Fuel poverty report warns of child deaths as the UK faces "humanitarian crisis" this winter

Harvey Thompson & Charlotte Salthill

A report by the Institute of Health Equity (IHE), Fuel Poverty, Cold Homes and Health Inequalities, paints a devastating picture of living conditions for millions of UK families and their children.

The study was co-led by Professor Ian Sinha, Consultant Respiratory Paediatrician at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, Liverpool, and Sir Michael Marmot, the director of the UCL Institute of Health Equity. Currently Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London, Marmot is highly respected for his work leading research groups on health inequalities for over three decades.

The report, "Fuel Poverty, Cold Homes and Health Inequalities" by Professor Ian Sinha, Consultant Respiratory Paediatrician at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, Liverpool, and Sir Michael Marmot, the director of the UCL Institute of Health Equity.

The IHE began looking at the health impacts of fuel poverty and cold homes in 2014. Over the last eight years, the data has charted an alarming deterioration. In their foreword the authors write, “If fuel poverty and cold homes were a concern in 2014, now, with the rapidly increasing price of energy, they are likely to become a significant humanitarian crisis.”

The report explains, “Fuel poverty means cold homes, but it means so much more,” including “food banks, desperate attempts to stay warm, inability to meet children’s needs, insufficient resources to pay the rent” and other stresses that “damage the health of adults and blight children’s development.”

It continues, “A child’s lungs play a crucial role in determining his or her health and life expectancy.” Their development is “impaired by problems associated with cold”. Adding factors such as “cutting back on food to pay the gas bills, and the mental health and educational impact of cold houses, the picture is bleaker still. Without meaningful and swift action cold housing will have dangerous consequences for many children now, and through their life-course.”

Local Government Association estimates for 2019 reveal that the National Health Service (NHS) has to spend around £2.5 billion per year treating illnesses directly linked to cold, damp and unsafe homes which are particularly dangerous for babies, children, older people and those with pre-existing health conditions—especially respiratory and cardiovascular.

Babies and children in early years living in cold homes are especially at risk as these conditions impact on the “development of their organs and body systems and social, emotional and cognitive function.” Cold, damp, and mouldy conditions also leave them with reduced resistance to upper and lower respiratory tract infections including bronchiolitis, and increased risk of asthma and acute asthmatic attacks. This is worsened by house dust mites which proliferate as windows are closed due to cold.

At the launch of the Fuel Poverty report, Professor Sinha said he had “no doubt” that children would die this winter as a result. The Financial Times noted Sinha’s comment that at his own Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool, staff were treating babies for respiratory illnesses at a cost of £3,000 per child “and yet we are going to send them home to the very circumstances which are going to make them ill in the first place.”

Among adults and older people, resistance to respiratory infections is directly related to cold temperatures. Studies have shown that visits to doctors for respiratory illnesses increase by up to 19 percent for every one degree below the mean temperature. Circulatory problems and long-term conditions such as diabetes, musculoskeletal and dementia are also more prevalent among those living in cold conditions.

COVID-19, a disease with potentially serious respiratory symptoms and the leading cause of excess winter mortality in 2020/21, is expected to surge again this winter.

The report notes, based on figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS), that “Cold homes and fuel poverty contribute to the phenomenon of excess winter deaths. England saw an estimated 63,000 excess winter deaths in 2020–21. Estimates suggest that some 10 per cent of excess winter deaths are directly attributable to fuel poverty and 21.5 per cent are attributable to cold homes.

“England’s excess winter deaths index is higher than the Northern European average.”

With the numbers of people falling into fuel poverty rising, the government has sought to change how it is measured to conceal the truth.

Fuel Poverty explains, “The most recent UK government estimates suggest a 13.2 percent rate of fuel poverty for English households (2020), a 14 percent rate for Welsh households (2021), an 18 percent rate for Northern Irish households (2018) and a 24.6 percent rate for Scottish households (2019). However different fuel poverty definitions and measurements across the UK’s nations make direct comparisons “difficult.”

In the most diplomatic language, the report’s authors point to attempts to falsify the data, writing that it is “unclear what prompted the change in the measurements of fuel poverty in England in 2021.” The result is that households are “not deemed fuel-poor if they live in a property with an energy efficiency rating in band C or above, regardless of whether or not they can afford adequate heating,” leading to significant underestimates.

But redefinitions cannot hide the horrendous social conditions being inflicted on millions.

“In the spring of 2022,” the report writes, “National Energy Action, a national fuel poverty charity, estimated 6.5 million households across the UK (23.4 percent of all households) were in fuel poverty—an increase from their estimate of 4 million in October 2021.” The figure will be even higher this winter.

Marmot’s report does not pull its punches on how these terrible social conditions arose. Identifying as factors the “post-pandemic rise in demand, war in Ukraine, and oil and gas companies “obscene profits,” it concludes, “But the underlying issues are the quality of housing, poverty, and the price of fuel. In a rich country, the idea that more than half of households should face fuel poverty is a sad judgement of the management of our affairs.”

Fuel Poverty highlights the impact of wage stagnation and austerity since the 2008 financial crash. It notes the “steady decline in real wages in recent years” and that “By June 2022, inflation hit a 40-year high.” The biggest cost increases have been in basic goods like transport, housing and household services, and food, “driving the so-called ‘heat or eat’ dilemma.”

Marmot’s report was released just as the Resolution Foundation think-tank forecast that 3 million people across the UK would be pushed into absolute poverty (below 60 percent of the median income after housing costs) due to a projected 10 percent drop in income over the next two years, the most severe assault on living standards in over a century.

