Amid mounting mass protests against IMF austerity, Sri Lanka’s autocratic president cancels local elections

K. Ratnayake

In flagrant violation of the country’s constitution and basic democratic rights, Sri Lanka’s unelected president, Ranil Wickremesinghe, has cancelled the island-wide local elections to be held March 9.

For weeks, Wickremesinghe’s government, which is imposing savage International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity measures, has been working to sabotage the elections, because it fears they would result in a massive and humiliating defeat.

Last week, the Election Commission told the Supreme Court the vote would not be able to go ahead as planned on March 9 because the government had refused to provide the money to print ballot papers. In doing so, the Treasury cited a presidential order to fund only “essential government expenses.”

Yesterday, speaking before parliament, Wickremesinghe arrogantly proclaimed there would be no elections and that he would set police upon any officials who tried to proceed with them.

Some of the Sri Lankan army troops mobilised on 8 February 2023 near Colombo Fort protests [Photo: Facebook Malainadu]

Assuming the airs of a dictator, he cynically declared, “The election has not been postponed. There is no election to be postponed in the first place.” He justified this assertion with the absurd claim, which was never raised before, that the Election Commission had lacked a proper quorum in launching the election. In reality, the Commission would have been violating the law—to say nothing of all Sri Lankans’ democratic rights—had it not proceeded with organizing the elections, which were already one-year overdue. The government itself acknowledged this, by previously publishing both the call for nominations and the election date in the official government gazette.   

Wickremesinghe went on to say that if the Treasury secretary gave money to the Election Commission, “I’d have to remove the secretary and ask the police to take legal action against him. The same would happen to the government printer [who is responsible for printing the ballot papers]. They will all lose their jobs.”

Wickremesinghe made no commitment—not that such a commitment would be worth a single rupee—as to when, if ever, the elections will be held.

On other occasions in recent days he has said there will be no elections until there is an “economic recovery” and that the “economic recovery”—that is, squeezing sufficient revenue surpluses from Sri Lanka’s impoverished workers and toilers to resume debt payments to international capital—is dependent on “public order.” 

The reality is Wickremesinghe and the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie are terrified of the renewal of the mass popular upsurge that convulsed the island from April through July of last year and which chased Gotabaya Rajapakse from the presidency, having first forced the resignation of his brother, Mahinda Rajapakse, as prime minster.

Speaking last week, Wickremesinghe vowed he would not “allow the country to go down [the road to] anarchy.” By this he meant, he is determined to use the full force of the capitalist state, running roughshod over the most basic democratic rights, to repress the incipient mass challenge to the ruling class’s scorched-earth “economic recovery program” of savage social spending cuts, privatization, and electricity and other rate hikes. Already, this program has led to mass impoverishment, with 35 percent of the population having to reduce the number of meals they eat per day.

SEP General Secretary Deepal Jayasekara addressing the press conference held in Colombo on 23 February 2023 [Photo: WSWS]

The Socialist Equality Party (SEP), the Sri Lankan section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, is calling on working people to vigorously oppose the government’s autocratic canceling of the local elections. “We, the Socialist Equality Party, strongly denounce the moves of President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s government to block the local government polls,” SEP General Secretary Deepal Jayasekera told a press conference in Colombo yesterday. “It is a blatant attack on the basic democratic rights of working people.”

The SEP has intervened in the local elections to intensify its struggle to mobilize the working class as an independent political force advancing its own socialist solution to the socioeconomic crisis ravaging the island—one that begins with the needs of the masses, not what bankrupt Sri Lankan and international capitalism can afford.

For weeks, the 53 candidates it has fielded for three local councils—Karainagar in the northern Jaffna district, Maskeliya in the central plantation district and Kolonnawa near Colombo—have been fighting to rally support for an international socialist program in opposition to the US-NATO instigated war on Russia and IMF austerity.

“Wickremesinghe’s action,” said Jayasekera, “is a part of his government’s broader attacks on the democratic rights of the masses. It is being carried out in preparation for suppressing growing struggles against the government’s harsh IMF-dictated austerity measures.”

The SEP general secretary explained the government’s fears that a crushing defeat in the local elections—a recent opinion poll showed it was supported by just 10 percent of the population—would intensify in-fighting within the political establishment. But its far bigger concern is that such a defeat will serve to further expose its illegitimate character and incite popular opposition.

A notorious representative of big business and pro-US stooge, Wickremesinghe was the sole representative of his party in parliament, when he was propelled into the presidency last July, through a ruling class conspiracy, led by the Rajapakse’s party, the SLPP, but in which the trade union-backed opposition parties were complicit.

Jayasekera reviewed the lessons of last year’s tumultuous events from the standpoint of preparing the working class and oppressed masses for the next stage of the struggle. The mass upsurge had demonstrated the immense social power of the working class and the potential for it to overcome the communal divisions incited by the bourgeoisie. But it also underscored the urgency of the working class forging itself into an independent political force, rallying the rural masses behind it.

Despite the militancy of the masses and the breadth of the mass movement, the ruling class was able to use Rajapakse’s departure, and the opposition supported calls for an interim government to reorganize the government and retake the initiative.

“We said,” continued Jaysekera, “there is no solution to the burning social and democratic problems within the capitalist framework.” Subsequently, “we initiated a campaign for a Democratic and Socialist Congress of Workers and Rural Masses, based on the delegates democratically elected by these action committees as an organ of independent workers’ powers and revolutionary political alternative” to the capitalist interim government that was set up by the discredited parliamentary cronies of Rajapakse.

Yesterday’s press conference was attended by journalists from six major media outlets, including Sirasa TV, MTV, TNL, ABC Capital and Virakerasari, the main Tamil-language newspaper.

