Fraud concerns raised over Gupta group of companies

Nick Beams

Further doubts have been cast over the future of the metals trading and manufacturing company GFG Alliance owned by Sanjeev Gupta following the publication of details of possible fraudulent activity.

Thousands of jobs are under threat in Britain, France and Australia if companies owned by Gupta, once touted as the “saviour of steel,” are forced into administration and possibly wound up.

GFG Alliance executive chairman Sanjeev Gupta marches with union officials and ALP senator Kim Carr in Whyalla, South Australia, September 2017. (AAP Image/David Mariuz.)

Evidence of possible fraud was revealed in an article published by the Financial Times (FT) over the weekend. It involves the use of fake invoices that formed the basis of finance provided to Gupta’s operations by the now collapsed financial firm Greensill Capital.

The liquidation threat arises from legal action taken by Credit Suisse which provided up to $10 billion for Greensill and is now attempting to recover some of its losses through a liquidation operation.

Greensill packaged the loans to Gupta into funds that were then sold off to Credit Suisse. The FT article said that six European metal companies named by Credit Suisse’s fund accounts had confirmed to the newspaper that they had never traded with Liberty Commodities, one of Gupta’s firms.

Ulrich Becker, the chief executive of KME Germany, one of the companies named, said: “We have nothing to do with Liberty. We did not trade with them in the past, we are not trading with them now, and we will not trade with them. We are copper producers and don’t even know that we would have bought from them.”

The German scrap metal firm RPS Siegen also said it had never traded with Gupta. However, Gupta told the FT that RPS had been “identified as a potential customer” and financing had been provided on that basis. The article stated that “among the invoices seen by the FT is a Liberty Commodities bill submitted to Greensill, which claimed Gupta’s trading firm had sold nickel to RPS.”

A GFG statement submitted in response to questions from the FT about the suspect invoices also pointed to the dubious activities of Greensill. “Many of Greensill’s financing arrangements with its clients, including some of the companies in the GFG Alliance, were prospective receivables programs, sometimes described as future receivables. As part of those programs, Greensill selected and approved companies with whom its counterparties could potentially do business in the future,” it said.

But as the article pointed out, GFG failed to account for the fact that it provided invoices from trading with a company where the relationship was only “prospective.”

The fallout from the collapse of Greensill and the legal action by Credit Suisse is widening. GFG employs 35,000 workers globally, all of whom are threatened with the loss of their jobs. It employs 5,000 workers in Britain, where, in Yorkshire, some 1,600 jobs are at immediate risk in three plants. Many of the 600-strong workforce at the Liberty Steel factory in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, have been placed on furlough and production at the plant has been described as “intermittent” since the middle of March.

In France, Gupta last week placed parts of his Alvance operation, involved in the manufacture of aluminium, in effective administration in order to try to protect them from creditors. Alvance launched a “conciliation procedure,” in which a conciliator tries to work out arrangements for the payment of creditors for three factories it owns which make parts for cars.

The factories employ almost 1,000 workers but there seems to be little prospect of rescuing them because their major customer, Renault, appears to have severed relations and GFG is not able to finance them.

An official of the CGT trade union said the conciliation process was not likely to succeed “especially since Renault and the government are not in a hurry to come to our rescue.”

As the financial net closes around his conglomerate, Gupta has initiated a media campaign attempting to portray himself as the defender of workers and their jobs against rapacious creditors.

In an op-ed piece published in the London Times on Friday, he wrote that “aggressive tactics” by Greensill creditors were “threatening tens of thousands of long-term jobs” in the UK and elsewhere.

“These creditors are at risk of destroying their own chance of recouping value by taking these knee-jerk actions. They undermine profitable businesses and ultimately put at risk thousands of skilled, industrial jobs in communities with limited alternative employment opportunities.”

In an oblique reference to some of GFG’s financial practices, Gupta said both he and GFG were “ready to change.” “We understand that the way we used to finance our operations needs to be overhauled and we will address our challenges head on.” But at this time of crisis what was needed were “cool heads and collaboration, not dangerous and cavalier behaviour.”

The media offensive has extended to Australia where around 1,800 jobs at the Whyalla, South Australia, steelworks of OneSteel Manufacturing are threatened, along with jobs at the metallurgical coal mine Tahmoor Coal in NSW. A liquidation operation launched by Citibank on behalf of Credit Suisse is set down for a hearing on May 6.

In 2017 Gupta was hailed as the saviour of Whyalla and led a victory march through the town, replete with union banners, when his company took over the plant. It had been placed in administration following the collapse of the previous owner Arrium in 2016.

Last week Gupta issued an open letter to the people of South Australia and the population of Whyalla, in particular, thanking them for the support they had shown since the Greensill collapse.

Whyalla, he wrote, had played an important role in providing high-quality steel that had shaped much of the country’s infrastructure for many decades. “I care deeply about continuing this legacy and building upon it to ensure and a sustainable future for industry and society.”

He claimed that GFG had received “multiple offers” from large lenders to finance both the Whyalla works and the Tahmoor coal mine that were now in an advanced stage of “due diligence.”

“Whyalla will always be a special place for me,” he concluded, “I have said before it is my spiritual home.”

None of this should be accepted by workers now facing the prospect of losing their jobs and livelihoods as a result of the dubious financial operations carried out by Gupta and his cohorts at Greensill. His spiritual and material home is not Whyalla, or Rotherham or his operations in France but money and capital.

His appeals are aimed at using the threat of thousands of job losses and the consequent economic and social devastation to pressure governments to come to the rescue of his financial empire.

In considering how to meet this impending threat, workers at Whyalla and around the world need to make a sober assessment of the experiences through which they have passed. Gupta and his companies were presented to them by the trade unions and Labor leaders as the path to a secure future. Just four years on, they are confronted with a disaster.

The issue goes far beyond the issue of the possible fraudulent operations conducted by Gupta and Greensill. The use of dubious and possibly criminal financial methods is not a personal or individual issue. Rather, it is the expression of a widening malignancy lodged in the very heart of the global financial system.

The entire financial world now functions on the basis of subjective valuations and the manipulation of arcane mathematical models, utilising the supply of ultra-cheap money from the world’s central banks, to ensure the flow of profit into the hands of the financial oligarchy at the expense of the rest of society.