This would mean 14 million people in the UK living in absolute poverty by 2023-24. Child poverty was forecast to reach 33 percent in 2026-27.

Both reports recommended the introduction of a “social tariff” for energy bills targeted at those on low incomes, with Marmot’s concluding that “efforts aimed at the poorest will not be enough. We need policies that will reduce fuel poverty across the social gradient, with effort proportionate to need—greatest for those most at risk. We call this proportionate universalism.”

But Prime Minister Liz Truss’s hard-right Thatcherite government has declared itself against any redistribution, except from the poor to the rich. If those in power have been willing to sacrifice over 200,000 people to a preventable virus, they will think nothing of the deaths and ill-health caused by freezing homes.

Protests in Iran enter second week after young woman’s police-custody death

Jordan Shilton

Protests are continuing for a second week in many of Iran’s major cities following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini at the hands of the clerical regime’s morality police. While the demonstrations are fueled by popular anger over the terrible social and economic situation in the country and the Shia clerical establishment’s monopoly over political power in the bourgeois Islamic Republic, the imperialist powers are shamelessly seeking to exploit the protests for their own predatory interests.

Protesters chant slogans during a protest over the death of Mahsa Amini. (AP) [AP Photo/FILE PHOTO IS TAKEN BY AN INDIVIDUAL NOT EMPLOYED BY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS AND OBTAINED BY THE AP OUTSIDE IRAN.]

Amini, from the northwestern city of Saqqez in Kurdistan province, was detained in Tehran September 13 for “improperly” wearing a hijab by the notorious morality police, who are responsible for enforcing the Islamic Republic’s strict dress code for women. Amini was visiting the capital with her family at the time. Reports suggest that she was severely beaten by the police, who allegedly struck her over the head with a baton and slammed her against a police vehicle. She was taken to hospital after falling into a coma and died three days later. In a clumsy attempt to calm public anger, the authorities made the improbable claim that the young woman died of a heart attack or a brain hemorrhage unrelated to any injury. Her family have rejected such assertions, declaring that Amini had no health problems.

As of Friday, state media reported that 35 people have died since the protests began, including five members of the security forces. Exile groups have reported as many as 50 deaths, with several children among them. Activists associated with these anti-regime groups released footage that appeared to show security forces firing live rounds at protesters. Hundreds of political activists and regime opponents have been rounded up and detained in raids.

The protests initially began in cities in western Iran dominated by the Kurdish minority, of which Amini was a member. As the week progressed, they spread to Tehran and other cities, where much if not most of their explicit support came from university campuses. Prominent slogans in the demonstrations have included “Death to the dictator,” a reference to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, and “Women, life, freedom!” in Kurdish.

President Ibrahim Raisi, who belongs to the conservative hard-line faction of the clerical establishment, vowed Saturday to “decisively confront” protesters. Security forces must “deal decisively with those who oppose the country’s security and tranquility,” he was reported by state media as saying during a call to a family of a deceased security service member. Access to the internet, including popular social media channels like Instagram and WhatsApp, has been heavily restricted by the authorities since Wednesday in a bid to curb the protests.

Earlier in the week, Raisi sought to strike a more conciliatory tone, pledging a full investigation into Amini’s death after speaking to her family. Since coming to power in 2021, Raisi—a prominent cleric, notorious for his role in the 1988 mass executions of political prisoners—has overseen a toughening of the enforcement of hijab guidelines by the morality police.

The protests are being fueled by a rapidly deteriorating economic crisis, produced above all by the devastating impact of a brutal sanctions regime enforced by the imperialist powers that is tantamount to war. The Iranian currency dropped to its lowest-ever level against the dollar during the summer, and inflation is running at over 40 percent. Iran’s oil exports have plummeted, slashing the country’s most important source of income.

In a report published earlier this month, UN special rapporteur Alena Douhan painted a devastating picture of the impact of decades of US-led sanctions on the country of 80 million people and called for their immediate abandonment. Douhan noted that even though medication and food are supposed to be excluded from these sanctions, licences provided by US authorities to ensure exemptions “appear to be ineffective and nearly non-existent.” She continued, “These constitute serious impediments to the enjoyment of the right to the highest attainable standard of health by all Iranians.”

Under the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, Washington, in concert with its European allies, dramatically intensified the campaign of economic sanctions it has waged against Iran since the blood-soaked regime of the US-sponsored Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was toppled by a mass popular uprising in 1979. The sanctions, which were coupled by threats of war (“all options are on the table”), were part of a bipartisan US push to bring about “regime change” or at least exploit the cleavages in the clerical establishment to bring Tehran more directly under Western domination.

Under the 2015, Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Obama administration agreed to relax the punishing economic sanctions in exchange for Tehran accepting that its civil nuclear program be subject to sweeping and unprecedented restrictions and international surveillance.

Tehran, which has always maintained that its nuclear programme is for civilian purposes only, complied with the terms of the agreement to the letter.

However, Washington refused to fulfil its obligations under the deal. Instead, under Trump it repudiated the Iran nuclear accord in May 2018; then, as part of a “maximum pressure” campaign, launched all-out economic war against Iran and threatened retaliatory measures against any country that did not abide by its illegal sanctions.

Although the European imperialist powers made empty pledges to oppose Trump’s provocative move and offer Tehran alternative trading and financial options to remain linked to the world market, these promises remained a dead letter. Concerned far more with protecting their lucrative business interests and frayed geostrategic relations with the US than maintaining ties with Iran and upholding international law, European companies withdrew from Iran en masse and the European powers fell into line.

