop as great progress. A lie told a thousand times finds believers. Ultimately several among the new generation of farmers themselves as well as most others started believing this is progress and so businessmen and their official collaborators could justify the concentration of government spending on only this so-called progress. The genuine progress of thousands of years in conserving very rich genetic diversity was forgotten by most, but its great value for breeding was recognized by shrewd businessmen who got these conserved in gene banks from where billionaire multinational companies could obtain these quietly for their narrow profit requirements.

As the genetic diversity on fields dwindled greatly, big businessmen prepared for their second onslaught to reduce this further , using their technology of GM crops and genetic engineering, so that only seeds of a handful of giant corporations would dominate world farming. They would like to use the world media and other collaborators to hail this as the second green revolution.

Before concluding, we will like to give here just one episode on how all these changes took place. There have been several such episodes in various parts of the world.

In early and mid-sixties of the previous century India was making very good progress for improving rice cultivation based on the rich diversity of indigenous rice varieties. Then suddenly pressures started being exerted to abandon this and instead opt for an entirely different program imposed from outside and based on non-indigenous seeds, even though these were suspected to be harmful. On March 15, 1966 Dr. R.H. Richharia, the then director of the Central Rice Research Institute (CRRI) wrote an extremely important letter to the Director General, Indian Council of Agricultural Research, Delhi.

“The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) Manila, has been sending a lot of rice experimental material from time to time into this country”, this letter said, “and these are grown in several states. It has come to my notice that most of this material are susceptible to a very peculiar disease, not known to this country so far; it is suspected to be virus”

Having sounded this warning the author of this letter went on to state, “I may point out that in the last Rice Research Workers’ Conference during November 1965, I.R. 9-60 has been recommended as one of the donor parents for hybridization programme in the various rice-growing states. But this material, as has already been reported earlier, has been observed by me at CRRI and two other centres to be infected with the yellowing disease at an early vegetative phase. I may also inform that from some source of information I have learnt that I.R. 9-60 is not only susceptible to Tungru virus, but, also to bacterial blight. As such it is not a desirable material for being used as a donor parent; if used, it may spread diseases where-ever the material is grown. Under these circumstances it would soon be beyond our control.

“That some sort of inoculum of this dreadful disease is getting built up in the country is evident from the fact that Taichung Native I which was not showing the yellowing of leaves in the early vegetative phased of the summer crop of last year, has now exhibited it. Since the Ministry of Food and Agriculture has a huge programme of speedily spreading this variety in the near future, timely action has to be taken against any future catastrophe of the kind being observed now.”

Having sounded these warnings the then Director of CRRI, who was one of the most famous rice-experts in the world made the following recommendation –

a) Wherever rice cultures from IRRI are being grown they should be carefully watched for which instructions have to be issued.
b) Action will have to be taken to withdraw the hybridization programme recommended under item A(2) of the Rice Research Workers Conference involving I.R. 9-60 as the donor parent.
c) Restrictions will have to be imposed against the free import of IRRI rice material by any source other than CRRI.

Unfortunately, however, these warnings and recommendations were ignored by the top authorities, and instead the writer of this letter was pre-maturely retired from his senior post. The pest and disease susceptible varieties were allowed to be spread.

All this proved very harmful for India’s agriculture, and the results become evident all too soon. The massive damage become so worrying that a special task force on rice breeding was constituted of eminent experts in 1979 to examine this issue. These experts met at the CRRI in February. Dr. Richharia was called back from his retirement to head this task force as his advice was considered invaluable. This task report stated clearly and firmly, “Most of the HYVs are derivatives of T(N) 1 or I.R. 8 and, therefore, have the dwarfing gene of dee-geo-woo-gen. This narrow genetic base has created alarming uniformity, causing vulnerability to diseases and pests. Most of the released varieties are not suitable for typical uplands and low lands which together constitute about 75 per cent of the total rice area of the country. To meet these situations, we need to reorient our research programmes and strategies.

“Referring to this problem of narrow genetic base at another place again the task force says, “A cursory look at the pedigree of the different rice varieties released in India reveals that a very narrow germplasm base is involved. It is also noticed that many times the same female parent is involved in the cross combination.”

Thus even though the earlier warnings of Dr. Richharia were now confirmed by the actual experience of about 13 years and supported by the country’s eminent rice-breeders represented in this task-force, these warnings were still ignored to a large extent and the official rice programme/policy centred on exotic dwarf HYVs with a narrow genetic base continued as before.

Opposition mounts to unsafe opening of schools in Spain

Alice Summers

Opposition is mounting to the continued opening of unsafe schools in Spain. There are growing calls by educators and parents to close schools, and strikes have broken out among students as infection rates in education centres soar.