These operations and the “valuations” attributed to financial assets bear no relation to the underlying real economy and contain within them the seeds of a collapse, with vast, devastating, social consequences. This can be seen from the fact that, in the midst of the greatest economic contraction since the Great Depression, the stock market has enjoyed one of its best years ever, reaching record highs.

The collapse of Greensill and its impact on Gupta’s operation is a warning of the crisis now building up in the financial system as a whole and the threats confronting all sections of the working class, the world over.

Workers cannot meet these dangers by seeking a solution for “their” individual companies within the framework of the profit system. That was the road taken four years ago and it has ended in an even bigger crisis.

The working class must advance its own independent program to meet the crisis of the system as a whole which, as the global character of the GFG crisis reveals, must be international in scope.

Australia: Thousands protest Aboriginal deaths in custody

Martin Scott

Thousands of Australians rallied across the country on Saturday to protest the continuing scourge of Aboriginal deaths in custody.

This Thursday marks 30 years since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody handed down its report. Since that time, 474 indigenous people have died in police custody, including 5 since the beginning of last month.

Protesters gathered outside Victorian parliament on Saturday. (Credit: Facebook/Charandev Singh)

The rallies featured emotional speeches by the families of the deceased, punctuated by frantic appeals to racialism and identity politics by entertainers and “activist” politicians. This narrative was at odds with the multi-racial composition of the protests, which demonstrated mass outrage and opposition to the mounting death toll of the most oppressed section of the working class.

The insistence that only Aboriginal voices should be heard at such protests has become standard practice, but Victorian Greens MP Lidia Thorpe put forward an even more divisive perspective. She told the Melbourne rally: “It’s black women that keep black women strong to continue the fight for justice in this country.”

Thorpe said the government was carrying out “sophisticated genocide to continue to annihilate the first people of this country,” and told the crowd, “you all need to help decolonise this place.”

Despite these radical claims, Thorpe guided protesters back to the parliamentary road, saying: “You have to support the ten demands from these families, not just rock up for a rally.”

The ten demands, compiled by the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services, centre around a call for “governments to sit down with us in transparent, open and honest conversations about solutions and proactive measures to effectively eradicate Black deaths in custody for future generations.”

Some of the demands pointed to broader issues confronting Aboriginal people, including poverty-level welfare, a lack of funding for public education and healthcare, punitive policing and homelessness.

But the futility of such appeals to “official” channels is demonstrated by the fact that the first demand is for governments to “implement all recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.”

At the Melbourne rally, co-organiser Sue-Anne Hunter repeated the common refrain: “If we had implemented the recommendations from the Royal Commission, we wouldn’t be talking about these things now.”

In fact, around two-thirds of the recommendations have been followed. Claims to the contrary can only be understood as an effort to restore confidence in the ability of the bourgeois legal system to bring an end to the disgraceful situation.

Since the Royal Commission, the number of Aboriginal deaths in custody each year has increased by more than 50 percent. This growth is a product of a massive increase in the indigenous incarceration rate, which has more than doubled since 1995. In 2020, 2,333 out of every 100,000 Aboriginal people were incarcerated, higher than the rate of African Americans in the US.

The number and rate of non-Aboriginal deaths in custody is no better. Of 2,608 deaths analysed by the Australian Institute of Criminology in 2018, 2,104 were of non-indigenous people. Aboriginal prisoners died at a rate of 0.13 percent compared to the overall rate of 0.21 for the whole prison population.

The difference lies in the fact that indigenous people make up 28 percent of prisoners but only 3 percent of Australia’s population.

This cannot be understood primarily as an issue of racism within the police or judicial system, but is a product of the fact that Aboriginal people are among the most oppressed members of the Australian working class. The 2011 Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey found that 19.3 percent of indigenous people were living in poverty, compared to 12.4 percent of other Australians.

While the Royal Commission handed down 339 recommendations, it did not result in a single charge against a police or prison officer, and none have been laid in the three decades since.

In a sharp example of the dead end presented by these official inquiries, the Northern Territory Labor government last month announced that it would reverse changes to bail laws made in response to the 2017 Royal Commission into the Detention and Protection of Children in the Northern Territory.

Part of a 2019 protest in Alice Springs following the death in custody of Kumanjayi Walker in Yuendemu. (Credit: WSWS)

At the time, Labor Minister for Territory Families Dale Wakefield described the report as “possibly the most important document that our government has received.”

But now, young people in the Territory will no longer be entitled to a presumption in favour of bail for offences including unlawful entry, unlawful use of a motor vehicle and assaulting police.

Under the proposed laws, children as young as 10 will face automatic bail revocation for “serious” breaches including failure to attend court, failure to complete youth diversion programs and alleged violations of “certain electronic monitoring conditions and curfew.” This last point is significant as the government also announced its intention to expand police powers to fit children with electronic monitoring devices.

Aboriginal youth are overwhelmingly the target of such “tough on crime” measures, at times making up 100 percent of the Territory’s youth detention population.

The most recent Aboriginal person to die in custody was a 45-year-old inmate at Perth’s maximum security Casuarina Prison. He died in the Intensive Care Unit of Fiona Stanley Hospital on April 3 after undergoing a medical procedure.

The prison is currently the subject of legal action, with two indigenous prisoners claiming in the Western Australian Supreme Court that they have been held in solitary confinement more than 20 hours per day for months on end and denied recreation time.

Just over two weeks earlier, a 37-year-old man was killed in a police pursuit in the western New South Wales town of Broken Hill. Police claim that the victim, Anzac Sullivan, suffered a “medical episode” after attempting to flee and could not be resuscitated.

The young age of the two latest victims is a reflection of the much broader health crisis confronting Aboriginal people. Life expectancy for Aboriginal people is 8-9 years shorter than for the general population, and the rates of acute rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease for indigenous Australians are among the highest in the world.

The fight to prevent further deaths in custody, regardless of race, can only be carried out on the basis of a broader struggle to end the appalling social conditions that lead to the high rate of imprisonment for Australia’s most vulnerable layers. This requires the unified struggle of the entire working class which, under the pretext of the pandemic, is experiencing a sustained assault on working and living conditions.

Saturday’s rallies, and the massive protests that took place last year despite a campaign of suppression by governments and police, demonstrate that there is support for such change among broad layers of the population.

