UK’s Birmingham council, largest local authority in Europe, declares effective bankruptcy

Paul Bond

Labour Party-run Birmingham City Council’s effective declaration of bankruptcy last week marks a dramatic escalation in the social crisis confronting millions.

According to reports, “at least 26” more councils could be in the same position, some “within months.” Bradford, Devon, Guildford, Hastings, Kent and Southampton, with millions of people in these areas, have been identified as at risk.

Birmingham City Council House [Photo: G-Man]

Birmingham council is Europe’s largest local authority, serving 1.14 million people. It issued a section 114 (s.114) notice on September 5, saying it cannot meet its current liabilities without extraordinary financial support and cannot commit to new spending. The council has a projected deficit for 2023/24 of £87 million and faces a £760 million bill for equal pay claims that is rising by £14 million each month.

The statement warned, “The Council will tighten the spend controls already in place and put them in the hands of the Section 151 Officer to ensure there is complete grip. The notice means all new spending, with the exception of protecting vulnerable people and statutory services, must stop immediately.”

As a first step, the council has asked all 10,000 staff if they want to take redundancy. This is after the council has already slashed the workforce in half, from 20,000, since 2010.

The first full council meeting since the announcement was held September 12, at which council leader John Cotton said “an improvement board with specialist experts” was being brought in, in consultation with Conservative government Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove. The government previously utilised the same anti-democratic measures to sent unelected commissioners to oversee council operations in Labour-controlled Liverpool City Council in 2021. Birmingham council is to agree its “budget recovery plan” on September 25, with Cotton warning of “tough and robust decisions,” i.e., cuts to jobs and further brutal cuts to services.

Attention has focused on mismanagement of the equal pay situation, but this was only a contributing factor to the crisis, not its sole cause. Similarly, the three-year-delayed implementation of a cloud-based IT system and its subsequent problems which pushed the cost up from £19 million to around £100 million.

Councils cannot officially declare bankruptcy because they are legally obliged to provide certain statutory services. However, services deemed “non-essential” are likely to be axed. Birmingham ended all existing non-essential spending in July with immediate effect and has yet to announce what services will now be considered non-essential, but they may include libraries.

While council tax rises are usually capped at five percent, authorities have been given government permission to introduce sharper rises in extreme conditions. Slough Borough Council—led by the Conservatives with support from the Liberal Democrats—which issued a s.114 notice in 2021, was this year allowed to raise council tax by 10 percent. Conservative-run Thurrock council in Essex issued a s.114 notice last December. Having raised council tax 10 percent last year, Thurrock is warning of a similar rise this year as well.

The first s.114 notice was issued in 2000, but their use has steadily increased in the last five years, reflecting a worsening crisis in government funding and the enthusiastic drive towards privatisation and commercial speculation. Croydon council, with no party in overall control, has issued three notices. Birmingham’s s.114 is its second one this year. In June, Liberal Democrat-run Woking council issued a notice over “an extremely serious financial shortfall,” warning of the need to find £12 million worth of cuts.

The bankruptcy of Northamptonshire County Council in 2018 resulted in outsourcing and privatisation for the benefit of big business, with the aim of providing the bare minimum service and deferring vital support to charities and volunteers.

That the crisis is collapsing a council the size of Birmingham has forced an acknowledgement of just how much has been slashed from local authority budgets in recent years. Council leader Cotton pointed to the effect of rising inflation levels and the cost-of-living crisis on demand for services, under conditions where the council has lost around £1 billion in funding in the last decade (a cut of over £900 for each resident), a situation replicated across the country.

This was part of a savage austerity onslaught nationally in which over half a trillion pounds (£540 billion) was stripped from public spending by successive Conservative governments, with local councils of all political stripes enforcing austerity at local level, leading to the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, cuts to pay and worse terms and conditions.

According to a 2017 study in the European Journal of Public Health, just between the years 2010-12, “there were over 500,000 public sector job losses”. The human cost of this was harrowing, with 330,000 excess deaths in Britain between 2012 and 2019 attributed to spending cuts to public services and welfare benefits.