Coronavirus cases in schools have rapidly increased since children returned to classrooms after the holidays, with the number of outbreaks in education centres more than quadrupling in only two weeks. In the week ending January 22, the Ministry of Health reported 95 new outbreaks in a seven-day period; by February 5, this had risen to 413 individual outbreaks in schools in a single week, the highest figure since the government began recording this data. An “outbreak” is defined as a cluster of three or more linked cases in a single area.

Podemos party leader Pablo Iglesias speaks as Spain’s caretaker Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez looks on after signing an agreement at the parliament in Madrid, Spain, Tuesday, Nov. 12, 2019. (AP Photo/Paul White)

The number of schoolchildren who have had to self-isolate due to coronavirus infections has also shot up. In the Madrid region, the number of children in quarantine doubled in a week, from 12,051 in the last week of January to 25,540 at the start of February. In the same period, the number of classrooms forced to close tripled, increasing from 357 to 1,025.

In Catalonia, the number of classrooms placed in quarantine doubled in two weeks, with 25 percent of schools in the regional capital of Barcelona having at least one class closed. Meanwhile, in the Basque Country, this figure has increased 12-fold since the return to school after the holidays, and multiplied by 11 in the region of Castilla y León. Across Spain, nearly 6,000 classes are quarantined.

While the number of daily coronavirus cases reported across Spain has been gradually falling since the end of January, deaths have continued to rise. An average of 480 people died of the virus every day last week, taking the official death toll to over 65,000. Last Tuesday, Spain reached the horrific milestone of 3 million cases, only the fourth European country to have done so.

Despite the explosion of cases in schools, the Podemos-PSOE (Socialist Party) government has ruled out moving to online learning while the pandemic rages. In a press conference last week, PSOE Education Minister Isabel Celaá insisted on “maintaining in-person education, because education centres are the safest environments that they [children] could be in. … In-person education is irreplaceable, a social conquest.”

Similarly, Fernando Simón, director of the Centre for the Coordination of Health Alerts and Emergencies, claimed in a press conference last week that “Schools continue to be safer than most other areas of social life,” cynically declaring that closing schools would in fact make children less safe than being at home! “We can’t remove from their day-to-day [life] the part of the day in which students are the most protected with masks and preventative measures,” he pronounced absurdly.

Simón’s claim that schools are one of the safest places for children and teachers is belied by the government’s own data. Health Ministry figures from the first week of February show that schools are the site of far more infections than care homes, where 161 outbreaks were recorded, workplaces (270 outbreaks), or other social settings (407 outbreaks). This compares to the 413 outbreaks reported in schools.

As far as the ruling class is concerned, schools must remain open whatever the cost, to act as holding pens for children while parents are sent back to unsafe workplaces to continue generating profits for the bourgeoisie.

This criminal policy is meeting increased opposition among workers and youth, however.

Last Thursday, students at over 60 different institutions in the region of Valencia went on strike, protesting the “devastating impact” of the pandemic on public education. The student strikers demanded that stay-at-home lock-down measures be imposed and that all non-essential production and school activity be halted to protect the population from the virus.

Students also called for the cancellation of all exams, to be replaced with other forms of assessment, and for all parents to receive paid leave and have their jobs protected so that they can stay at home to care for their children. Other demands included: to reduce class sizes, to hire new teachers and health care professionals in all education centres and to install high-quality air filtration systems.

Parents from the Valencian Confederation of Parents’ Associations also called for the “immediate” closure of schools, as well as the vaccination of all education workers.

Meanwhile, in Salamanca, in the region of Castilla y León, parents’ organisation DERPA (Derecho a Enseñanza sin Riesgo en Pandemia—The Right to Education without Risk in the Pandemic) has demanded that the regional government allow parents the choice of whether or not to send their children into school. “[School attendance] is a very significant risk,” said Verónica González, president of DERPA, “and there are families with [underlying] conditions.”

In many regions, parents have taken matters into their own hands, refusing to send their children into schools. In Andalucía, absence rates in primary schools doubled in the first term of the year as compared to last year. In the first term of the 2019-20 school year, 6,152 cases of absenteeism were reported in this region; in 2020-21, this increased to 11,427.

In the Andalucían town of La Línea de la Concepción, which borders the British enclave of Gibraltar, over 90 percent of schoolchildren have been kept away from classrooms by their parents since the Christmas break. The town has had one of the highest incidence rates of the virus in Spain. Many parents fear an outbreak of the far more contagious British strain due to its proximity to Gibraltar.

Education unions in Andalucía have made very weak statements of support for schools to be temporarily closed. Public sector union Central Sindical Independiente y de Funcionarios (CSIF) spokesperson Pilar González stated that the “prompt and temporary closure of education centres in these [worst-hit] areas, which would be reviewed after 14 days …, would serve to contain the spread of contagion in the autonomous region [Andalucía] and to prevent schools from becoming … unsafe places for students and teachers.”