Picking up where Trump left off, the Biden administration has continued to ratchet up pressure on Iran, including with provocative military threats and actions and by introducing ever more preconditions for a promised revival of the nuclear accord. Biden has also cultivated an anti-Iran alliance of the Gulf states and Israel, which has been given a free hand by Washington to step up its aggressive air strikes against Iranian targets in Syria.

In light of this record, the sheer hypocrisy of the imperialist powers’ sudden concern for the “rights” of the Iranian people in the wake of Amini’s death is breathtaking. During his speech to the United Nations General Assembly Wednesday, Biden declared, “Today, we stand with the brave citizens and the brave women of Iran who right now are demonstrating to secure their basic rights.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken attacked Tehran for “violently suppressing peaceful protesters,” as he unveiled an exception to the US sanctions to allow internet software companies to provide technology to the Iranian market with the aim of circumventing state restrictions on the internet. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz chimed in, writing on Twitter, “It’s terrible that Mahsa Amini died in police custody in Tehran. Wherever it is in the world, women must have the right to live as they please without having to fear for their lives.”

On cue, the same media outlets that have spent the past seven months belching out pro-war propaganda to legitimise the US-NATO war on Russia, which has led to the deaths of tens of thousands on both sides, suddenly discovered their sympathy for the “human rights” of Iranians. The New York Times, Britain’s Guardian, Germany’s Der Spiegel, and others have pumped out column after column of moralising drivel, denouncing the regime in Tehran, and proclaiming support for the “rights” and “freedom” of the Iranian people.

None of these people or publications have been troubled by the hundreds of thousands of entirely preventable COVID-19 deaths in Iran, a large portion of which must be put down to the malicious exclusion of Iran from access to health care technology and medication under the US-led sanctions regime. The US and its European allies are also fully complicit in the barbarous war waged by Saudi dictator Mohamed bin Salman against Iranian-backed Hauthi rebels in the impoverished country of Yemen, where tens of thousands of civilians have died since 2015 and millions have fled their homes.

The glaring double standard is to be explained, as always when it comes to the political establishment and the bourgeois media, by definite imperialist interests. Washington, Berlin, and the other major powers view the protests over Amini’s death as a useful stick to beat the Tehran regime into making concessions in the largely stalled talks aimed at renewing the nuclear accord. The failure to reach an agreement thus far is entirely the fault of the imperialists, who have engineered one provocation after another against Tehran. In June, the US and its European allies collaborated to adopt a resolution at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) over the objections of Russia and China, and with India and Pakistan abstaining, that accused Iran of not complying with IAEA inspectors. Biden has also refused to remove the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from the US list of terrorist organizations, a key Tehran demand, although it now appears to have dropped it to no avail.

On September 7, the IAEA provocatively asserted that it is “not in a position to provide assurance that Iran’s nuclear program is exclusively peaceful.” As a matter of fact, the US has admitted that there is no evidence of Iran having any kind of nuclear weapons programme since 2003, as admitted by current CIA director William Burns.

Beyond the nuclear talks, the imperialist powers are determined to intensify pressure on Iran’s bourgeois-clerical regime as it deepens its partnerships with Russia and China in Central Asia. At the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meeting in Uzbekistan earlier this month, Iran signed a memorandum of obligations to become a full member of the security and trade bloc led by Beijing and Moscow. Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdullahian said the move marked “a new stage of various economic, commercial, transit and energy cooperation.”

Separate agreements were signed with Uzbekistan to expand trading relations. In August, Tehran announced a new railway project with Kazakhstan aimed at boosting trading relations in Central Asia and pledged that it would from now conduct Iran-Russia trade in the two countries’ own currencies rather than in US dollars.

Raisi speaks for the hardline faction of the clerical establishment, which was never fully reconciled to the efforts of former president Hassan Rouhani and the so-called “reform” wing to reach an accommodation with US and European imperialism through the nuclear accord. During a meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the SCO conference, Raisi said of Iran’s SCO membership, “The relationship between countries which are sanctioned by the US, such as Iran, Russia or other countries, can overcome many problems and issues and make them stronger. The Americans think whichever country they impose sanctions on, it will be stopped, their perception is a wrong one.”

Protests against political and social crisis continue in Haiti as imperialist powers consider military intervention

Alex Johnson

Mass protests escalated across Haiti after weeks of resistance to the conditions of poverty and oppression millions are facing. This is combined with political opposition to Prime Minister Ariel Henry, widely perceived as a pawn of the US ruling elite, who protesters are demanding be ousted from power. In response to some of the largest demonstrations in recent years, international media outlets and imperialist governments alike are now mulling over or explicitly calling for a foreign military intervention to crack down on dissent.

Demonstrators protest against fuel price hikes and to demand that Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry step down, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Monday, Sept. 19, 2022. [AP Photo/Odelyn Joseph]

The opposition to the corrupt political establishment, intolerable social climate and decades-long imperialist oppression is being expressed in targeted attacks against critical institutions widely seen as bastions of neocolonial domination over the small island.

A local bank in the coastal commune Léogâne, Unibank, was one of several banks across the country which protesters attacked and partially burned. Protesters sprayed graffiti on the building reading “Down with USA” and “Down with USA and Ariel Henry.” In Jeremie, a commune in Haiti’s southeast region, protesters were filmed burning down and ransacking Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) facilities, while other NGOs around the country are reporting being attacked.

NGOs have been the source of immense contempt by the population following the devastating 2010 earthquake. Thousands of NGOs have come to operate around 80 percent of the country’s basic public services, ostensibly enlisted to rebuild infrastructure and provide long-term employment to jobless locals. They have instead siphoned off millions in relief money that has gone totally unaccounted for while highly paid staffers have profited from the country’s misery.