To divert from this systemic crisis, attention is being focused on one specific financial demand. In 2008, Tony Blair’s Labour government introduced “single status” pay deals, supposedly to create a common and equal pay scale and harmonise conditions for all jobs. No funding was provided for this, so councils used it as a mechanism to equalise wages downwards, resulting in a wave of strikes.

In Birmingham, 5,000 mainly female council workers won a case for equal pay in 2010. The council’s appeal of the decision was rejected in 2012. Since then, the council has paid out £1.1 billion in their ongoing settlement of equal pay claims.

This provided the trigger for the s.114 notice, as external auditors expressed concern that insufficient money had been put aside for these claims in accounts for 2020/21 and 2021/22, meaning that the accounts for these years could not be legally closed.

Councils of all political colourations responded to austerity cuts by hastening their rush into commercial deals, including property speculation. Thurrock’s s.114 notice followed borrowing to invest in solar energy. Woking admitted a “historic investment strategy” of “unaffordable borrowing.”

Labour councils were among the most enthusiastic and reckless in establishing ties with big business. Croydon’s crisis was triggered by the failure of its in-house property development project Brick by Brick.

All the parties have a shared economic agenda of taking from workers and public services to pay for the capitalist crisis. Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves made clear in an interview with the right-wing Sunday Telegraph this month that Labour is committed to more of the same.

Reeves dismissed any notion Labour in government might have “spending plans that require us to raise £12 billion,” necessitating tax rises on the wealthiest. Instead, in a pledge to continue austerity measures, she urged shadow ministers “to come up with reforms and identify schemes that could be scrapped so that the money can be spent elsewhere,” as “the money is simply not going to be there.”

Of the seven authorities that have issued s.114 notices, four are Labour-run (Birmingham, Croydon, Slough, Hackney) and two are Tory-led (Thurrock, Northamptonshire). Woking, under the Liberal Democrats, issued its notice in response to a staggering £1.2 billion deficit left by the previous Conservative administration. Catastrophic property speculation was involved here, too, with £750 million borrowed for the Victoria Square development, a project revealed to be worth just £200 million in reality.

While bringing councils to the point of bankruptcy, and slashing vital social services, a handful of council leaders and CEOs have reaped huge financial rewards. At Kent council, facing an £86 million deficit, former council chief David Cockburn earned £263,371 in pay and perks up to his resignation in July. His successor will be on a basic salary of £236,000. Birmingham CEO Deborah Cadman earned £244,820 in 2022/23, up from £186,003 the previous year.

Andy Street, Tory mayor of the West Midlands Combined Authority—which covers Birmingham—was able to point out that Labour’s next mayoral candidate Richard Parker, had “stood by and watched council budgets get cut time and time again.”

Child poverty in the US doubled in 2022 with ending of expanded benefits

Alex Findijs

Child poverty in the United States more than doubled during 2022, according to new data from the Census Bureau. Child poverty increased from 5.1 percent of children in 2021 to 12.4 percent in 2022, or about 9 million children. At the same time, overall poverty increased by 4.6 percent to 12.4 percent, the first increase in the overall Supplemental Poverty Measure since 2010. 

Preschoolers eat lunch at a day care center, Monday, Oct. 25, 2021, in Mountlake Terrace, Wash. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)

This sudden jump in child poverty was caused by the expiration of expanded benefits through the Child Tax Credit (CTC), which gave families up to $3,600 per child in monthly installments, as well as the elimination of expanded unemployment insurance and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) payments. All together, these programs, launched in response to the stay-at-home orders that were issued at the onset of the COVID pandemic, helped bring down child poverty from a rate of 12.6 percent in 2019. 

The doubling of poverty is the direct result of a deal cut between President Joe Biden and congressional Republicans last year on a federal budget which protected massive military spending while slashing the limited social program expansions implemented at the outset of the pandemic.