At the end of January, the Workers’ Councils (CCOO), one of Spain’s largest unions, also called for schools in some of the worst-affected regions of Spain to temporarily move to online teaching “in cases where public health officials deem it [necessary].” Where in-person education is still possible, the CCOO proposed that teachers receive FFP2 masks.

While there is no lack of willingness to fight among educators, parents and students, the unions have refused to call for strike action to force the closure of schools. Their supposed “opposition” is limited to politely worded letters asking regional governments to take action, requests which they know full well will be ignored. The unions’ calls for school closures are restricted to only a few regions or sub-regions, thereby working to prevent a coordinated struggle across Spain and internationally.

The unions seek not to organise opposition to unsafe schools, but to demobilise it. Their impotent pleas to the central and regional governments aim to give the impression that they have tried to oppose in-person schooling, and so to convince workers that nothing more can be done.

Workers must break with these bought-and-paid-for tools of big business, turning instead to their class brothers and sisters internationally. Strikes and protests have already broken out across the world, with educators and students mobilising in opposition to unsafe schools in Brazil, India, Germany, the USA and many other countries.

Prime Minister Johnson backed by Scottish and Welsh governments in deadly school reopenings

Thomas Scripps

The Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee opposes the unsafe reopening of schools in Britain, which are starting next week. School pupils are to return to the classroom from Monday in Scotland and Wales, beginning the UK’s premature lifting of the national lockdown in the interests of the corporations.

Following a COVID-19 press briefing Monday in which she said she was “very, very, very keen to go ahead” with plans for children to return to on-site learning, Scottish National Party (SNP) First Minister Nicola Sturgeon insisted “In terms of the order in which we exit lockdown, the Scottish Government has always made clear that education should be the priority.” She announced that primary school children up to age seven and some secondary school students in exam years will return to school on February 22. Another phase of school reopenings will take place during the first week of March.

Wales will begin a phased reopening of schools, initially for children up to age seven and some older children on vocational courses, from February 22.

Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo, Pool)

The SNP and the Welsh Labour Party-controlled devolved government are working in unison with Downing Street. At his Monday press conference, Prime Minister Boris Johnson pledged to outline a “roadmap” next week, “saying as much as we possibly can about the route to normality… Because we want this lockdown to be the last. And we want progress to be cautious but also irreversible.”

Johnson has set a target of March 8 for reopening schools in England.

This criminal policy will lead to a disastrous increase in transmission of the COVID-19 virus. Numerous studies have detailed the major role played by on-site schooling in community transmission.

By December 12 last year, after schools in England had been open for three months, secondary and primary school-aged pupils had the highest infection rates in the country of any age group, according to Office for National Statistics (ONS) data. Government statistics released January revealed the widespread infection of school staff, who the National Education Union calculated were a minimum of 1.9 and up to seven times more likely to be exposed to the virus than the general population.

Imperial College London’s REACT study, covering the period February 4 to February 13, found that the age groups with the highest rates of infection were 18 to 24-year-olds and 5 to 12-year-olds. The second group covers children of primary school age.

Due to the limited nature of the lockdown, many parents have been forced to work unnecessarily and to send their children to school. Department for Education figures released this week revealed that attendance rates in primary schools were now six times higher than during the first lockdown last spring, when approximately 4 percent of pupils attended class. Last week, 24 percent of primary school pupils were on-site—an increase on the 23 percent the week before and the third week in a row that primary school attendance has increased.

Overall, 16 percent of all state school pupils were in classes on February 11. Of these approximately 894,000 children of key workers were in attendance last week.

The prevalence of the virus remains high and an increase in infection rates will lead to a rapid explosion of cases. When schools were reopened last September, contributing to the devastating second wave of the virus, the ONS estimated one in 1,400 people in England had coronavirus the previous week. According to the REACT study, the rate is now seven times higher, one in 200.

The danger is heightened by the spread of new variants of the virus. The (B.1.1.7) variant, first detected in Kent last September, and which now accounts for the majority of UK cases, is believed to be 30 to 70 percent more transmissible. Last Friday, the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG) reported it was also between 30 and 70 percent more deadly.

Genetic screening tests have found 217 cases of the “South African variant” (B.1.351) in Britain, which is thought to be up to 50 percent more contagious. It has a mutation which makes it more resistant to the body’s immune defences, limiting the effectiveness of current vaccines. Some cases of the Kent strain found in the south west of the UK have this mutation.

This week, the UK discovered 38 cases, and four more “probable cases”, of yet another strain—B.1.525, currently most prevalent in Nigeria. The BBC explained, “One of these changes B.1.525 has is a mutation called E484K—also found in the Brazil and South African variants—that may help the virus evade some of the body’s immune system defences.

“Other alterations make it similar to the UK ‘Kent’ variant that experts say is more contagious than the original version of coronavirus that started the pandemic.”