Other instances included large-scale arson attacks, including the burning down of barricades in Port-au-Prince after Henry slandered protesters as “gangs” funded by local businesses and foreign interests. The notion that the unrest in Haiti is primarily the product of gang violence rather than raging social inequality is being repeated in ruling circles. During his speech at the United Nations General Assembly meeting on Wednesday, UN Secretary General António Guterres said gangs in Haiti were “destroying the very building blocks of society.”

Guterres has joined Dominican Republic President Luis Abinader, whose government has clamored in recent weeks for the return of a UN “peacekeeping” force like MINUSTAH, a Brazilian-led international military occupation that was tasked with suppressing opposition in Haiti’s shantytowns after the overthrow of elected president and former priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004.

Perhaps the most cynical and hypocritical comments from the General Assembly came from Sébastien Carrière, Canada’s ambassador to Port-au-Prince, who said “the international community needs to get together and support Haiti.” Carrière lauded the Haitian police, declaring that he had the “utmost respect for the [police] and the work they are doing,” and that what was missing in resolving the crisis was “political actors getting together and also doing the best they can to come to an inclusive accord that doesn’t leave anybody behind and puts the country back on the right track.”

Videos circulated widely on social media have refuted this disgusting flattery, clearly documenting the same Haitian police, trained and armed by the various imperialist powers, beating, maiming and gunning down protesters over the past month. In this, Canada has been a complicit actor, providing $42 million in funding for the Haiti’s security force this year alone.

The so-called “political actors” cited by Carrière have been handpicked by the imperialist powers themselves, above all Henry, to form Haiti’s government following the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July 2021. This was done through the Core Group of imperialist ambassadors operating in Haiti who saw Henry as a more auspicious figurehead for a puppet regime than interim president Claude Joseph.

The unelected Henry was carefully selected due to his politically criminal history as an operative for the US government stretching back to the early 2000s, when he led the Democratic Convergence (CD) movement which played a critical role in toppling Aristide in a US-backed coup. Leading up to the coup, CD made explicit appeals to the US for an invasion and the restoration of the violent Haitian army that tortured and killed thousands in the 1990s. Henry’s organization provided political cover for the CIA-trained and funded death squads and former army officers that would carry out Aristide’s violent overthrow.

Prior to becoming prime minister, Henry served in ministerial positions under the presidencies of US lackeys Michel Martelly and Moïse, the former being installed in 2011 through fraudulent elections orchestrated by Hillary Clinton, before placing Moïse in power as his handpicked successor in another entirely bogus electoral process.

Both Martelly and Moïse were infamous for their connections to Haiti’s rapacious business elite and for carrying out brutal police crackdowns on protestors in Haiti’s shantytowns. In the waning days of his term, Martelly relied on the Haitian police and BOID (Departmental Brigade of Operations and Interventions), a paramilitary unit that was directed at crushing opposition to his rampant corruption, while Haitians starved on poverty wages and dilapidated infrastructure.

Just recently a lawsuit was brought against Martelly which alleged Haitian officials and multinational corporations conspired to fix the prices of remittances and telephone calls from the United States to Haiti, diverting millions in tax funds into private hands instead of filling the government’s treasury. Haiti’s intractable political crisis came to a head during the presidency of Moïse, who gutted the federal legislature, judiciary and local governments and defied his constitutional term limit in his efforts to inaugurate a dictatorial regime.

The gangs that are now violently terrorizing the nation were largely a creation of Moïse. In 2018, these gang forces carried out the La Saline massacre that gruesomely killed 59 people in a neighborhood that was the scene of protests against his government. Police agent Jimmy “BBQ” Cherizier is a former police officer who participated directly in the assault and subsequently founded the G9 Family and Allies gang federation, employed to intimidate voters during elections and quell social unrest.

Large-scale protests against Moïse erupted after a criminal investigation found that Moïse and his political cronies embezzled millions through a development fund, PetroCaribe program, that was subsidized by Venezuela that was intended to help low-income Haitians.

The massive resistance of Haiti’s oppressed working class, who face super-exploitation by American apparel and other companies, has led to a propaganda offensive by foreign diplomats and strategists to scapegoat gangs and oligarchs as responsible for the uprisings. Juan Gonzalez, the National Security Council’s senior director for the Western Hemisphere and a special assistant to Biden, said during an appearance Monday at the Washington D.C.-based United States Institute of Peace meeting that Haiti’s instability was being financed by people “who have mansions in different parts of the world, and are paying for people to go into the streets.”

The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post, a propaganda conduit for the US military and intelligence agencies, is once again trumpeting another colonial-style intervention in Haiti. The Post writers reprised their comments from an editorial last year following the assassination of Moïse calling for “boots on the ground” or another violent military intervention. They complain about the “absence of muscular action by outside actors,” and argue “propping up the prime minister [Henry]” is a mistake. The Post editorial insists that outside some foreign expedition on the island and external force, any policy decision in Haiti is an “abdication of responsibility.”

Aside from falsely conflating the violent carnage now being meted out by the likes of G9 and its family with the genuine expressions of popular anger against poverty and political repression, the Post editorial entirely brushes over the fact that the social disaster and gang warfare are result of actions of Henry and his predecessors who have received the full backing of Democratic and Republican administrations alike.

A major US newspaper calling for the renewal of direct colonial-style domination of Haiti has frightening implications, as it recalls the two-decade-long US Marine occupation of Haiti after President Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam was assassinated. This ushered in more than a century of imperialist plunder that saw hundreds of thousands killed under the Duvalier dictatorships, US -backed military juntas and a 13-year-long UN military operation. American intelligence agencies and State Department officials funded death squads that murdered without restraint in Haiti’s slums. It is this century of imperialist domination that has cemented a legacy of abysmal economic conditions out of which the present crisis has emerged.