When one of the journalists asked whether the SEP would collaborate with the various opposition parties in contesting the government’s cancellation of the elections, Jayasekera explained that those parties, such as the official opposition SJB and JVP, have themselves a long history of conniving in attacks on democratic rights, including through the promotion of rabid anti-Tamil chauvinism. Moreover, they support the anti-democratic IMF austerity measures being implemented by the government.

Hostile to the social and democratic needs and aspirations of Sri Lanka’s workers and toilers, the opposition parties have responded to Wickremisinghe’s cancellation of the election by appealing to the Western imperialist powers.

All of these countries, beginning with the US, UK, Germany and France, have a long and bloody history of imperialist banditry and intrigue, including sustaining savage anti-working class dictatorships from Pinochet and the Shah of Iran 50 years ago to Egypt’s al-Sisi today. And they backed the Sri Lankan state in its bloody three decades-long civil war against the Tamil minority.  

Led by Washington, they have instigated and are now dramatically escalating war with Russia, bringing the world ever closer to a nuclear conflagration, in a desperate attempt to offset their crisis through plunder and conquest.

Moreover, Washington and its ally, India, have been ruthlessly exploiting Sri Lanka’s economic crisis to harness the island still more completely to the US military-strategic offensive against China. Only last week a delegation of 20 Pentagon officials visited Sri Lanka for secret talks with the government.

And of course, all the Western powers stand full-square behind the IMF’s austerity program.

The SJB has complained to the UN office in Colombo over the “unconstitutional attempts” by the government to postpone the local government elections.

Speaking in the parliament Wednesday, the JVP propaganda secretary Vijith Herath tried to hold up the vultures of the IMF as guardians of democracy, declaring, “The IMF has clearly stated that the government of Sri Lanka should have a popular mandate to receive assistance.” Herath said his party will hold demonstrations, take legal actions and “brief diplomats of the European Union, the United Nations and human rights organisations.”

The Freedom People’s Congress, a grouping that broke away from the former President Rajapakse’s party last year, has sent a letter to foreign missions “expressing their deep concern over the present situation surrounding the franchise of the people.”

Israel’s murderous assault on Nablus a deliberate provocation, but armed struggle offers no way forward

Jean Shaoul

The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) carried out a mass raid on the northern West Bank city of Nablus on Wednesday morning, killing 11 people and wounding 103 in a barbaric show of brutality and militarism. Those killed included two older men aged 72 and 66.

Mourners chant slogans and carry the body of Montaser Shawwa, 16, through an alley, during his funeral in the West Bank refugee camp of Balata, Nablus, Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2023. Shawwa succumbed to his wounds that were sustained during an Israeli army operation in the occupied West Bank on February 8. [AP Photo/Nasser Nasser]

It was by far the deadliest raid in decades, with soldiers preventing paramedics from evacuating the injured from the scene and firing on ambulances. Video clips showed a military jeep driving into a crowd of Palestinians who were confronting the raid, while another shows an elderly man lying motionless on the ground after he was apparently shot and left to bleed. Others showed three apparently unarmed people running along a sidewalk, one of whom fell to the ground after they came under fire.

These extra-judicial killings in broad daylight by the Middle East’s strongest war machine in a busy downtown area are nothing short of a war crime by the newly installed coalition government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Israel, with its customary hypocrisy and cynicism, justified its murderous assault with claims that it was “seeking to arrest” three armed terrorists who had killed an Israeli soldier in October and were “involved in the planning of shooting attacks” in the future, without providing any evidence to back up the allegations. An army spokesperson said that the soldiers were met with heavy gunfire when they attempted to detain the three wanted men but did not explain why a further eight were killed.

The raid was a deliberate provocation calculated to precipitate revenge attacks in Israel and rocket fire from the besieged Gaza Strip, which is controlled by Hamas, the bourgeois clerical group affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood. Such attacks will in turn be used by the authorities to declare a “security crisis” and derail the growing protest movement against the government’s efforts to assume dictatorial powers and neuter the judiciary—in pursuit of their broader plans to annex the Palestinian territories that Israel has occupied illegally since the 1967 Arab Israeli war.

While the leaders of Israel’s protest movement largely share the Netanyahu government’s agenda and are hostile to any appeal to Israel’s Palestinian citizens, they fear his fascist-backed power grab is endangering the stability of capitalist rule and the Israeli state. Very conscious that the growing movement is also animated by broader social discontent and opposition to Israel’s brutal suppression of the Palestinians and system of apartheid rule, they have sought to restrict the protests to protecting the Supreme Court, which has nodded through Israel’s Jewish Nation-State Law and authorized settlements, land seizures and evictions in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah. They are determined that those participating in the rallies should not reach out to the Palestinians and unify their struggles.

After the killings in Nablus, the IDF carried out airstrikes on two military sites operated by Hamas. This followed the firing of six rockets from the Gaza strip, that for the last 15 years has served as an open-air prison for its two million inhabitants, five of which were intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome air defence system.

Wednesday’s deadly raid was the third major operation in the West Bank in which several Palestinians have been killed since the new government took office at the end of last year. A raid on Jenin refugee camp in late January killed 10 Palestinian militants and civilians, while a similar operation in Jericho earlier this month killed five Palestinian fighters.

The latest massacre brings to 61 the number of Palestinians that have died at the hands of Israeli police, soldiers and settlers so far this year, as well as 10 Israelis and one Ukrainian national in the escalating violence. It follows last year’s record that saw at least 170 Palestinians killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, including 30 children, the highest death toll in the occupied Palestinian territories in a single year since 2005.