Scientists worldwide are warning that these new variants will spur new waves of infection. Caroline Colijn, a COVID modeler and mathematician at Simon Fraser University in Canada, likened the situation to a “forest fire”, saying, “We’re seeing things drop because of restrictions—those fire hoses we put in front of the fire. Then we turn the hoses off and we’re surprised that this wave is coming back.”

Professor Saloshni Naidoo, Head of the Department of Public Health Medicine at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa warned, “If there are more variants, and if they are more transmissible… then the third wave can be more severe than previous waves.”

Professor Steven Riley, a member of the UK’s Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling, told the Evening Standard, “If for some reason we were to choose to just pretend it (coronavirus) wasn’t here any more then there is the potential to go back to a wave that is a similar size to the one that we are in now.”

The spread of the more contagious strains is seeing more children infected and hospitalised. The British Medical Journal reported February 9, “[M]ore young children are being infected in Israel and Italy, emerging data suggest”. Israeli medical officials have told hospitals to prepare for more child coronavirus patients as schools reopen.

This reality is being buried under an avalanche of government and corporate media propaganda, recycling the claims of cherry-picked studies and scientists. But in the face of mounting evidence globally that education settings are major vectors in spreading COVID-19, the propaganda offensive aimed at the unsafe reopening of schools can only proceed thanks to the open collusion of Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party and the trade unions.

National Education Union (NEU) Joint General Secretary Mary Bousted tweeted yesterday that the Imperial REACT survey made “the strongest case for a phased re-opening of schools to full pupil intakes… Everyone wants them to be opened in a safe and sustainable way so let’s make that happen.” The NEU has consistently sacrificed its members’ safety throughout the pandemic.

According to the Telegraph, union bosses are due to meet with the government today “for talks to finalise plans for mass testing secondary pupils on their return.”

Workers will be watching these events with a painful sense of déjà vu. Last year saw the same promises and demands for “proof” of school safety followed by the abandonment of the unions’ supposed “red lines”. According to the Times Educational Supplement at least 570 educators have so far paid with their lives. If the reopening is also allowed to proceed as it did in September, it can only produce the same terrible consequences and worse.

School and day-care centre openings in Germany—a murderous herd immunity experiment

Gregor Link

Restrictions on face-to-face teaching and the impact of the Christmas and winter holidays led to a substantial drop in new infections and deaths in recent weeks, proving once again the central role that schools and day-care centres have played in the COVID-19 pandemic.

This impressively underscores the urgent need for a European-wide school and general strike to defeat the pandemic and prevent the avoidable deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. In Germany alone, COVID-19 continues to claim an average of 400 lives every day, and across Europe 4,000 deaths are daily added to the grim toll.

The spread of the original coronavirus strain is being eclipsed in more and more European countries by more contagious variants, which are now also increasingly being detected in mass outbreaks in Germany. According to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the proportion of the UK variant of new cases rose to more than 20 percent within 14 days.

Given the proliferation of variants, virologists Melanie Brinkmann and Christian Drosten recently warned in the newsweekly Der Spiegel that a comprehensive policy of opening up the economy would immediately cost the lives of 100,000 to 180,000 more people in Germany alone.

But instead of keeping schools and day-care centres closed, scaling down the economy to absolutely essential levels and containing the pandemic with measures coordinated across Europe—a goal supported by more than 1,000 leading scientists—the federal and state governments are systematically seeking to create conditions for a third wave. Nowhere is this more evident than in the attempt by state leaders to return to unprotected face-to-face teaching as soon as possible.

In Saxony, where the crematoriums were overwhelmed in the face of mass deaths just a few weeks ago, primary schools and day-care centres have already been back in “restricted regular operation” since Monday—without distancing rules and the compulsory wearing of masks in class. On March 8, secondary pupils are also to return to alternating in-person and remote teaching.

State Premier Michael Kretschmer (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) left no doubt that this was a deliberate human experiment designed to assess more precisely the influence of schools and day-care centres on the level of contagion in the general population. In an interview with the tabloid, Bild am Sonntag, he described the “opening of day-care centres and primary schools” as an important “experiment” whose “effects” would be “seen at the beginning of March.”

Kretschmer is thus following the advice of the Bonn virologist Hendrik Streeck, who in recent weeks and months had repeatedly called in the press and on talk shows for a policy of “trying things out.” Claiming, “we know nothing about the incidence of infections in schools,” Streeck had suggested on the Sandra Maischberger show at the end of January, “opening schools in one place and not in another.” This was “not an experiment on humans,” the virologist had hastily claimed at the time.

However, the fact that this is exactly what is happening is openly acknowledged in the bourgeois press. For example, a commentary in the Süddeutsche Zeitung—which welcomes the school openings—refers to Kretschmer’s plans as a “gamble” for which there were “of course reasons” and noted, “Other federal states have already announced that they also want to dare to undertake the experiment.”