Henry and other top government officials are also now pleading for international intervention amid the irresolvable political conflicts raging the country. Foreign Minister Jean Victor Geneus told UN delegates in New York on Saturday that Haiti was facing a multifaceted sociopolitical and economic crisis that is being exacerbated by gang terror and could “only be solved with the effective support of our partners.” Geneus cited Henry’s own words, saying the prime minister had “no desire to stay in power longer than necessary” and appealed to the regime’s foreign patrons to facilitate an electoral coalition.

The bloody fighting between the various gang organizations is a testament to the hostility among rival sections of the Haitian ruling elite. Cherizier was enlisted by Haiti’s big business families to control the importation of food, fuel and other lucrative goods.

A section of Haiti’s ruling-elite is turning to ever more violent means to produce the conditions for Henry’s overthrow to consolidate control over Haiti’s most profitable sectors.

At the General Assembly Biden issued bland platitudes, professing his intention to “stand with our neighbor in Haiti as it faces political-fueled gang violence and an enormous human crisis,” without making any long-term policy decision to address the crisis.

Although the Biden administration has not unveiled any immediate plans for intervention, the US has maintained its criminal anti-immigrant policies that have placed Haitian migrants under conditions tantamount to torture, while continuing to deport refugees in droves without any consideration of their asylum claims. A new report from Amnesty International documents discriminatory and degrading ill treatment of Haitian asylum seekers that have accompanied the mass expulsions under the Title 42 Trump-era policy which Biden has continued.

Whatever the coloration of any political regime that emerges from crisis, either the prolongation of Henry’s rule or the cobbling together of a coalition including his political opponents, what is certain is that the US and world imperialism will arrange a factional alliance as grasping and corrupt as all the other governments that followed the 2004 coup. The self-serving lies about lending “support” to Haiti are not to ensure democracy, but to facilitate a new round of fraudulent elections like all the ones since the installation of Martelly.

Neo-fascist Georgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy wins general election

Alex Lantier

Georgia Meloni of the Brothers of Italy (FdI) party, the political successor of the Fascist Party of World War II-era dictator Benito Mussolini, won last night’s Italian general election.

Far-Right party Brothers of Italy's leader Giorgia Meloni speaks to the media at her party's electoral headquarters in Rome, early Monday, Sept. 26, 2022. [AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia]

With 26 percent of the vote, she will seek to form a government with Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing Forza Italia party (8 percent) and Matteo Salvini’s far-right Lega (9 percent). Due to the extra seats granted under the Italian electoral system to the party receiving the most votes, the FdI and its allies are projected to have an absolute majority in both houses of parliament. They would have around 235 of the Chamber’s 400 seats and 115 of the Senate’s 200 seats.

The elections saw a disintegration of the parties falsely designated by capitalist media as the “left.” The Democratic Party (PD), Italy’s main social-democratic party, fell to less than 19 percent, while populist Five-Star Movement (M5S) won 15.5 percent. The Popular Union, a coalition including remnants of Italy’s Rifondazione Comunista party that was endorsed by the pseudo-left Podemos government in Spain and Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France, received only 1.35 percent.

The return of Mussolini’s descendants to direct rule over Italy, for the first time since the end of World War II 77 years ago, is a warning to workers worldwide. The only way forward against imperialist war and social austerity is a break with a bankrupt political establishment and a struggle to mobilize the working class, independently of the existing parties and national trade union bureaucracies, in a struggle for socialism.

Since the 1991 Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union, European governments of all stripes have imposed austerity, bank bailouts for the rich, and waged imperialist wars. In Italy, Rifondazione Comunista and the PD played leading roles in government to impose these anti-worker policies. With the COVID-19 pandemic and the NATO war on Russia in Ukraine, the bourgeoisie is shifting even further to the right. Amid rising working class anger over the global surge of inflation, the ruling class is using Meloni’s populist demagogy to try to build a police state inspired by 20th-century fascism.

Last night, Meloni began her victory speech by indicating that she saw it as a triumph of the fascist tradition. Meloni, whom official European media euphemistically refer to as “post-fascist,” said, “I dedicate this victory to all those who are no longer here and who deserved to be alive tonight.”

She insisted that she would lead a “responsible” government and tried to use her gender to give herself a progressive gloss. Demanding “mutual respect” from other political organizations in Italy, she pledged to “concentrate on what unites us rather than what divides us. The time has come to be responsible.”

Meloni told the press that, as Italy’s first female prime minister, her election was “a step forward. I defined it as breaking the ‘glass ceiling,’ one that still exists in many western countries, not only in Italy, preventing women from achieving important public roles in society.”

Meloni also sought to calm concerns in ruling circles that she might make nationalist criticisms of the NATO war on Russia or the EU’s multi-trillion-euro bank bailouts for the super-rich. She emphasized that she supported Italy’s position inside the European Union (EU) and the NATO alliance, as well as the war against Russia in Ukraine.

“We will be guarantors, without ambiguity, of Italy’s positioning and of our uttermost support to the heroic battle of the Ukrainian people,” she said. She also backed the surge in EU military spending and the EU’s cut-off of purchases of Russian natural gas: “If we had an EU more like the one we imagine, we would have developed a more effective defense policy, invested in energy security and maintained short value chains to avoid reliance on other—often untrustworthy—countries for gas, raw materials, commodities, chips and other goods.”

PD leader Enrico Letta gave a press conference today conceding defeat. He insisted that the PD would “not allow Italy to leave the heart of Europe” and would defend “European values” as enshrined in Italy’s 1946 post-war constitution. He pledged to take a “hard and demanding position” to build majority support for “progressive and democratic values,” which Letta said his party had found impossible to do successfully during this election.