The Nablus atrocity is part of Operation Breakwater, launched last March in response to a series of Palestinian attacks on Israelis, that has seen almost daily raids and arrest operations in the West Bank, focusing on the cities of Jenin, Nablus, Hebron and Jericho. These operations are fueling ever more resistance in the West Bank under the banner of new groups such as the Lions’ Den, the Nablus Brigade and the Tubas Brigades, as hostility towards the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority (PA) headed by President Mahmoud Abbas for its craven subservience to Israel escalates.

Indeed, in a tacit admission that the assault would lead to further violence, especially in the run up to Ramadan that begins next month, a police spokesperson said it would deploy extra personnel across Jerusalem and the West Bank in anticipation of further attacks, with the Jerusalem Post writing that Israel was preparing “for possible ripple effects from the operation such as revenge terrorist attacks in the West Bank, Jerusalem and the interior or rocket fire from the Gaza Strip.”

These events come just days after the cabinet approved the legalization of nine illegal outposts in the West Bank and the construction of 7,000 homes in existing settlements, prompting the United Arab Emirates, at the request of the Palestinian Authority, to table a resolution condemning the decision. The UAE, which has normalized its relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords, subsequently watered down the resolution at Washington’s insistence so that it could pass without the customary US veto.

Part of the backroom wheeling and dealing at the UN was that the PA would receive a financial aid package while Israel would not approve any more illegal settlements or settlement construction and would “reduce” its armed incursions into areas of the West Bank under the PA’s nominal control. All this was for public consumption. Just three days later, Netanyahu rode roughshod over the deal and authorized the raid.

This latest atrocity met with the customary tut-tutting by the United Nations, the US, the European powers and their Middle East allies. It underscores the fact that they have given Israel’s fascistic government carte blanche to terrorise and suppress the Palestinians with ever greater force in pursuit of its agenda of annexing the Palestinian territories and implementing apartheid rule—as embodied in the Nation-State Law that enshrines Jewish supremacy as the legal foundation of the state. The Arab regimes that long proclaimed their support for a Palestinian state as a means of legitimizing their dictatorial rule over their own citizens stand exposed as outright accomplices of the Zionist state.

It also demonstrates the utterly opportunist use of the charges “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity.” The Biden administration excoriates Russia for such crimes in Ukraine while glossing over what its attack dog does on a daily basis as the quid pro quo for services rendered in pursuit of Washington’s predatory interests in the Middle East. What is defined as a war crime or crime against humanity and who is sent to the Hague tribunal—whose authority the US and Israel do not recognize for their own officials—depends entirely on the geo-political and economic interests of the various imperialist powers.

There is no solution to the Palestinian workers’ desperate economic and social situation within the capitalist system, nor is there any national solution. No amount of pressure will change the policies of the Palestinian leadership, the Israeli government and their imperialist backers. That has been bitterly demonstrated over decades.

The only real ally of the Palestinian masses is the international working class. The wave of international protests and strikes in Europe and North America as well as the Middle East is part of a growing militancy among workers, who harbour a growing outrage and revulsion at Israel’s war crimes, imperialist militarism and the deepest economic crisis of the world capitalist system since the Great Depression.

Russia suspends participation in New START nuclear arms control treaty as US prepares expansion of Ukraine war

Clara Weiss

In an address to the Federal Assembly on February 21, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia would suspend its participation in the 2011 New START nuclear arms controls treaty. The treaty, which provided for a 50 percent reduction of the number of strategic nuclear missile launchers and a bilateral inspections regime, was the last remaining arms control treaty that was active between Russia and the US, the world’s two largest nuclear powers. 

Defending his decision, Putin pointed out that NATO had de facto posed an ultimatum to Moscow earlier in February, demanding that Russia allow the US to resume nuclear arms inspections as part of the Treaty. Putin said, “We know that the West is directly implicated in attempts by the Kiev regime to strike our strategic aviation bases. The drones that are used for these attacks were equipped and upgraded with the help of NATO experts. And now they want to also inspect our defense objects? Under the current conditions of today’s conflict, this simply sounds like nonsense.” 

Putin also stated that the Russian Ministry of Defense and Rosatom “should ensure their readiness for the testing of Russia’s nuclear weapons. We will of course not be the first ones to do so, but if the US will conduct tests, then we will conduct them too. No one should have the dangerous illusion that the global strategic parity [in nuclear arsenal] can be destroyed.” 

Putin’s speech, while scheduled weeks in advance, came just hours after President Joe Biden completed a highly provocative tour of Kiev, where he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and pledged that the US, which has spent tens of billions of dollars on the Ukrainian army over the past year alone, was committed to the war “as long as it takes.”

Coming just a few days before the first-year anniversary of the beginning of the war, Biden’s visit left no doubt about the character of this war: it is a war waged by NATO against Russia, in which the NATO-directed and armed Ukrainian armed forces are but a proxy. With widespread concerns about the crisis-ridden state of the Ukrainian army, one year into the war, Washington signaled with Biden’s visit that it is prepared to fund and continue the war against Russia, come what may. 

Given the extraordinarily provocative character of Biden’s visit, Putin’s speech underscored, above all, the utterly bankrupt basis upon which the Russian oligarchy has conducted this war. Putin spent much of the speech lamenting the fact that NATO and the US, which he again called “our partners”, had continued to expand to Russia’s borders and prepared for war despite the constant efforts by the Russian oligarchs to find a compromise and basis for collaboration. 

Having emerged out of the Soviet bureaucracy’s nationalist betrayal of the October revolution, which culminated in the 1991 destruction of the Soviet Union, the Putin regime invaded Ukraine last year, basing itself on the bankrupt conception that the war would force the imperialist powers to negotiate with the Russian oligarchs. But instead, the invasion was seen as a gift by the imperialist powers, which have long sought to provoke this war, and have since used every opportunity to escalate and expand it, determined to bring about the complete defeat of Russia and thus facilitate a regime change operation in Moscow and the break-up of the country.