On top of the end of these benefits there has been a mass unwinding of Medicaid programs across the country, with millions of people kicked off of their Medicaid health insurance after the ending of the official COVID-19 Public Health Emergency by Biden earlier this year.

In March 2020 a continuous enrollment provision was created for Medicaid that prevented states from disenrolling Medicaid recipients. This provision ended on March 31, 2023, and states will continue to review the eligibility of the 94 million people that were enrolled in Medicaid coverage as of March. 

At least 6.4 million people enrolled in Medicaid have been disenrolled as of September 13 of this year, about 36 percent of all people who attempted to renew their coverage. States run by Republican-controlled legislatures lead this trend, with Texas disenrolling nearly 900,000 people and Florida disenrolling 430,000.

Only 15 states reported data with breakdowns by age, but the trends from these states alone show a massive impact on children. Of those disenrolled, children made up 42 percent across the 15 states, totaling 1,278,000. In Texas the share of children skyrocketed to 81 percent, while in Kansas, Idaho and Missouri the figure was 50 percent or greater.

For people who were able to re-enroll in Medicaid, only 55 percent were re-enrolled through an “ex parte” process by the state administration on behalf of the participant. The other 45 percent had to renew their coverage by themselves through a renewal form.

Compounding the evisceration of pandemic era benefits overseen by the Democratic Biden administration is a significant decline in household income as the cost of living continues to soar.

According to the Census, real median household income in the US fell by 2.3 percent from $76,330 to $74,580 in 2022, the largest decline since 2008. Since 2019, real median household income has fallen a total of 4.7 percent. Meanwhile, the cost of living rose by 7.8 percent between 2021 and 2022, the largest increase since 1980.

The data also showed that the percentage of women working full-time rose to 65.6 percent in 2022, the largest figure ever recorded, while the percentage of men who hold full-time jobs stood at 74.8 percent, potentially reflecting a rise in the number of families where both parents work (48.9 percent in 2022 compared to 46.8 percent in 2021).

As the cost of living continues to rise and real wages are eroded, more and more people face destitution and poverty. Among those suffering from the decline in living standards are an increasingly large number of aging Baby Boomers—the generation born between 1946 and 1964—who are facing homelessness.

Since 2019, the percentage of people aged 55 and over living in homeless shelters has risen from 16.5 percent to 19.8 percent. This rapid rise in homelessness for older people has been described as a “silver tsunami,” as more people near retirement age without enough savings to pay their expenses. A typical cause of homelessness for older people is the death of a spouse or a medical emergency.

The average Social Security payment is just $1,781.63 a month, while the average cost of rent is $2,038 a month. Many Baby Boomers do not have adequate pensions after decades of pension fund mismanagement and concessions given to employers by the pro-corporate union bureaucracies.

A common misconception is that the Baby Boomer generation is incredibly wealthy. In terms of total wealth held by people in that age group, this is technically true. More than $78 trillion, about half of all wealth in the US, is held by Baby Boomers. However, the vast majority of this money is owned by an aging cohort of capitalists and billionaires.

Research by the National Institute of Retirement Security found that the bottom half of Baby Boomers owned only 2 percent of the financial assets of their generation, while the top 5 percent owned 58 percent. The middle 40 percent of Baby Boomers, between the 30th and 70th percentile, owned just 14 percent of their generation’s financial wealth.

Fundamentally, the distribution of wealth in society is across class lines, not generational.

While the average retirement savings for those aged over 55 is above $400,000, according to the Federal Reserve, the median retirement savings for that same group is significantly less. Figures from the Federal Reserve place retirement savings for those aged 65-74 at $164,000, while figures from Vanguard are even lower, at just $70,000 for those 65 and older.

Even at the higher end, elderly people can be overwhelmed with the price of medical care and the increasing cost of living. As the economic crisis within the United States deepens, the percentage of people without homes who are over the age of 55 will continue to increase.