While the latest round of protests are rooted in the genuine and justified outrage of the ordinary people, the racialist narrative promoted by the organisers will only serve to divide and suppress a genuine movement of the working class against all forms of class oppression.

Financiers of the Belarusian dictator

Slavisha Batko Milacic

Protests in Belarus continue, and opposition leaders, mostly fled from the country, are busy calculating and looking for funds that the Belarusian dictator Lukashenko annually withdraws from the budget of his Republic. Meanwhile, information about the wealth of his family is almost on the surface, and the enrichment scheme of the Lukashenko clan has been worked out a long time ago, even with other Presidents…

Lukashenko’s eldest son, 45-year-old Viktor, a member of the Security Council of Belarus, the head of the country’s Olympic Committee has long been known in the republic not only as a likely successor to his father, but also as the main financier of the current head of state. His wife Lilia is one of the directors of the art gallery of the Dana Holdings group shopping center in Minsk. However, according to the Belarusian oppositionists, its real role has nothing to do with art. According to the Belarusian oppositionist Valeriy Tsepkalo, quoted by EU observer, “the art, which she definitely knows perfectly well, is to make money for Alexander Lukashenko, making huge concessions to his pet enterprises”.

According to the last dictator of Europe, Dana Holdings, which is based in Minsk: “Is one of the most successful and, probably, the richest company in the world, which creates a miracle – wonderful samples of the construction industry.” The owners of the company, Serbian businessmen Bogoljub and Dragomir Karic, are the largest developers in Belarus. Among the implemented projects is the Mayak Minska complex near the National Library, which includes the same shopping center with an art gallery where Lilia Lukashenko works. By the decree of Alexander Lukashenko himself, the Serbs, out of competition, were allocated a huge territory of the former airport for the construction of the Minsk-Mir complex, a capsule in the foundation of which the Belarusian dictator laid down together with the President of Serbia Tomislav Nikolic. Separately, it is worth mentioning the office complex “BK Capital Center” in one of the central squares of Minsk, completed after the Belarusian protests in 2020, on the facade of which the coat of arms of the Karic family is depicted, and the abbreviation BK is deciphered by Minskers as “Brothers Karic”.

Even organizations loyal to Lukashenko opposed the last project. Thus, the Belarusian Union of Architects asked the Ministry of Architecture and Construction to arrange hearings on it, but, of course, they were ignored. The protests of the townspeople were also not heard.

Let’s figure out who the Karic`s are and where their wealth and influence come from. The four brothers – Bogoljub, Dragomir, Sreten and Zoran and the formation of their clan began during the reign of the Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, after whose fall the brothers, apparently according to long-established schemes, found another patron and business partner – the Belarusian president.

So, Bogoljub Karic, for example, was the minister of privatization of Serbia for several months. In 2004, he won 20 percent of the votes in the country’s presidential elections. Later, he was accused of financial fraud, as a result of which the state suffered more than 40 million euros in damage, and the authorities issued an international arrest warrant, but Bogoljub had left Serbia by that time and soon settled in Belarus. Obviously, his experience was useful to a new customer. Moreover, despite the fact that the investigation about Bogoljub Karic was stopped in Serbia only in 2016 (and was marked by his triumphant return to Belgrade), back in 2009 his brother Dragomir arranged a visit to Serbia for the Belarusian dictator, who was in partial political isolation.

After publications in the EU Observer, the management of the Dana Holdings group did not find anything better than to disown Lilia Lukashenko, stating that she was a simple designer and did not return to work at Dana Astra after she went on maternity leave three years ago. However, this did not save the company from European sanctions, which were introduced on December 17, 2020 by the Council of the European Union. However, the sanctions hardly prevented President Lukashenko’s Serbian friends from their financial activities in Cyprus, which, by the way, is the largest investor in the Belarusian economy. Naturally at the expense of offshore companies. However, these sanctions are unlikely to force Cyprus, actually an EU country, to take any decisive measures. So, according to Valery Tsepkalo, who until 2017 was in charge of high-tech parks in the Republic of Belarus, Cyprus tax incentives and offshore companies allowed Lukashenko to launder more than $ 1 billion. Considering that Tsepkalo himself stood at the origins of Belarusian IT and worked closely with Belarusian development companies, he knows what he is talking about. Nevertheless, even the “EU Observer”, although it indicated the schemes of enrichment of the Lukashenko family, cannot find where the huge funds of the ruling clan of Belarus ended up … yet.

Nothing much has changed since December 2020, when Dana Holdings group was under European sanctions. Protests in Belarus are dying down, the EU could not or did not want to take measures that could really decisively hit the dictator.

The Secret Wars of Africa’s Sahel: What Is Behind Mali’s Ongoing Strife

Ramzy Baroud

In a recent report, the United Nations Mission in Mali, known as MINUSMA, concluded that, on January 3, French warplanes had struck a crowd attending a wedding in the remote village of Bounti, killing 22 of the guests.

According to the findings, based on a thorough investigation and interviews with hundreds of eyewitnesses, 19 of the guests were unarmed civilians whose killing constitutes a war crime.

Unlike the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and other countries, the French war in Mali receives little media coverage outside the limited scope of French-speaking media, which has successfully branded this war as one against Islamic militants.

What is interesting about the Mali story is the fact that, despite its centrality to the geopolitics of the Sahel region in Africa, it is framed within disconnected narratives that rarely overlap.

However, the story has less to do with Islamic militancy and much to do with foreign interventions. Anti-French sentiment in Mali goes back over a century when, in 1892, France colonized that once-thriving African kingdom, exploiting its resources and reordering its territories as a way to weaken its population and to break down its social structures.

The formal end of French colonialism of Mali in 1960 was merely the end of a chapter, but definitely not the story itself. France remained present in Mali, in the Sahel and throughout Africa, defending its interests, exploiting the ample resources and working jointly with corrupt elites to maintain its dominance.

Fast forward to March 2012 when Captain Amadou Sanogo overthrew the nominally democratic government of Amadou Toumani Touré. He used the flimsy excuse of protesting Bamako’s failure to rein in the militancy of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) in the north.

Sanogo’s pretense was quite clever, though, as it fit neatly into a grand narrative designed by various Western governments, lead among them France and the United States, who saw Islamic militancy as the greatest danger facing many parts of Africa, especially in the Sahel.