The Kremlin, which was not prepared for a protracted war, has since scrambled to hold on even to the territories occupied in the first weeks of the war. With a new offensive now underway, involving tens of thousands of newly mobilized soldiers, territorial gains by Russia have remained minimal. Meanwhile, casualties on both sides are horrifyingly high, with estimates putting the number of dead and wounded among both the Russian and Ukrainian army in the hundreds of thousands. 

In an indication that the years-long economic war by the imperialist powers against Russia, which was dramatically escalated over the past year, is taking a severe toll on the population, for about half of his speech Putin engaged in social and nationalist demagogy. As a result of the sanctions war, entire branches of industry that were closely integrated into the world economy, most notably auto, have been left in shambles, and Russia has been cut off almost entirely from the semiconductor industry, which is critical to the functioning of any modern economy (and army). Yet Putin painted a picture of an economy that had successfully weathered a supposedly only minor crisis and was now preparing to come back stronger than ever. He also tried, yet again, to present himself as an enemy of the oligarchs, despite the fact that his entire regime is dedicated to the defense of this criminal ruling class. 

However, Putin’s main strategy, to diffuse and disorient popular discontent, consists in the promotion of the worst traditions of Great Russian chauvinism. As in previous speeches, he quoted the Tsarist official Pyotr Stolypin, who said, “In the defense of Russia, we must all join together, coordinate our efforts, our duties, and our rights to uphold one supreme historical right — the right of Russia to be strong.” 

Whatever the reactionary combination of complaints about and appeals to the imperialist powers, and efforts to whip up nationalism on the part of the oligarchic Putin regime, NATO and the US continue to work to rapidly escalate and expand the war.

In a 20-minute speech also on Tuesday in Poland’s capital Warsaw, Biden largely repeated the same war propaganda that has been coming out of the White House and its affiliated news media for the past year: he denounced “Putin’s war,” praised the “patriots” and “heroes” that are “defending Ukraine” — a substantial layer of which are outright neo-Nazis — and insisted that “democracies” would stand united in the fight against “autocracy”. 

The nauseating hypocrisy of Biden’s speech was underscored by the very setting in which it was given: Biden spoke at the invitation of Poland’s ruling far-right Law and Justice party (PiS), which has played a central role in the NATO offensive against Russia, and is infested with fascist and anti-Semitic elements. In its almost eight years of rule, PiS has banned free speech on and research about the role of Polish anti-Semitism in the Nazi-led Holocaust, effectively abolished the right to abortion and an independent judiciary, and has clamped down on the rights of LGBTQ+ people. 

Perhaps the most significant aspect of Biden’s speech was his open appeal to the Polish nationalist and anti-Communist right, the pro-NATO opposition in Belarus, and the pro-NATO government in Moldova. Biden praised the “brave leaders of the opposition and the people of Belarus”, meaning the NATO-backed opposition around Svetlana Tikhonovskaya. As in Russia and other former Soviet countries, the US has been working to bring about a regime change in Belarus. Ruled by the authoritarian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus is now the only remaining ally of Russia in Eastern Europe and on the verge of being fully dragged into the war in Ukraine.

Biden also stressed the role of Moldova, a tiny country of 3.6 million, sandwiched between NATO-member Romania and Ukraine. A portion of Moldova that borders Ukraine, Transnistria, is ruled by Russian-backed separatists and hosts 1,500 Russian troops. The country has long claimed a constitutionally enshrined neutral status. However, under its current President Maia Sandu, Moldova has sided with NATO in the war against Russia. The Sandu government is now openly discussing membership in NATO, despite warnings by the Kremlin that Russia would respond militarily to such an alignment. Sandu was present during Biden’s speech in Warsaw and the US President praised her, “I’m proud to stand with you and the freedom-loving people of Moldova. Give her a round of applause.”

Behind the smokescreen of rhetoric about “democracy” and “liberty”, the imperialist powers, basing themselves largely on fascist and ultra-nationalist forces, are preparing an escalation and geographic expansion of the war in Ukraine, which threatens to soon engulf all of Eastern Europe and could result in a nuclear catastrophe.

Sturgeon resigns, Scottish National Party in crisis

Steve James

At the age of 52, Nicola Sturgeon has chosen to walk away from her roles as first minister of Scotland and leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP). Her resignation has multiple immediate causes, but all point to a crisis engulfing not only the SNP but the entire political project of Scottish separatism.

Depending on Sturgeon’s successor, the SNP’s coalition with the Greens may collapse, triggering an unpredictable Scottish general election.

Speaking in Bute House, her official residence in Edinburgh since 2014 when she replaced Alex Salmond as first minister, Sturgeon indicated divisions in the SNP over her proposal for the next UK general election. “My preference of using the next Westminster election as a de facto referendum is well known. I’ve never pretended it is perfect.”

Nicola Sturgeon [Photo by The Government of Scotland / Flickr / CC BY-NC 2.0]

Last December, the UK Supreme Court ruled that the Scottish government did not have the authority to legislate for a second referendum, should the UK government not agree with it. Since then the SNP has been searching for a mechanism to continue its push to overturn the result of the 2014 referendum when Scotland voted by 55 to 45 percent to remain in the UK.

Sturgeon’s preference was for a general election in which every vote for the SNP, and any other pro-independence party, would be construed as a vote to break from the UK. The proposal was a concession to hardline nationalists within the SNP and outside it, in the form of Salmond’s Alba Party and various pseudo-left hangers on of both parties. A special SNP conference, now cancelled, was to have taken place next month to discuss it.