Thuringia, which is governed by the Left Party, plans to return to regular operation in primary schools and day-care centres as of Monday. The “incidence threshold” to be reached is set at 100 cases per 100,000 inhabitants per week, which is so high that from March 1 onwards, in-person classes will presumably also apply to all other grades in most districts. Up to grade seven, masks are not compulsory in class.

A Tagesschau report makes it clear that the coming Monday marks the beginning of the comprehensive opening of schools and day-care centres in the vast majority of the federal states:

· North Rhine-Westphalia, Baden-Württemberg and Saarland, for example, intend alternating in-person and remote lessons for primary school children from Monday. For day-care centres, “regular operation under pandemic conditions” applies, i.e., unprotected contact between children and educators.

· Brandenburg is also switching to alternating teaching at primary schools; day-care centres have already been open for weeks. Berlin is also maintaining “emergency care” for primary school children of “key worker” parents and is increasing day-care capacity to 60 percent. Alternate teaching for final-year classes is “possible by arrangement.”

· Bavaria is introducing alternating teaching for primary school classes in districts and cities with an incidence below 100. Also, there is “restricted” regular operation at day-care centres and face-to-face teaching for the final years of grammar schools, vocational, secondary modern and middle schools.

· In Hesse, there is alternating teaching for classes one to six and the final years, as well as “restricted regular operation for nurseries.” Rhineland-Palatinate is providing alternating teaching for grades one to four and “regular operation under pandemic conditions” in nurseries and child-care centres.

· In Schleswig-Holstein, day-care centres and grades one to four are to return to general attendance mode from Monday without dividing up classes or groups. Classes five to 13 will potentially follow on March 7. In Mecklenburg-Pomerania, analogous regulations will apply from Wednesday.

· In Saxony-Anhalt, there is currently “emergency care” for years one to six and in-person attendance for the final years. As soon as the incidence value drops to 50, regular classes are to be held again “at all schools in the respective district” from March 1.

· Bremen and Hamburg start relaxations on March 1, although the incidence figures for both city-states are well above the national average. Bremen envisages a return to “attendance at full class size” for primary schools. As in other federal states, an “emergency care provision” is currently in place that deprives working parents of the legal basis to demand leave of absence from their employers.

· In Lower Saxony, primary school pupils and special needs pupils with a focus on mental development have already been in alternating classes since January, and this is now to apply to final-year classes as well. A general “return to face-to-face teaching” is targeted for the beginning of March, as well as for day-care centres. Meanwhile, Volkswagen—the largest employer in the state—is planning to set up its own vaccination centres, as it expects to become “part of the German vaccination strategy,” according to a spokesperson. With a vaccination rate of 2.8 percent, the state ranks last in nationwide comparison.

While several federal states boast of offering pupils and school staff one to two free tests per week, teachers report on social media that the testing stations are often out of reach or overloaded. A recent study by the Technical University of Berlin, comparing different indoor situations, has again proven that full classrooms without the mandatory wearing of masks—as well as open-plan offices—are by far the riskiest environments.

Although teachers, educators and their families are therefore directly exposed to an incalculable risk, the chairman of the Standing Vaccination Commission, Thomas Mertens, stated on Tuesday that there was “no need to give teachers priority now in deviation from the [previous] recommendation.” So far, teachers and educators have a lower priority than emergency police officers and law enforcement officers when it comes to being vaccinated.

In their murderous drive to open up day-care centres and primary schools, government leaders rely—as they did at the beginning of the pandemic—on pseudo-scientific studies and a phalanx of academic propagandists of so-called herd immunity. Under the name “Coronavirus Strategy Working Group,” a right-wing network has come out in the open in recent days, demanding that the population “live with the virus” and explicitly calling for the “opening of day-care centres and primary schools.”

The “working group” is supported by Streeck and consists of eight professors—among them the epidemiologist Klaus Stöhr, the head of the Frankfurt health authority René Gottschalk, Jonas Schmidt-Chanasit from the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine and Gerd Antes, a founding member of the “Evidence-Based Medicine Network.” They have been known for months as vehement advocates of a herd immunity policy.

In their current position paper, the group is demanding the government draw up detailed “pandemic plans” to be able to determine a politically “targeted pandemic level” depending on the “occupancy of intensive care units.” To this end, a flexible “target corridor” of infected persons and COVID-19 deaths had to be envisaged “that would bring Germany to the end of the pandemic without constant new discussions of principles.”

Classroom in Dortmund, Germany, August 13, 2020 (AP Photo/Martin Meissner, File)

Like leading government politicians and business associations, these professors claim that “the collateral damage caused by the closure of day-care centres and schools” has been “given too little consideration” in the past. With audacity and ignorance otherwise only known from coronavirus deniers and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), the authors go on to declare that the “effectiveness of day-care and school closures in reducing ... deaths in the risk groups of the elderly and those in need of care ... is not provable in the literature” and thus represents a “restriction of the fundamental rights of children and young people” that is “imposed on them in an extraneous manner.”