Meloni’s election victory is the product of the bankruptcy of the PD and its pseudo-left satellites. They speak not for democracy or historical progress, but for layers of the bourgeoisie and of the pro-imperialist affluent middle classes who support war with Russia, EU bank bailouts, inaction on COVID-19, and petty-bourgeois gender politics. During the campaign, they attacked Meloni largely from the right: first, claiming that she was anti-EU and pro-Russian, or “aligned on the pro-Putin front” in Letta’s words; and, secondly, that she was hostile to women.

Neither criticism proved effective against Meloni—who repeatedly made bellicose statements denouncing Russia and began her speeches with the refrain, “I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am a Christian, and you can’t take that away from me.”

The Italian ruling class and political establishment carefully prepared Meloni’s victory and groomed her for it. Meloni was invited earlier this month to speak to the Ambrosetti economic forum, an influential Italian business forum held on the shores of Lake Como. After a friendly election debate on September 12 between Meloni and Letta, Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote, “no one demonizes Giorgia Meloni in Italy, not even the press. She is sailing to her election victory, at least that is how it appears.”

This is because Letta—whose party was a key component alongside Salvini’s far-right Lega and the M5S of the outgoing Italian coalition government led by former European central banker Mario Draghi—himself has only the most limited political differences with the far right.

Among workers and youth in Italy and across Europe, however, there is deep opposition to policies jointly outlined by Meloni and Letta. Food and heating prices are skyrocketing, as energy conglomerates rake in billions of euros in super-profits from gouging consumers. With economists projecting that Italy could lose a half-million jobs or more due to energy shortages this winter, an explosive movement is being prepared.

This reality, of which ruling circles are well aware, played the decisive role in the Italian political establishment’s friendly treatment of Meloni during the election campaign. It is legitimizing fascism as it seeks to install a government that will be as aggressive as possible in waging war and repressing working-class opposition.

However, the lies of the ruling elite have not succeeded in whitewashing the legacy of Mussolini and Hitler in the eyes of millions. Today several high schools were occupied in Milan, Rome, and Palermo as students protested Meloni’s election victory.

Students occupying the Manzoni high school in Milan told the daily La Repubblica they opposed “exploitative and deadly temp work” facing their generation and the “dangerous and repressive political situation, given the recent electoral results.” Speaking to Meloni and the Confindustria business federation, they said, “We do not want to take more steps back, act as if nothing was happening and wait for you to change things.”

Understanding Libya’s Relentless Destabilization

John P. Ruehl

Libya’s competing domestic actors are being exploited by foreign powers seeking to downplay their role in the fragile country.

After leading a military coup in 1969, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi cemented his rule over Libya for more than 40 years. A variety of different political ideologies—Pan-Arabism, Pan-Africanism, socialism, Islamic leftism, and others—characterized his leadership, which were further reinforced by a cult of personality. While living standards for Libyans increased under his rule, Gaddafi attracted resentment among some non-Arab populations, Islamic extremists, and other political opponents.

As the Arab Spring spread outward from neighboring Tunisia into Libya in February 2011, protestors and militant groups seized parts of the country. Loyalist armed forces retook control of much of what they had lost over the next few weeks after the outbreak of the protests, but Gaddafi’s historical antagonism toward Western governments saw them seize the opportunity to impose a no-fly zone and bombing campaign against Libyan forces in March 2011.

Alongside assistance from regional Middle Eastern allies, the NATO-led intervention was successful in helping local militant groups topple Gaddafi, who was later captured and executed in October 2011. Soon after his death, questions were immediately raised about how Libya could be politically restructured and avoid becoming a failed state. After militant groups refused to disarm, they along with their allies began to contest territory and control over Libya’s fragile new national institutions.

The National Transitional Council (NTC) was established to coordinate rebel groups against Gaddafi, and naturally inherited much of the Libyan government after the war. But a number of countries did not recognize its authority, and after handing power over to the General National Congress (GNC) in 2012, Libya’s weak central government steadily lost political control over its enormous territory to competing groups.

Libya’s population of almost 7 million people lives in a highly urbanized society that has led to the development of strong regional identities among those living in its northern coastal cities. There has also historically been an east-west divide between the two coastal provinces of Cyrenaica in the east and Tripolitania in the west.

A large Turkish and part-Turkish minority also live throughout Libya’s major cities, particularly in the city of Misrata. Most of them have descended from the Ottoman troops who married local women during Ottoman rule from 1551-1912, and though not a strictly homogenous group, the majority revolted against Gaddafi as nationwide protests began in Libya.

The historical lack of central authority in Libya’s more rural south resulted in widespread autonomy for the Tuareg tribe in the southwest and the Tubu tribe in the southeast. While the Tuaregs largely supported Gaddafi, the Tubu joined the revolutionaries, sparking increased tension between these two tribes to gain control over the city of Ubari, local smuggling routes, and energy infrastructure.

Alongside ethnic and cultural disputes, Libya was further destabilized by radical Islamists after the fall of Gaddafi. Mass unemployment among Libya’s relatively young population fueled recruitment for ISIS and the Al Qaeda-affiliated Ansar al-Sharia. Having gained battlefield experience and with limited economic prospects, many militants in Libya had little incentive to return to civilian life, while the influx of foreign jihadists also kept the violence ongoing.

Rivalries between these numerous factions helped lead to the outbreak of the second Libyan civil war in 2014. The UN-brokered Libyan Political Agreement (LPA) was signed in December 2015 to create a Presidential Council (PC) for appointing a unity government in Tripoli but failed to curtail growing violence between local actors.