Interestingly but not surprisingly, Sanogo’s coup, which angered African governments, but was somehow accommodated by Western powers, made matters much worse. In the following months, northern militants managed to seize much of the impoverished northern regions, continuing their march towards Bamako itself.

The army coup was never truly reversed but, at the behest of France and other influential governments, was simply streamlined into a transitional government, still largely influenced by Sanogo’s supporters.

On December 20, 2012, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 2085, which authorized the deployment of the African-led International Support Mission to Mali. Armed with what was understood to be a UN mandate, France launched its war in Mali, under the title of ‘Operation Serval’.

It is worth mentioning here that the Mali scenario had just transpired in Libya when, on March 17, 2011, the UNSC passed Resolution 1973, which was conveniently and immediately translated into a declaration of war.

Both scenarios proved costly for the two African countries. Instead of ‘saving’ these countries, the interventions allowed violence to spiral even further, leading to yet more foreign interventions and proxy wars.

On July 15, 2014, France declared that ‘Operation Serval’ was successfully accomplished, providing its own list of casualties on both sides, again, with very little international monitoring. Yet, almost immediately, on August 1, 2014, it declared another military mission, this time an open-ended war, ‘Operation Barkhane’.

Barkhane was spearheaded by France and included Paris’ own ‘coalition of the willing’, dubbed ‘G5 Sahel’. All former French colonies, the new coalition consisted of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger. The declared goal of France’s indefinite intervention in the Sahel is to provide material support and training to the ‘G5 Sahel’ forces in their ‘war on terror’.

However, according to Deutsche Welle, the ‘optimism’ that accompanied ‘Operation Serval’ completely vanished with ‘Operation Barkhane’. “The security situation has worsened, not only (in the) the north but (in) central Mali as well”, the German news agency recently reported, conveying a sense of chaos, with farmers fleeing their land and with “self-defense militias” carrying out their own operations to satisfy “their own agendas”, and so on.

In truth, the chaos in the streets merely reflected the chaos in government. Even with a heavy French military presence, instability continued to plague Mali. The latest coup in the country took place in August 2020. Worse still, the various Tuareg forces, which have long challenged the foreign exploitation of the country, are now unifying under a single banner. The future of Mali is hardly promising.

So what was the point of the intervention, anyway? Certainly not to ‘restore democracy’ or ‘stabilize’ the country. Karen Jayes elaborates. “France’s interests in the region are primarily economic,” she wrote in a recent article. “Their military actions protect their access to oil and uranium in the region.”

To appreciate this claim more fully, one only needs a single example of how Mali’s wealth of natural resources is central to France’s economy. “An incredible 75 percent of France’s electric power is generated by nuclear plants that are mostly fueled by uranium extracted on Mali’s border region of Kidal,” in the northern parts of the country. Therefore, it is unsurprising that France was ready to go to war as soon as militants proclaimed the Kidal region to be part of their independent nation-state of Azawad in April 2012.

As for the bombing of the Bounti wedding, the French military denied any wrong-doing, claiming that all of the victims were ‘jihadists’. The story is meant to end here, but it will not – as long as Mali is exploited by outsiders, as long as poverty and inequality will continue to exist, leading to insurrections, rebellions and military coups.

Strike movement in Scotland sparked by end of lockdown measures

Stephen Alexander

The relaxation of coronavirus lockdown restrictions in Scotland, as part of a UK wide reopening of the economy, has sparked a multi-sector wave of strike action, ballots and protests.

Workers are engaged in struggles at universities and colleges, the railways, the National Health Service, the energy and water utilities, together with air traffic controllers, packaging workers and defence industry workers.

All these workers have been designated as essential to the basic functioning of society during the pandemic, consistently risking their lives in unsafe workplaces. Having been cynically lauded as heroes by the UK Conservative and devolved Scottish National Party (SNP) governments, they now face swinging cuts to jobs, pay and conditions. This is part of global assault by capitalist governments and big business to impose the full cost of the pandemic onto the backs of the working class through fire and rehire schemes as well as brutal austerity.

Strikers at West College Scotland on the picket line (credit: EIS Twitter)

Workers in Scotland have suffered a steep decline in living standards since the onset of the pandemic. The number of Scots claiming unemployment benefits has risen by 89 percent over the past year to 212,000, including 4,000 new claimants in February. Payroll figures are down by 65,000 on the beginning of last year, with young people and hospitality workers most likely to have lost their jobs. Tens of thousands more redundancies are threatened by the planned end to the Johnson government’s furlough scheme in September.

The gutting of living standards across Britain was made possible by the corporatist trade unions and the Labour Party “opposition”, which have suppressed workers struggles throughout the pandemic in the name of “national unity”—even as the lives of tens of thousands of workers were sacrificed to profit. Having signed off on corporate bailouts worth hundreds of billions of pounds and repeatedly enforced the unsafe reopening of schools and workplaces, the union bureaucracy is devoting all its efforts to containing social anger and preventing the emergence of a unified movement of the working class.

College lecturers are opposing mass redundancies and plans to replace lectures with poorly-paid, less qualified instructor assessors. The Education Institute Scotland-Further Education Lecturers Association (EIS-FELA) began a 24-hour strike on March 25, followed by a series of two-day strikes between March 31 and April 20. a number of three-day stoppages are planned for May. Separate strike action took place in March over moves by Forth Valley College to impose compulsory redundancies. EIS members at Argyll college are being balloted over similar “modernisation” plans.

No trust can be placed in the EIS-FELA to fight any of this. This union has overseen cuts to thousands of staff and student places as part of the commercial restructuring and mergers of Scotland’s further education system. Despite repeated, almost annual, strike action by lecturers, they are still posed with fighting to defend the very existence of their profession. The EIS has isolated lecturers from other educators in schools and universities across the UK who face identical cuts. Every struggle has instead been subordinated to local, backroom negotiations between union bureaucrats, management and the Scottish government.

The University and Colleges Union (UCU) has played the same role at Scotland’s universities, which have exploited the pandemic to accelerate long-running attacks on wages, conditions and pensions of lecturers and staff.