Her proposal suited neither those wishing to avoid an immediate focus on independence, or the hardline nationalists. A poll carried out by Lord Ashcroft Polling estimated that, of SNP voters, only 44 percent supported the scheme. Among voters in general, support collapsed to 21 percent. Many commentators noted that even in 2015, the SNP’s most successful Scottish election campaign, the party only won 49 percent of the vote. Nationalist writer Iain McWhirter wrote in the Spectator, “MPs in Westminster began to shift uneasily in their seats since they are in the front line of this kamikaze assault on the UK constitution.”

Leader of the SNP in Westminster, Stephen Flynn, was known to oppose the plan. Sturgeon loyalist and NATO warmonger, Stewart McDonald, authored a report complaining that the proposal was impatient.

Rather than fighting this out, Sturgeon threw in the towel, declaring, “By making my decision clear now I free the SNP to choose the path that it believes to be the right one, without worrying about the perceived implications for my leadership and in the knowledge that a new leader will steer us, I believe, successfully on that path.”

Sturgeon’s decision has echoes of the recent resignation of Jacinda Adern in New Zealand, as both saw political storms ahead and decided it was better to leave politics and go and make some serious money.

Gender recognition row

In all such political crises, there are immediate contributory factors. Sturgeon’s position was already unsafe. In recent weeks she had attempted to shore up support in layers of the party’s middle-class constituency with a Gender Recognition Reform Bill intended to reduce the time, bureaucratic hurdles and medical examinations required to formally change one’s legal gender—similar to measures introduced in nine European countries.

The bill included a reduction in the age at which someone could legally change their gender and was intended also as a (cost free) means of broadening the SNP’s support among young people, a key constituency in their drive for independence. It was extensively debated in the Scottish parliament and passed with a large majority.

The British Conservative government used Section 35 of the Scotland Act 1998 to prevent the Scottish bill from becoming law. It was opposed by 15 members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs), mainly on religious grounds, and feminists within and outside the SNP, who believe the legislation undermines single-sex safe spaces. But more damaging for Sturgeon was the opposition to the proposals of two thirds of the electorate in opinion polls, with only 20 percent in favour.

Things were made worse for Sturgeon by a scandal surrounding two transgender women who had been convicted of sex offences while living as men, one of rape, being approved to serve their terms in women’s prisons.

In addition, there is an ongoing police investigation into the SNP’s finances, and a trove of emails hacked from Stewart McDonald's email account.

The history of the SNP

But the SNP’s crisis is rooted above all in the acute social tensions between workers in Scotland, the UK and internationally, and the financial oligarchy. This has fatally undermined the party’s ability to pose as a progressive alternative to the Tories and the Labour Party.

From its formation in 1934, the SNP articulated the interests of sections of the Scottish landed aristocracy, bourgeoisie and upper middle class. It remained on the political margins until the 1960s, when the collapse of much of Britain’s industrial base and the discovery of oil in the North Sea gave them an angle with which to exploit broader social grievances.

In 1974, in conditions of a mass movement in the working class across Britain against the then Tory government, the party expressed its visceral hostility to working people with the selfish nationalist slogan “It’s Scotland’s Oil,” seeking a means of enriching themselves while presenting oil wealth as the means to overcome endemic poverty in Scotland.

The Labour Party accurately defined the SNP as “Tartan Tories” but adopted some of their prescriptions as a means of sowing regional divisions in the working class. In 1979, at a time of mass struggle against the Labour government’s austerity policies known as the “Winter of Discontent”, Labour held a Home Rule referendum for the establishment of a Scottish assembly. The result, 52 percent to 48 percent for the assembly, failed to reach a 40 percent participation threshold to be implemented. In response, the SNP, now with a handful of MPs, brought down the Labour government and opened the door to Margaret Thatcher’s Tories.

Throughout the huge class battles of the 80s, and the destruction of manufacturing industry in the 80s and 90s across Britain, both the Labour Party in Scotland and the SNP competed to present the social disasters imposed on the working class in explicitly nationalist and pro-capitalist terms. For Labour the solution was regional devolution, through which Scottish industrial and financial interests could attract globally mobile investment. For the SNP, the key to attracting investment was independence, within the European Union trade block, to counter reliance on the UK economy, and low taxes to attract global investors.

The SNP benefitted for years from the lurch to the right by the UK’s major parties. It successfully exploited hostility to the Tories during their 18 years in office, focusing on the fact that workers in Scotland voted Labour but still got Tory governments. Then, when Labour finally won office in 1997, they were easily able to portray themselves as to the left of Tony Blair’s “New Labour” government, with its wholesale adoption of Thatcherite economic nostrums.

Blair’s Labour government sought to pull the SNP’s wings off and encourage regional competition for foreign direct investment by legislating in 1998 for a new referendum for a Scottish parliament. The result was an overwhelming “Yes” vote secured by a campaign led jointly by Labour’s Donald Dewar and SNP leader Alex Salmond. A devolved government was created led by the Scottish Labour Party but in alliance with the Scottish Liberal Democrats.

Salmond capitalised on the Labour Party’s continued shift to the right, open warmongering and the popular hatred it was inspiring through its role in slashing local government services and pushing forward privatisations. In 2007, he was elected First Minister and the SNP has been in power ever since.

Sturgeon succeeded her mentor Salmond in 2014 after the former resigned following defeat in the 2014 independence referendum. For years the party was able to combine complaints that Scotland was being prevented from pursing a progressive economic and social agenda by its subordination to England, while utilising higher per capita public spending agreed to as part of the devolution package to dress itself up in a left disguise.

The SNP’s record in government

This fiction was always destined to collapse. The 2008 financial crisis saw Salmond frantically call for the British government to bail out Scottish-based bank RBS while the SNP ruthlessly imposed austerity measures, passing on to workers all the costs of propping up the financial oligarchy and supporting the transformation of every area of social spending into a revenue stream for the wealthy.