Two major entities came to dominate the country. The Government of National Accord (GNA), which was presided over by the PC, was recognized in March 2016 to lead Libya, with Fayez Serraj as the Libyan prime minister. This move partly incorporated elements of Libya’s political Islamic factions.

The Libyan House of Representatives (HoR), meanwhile, refused to endorse the GNA, and relocated to Tobruk in Cyrenaica after political pressure and Islamist militias forced it out of Tripoli in 2014. The HoR is led by former General Khalifa Haftar, who commands the Libyan National Army (LNA).

The GNA retained official recognition by the UN as well as Libya’s most important economic institutions, including the Central Bank of Libya (CBL). But both the GNA and the HoR continued to fight for influence over the National Oil Corporation (NOC), while many other national institutions were forced to work with both factions.

Military force has also been integral to enforcing rival claims to Libya’s leadership. In 2017, Haftar’s forces seized Benghazi, consolidating power across much of the east and center of the country. But his attempt to take Tripoli in 2019-2020 was repelled by GNA and allied forces, prompting an HoR retreat on several fronts. A ceasefire between the GNA and the rival administration of the LNA declared an end to the war in October 2020, but tensions and violence persisted.

Libya’s civil conflict has also been inflamed by outside powers. Turkey opposed the original NATO-led intervention in 2011 but supported Libyan Turks, some of whom founded the Libya Koroglu Association in 2015, to coordinate with Turkey. Ankara has also supported the GNA with arms, money, and diplomatic support for years, and Turkish forces and military technology were integral to repelling Haftar’s assault on Tripoli.

Turkey’s business interests in Libya and desire to increase its power in the Mediterranean remain Ankara’s core initiatives, and in June it voted to extend the mandate for military deployment in Libya for another 18 months. Both Turkey and Qatar, which has also been a strong backer of the GNA, are close with the Libyan branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and associated political circles in Libya, to attempt to promote a brand of political Islam that rivals Saudi-led initiatives.

With few core interests in Libya, the U.S. has shown tacit support for intervening again in a conflict it had allegedly won, but from 2015 to 2019, U.S. airstrikes and military support helped the GNA push ISIS out of many Libyan cities. Yet, Washington has remained wary of being associated with the Libyan conflict and with Islamists allied with the GNA, and the U.S. harbored and provided support to Haftar for decades to pressure Gaddafi before the civil war.

Egypt has been one of the HoR’s most crucial allies, providing weapons, military support, and safe haven through Libya’s eastern border. Besides protecting Libya’s Egyptian population, Egypt’s military-led government is also seeking to suppress political Islam in the region after Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood briefly ruled Egypt from 2011 to 2013 following Egypt’s own revolution. In 2020, Cairo approved its own intervention in Libya.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have similar interests in suppressing rival political Islamic forces in the region and have provided funding and weaponry to Haftar. Doing so has brought them closer to Russia, which has also supported Haftar with substantial military assistance. This includes warplanes piloted by the Russian private military company Wagner, which is suspected to be partially bankrolled in Libya by the UAE.

Libya’s destabilization complements the Kremlin’s attempts to influence Europe. Haftar’s forces and supporters managed to block Libyan oil exports in 2020 and again earlier this year, threatening continental supply and increasing Russia’s leverage. Additionally, instability in the region and porous borders encourage migrant flows to Europe, often increasing the popularity of right-wing political parties which have grown closer to Russia over the last two decades.

The HoR has also found less direct aid from France. Officially, Paris has supported UN negotiations and the GNA and has sought to minimize perceptions of its involvement in the conflict. But the death of three undercover French soldiers in Libya in 2016 showed that Paris remained deeply involved in the country’s civil war, and it has sold billions in weapons to Saudi Arabia and the UAE to help Haftar. This is part of France’s efforts to suppress Islamist groups in Africa, where France retains considerable interests.

France’s position has brought criticism from Western allies. In 2019, Paris blocked an EU statement calling on Haftar to stop his offensive on Tripoli, while its support for Haftar has severely undermined its relationship with Italy, which has seen its economic influence in Libya decline.

Since the conclusion of the second Libyan civil war in 2020, steps have been taken to unify the country. A Government of National Unity was established in 2021 to consolidate Libya’s political forces, and the new Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh reached an agreement with Haftar in July 2022 to enforce a ceasefire.

But based on the current dynamics of limited intervention, there is relatively little risk and high rewards for foreign powers to continue destabilizing Libya. Turkey and Russia are also using the conflict to add to their leverage over one another in Syria. With repeated delays in holding elections in Libya and rival local and foreign actors seeking to dominate the country, Libyan citizens risk continuing to be used instead of being helped to ensure a stable and secure future for their country.

UK Truss government delivers class war budget

Robert Stevens

Friday’s mini budget was a smash and grab raid by Britain’s Conservative government on behalf of the super-rich and the corporations.

Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng made a statement lasting just 30 minutes, announcing policies reducing the taxes on the richest by tens of billions of pounds.

Prime Minister Liz Truss (left) and Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng discuss their Growth Plan ahead of a fiscal statement to the House of Commons on September 23 . 10 Downing Street, September 22, 2022 [Photo by Rory Arnold/No 10 Downing Street/Flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 4.0]

The cuts in taxes for the richest were easily the biggest carried out by any government for 50 years.

In one fell swoop Kwarteng reversed a rise in corporation tax planned by the Johnson government, who Prime Minister Liz Truss replaced just 17 days ago. He announced, “The UK’s corporate tax rate will not rise to 25 percent - it will remain at 19 percent. We will have the lowest rate of Corporation Tax in the G20.” This will save the corporations “almost £19 billion a year” the chancellor said.