The University of Dundee has threatened 3,000 employees with pay cuts and mass redundancies unless they sign up to “flexible working” arrangements, including unpaid career breaks, reduced working hours and early retirement.

Nurses and health workers held a protest in Glasgow last month, as part of UK-wide demonstrations calling for better pay, safe working conditions and an end to overwork and understaffing. They rejected the SNP’s offer of a derisory 4 percent pay rise, after nurses suffering a 20 percent pay cut over the past decade.

On Sunday, Unison Scotland called on its members to accept with the justification that “This offer is substantially higher than public sector pay deals achieved recently.” However, what the union bureaucracy fear most of all is its members throwing out the offer, with the union having to sanction an industrial action ballot and the situation soon spiralling out of its control. Unison’s call for acceptance immediately sparked opposition from health workers on social media. The union’s poster calling for acceptance of the miserly deal states in bold as the main reason to do so: “Sustained and substantial industrial action would be required to bring the new government [following the Holyrood elections in May] back to the table after the election.” The union have delayed the balloting period to vote on the deal for a long as possible, with the balloting period not closing until May 7, the day after the elections.

Train conductors have launched industrial action against ScotRail operator Abellio. On March 28, members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport workers union (RMT) began six 24-hour strikes taking place on consecutive Sundays. Ticket examiners have voted separately in favour of strike action over payment rates for overtime and rest day working. The RMT, train drivers’ union Aslef, the white-collar union TSSA and Unite trade unions are considering yet another “consultative” or non-binding ballot of ScotRail workers over widespread opposition to a 1.1 percent pay offer—a real-terms pay cut. Abellio has received a £1 billion public bailout from the Scottish government, underwriting the profits of the Dutch multinational from pandemic losses.

These struggles have been walled off by the RMT from identical struggles of transport workers across the country. This includes its own members at Network Rail, a government-run company that owns and manages much of the UK’s railway infrastructure. The RMT is balloting for a national strike against the threat of 14,000 redundancies, as part £1 billion in budget cuts that will slash safety critical maintenance resources by 50 percent.

The RMT’s role as an enforcer for rail companies was most clear in its betrayal of the struggle of conductors against the imposition of Driver Only Operation (DOO) trains by the UK’s private train operators in recent years. In October 2016, after a series of strikes at ScotRail, a deal was pushed through by the RMT allowing drivers to release doors and leaving conductors only to close doors.

Scottish Water workers are being balloted by GMB Scotland, Unite Scotland and Unison Scotland over changes to supplemental pay for additional hours worked, amounting to a potential £4,000 loss annually. 100 jobs are under threat at a Business Stream site in Edinburgh, a Scottish Water subsidiary. The unions are calling for “meaningful negotiations”, with the Scottish government-run company, “before this dispute escalates to inevitable industrial action”.

Scottish Water recorded a turnover of £1.6 billion and pre-tax profits of £86 million in 2019/20.

This corporate looting of workers’ pay and conditions follows the pattern of the ongoing dispute of engineers at Scottish Gas (British Gas elsewhere in the UK) against the fire and rehire strategy of owners, Centrica. After 42 days of staggered strike action, the GMB advised its members to sign the new contract which includes a pay cut of 15 percent. The company has been given carte blanche by the union to impose the firing of hundreds of workers who have not yet signed the inferior contract by April 14. On the very day that the workers are due to be fired, refusing to sign or transferred over to the new terms against their will, the GMB has called a token one-day walkout.

Air traffic control workers at Highlands and Islands Airports Ltd are fighting 60 job cuts tabled as part of plans to centralise air traffic control towers across seven airports at a single remote base in Inverness.

Engineering workers at Coulport and Faslane Naval bases took part in limited strike action in March against a pay deal with Babcock Marine, which provides services to Britain’s nuclear-armed Trident submarines.

SAICA packaging workers at Edinburgh and Milngavie have been engaged in staggered one-day stoppages since March 17, against moves to extend the working week and impose inferior payment for banked hours.

In “third wave,” coronavirus cases surging in France

Jacques Valentin

While the Macron government in France has implemented extremely limited and belated lockdown measures, a catastrophe is unfolding across the country and Europe. Using the distribution of vaccines to a small portion of the population as a justification, Macron is seeking to reopen the economy as quickly as possible. The short lockdown period of two weeks will not allow for a significant reduction in contaminations.

In an interview with world news agency AFP, epidemiologist Dominique Costagliola referred sceptically to the government’s announced lockdown timetable. “For the moment, it’s early to assess the impact,” he said. “In May we won’t have reached the levels [of vaccination] permitting us to relax the lockdown measures significantly. If it means we have a fourth wave, I don’t think it would be a good idea.”

A study published Tuesday by the Pasteur Institute also warned that because of the so-called UK variant, which is more contagious than the previously dominant strain, 90 percent of the adult population would have to be vaccinated before they could return to normal life without the risk of an epidemic resurgence. Currently, 10 million people, or about 18.7 percent of the country’s total population, have received one dose, and roughly a third of those require a second dose. Due to delays and the poor organisation of the vaccination campaign, many elderly people are still not vaccinated.

Medical workers tend a patient suffering from COVID-19 in the Nouvel Hopital Civil of Strasbourg, eastern France, Thursday, Oct.22, 2020.(AP Photo/Jean-Francois Badias)

This month France will pass 100,000 deaths. The ruling class has sought to normalise this level of mass death as part of its drive to extract profit from the labour of workers in France and Europe without constraint.

Its policy demands that workers remain at their workplaces and that schools remain open so that parents can continue to go to work. That is why the ruling class is opposed to any serious lockdown policy. Macron is adamantly refusing to close schools, which health professionals have demanded for months.

Despite the denials of Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer, schools have become the main vectors for the spread of the virus. Previously, the government’s policy maintained that classes should only close if three students in the class tested positive. With the inevitable delays involved in detecting and reporting cases, entire schools were allowed to become infected.

The policy of “herd immunity” deliberately pursued in the school system met with no serious opposition from the trade unions, which supported the policy of face-to-face teaching and the maintenance of nonessential production at all costs. The unions actively opposed any calls for strike action to close schools.