The SNP’s actual role in government belied its pose as a friend of the working class. Running most of Scotland’s local authorities, the party has intensified the assault on social spending. Currently, the SNP’s flagship authority, Glasgow, is reported to be considering scrapping as many as 800 teachers’ jobs, in response to a £60 million funding deficit. Other proposals including closing care homes and day centres, cutting homeless provisions and cutting or entirely ending support to as many as 237 charities running small-scale community projects.

In contrast, Sturgeon and the SNP have stepped up their drive to attract global investment. The party has signed up to Sunak’s freeport, cheap labour and tax-break, schemes, with two locations identified. It is selling off vast swathes of land and seabed at rock-bottom prices for exploitation by privately owned wind power generators.

The pandemic also did much to undermine the SNP’s pseudo-progressive posturing. While Sturgeon’s down-to-earth daily press briefings made for a sharp contrast with the blatant mendacity of Boris Johnson, her underlying policies were identical, following the Tories’ lifting of public health measures within a matter of weeks. Scotland has suffered 16,780 COVID-19 deaths of the UK total of 218,405 which, given the differences in population, is a close to identical death rate.

During the 1970s and 80s, the SNP postured as an opponent of militarism, particularly opposing nuclear weapons and nuclear dumping in rural Scottish locations. All this has been dropped. The party is now an open advocate of NATO militarism, supports the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine and seeks a role in NATO military doctrine for an independent Scotland’s armed forces. It has not yet formally dropped opposition to Trident nuclear weapons being based on the Clyde, but that is purely a matter of time. Such manufacturing as is left in Scotland is massively dominated by the arms industry.

These realities meant that the SNP, while still by far Scotland’s largest party, was only able to form a majority government in 2021 in a coalition with the Scottish Greens.

For the socialist unity of the working class

Acute social tensions produced by the cost-of-living crisis and exacerbated by the pandemic and the war in Ukraine mean that the Scottish government, like its UK and Welsh peers, has confronted a powerful movement in the working class. It too has depended on the trade unions to impose below-inflation pay agreements on local authority refuse workers, education workers, NHS staff, rail workers and many more.

Health provision in Scotland, as across the UK, is in deadly danger. The RCN nurses’ union has suspended strike action on both sides of the border, leaving the NHS in Scotland in a parlous state, short of 2,000 GPs and 6,400 nurses and midwives and with 14 percent of consultant positions vacant.

Every major social issue facing working people in Scotland is identical to those facing workers in England, Wales and throughout the world—rooted in a global crisis and breakdown of world capitalism. With millions of workers fighting back in an objectively unified counteroffensive against all the governments and parties of big business, the fiction that an embrace of “civic nationalism”, shorn of all nasty trappings, offers a path to economic security and democratic accountability is revealed as a fraud, along with the SNP’s claim to represent all Scots, irrespective of class.

The SNP is on a collision course with the working class, no less decisively than the Tories and the Labour Party. This does not translate in some quasi-automatic fashion into a popular repudiation of the anti-working-class perspective of Scottish separatism. But it creates the most favourable basis for advancing a perspective of international working-class unity in a struggle for socialism.

Workers will come to understand that if the crisis they face is global and arises out of the basic contradictions of world capitalism, then the solution too, is necessarily global, unified and socialist.

At what it is now clear was the high-water mark of support for Scottish nationalism, during the 2014 independence referendum, the Socialist Equality Party explained:

“We are for a revolutionary struggle of the working class against all of the representatives of British imperialism and the financial oligarchy. We advocate a workers’ government and a socialist Britain.

“We see this as inseparable from the fight for the United Socialist States of Europe.

“We are equally opposed to all those tendencies that have rallied behind the Scottish National Party (SNP) and the creation of a Scottish capitalist state. All efforts to equate anger towards the ruling elite with support for national separatism are fraudulent.

“A Scottish state will be no less beholden to the banks and major corporations than the UK. Its creation would signal a mad scramble to the bottom, as the governments in Westminster and Holyrood compete to cut the corporation tax and further slash wages and working-class conditions.

Following corruption allegations, the fall of India's Adani group continues

Nick Beams

In the month since the publication of explosive accusations about its financial operations, the India-based Adani group of companies has been undergoing a not-so-slow train wreck.

Congress party members demand investigation into allegations of fraud and stock manipulation by India's Adani Group in New Delhi, India, Monday, Feb.6, 2023. [AP Photo/Manish Swarup]

The combined market value of the group’s shares fell to below $100 billion earlier this week, bringing to $135 billion the loss of market capitalisation since the US-based Hindenburg Research published a report on January 24 alleging widespread accounting fraud and stock manipulation.

The group’s founder, Gautum Adani, at one stage ranked the third richest man in the world, has close connections with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Adani has denied the allegations and wrapped himself in the Indian flag, claiming they were an attempt to take down the country. But his protestations and efforts to provide assurances to the markets that the financial position of his group is sound have not halted the slide.

The Hindenburg allegations, which it said were the result of a two-year investigation, claimed that the Adani Group was “pulling the largest con game in corporate history.” The increase in the group’s share values over the past three years of more than $100 billion was “largely through stock price appreciation in the group’s seven listed companies” which spiked an average 819 percent in that period.

Despite its name, Hindenburg’s investigation was not disinterested academic research. It is well known as a shorting investor. Shorting involves borrowing shares in a firm and selling them in the expectation the price will fall, then buying them back at the lower price, returning them to the lender and profiting from the transaction.

While there are restrictions on such activities in India, Hindenburg seems to have found a way to short Adani stock, according to a report in the Financial Times. The founder of Hindenburg, Nathan Anderson, has not indicated how he organised his bet against the Adani group saying only that he had taken a short position “through US-traded bonds and non-Indian-traded derivative instruments.”