The “proportional increase of the B.1.1.7 variant or other variants” is, at the same time, “no reason to change the SARS-CoV-2 control strategy. …” There is also “no evidence” for the necessity of additional “protection concepts for schools and kindergartens.” Instead, the British studies on the infection rate of B.1.1.7 “urgently” need to be subjected to “verification in Germany.” This can “only be done in countries with low levels of the variant. Study protocols and locations must be prepared for this (emphasis added).”

The consequences of such a herd immunity policy—combined with only partial immunisation—are openly stated by the paper: “With increasing immunity in the population, the probability of the emergence of [variants created under high pressure of selection] increases. This can be expected soon in countries with declining population susceptibility.”

Iran, Russia and China launch joint naval exercises in Indian Ocean

Alex Lantier

On February 16, as NATO prepared its summit to prosecute “strategic rivalry” with Russia and China, Iranian and Russian warships launched ongoing naval drills in strategic waters of the Indian Ocean, south of Iran and the oil-rich Persian Gulf. They are to soon be joined by Chinese warships which were reportedly delayed by the Chinese New Year festival.

The drills highlight the global war tensions that are at explosive levels as the Biden administration takes office. These are the second such exercises, continuing a format inaugurated by joint Iranian-Russian-Chinese “Maritime Security Belt” naval drills held in December 2019. Shortly afterwards, Washington ordered the brazen assassination of top Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, who was murdered in a US drone strike at the Baghdad airport on January 3, 2020.

A warship sails while approaching Iran’s southeastern port city of Chahbahar, in the Gulf of Oman. Iran’s navy on Friday kicked off the first joint naval drill with Russia and China in the northern part of the Indian Ocean. (Iranian Army via AP)

This year’s Iranian-Russian-Chinese exercises take place as Iran’s economy reels under the impact of US sanctions and the COVID-19 pandemic. As he maintains devastating financial sanctions that Trump imposed on Iran after unilaterally scrapping the 2015 Iranian nuclear treaty, Biden ordered last month a provocative flyover of the Persian Gulf by a lone B-52 Stratofortress bomber escorted by Saudi F-15 fighter jets.

The Iranian-Russian-Chinese drill underscores that with its threats against Iran, Washington is prosecuting a far broader, global conflict that threatens to erupt into war.

This drill comes shortly after the larger Malabar 2020 naval exercise in November with US, Indian, Japanese and Australian ships including aircraft carriers USS Nimitz and INS Vikramaditya. This joint naval mobilization of the so-called “Asian Quad” of US allies was, as Voice of America reported citing Indian naval spokespersons, an “effort to contain China.” Shortly after these exercises, top Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh died on November 27, near Tehran, in what US intelligence officials described as an Israeli assassination.

Iran’s Navy Chief Rear Admiral Hossein Khanzadi announced that the current drill aims to “ensure collective security in the region and in the northern Indian Ocean.” Khanzadi implied that the drill aims to expel US influence from the region: “It means that global arrogance which until today dominated the region must realize that it needs to leave it.”

While Khanzadi also initially reported that Indian warships would join the joint exercise, Indian navy officials subsequently denied that India is participating in the exercises.

The Russian Baltic fleet press service reported that the corvette Stoyky and the tanker Kola would participate in the exercise. It said that “Russian and Iranian sailors will carry out joint maneuvers, the freeing of a merchant ship hijacked by pirates, as well as extinguishing a simulated fire on a ship in distress.” It added that the ships would practice artillery firing at surface targets, searchlight signaling, and defense against piracy or sabotage operations.

On February 8, as Russian Ambassador to Iran Levan Dzhagaryan announced the exercises, General Kenneth F. McKenzie, the commander of the US Central Command that leads US military operations in the Middle East, denounced them at the Middle East Institute in Washington.

He said, “The CENTCOM [area of operations] is and always has been a crossroads of global interests and, historically, a prime arena for foreign powers to compete for influence for resources and for access. In 2020, Russia and China exploited an ongoing regional crisis; financial infrastructure needs; perception of declining US engagement; and opportunities created by COVID-19 to advance their objectives across the Middle East and central and southern Asian nations to gain or strengthen footholds in the region.”

While branding Iran as a supporter of “terrorist organizations” and for supposedly driving “instability seen in Syria and Yemen,” McKenzie also attacked Moscow and Beijing.

He said Russia would “continue to challenge US presence as opportunities present themselves.” He cited Moscow’s attempts to serve “as an alternative to the West by trying to mediate regional conflicts” and to increase its influence by “participating in regional and multilateral organizations and military exercises.” He added that “China uses its ‘Belt and Road’ initiative and the China-Pakistan economic corridor to expand Chinese influence and presence” in the Middle East.