Only when the government was confronted with angry parents and teachers refusing to work, amid an explosion of cases at the end of March, did Blanquer announce that classes should close as soon as a single student tested positive. Immediately, this led to a sharp rise in class closures. Ultimately, Macron was forced to announce on March 31 that nurseries, kindergartens and schools would be closed until April 26. Collèges and lycées, or upper-level secondary schools, would be closed until May 3 which includes a two-week holiday.

This is insufficient time to hope to stop the spread of the epidemic.

As a result of the delayed lockdown policy, the milestone of 30,000 COVID-19 patients hospitalised in France has been passed. As of yesterday, there were 30,671 hospitalisations, close to the peak of the first wave (32,292) and the second wave (33,466 cases). More than 5,700 people are in intensive care, well above the second wave peak of 4,903 on November 16. In the first wave, the peak was 7,000 people, in April 2020.

According to the daily Le Monde, on April 1, 7,900 beds were available in intensive care units, 90 percent of which were occupied by both COVID-19 (5,100 people at that point) and non-COVID patients. According to Macron, the number of ICU beds will be increased to 10,000 to cope with the third wave.

ICU specialists have stated that the government’s announcements are unrealistic. Djillali Annane, head of the resuscitation department at the Raymond-Poincaré Hospital in Garches, said, “It is not possible. There is confusion between resuscitation beds, around 5,000 in total, which are not increasing any more, and critical care beds, created in a temporary manner with room for maneuver, but probably not to the point of increasing to 10,000.”

These temporary beds are obtained by cancelling other urgent care procedures, which is not sustainable in the long term. Staff are also exhausted by months of covid-related overload, has barely lessened since the second wave in late 2020.

Without a serious containment policy in place, the result has been a public health disaster. Professor Gilbert Debray, the head of the nephrology department at La Pitié-Salpêtrière, stated, “As a doctor, I cannot accept 12,000 deaths per month, hundreds of thousands of long-term COVID sufferers, which we do not talk about, an 80 percent postponement rate of other operations, and accept the risk of a new variant that will bring us back to square one.”

He criticized Macron’s policy, which is the same for the European Union as a whole. He notes that the countries that have adopted the “zero COVID” strategy “have won on the health, societal and economic fronts.” A zero COVID strategy could have been put in place at the end of the first lockdown but was consciously rejected by Macron.

The corporate media is seizing on the slightest hint of improvement in the number of cases to encourage optimism and defend Macron’s planned reopening timetable. With the Easter weekend, the statistics on the number of new infections during the week are contradictory and unreliable. While there has been some slowing down or stabilisation in some regions, the situation is worsening in others, such as in the Bouches-du-Rhône, and incidence levels remain very high in most areas.

Under conditions where daily case numbers remain higher than at the end of the second wave, the government’s planned reopening of schools and the loosening of restrictions will only open the door to a fourth catastrophic wave of the virus.

Prince Philip: An embittered defender of hereditary privilege

Paul Bond & Chris Marsden

Prince Philip spent the whole of his long life trying to keep the dying embers of monarchy alight. It was a calculated, cynical effort to defend and maintain aristocratic class privilege by a self-described “discredited Balkan prince of no particular merit or distinction.”

The British press have fallen over themselves at Philip’s death. The torrent of fawning media coverage is relentless and sickening, and yet has offered no insight into the man or his role. Moreover, the barrage of propaganda had the opposite effect sought by its authors, confirming that the mass of the working population did not share the forced expressions of loss at the passing of the man the disgraced Prince Andrew ludicrously referred to as the “grandfather of the nation.”

The BBC rescheduled all its television programmes, even suspending one channel altogether. All but one of its national radio stations were also rescheduled to rolling news. Its archive radio station was reprogrammed for a whole weekend. Commercial broadcaster ITV also rescheduled television programming to focus on seemingly endless “tributes” and commentary. The response was a collapse in viewing figures. BBC1, the BBC’s main news channel, saw an audience fall of 6 percent. Elsewhere, audiences just turned off. BBC2 and ITV saw viewing figures drop by 60-65 percent.

Philip Mountbatten, Princess Elizabeth and Louis St. Laurent on a tour of Canada in 1951 (nagualdesign/Flickr)

Philip’s self-appraisal accurately conveys his personal unimportance. More significant, however, is the rotten political role he played throughout his life. His defence of the monarchy and aristocratic privilege, courtesy of the bourgeois order on which it now rests, was driven by a highly attuned sense of a precarious existence, and a well-founded fear of the masses who could end it.

His life was shaped by reaction against revolutionary tumult. The most consequential episode shaping Philip and his world view was the 1917 Russian Revolution, which overthrew Tsarism and established the world’s first workers’ state under the Bolsheviks. Europe’s monarchies and the bourgeois order on which they rested trembled in response, fearing a similar fate. Philip never forgot this fear, or the reason for it.

Thanks to his relationship to the Russian Tsars, his DNA was even used to identify the corpses of the Romanovs. Asked later in life whether he would like to visit Russia, he said he would while adding the caveat, “although the bastards murdered half my family.”

He had personal experience of how tenuous an incestuous European royalty’s grip on power was. Philip was born on the Greek island of Corfu, becoming Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark as the only son among five children. His grandfather, Prince William of Denmark, married a granddaughter of Tsar Nicholas I. Prince William had accepted the Greek government’s 1863 invitation to become George I, King of the Hellenes. He was assassinated in 1913.

He was succeeded by his eldest son, Constantine I of Greece.

Philip’s father was William/George’s younger son, Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark. His mother was a daughter of the German Prince Louis of Battenberg and a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria.

Constantine I was deposed in 1917 over Greek neutrality in World War I, and reinstated in 1920. In 1922, he was overthrown again following an army revolt. Prince Andrew was arrested and court-martialled for “disobeying an order” during the Battle of the Sakarya, which lost territory at the end of the Greco-Turkish conflict. Stripped of Greek nationality, Andrew faced treason charges. Britain’s George V, fearing his execution, sent a naval cruiser to remove the family to Italy, including the one-year-old Philip.

The other factor shaping Philip’s fate was Stalinism’s betrayal of the revolutionary struggles of the working class, which allowed for the survival of European and world capitalism and facilitated the growth of political reaction throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The survival of the monarchy in Greece, for example, depended on the protection of the Metaxas dictatorship, which drew inspiration from Mussolini’s fascists, but was allied to British imperialism. Ultimately the Greek monarchy was abolished by the military junta in 1973.