But the withdrawal of money goes well beyond the activities of Hindenburg. Adani suffered a significant blow when the ratings agency Moody’s cut its outlook on four companies in the group from “stable” to “negative” while leaving ratings unchanged.

Moody’s said its decision was the result of “the significant and rapid decline in the market equity values of the Adani Group” following the release of the Hindenburg report.

Like many corporate giants, Adani has sought to advance an ESG (environment, social governance) program to capture funds from so-called ethical investment.

Norway’s largest pension fund, KLP, recently dumped its entire holding of shares in Adani’s Green Energy on the basis that it may have been financing polluting activities. In particular the Carmichael coal mine project in central Queensland, Australia, has been the subject of intense opposition on environmental grounds.

Bloomberg reported that a public filing on February 10 “made clear that Adani is using stock from its Green companies as collateral in a credit facility that’s helping to finance the Carmichael coal mine.”

The money invested in the Adani green companies is not directly involved. But to the extent that it raises their share values it increases the value of the collateral used to finance other, polluting projects and thereby lowers the cost of loans to finance them.

KLP has banned investment in coal. According to its head of responsible investing, Kiran Aziz, any indirect financing of the Carmichael project would be a “breach of our commitments.”

The withdrawal of money could be extended. According to Bloomberg, there are more than 500 funds in the European Union which are registered as “promoting” ESG goals and which hold Adani stocks either directly or indirectly.

According to the Hindenburg report, the notion that the operations of the Adani companies were in some way separate from each other was a fiction. It noted that “Adani Group companies are intricately linked and dependent upon one another” and that none of the entities “are isolated from the performance, failure, of the other group companies.”

Announcing the withdrawal of money by KLP, which manages funds of around $75 billion, Aziz said: “Adani’s corporate structure created an unacceptably high risk that ‘clean’ investment could be siphoned off towards coal mining.”

But this reaction could well be taken with a large grain of salt because the complex and interconnected structure of the Adani group was well known before the Hindenburg report.

The intimate connection between the Adani group and the Modi government means that its possible demise will have significant political consequences. While the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has declared it has “nothing to hide,” Modi has remained silent.

Others, however, are questioning whether Modi will be able to ride out the storm.

Speaking at the recent Munich Security Conference, multi-billionaire George Soros, who made his fortune as a hedge fund manager, said: “Modi and business tycoon Adani are close allies; their fate is intertwined.”

Soros said that Adani had tried to raise funds in the stock market but had failed.

“Adani is accused of stock manipulation and his stock collapsed like a house of cards. Modi is silent on the subject, but he will have to answer questions from foreign investors and in parliament.”

He claimed the Adani demise would weaken Modi’s stranglehold on the federal government, open the way for much needed institutional reforms and even bring about a “democratic revival in India.”

What Soros means by a “democratic revival” is not an end to the domination of the Indian economy by corporate and financial giants. He wants a weakening of the control exercised by Modi over economy and finance which has been used for the benefit of “insiders” such as Adani. This would open the way for other sections of finance capital, for which Soros speaks, to benefit from the plunder of the country’s resources and the exploitation of its labour.

White House violates right to asylum and bans immigration at US-Mexico border

Eric London

On Tuesday, the Biden administration announced a sweeping new immigration policy that bars entry to almost all immigrants at the southern border and denies them the right to apply for asylum.

The new policy is to take effect on May 11, the day of the expiration of Title 42. This previously obscure public health provision of US law was first employed by Trump to ban immigration at the US-Mexico border under the false pretense that immigrants spread COVID-19. This cruel and hypocritical policy of blanket exclusion was then continued by Biden, even as he proclaimed the pandemic had ended.

Biden’s new policy is aimed at filling the gap left by Title 42’s expiration. It means all immigrants who attempt to cross the southern border on foot will be deported without a court hearing or any right to apply for asylum.

The administration’s pseudo-legal justification is that all immigrants who pass through Mexico forfeit their right to asylum in the United States when they fail to do so in Mexico. But the reality is Mexico is wracked by the same violence and poverty that dominate all countries from which refugees flee.

The administration of Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has been harassing, beating and persecuting Central American and Caribbean immigrants on behalf of American imperialism since he took office in 2018, while many thousands seeking refuge in the US have been condemned to languish in tent camps on the border, subject to cold, hunger and the predations of Mexico’s infamous cartels.

Biden came into office promising that he would reverse the anti-immigrant policies of the Trump administration and uphold the right to asylum. The policy now introduced by his administration makes a mockery of that pledge, grossly violating both international and US law, which both guarantee the right to asylum. The United Nations 1951 and 1967 protocols on the rights of refugees, which were ratified in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the Second World War, expressly guarantee the right to asylum and make it illegal to deport “refugees,” the legal term for those who meet the requirements for asylum. Article 33 of the 1951 protocol states, “No contracting state shall expel or return a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of the territories where his life or freedom would be threatened.”

The decision will have a disastrous impact on the lives of masses of workers across Latin America. Countless people will be sent back into the clutches of their persecutors in societies devastated by over a century of US imperialist exploitation. Many will die or be tortured in violation of the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which bars countries from forcing people back to countries where they face a likelihood of suffering extreme persecution.

Thousands more will be separated permanently from parents, children and relatives who are already in the US. Billions of dollars in remittance money will be lost, fueling starvation and poverty already worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change and the US-NATO war against Russia. In the end, the policy will only force immigrants to cross under more dangerous conditions to avoid detection: deeper into the deserts, farther out into the sea, where many more will die.

There are only three precedents in US history which were as sweeping and anti-democratic as this:

The first is the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred all immigration by Chinese laborers for 10 years beginning in 1882.