US imperialism faces an insoluble crisis amid its catastrophic response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the debacle of its Middle East policy. In the three decades since the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 removed the main military counterweight to US imperialism, Washington waged aggressive wars from Iraq to Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. Costing millions of lives and trillions of dollars, these wars did not reverse but hastened US decline. US forces withdrew or left behind skeleton forces in countries they had invaded, discredited at home and abroad.

While Washington retains regional military superiority with vast naval and air forces in heavily-guarded strategic bases across the Middle East, this cannot resolve a crisis rooted in profound shifts in global economy and class relations that have matured over decades.

Russia and Iran both intervened in Syria to oppose the Al Qaeda-linked militias NATO supported in the proxy war for regime change it launched against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in 2011. With US, European, Russian, Iranian and Turkish forces all intervening in Syria, the country lost over a half-million dead; 10 million Syrians were made refugees.

The NATO defeat in the war, with its proxies now consigned to a small portion of Syria’s territory, has gone hand in hand with a reorientation in the region as China emerges as the main trading partner for many countries in the region, and the debacle of the US response to COVID-19.

Last July, the New York Times broke news that China and Iran has signed a 25-year treaty of commercial and military cooperation. In an alarmed article, it wrote: “At a time when the United States is reeling from recession and the coronavirus, and increasingly isolated internationally, Beijing senses American weakness. The draft agreement with Iran shows that unlike most countries, China feels it is in a position to defy the United States, powerful enough to withstand American penalties, as it has in the trade war waged by President Trump.”

The Times called the alliance “a sweeping economic and security partnership” based on $400 billion of Chinese investment in Iranian industry and infrastructure. It added, “The partnership, detailed in an 18-page proposed agreement obtained by The New York Times, would vastly expand Chinese presence in banking, telecommunications, ports, railways and dozens of other projects. In exchange, China would receive a regular—and, according to an Iranian official and an oil trader, heavily discounted—supply of Iranian oil over the next 25 years.”

The Times pointed to growing Chinese influence in regional infrastructure and the potential for a corresponding growth of China’s influence in naval affairs and in the region’s critical oil trade. Chinese ports built under the BRI program in the Indian Ocean region, like Hambantota in Sri Lanka and Gwadar in Pakistan, it wrote, constitute “a necklace of refueling and resupply stations from the South China Sea to the Suez Canal. Ostensibly commercial in nature, the ports potentially have military value, too, allowing China’s rapidly growing navy to expand its reach.”

While Beijing is attempting to balance its relations with Iran with its close commercial relations with Iran’s regional rivals, like Saudi Arabia, this treaty was nonetheless confirmed. Moreover, as Chinese firms recently completed railroads linking China to Tehran via ex-Soviet Central Asia, US diplomatic sources speculated that China might finance the post-war reconstruction of Syria, estimated at between $200 billion and $1 trillion.

These events are, in the final analysis, a warning to the working class. There can be little doubt that Washington will respond to the growing weakness and crisis of its position with renewed wars and reactionary intrigues, even though it faces nuclear-armed opponents in both Russia and China.

As for the Iranian, Russian and Chinese capitalist regimes, they have no progressive solution to imperialist aggression or the crisis of the imperialist-dominated world order. Oscillating between desperate attempts to cut deals with Washington and to threaten it with their militaries, they leave the world teetering on the brink of global nuclear war.

It is urgent to build an international, socialist movement in the working class. Such a movement can not only fight for a scientifically-driven world policy to halt the COVID-19 pandemic, but end the danger of war by overthrowing the capitalist system which gives rise to the drive to war.

Trade unions call off strike at Alcoa aluminium giant in Spain

Santiago Guillen & Alejandro López

Spain’s largest trade unions, the Podemos-affiliated Workers’ Commissions (CCOO) and Socialist Party (PSOE)-affiliated General Union of Workers (UGT) have called off the four-month strike at Alcoa’s San Cibrao aluminium plant in Spain’s northeastern region of Galicia. Having isolated the strike, the unions moved to shut it down as it coincided with an international upsurge of struggles against wage cuts, job losses and the ruling class’ “herd immunity” policy.

The San Cibrao strike opposed the decision of Alcoa, the world’s third-largest aluminium producer, headquartered in Pittsburgh, USA, to close this smelting plant and fire all 530 workers. Another 1,500 indirect jobs were affected. Since 2008, Alcoa has closed or sold 18 aluminium factories worldwide, four in recent months, including at A Coruña and Avilés in Spain and Intalco in the United States.

The Alcoa San Ciprián aluminium facility in Spain. (Aluminiumtoday.com)

It is part of an international offensive against aluminium workers as major corporations restructure operations to maximise profits. Worldwide, the industry is beset by oversupply, as Chinese demand has slowed in recent years, and especially now, with the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Alcoa arrived in Spain during the privatisation wave of the 1990s. It acquired a number of plants from the state-led aluminium company at very low cost, promising to reinvest €400 million. This never came. Instead, over the next decades, it sold plants to investment funds and sacked thousands of workers, while making over €1.5 billion in profits.