Philip’s orientation to British imperialism was dictated by similar geopolitical facts and attendant political considerations. His exiled family lived outside Paris until his mother’s institutionalisation after a breakdown. His father headed for Monte Carlo’s casinos, staying in Vichy France until his death in 1944.

Philip’s sisters all married German princes. Three of his brothers-in-law joined the Nazi Party and fought for them. His sister Sophie’s first husband was in the SS. In 1937, one sister, Cecilie, who had recently joined the Nazi Party, was killed in an air crash. Philip followed her coffin through crowds giving fascist salutes in Darmstadt. He later demonstrated the cynicism of his aristocratic judgement, saying of that period, “It’s simply what happened. The family broke up… I just had to get on with it. You do. One does.”

In 1933, Philip had attended Kurt Hahn’s prestigious Schule Schloss Salem in Germany. But the Jewish Hahn had to leave Germany two terms later for criticising Nazism. Philip followed him to Scotland, and his newly established Gordonstoun school. Philip’s personal loyalty to British imperialism was assured.

Hahn, a surrogate father-figure, was to help shape Philip for a role in the upper levels of British society. The prince, he wrote, “will make his mark in any profession where he will have to prove himself in a trial of strength.” Hahn also inspired the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme, which combines individualism with civic responsibility as a “do-it-yourself kit in the art of civilised living” for young people. Although carrying the prince’s name, Philip said “It would never have started but for Hahn.”

Before the war Philip was sent to naval college, where he first met a Princess Elizabeth as a child. Graduating top of his class in 1940, he joined the navy, seeing military action and gaining promotion. Even here his reputation was for intolerance. “One of his crew,” commented a biographer, “said he would rather die than serve under him again.”

When he first set out to court Elizabeth, the British monarchy regarded him as beneath them, with his mixed heritage, rough character and lack of titles. Royal reactions to his request to marry Elizabeth show that social layer’s backwardness. The Queen Mother called him “the Hun.” Her brother dismissed him as “a German.” Nevertheless, the marriage was agreed. Renouncing his Greek title, he took British nationality and adopted the anglicised name Mountbatten. On his wedding day in 1947 he was made Duke of Edinburgh. Philip took leave from the navy in 1951 to support Elizabeth, who was taking over duties from her ailing father. In 1952 George died, and Elizabeth became queen.

It is from this point on that most obituaries of Philip focus—his role as the queen’s husband for nearly seven decades, the longest serving royal consort in British history. And the narrative goes that this was a role that he played loyally and, for the most part, with aplomb.

His readiness to support the queen, not to say provide the necessary heir/s to the throne, was a vital gift to Britain’s ruling elite. It is one acknowledged in innumerable tributes to his readiness to sacrifice masculine dominance and walk the necessary distance behind his spouse. The most ludicrous of these comes courtesy of Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian, who describes Philip as someone “in an era still uncomfortable with the idea of a man bowing to female authority” who came “to define a different kind of masculine ideal; one rooted in devotion, support and the kind of strength that does not need to show itself by muscling endlessly into the limelight.” His “real function in public life was having the grace to fade into the background of it and allow his spouse the spotlight…”

Hinsliff does, however, make one useful observation, stating, “It was perhaps the crown, as much as the woman wearing it, to which this scion of the exiled Greek royal family deferred; the crown to which he famously pledged allegiance by kneeling before his wife at her coronation.”

Philip was indeed prepared to subject himself to what he clearly saw as a personal humiliation to preserve the authority of the crown as an institution. His life was dedicated to making the monarchy palatable to the population and to defending it against an eruption of plebeian hostility. Indeed because of his insistence that the monarchy must adapt to survive, he became known as its “moderniser.” Notwithstanding his real autocratic feelings, he chaired the Way Ahead Group of leading royals and their advisers, to analyse and avert criticism of the monarchy. His role, he said, was simply “to ensure the Queen can reign.”

The same can be said of his “charitable works”, and commitment to honouring his numerous public engagements—because this was the price to be paid for a private life of extraordinary privilege, of cricket, polo, yachting, cruising, dining, partying and the rest.

Yet he still bridled at his “sacrifice”, and was noticeably bitter, not just privately but in public. He regretted not being able to continue his naval career and complained that his children bore the name Windsor rather than Mountbatten, declaring, “I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his children. I’m nothing but a bloody amoeba.”

His numerous ignorant and sometimes nakedly racist pronouncements while on official duties are infamous expressions of his concealed dissatisfaction and suppressed persona. But perhaps the most revealing was when he told Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner, “It’s a pleasant change to be in a country that isn’t ruled by its people.”

The prince’s concern for the monarchy also rested on broader thinking about the general stability of capitalism. In 1977 he compared the British economy to dry rot in a house, saying, “You don’t know when it starts, you don’t know when the crisis is, but gradually the place becomes uninhabitable.”

It should be added that Philip’s much-vaunted environmentalism was likewise based on a misanthropic class privilege. His advocacy for nature conservation accompanied the right to hunt big game for sport. He coupled defence of species against extinction with a naked hostility to the mass of humanity, writing, “I am tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus, but that is perhaps going too far.”

These political and class realities find expression in the eulogies from Britain’s political leaders. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, one of the most transparently self-serving representatives of the venal British bourgeoisie, praised Philip’s “ethic of service.” Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer declared that Britain had “lost an extraordinary public servant.”

In the not-too-distant future people will look back in disbelief that this ridiculous and parasitic institution and its representatives was still being discussed in 2021. The death of Prince Philip has exposed again the pressing need for royalty to be confined to the history books, once and for all.

Staggering 10 to 15 percent of infected children suffer from Long COVID

Norisa Diaz

Recently published data from the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows that among children who have survived COVID-19, 13 percent of those 11 years or younger and about 15 percent of those aged 12 to 16 are suffering the effects of Post-acute COVID-19 (“Long COVID”) and report at least one symptom five weeks after a confirmed COVID-19 infection.

Long COVID is a multisystem disease in which growing numbers of adults and children are suffering from lingering symptoms for months or even a year now after contracting COVID-19. These include sleep disorders such as insomnia, heart palpitations, gastrointestinal issues, breathing difficulties, muscle and joint pain plus exhaustion, headaches and cognitive impairment (“brain fog”) and overall lack of concentration. Those who suffer from persistent symptoms sometimes refer to themselves as “long haulers.”