The second is the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which excluded immigration from the impoverished countries of Southern and Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Hitler wrote approvingly of the act, and, as Yale Law Professor James Whitman explained in his 2017 book Hitler’s American Model, Nazi jurists drew on the Chinese Exclusion and the Johnson-Reed acts in shaping the race laws of the Third Reich.

The third precedent is Donald Trump’s executive order banning travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries in early 2017 which was met with large spontaneous demonstrations at airports across the country.

Despite the historically reactionary character of the asylum ban, the move has been met with almost total silence in the corporate media, which is too single-mindedly focused on endless denunciations of Russia’s crimes, real and imagined, to acknowledge the ban. A day after it was announced, no article about the asylum ban could be found on the online front pages of the New York Times, Washington Post or CNN.

The media silence is an acknowledgment that the asylum ban exposes the lie that US imperialism is a champion of “democracy” and is defending it in the US-NATO war against Russia.

In June 2022, Biden issued a statement marking “World Refugee Day” in which he presented the US as a beacon of hope for asylum seekers and blamed “Russia’s war against Ukraine” for the fact that over 100 million people have been forced to flee their home countries.

Biden’s statement covered up the fact that most of those 100 million are fleeing countries devastated by US imperialism’s wars of the last three decades: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. Unlike Russia, he said, the United States is “protecting and welcoming refugees” and “leads the world in responding to the needs of refugees.”

The hypocrisy and lies of American imperialism know no bounds. Speaking last week, Vice President Kamala Harris cited alleged Russian deportations of Ukrainians as proof the government is carrying out “crimes against humanity.”

“Russian authorities have forcibly deported hundreds of thousands of people from Ukraine to Russia, including children,” Harris said. “They have cruelly separated children from their families.”

While the Russian government has denied these claims, no one can seriously dispute that the United States leads the world in separating immigrant children from their parents.

In 2021, the Biden administration detained 122,000 immigrant children at facilities across the US, according to a report by CBS News. Under Donald Trump, tens of thousands of children were deliberately separated from their families in a fascistic policy concocted in the sick mind of Trump’s Nazi adviser Stephen Miller. Under Title 42, the Trump and Biden administrations have together expelled hundreds of thousands of immigrants on the false and racist pretense that they were likely to spread COVID-19.

The Biden administration’s decision is a major concession to the far-right elements who dominate the heavily militarized state deportation apparatus and who are two years removed from the January 6, 2021 plot to overthrow the Constitution. The Democratic Party, desperate to maintain “bipartisanship” with the increasingly fascistic Republican Party in order to prosecute the war against Russia, is driving the political system ever further to the right.

The attack on immigrants is an international phenomenon. As the European imperialist powers escalate the conflict with Russia, right-wing nationalist elements are being emboldened to attack immigrants and refugees, while nation after nation close their doors to immigrants.

After British Home Secretary Suella Braverman depicted the attempts of refugees to secure asylum in the UK as an “invasion,” a far-right mob assaulted immigrants at a hotel housing refugees last week in Knowsley, outside Liverpool. Refugee organizations published a letter earlier this month warning of a rise in “premeditated extremist attacks” against immigrants across the UK.

According to the German Federal Ministry of the Interior, violent attacks on immigrants increased dramatically in 2022, with 65 separate incidents in the first ninth months of the year. In June 2022, the Spanish government of Pedro Sanchez massacred dozens of immigrants at the Melilla border crossing in North Africa.

Alexander von Humboldt Foundation International Climate Protection Fellowships 2023

Application Timeline: 1st March 2023

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: Citizenship of a non-European threshold or developing country (see list of countries in the Program Webpage Link below) which is also the fellow’s habitual abode and place of work;

To be taken at (country): Germany

Subject Areas: Climate Protection

About the Award: The International Climate Protection Fellowships enable prospective leaders to conduct a research-related project of their own choice during a one-year stay in Germany. Submit an application if you are a prospective leader from a non-European threshold or developing country working in the field of climate protection and resource conservation in academia, business or administration in your country.

Type: Fellowship

Selection Criteria:

• First academic degree (Bachelor’s or equivalent), completed less than 12 years prior to the start of the fellowship
• Extensive professional experience in a leadership role (at least 48 months at the time of application) in the field of climate protection and resource conservation or a further academic or professional qualification;
• Initial practical experience (at least 12 months at the time of application) through involvement in projects related to climate protection and resource conservation (possibly already during studies);
• Leadership potential demonstrated by initial experience in leadership positions and/or appropriate references;
• A detailed statement by a host in Germany, including a confirmation of support; details of the proposed project must be discussed with the prospective host prior to application;
• Very good knowledge of English and/or German, documented by appropriate language certificates;
• Two to three expert references by individuals qualified to comment on the candidate’s professional, personal and, if applicable, academic eligibility and his / her leadership potential.

Benefits of Alexander von Humboldt Foundation International Climate Protection Fellowships

• Fellowship amount according to qualifications between €2,150 and €2,650 per month
• Two-month intensive language course in Germany
• Lump sum for travel expenses
• Allowances for visits by family members lasting at least three months
• Allowance of €800 per month for the host in Germany for projects in the natural and engineering sciences, and €500 per month for projects in the humanities and social sciences

Number of Awards: 20

Duration: One year

How to Apply for Alexander von Humboldt Foundation International Climate Protection Fellowships: Apply online until 1 March 2023

Visit the Scholarship Webpage for Details

Sponsors: Alexander von Humboldt Foundation

Important Notes: Potential applicants who have spent more than six months in Germany or more than 12 months in a country that is not on the list of countries at the time of or shortly before application should contact the Humboldt Foundation (info@avh.de) before submitting an application as they may be ineligible on formal grounds.