He then announced an even greater tax cut for the richest 1 percent who earn over £150,000 a year. They previously paid tax at 45 percent in the highest bracket known as the “Additional Rate”. Kwarteng stated, “At 45 percent, it is currently higher than the headline top rate in G7 countries like the US and Italy. And it is higher even than social democracies like Norway. But I’m not going to cut the additional rate of tax today… I’m going to abolish it altogether. From April 2023, we will have a single higher rate of income tax of 40 percent.”

A single higher rate covers all incomes from £50,271 upwards. The 660,000 people earning over £150,000 a year will save an average of £10,000. Torsten Bell of the Resolution Foundation thinktank tweeted, “Any of you earn £1m? You're getting a £55k tax cut next year - twice what a typical earner brings home a year”

The cost of abolishing the additional rate was listed by the government as £2 billion, but according to commentators including the Institute for Fiscal Studies it is closer to £6.6 billion.

What was offered to the UK’s 31 million workers was minuscule and will soon be eaten up by the escalating cost of living. A cut in the basic rate of tax from 20 pence to 19 pence next April will see workers save just £170 on average. A worker on £20,000 a year saves just £74.30. The reversal of a planned 10 percent rise in National Insurance tax contributions, set to be introduced in November, will save the lowest paid households earning just £12,00 a year—63 pence per month according to the IFS. A worker earning £20,000 a year saves £93 annually.

Kwarteng announced the abolition of the limited cap placed on bankers’ bonuses, set throughout the European Union in 2014, meaning no bonus could be more than 200 percent of annual salary. “A strong UK economy has always depended on a strong financial services sector… We need global banks to create jobs here, invest here … So we’re going to get rid of it”.

The chancellor would “reaffirm the UK’s status as the world’s financial services centre” with “an ambitious package of regulatory reforms later in the Autumn.”

There was nothing in Kwarteng’s speech that didn’t benefit big business—with the word business being referred to 28 times, almost once a minute. He confirmed that the cost of the energy price freeze announced by Truss on taking office would be £60 billion over the next six months. But this is another massive subvention to energy companies already drowning in profits.

Like the other handouts to the rich, it is to be paid for by additional government borrowing, which has jumped £72 billion as the deficit was revised upwards from £161.7 billion in April 2022 to £234 billion in September. This is a massive further borrowing commitment, after the measures taken during the pandemic forced the Johnson government to increase borrowing to £323 billion in 2020/21.

Yet those railing against government borrowing then, such as Janet Daley of the pro-Tory Telegraph, were ecstatic. “This was nothing less than a revolutionary Budget,” she declared, describing the governments of arch Tory right-wingers Johnson, Theresa May and David Cameron, as advocates of “the Big State-high tax interventionism willingly embraced for the last decade” that was now at an end.

However, the response to the budget’s give-away on global markets was hostile. It comes amid bourgeois demands for more austerity for workers and a clampdown on public spending. The Bank of England one day earlier acknowledged that Britain was officially in recession and hiked interest rates by 0.5 percent to 2.25 percent, their highest level since December 2008, to devastating effect for millions of mortgage payers.

The mini-budget sparked an immediate run on the pound as investors withdrew their backing and sold off UK government bonds. The pound fell to its lowest level against the dollar since 1985, plunging 3.5 cents on the previous day to $1.09. Against the euro the pound fell to €1.132, its weakest level since February 2021. The FTSE 100 share index fell by 2.3 percent.

Predicting that the pound could even fall to below parity against the US dollar, former US Clinton administration Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers declared, “Between Brexit, how far the Bank of England got behind the curve and now these fiscal policies, I think Britain will be remembered for having pursuing the worst macroeconomic policies of any major country in a long time.”

The shoveling of tens of billions to the financial aristocracy was accompanied by a declaration of war on the working class, who will be made to pay for every penny handed over to the wealthiest.

In a filthy measure, Kwarteng announced a drive to force 120,000 people on the Universal Credit welfare benefit into work declaring, “We will make work pay by reducing people’s benefits if they don’t fulfil their job search commitments.”

Enforcing the cost of what is an unprecedented boon for big business is to be carried out by a frontal assault on fundamental democratic rights, above all the right to strike.

Kwarteng frothed, “At such a critical time for our economy, it is simply unacceptable that strike action is disrupting so many lives. Other European countries have Minimum Service Levels to stop militant trade unions closing down transport networks during strikes. So we will do the same.

“And we will go further. We will legislate to require unions to put pay offers to a member vote, to ensure strikes can only be called once negotiations have genuinely broken down.”

This move would prevent strikes such as that by National Health Service workers currently being balloted on. It would be a license for the employers and the unions to string out negotiations and “new deals” ad infinitum.

The drive to destroy workers’ living standards and eviscerate democratic rights is intimately bound up to British imperialism’s military confrontation of Russia in Ukraine.

Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly in New York this week, Truss reiterated her pledge to spend 3 percent of GDP on defence by 2030, an additional £157 billion, and to “sustain or increase our military support to Ukraine, for as long as it takes.”

Speaking about her domestic agenda, Truss told the media that the official mourning period over the queen had prevented her moving to legislate “for minimum service levels on rail.” But this would be done “as soon as possible”. Truss added that “I want to take a constructive approach with the unions,” but this meant calling of all strikes: “I would tell them to get back to work.”

The measures will throw petrol on the flames of working class opposition that saw Britain’s “Summer of Discontent” strike wave, ensuring that the next rounds of action will be more explosive still, especially as this will bring workers into direct conflict with the state and the government.