An Italian study published in January 2021 showed that of the 129 children diagnosed with COVID-19 between March and November, 2020, “More than a half reported at least one persisting symptom even after 120 days since COVID-19, with 42.6% being impaired by these symptoms during daily activities. Symptoms like fatigue, muscle and joint pain, headache, insomnia, respiratory problems and palpitations were particularly frequent, as also described in adults.”

Photo submitted to Long Covid Kids member stories page. (Courtesy of Long Covid Kids, LongCovidKids.org)

The revelations are particularly concerning for infants, toddlers and children who are at the crucial stage of development. There is nothing yet known about how long it will affect and potentially ruin their long-term development and lives.

“The first thing is don’t let your child get COVID. You can’t develop Long COVID or have post COVID complications if you never get COVID,” said Dr. Daniel Griffin in a March 17, 2021 interview with Medcram.com. Griffin is an MD/PhD board certified in infectious disease and an instructor in Clinical Medicine and an associate research scientist in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at Columbia University.

Dr. Griffin cited data from the UK and explained the troubling cases he is seeing in the New York Tri-State area (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut) that some ten percent of children with COVID are suffering from Long COVID. “The one thing I want to bring up which parents are getting very upset about now is that children, like adults, may get covid and not be better in a week or two. Long COVID in adults is twenty percent, in children it may be as high as ten percent, that is what we are seeing in the UK where they have good surveillance.”

Dr. Griffin described that one third of Long COVID patients he sees had asymptomatic infections: “With the opening of schools and resumption of sports, large numbers of children are enrolling in sports and “realizing they can’t run up and down a soccer field, or a teacher is calling and saying ‘Hey your son is not paying attention in school.’ From there, parents are having to piece together that their child had COVID a few months ago and it was either mild or asymptomatic. We don’t see long COVID just in people who end up in hospital. Hair loss has been particularly traumatic.”

Information and studies on Long COVID in adults are difficult to find, but this is even more true when it comes to children. As a result, thousands of parents from around the world have taken to social media and sought answers from others in large support groups where children are experiencing a laundry list of debilitating symptoms that affect organs from the heart to the brain. Here they search for patterns, share stories and find support.

A number of parents on social media support groups air frustrations that their children have had numerous “tests come back normal,” so they are sent home without treatment or referrals to specialists. Parents report children have debilitating gastrointestinal pain, acute ankle and join pain so severe that it forces older children crawl, testicular torsions in boys, brain fog which prevents them from learning at school or via remote education, tremors, slurred speech, and fatigue that keeps them groggy for large portions of the day. In essence they do not recognize their children.

Many parents lament that they have burned bridges at a number of pediatric hospitals because their desperation has forced them to have to scream at the top of their lungs so their child’s issues are taken seriously. Major advocacy and information groups have also been built by parents and physicians seeking answers and sharing stories.

Frances Simpson is the cofounder of support and advocacy group Long Covid Kids (LCK) in the United Kingdom where she is a lecturer in psychiatry at Coventry University in Scarborough. Simpson and her two children have endured lasting effects of Long COVID for over a year now. In a recent interview with German Deutsche Welle (DW) news, she explained the exhaustion that parents face trying to get care for their children, often with little guidance from medical professionals: “It’s a really difficult place to be in. Quite often parents are ill themselves, and to have children who are ill and their illness is denied. Parents feel they are being gaslighted.”

LCK has conducted two major surveys on hundreds of children in its growing network. The findings of these surveys are among the most comprehensive data collected to date. Simpson noted that their surveys “established that a lot of the symptoms in children are very similar [to adults with long COVID], but children tend to have an increased amount of gastric issues. Children ending up with appendicitis. We see a lot of the symptoms of PMIS, Pediatric multisystem inflammatory disorder. We are seeing neuropsych symptoms, seizures, tics, Tourette’s, seizures. There is a real gamut.”

LCK notes, “Our study provides further evidence on Long COVID in children. It is based on a survey of 510 children. Symptoms like fatigue, headache, muscle and joint pain, rashes and heart palpitations, and mental health issues like lack of concentration and short-term memory problems, were particularly frequent and confirm previous observations, suggesting that they may characterize this condition. A better comprehension of Long COVID is urgently needed.”

Parents reported that their child’s activity levels had worsened. Only “10% of the children have returned to previous levels of activity and 21.2% are currently unable to enjoy any activity, while 30.2% enjoy occasional activity but usually have an increase of symptoms afterwards.”

Another worrisome issue is the frequency of neuropsychiatric symptoms and mental health issues. With regards to memory and concentration, “60.6% reported lack of concentration, 45.9% difficulty in remembering information, 40% difficulty in doing everyday tasks, 32.7% difficulty processing information, and 32.7% short-term memory issues.”

A number of children and families have shared stories and photos of handwritten notes that outline the age, location, and duration of symptoms. Fifteen-year-old Delaney suffers from multiple heart and breathing issues and holds a pair of ballet slippers indicating that she can no longer dance. Six-year-old Seren has been suffering for over 300 days from ulcers, pneumonia, rashes and extreme body pains. Eleven-year-old Itai says he can no longer play rugby and has been suffering for 349 days from a litany of symptoms that include tics and seizures.

Citing data from the UK Office of National Statistics (ONS), the organization notes that in the UK alone, 74,126 children report symptoms at 5 weeks, and 45,616 continue to report symptoms after 12 weeks.

Simpson and her two children continue to suffer from long COVID a year after their initial infections in March 2020. “My children are not better, they have relapses anytime something exerts them,” she said.

LCK provides an informational packet for parents and schools that compiles all the significant data, the results of their surveys, and also stresses the necessity of ventilation in classrooms. Among their materials they regretfully report that, though anecdotal, “We do not have one recovery story to share. No child in our group has yet returned to their previous state of health.”

Despite the growing number of cases and staggering data that 10-15 percent of COVID-infected children are facing Long COVID, there has been a near media blackout on the issue as schools have continued with reopening around the world. The ruling class throughout the globe is making a conscious decision as part of a class policy to turn a deaf ear to the issue, just as it has to the growing global death toll as it nears three million and a worldwide fourth surge is gaining momentum.