Alcoa’s high electricity-consuming plants were also showered with state electricity subsidies. The company managed to save around €1 billion. A ludicrous situation emerged where Alcoa, a transnational company, paid an average of four euro-cents per kwh, while its workers paid 23 cents for the same electricity in their homes.

In 2019, Alcoa sold its two plants in Avilés and A Coruña to Parter Capital Group, a Swiss hedge fund. The PSOE-Podemos government promoted this as the deal of the century. Industry Minister Reyes Maroto declared: “This is a day of hope. Spain needs industry, and we hope this announcement will serve not only to maintain jobs at the two plants, but also to create new jobs.”

Just over a month later, in September, Parter Capital Group moved to sell it to Grupo Industrial Riesgo—but not before Alcoa paralysed the electrolytic cells, thus stopping the production of primary aluminium.

In May, at the height of pandemic deaths in the spring of 2020 and amid a nationwide lockdown, the company announced the closure of its San Cibrao plant. The unions reacted with their well-rehearsed tactic of wearing down workers with isolated protests and strikes.

The unions criminally aided the company in preventing a united action between all workers at the three Alcoa plants in the same region. Instead, each plant issued strike actions and protests on separate dates. The CCOO and UGT also made sure no combined struggle emerged with the thousands of Nissan workers striking against the Japanese automaker’s decision to shut down its Barcelona plant, attacking 25,000 direct and indirect jobs.

The unions claimed that a “united front” of the regional and central governments, trade unions and workers would put “pressure” on Alcoa. The same tactic was used in the Nissan struggle to wear down working class opposition to plant closures.

At Alcoa’s San Cibrao plant, CCOO union leader José Antonio Zan called on the PSOE-Podemos government to “be brave” and “take over the plant.” Zan claimed the government could “intervene in the company and keep part of the shares.” He called on it to “start legislating” to take over the plant, given “the lack of respect on the part of the company. … It is shameful how Alcoa behaves.”

The unions promoted talks between the regional and national PSOE-Podemos government to shower Alcoa with new subsidies. The CCOO and UGT, effectively working for management, even submitted a draft proposal on subsidies for Alcoa, giving it more tax cuts and exemptions.

In October, Alcoa announced mass redundancies. Amid mass anger, the unions called an indefinite strike and plant occupation, which was widely supported by the workforce. For four months, not only was production stopped—blocking over 50,000 metric tons of metal shipments—but workers prevented any attempt by Alcoa to remove machinery or other manufacturing equipment. The strike showed the strength of the working class.

The need for a broader, united and international mobilisation in Spain and throughout Europe was directly posed.

Instead, the unions intervened to promote illusions that a court decision in December, ruling that the collective dismissal process was “null and void,” was a victory. The pseudo-left online daily Izquierda Diario hailed it as “the first victory for Alcoa workers.” It did not stop the redundancies, however.

The key task facing workers was to unite their struggle with other sections of the working class. In December and January, mass strikes and stoppages in Spain’s health care, transport, agriculture and industrial sectors emerged, as unemployment surged to 16 percent of the population, around 3.7 million workers.

These struggles are part of a global upsurge of class struggle, vastly intensified by COVID-19, as the ruling class seizes on the pandemic to slash wages and benefits and impose murderously unsafe working conditions.

The trade unions rapidly decided to shut down the strike on January 22. The CCOO, the UGT and the Galician-nationalist trade union CIG (Confederación Intersindical Galega) reached a deal behind the workers’ backs with Alcoa, for the company to sell the plant to the Spanish government, which would then re-sell it to another private firm. Even this possibility, however, is remote. As the unions said, the main issue was maintaining “social peace.” That did not mean maintaining jobs and salaries, however.

CCOO delegate Zan declared that “the agreement to achieve the social peace demanded by the multinational has been signed, now everything is in the hands of Alcoa and the SEPI [Spanish Society of Industrial Participations, the agency that manages state-owned companies], who have to negotiate to come to a deal. How could it be otherwise?”

Zan expected the plant to be sold to Liberty House, part of the British conglomerate GFG Alliance. However, he had to admit that he knows none of the details of “the operation,” although he claimed that “SEPI, Liberty or anyone who buys the company has to ensure the future through investments and modernise the factory.”

This is a fraud. International experience and Alcoa’s own previous deal in 2019 with Swiss firm Parter Capital Group shows that workers cannot put any hope in such operations. In each case they entail job losses and massive attacks on workers’ wages and conditions. Basic rights won over generations of struggle, including the eight-hour day and equal pay for equal work, are eliminated in defence of “competitiveness.”