These rapid rises in poverty and homelessness are the product of bipartisan policies by the ruling class to force people back to work during the COVID-19 pandemic to generate profits for corporations and banks. By ending the expansion of these benefits the ruling class aims to force people back to work by cutting off essential funds that had suppressed poverty rates. Now the Biden administration is attempting to suppress wage growth by triggering a rise in unemployment through rising interest rates.

Combined, these policies will have disastrous effects for the working class. Millions of people have been kicked off of expanded benefit programs and millions more are now being denied access to Medicaid health insurance. The rapid rise in child poverty to pre-pandemic levels is only likely to continue into the coming years as parents struggle to afford even the most basic necessities.

ECB lifts interest rates again as euro economy slows

Nick Beams

The European Central Bank (ECB) has lifted its interest rate to a record high, raising it by 25 basis points at the meeting of its governing council in Frankfurt yesterday, despite data which show the euro zone is teetering on the brink of a recession.

The European Central Bank during a thunder storm in Frankfurt, Germany, Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2023. The ECB's governing council met on Thursday. [AP Photo/Michael Probst]

In what has been characterised as a “knife edge” decision, the governing council decided by majority to raise its base rate to 3.75 percent. This was the 10th consecutive increase since it began rate hikes last year as officials revised down their estimates of growth in the euro area.

In her press conference, ECB president Christine Lagarde described the economy as slow and sluggish, with estimates by officials putting growth at only 0.7 percent for 2023, 1.0 percent in 2024, and rising to just 1.5 percent in 2025. The German economy, the largest in the euro area, is expected to contract as manufacturing continues to fall.

“The economy is likely to remain subdued in the coming months,” Lagarde said. “It broadly stagnated over the first half of the year, and recent indicators suggest it has also been weak in the third quarter. Lower demand for the euro area’s exports and the impact of tightening financing conditions are dampening growth, including through residential and business investment.”

That is, the growth slowdown is partly a product of the developing slump in the global economy but has also been engineered by the ECB in its so-called fight against inflation.

Like all central banks around the world, the ECB maintains that its rate increases are aimed at bringing down prices. But the real agenda is to ensure that under conditions of what is continually characterised as a “tight” labour market, the working class does not break out of the wages straitjacket to which it has been confined by the trade union bureaucracies.

The official level of inflation in the euro zone has halved over the past year, down from 10.6 percent to 5.3 percent. But the inflation in food prices, which has a major impact on working class households, is still at 10 percent and could go higher in coming months if there are shortages in supplies.

There have been claims by some economists and analysts that the ECB is coming to the end of its rate tightening cycle. That may be the case, at least for the present, in so far as the size of any increases is concerned. But Lagarde made clear there would be no letup in the downward pressure exerted by the central bank on the economy.

She said that on current assessments it considered that rates have reached levels that if maintained for a “sufficiently long duration” would make a substantial contribution to bringing inflation down to the target of around 2 percent.

“Our future decisions will ensure that the key ECB interest rates will be set at sufficiently restrictive levels for as long as is necessary,” she said.

Lagarde remarked that the labour market remained “resilient,” despite the slowing economy, with the unemployment rate remaining at a “historical low” of 6.4 percent in July. While not directly expressing it, she is clearly hopeful that situation will change.

Lagarde stated: “While employment grew by 0.2 percent in the second quarter, momentum is slowing. The services sector, which has been a major driver of employment growth since mid-2022, is now also creating fewer jobs.”

In an editorial on what it called the ECB’s rate rise dilemma, published on the eve of its latest meeting, the Financial Times focused on what is the key issue for the financial establishment—wages and the push by the working class to recoup cuts in living standards.

“With the labour market still tight,” it said, “annual pay growth is adding to price pressures, particularly in services.”

The editorial recalled the remarks of Lagarde at the Jackson Hole conclave of central bankers last month in which she insisted that “the fight against inflation is not yet won.”

While it was not the central focus of her remarks, Lagarde made clear that the ECB wants cuts in government spending which both directly and indirectly will hit workers’ living standards.

She said that as the “energy crisis fades” governments should continue to roll back related support measures as this was “essential to avoid driving medium-term inflationary pressures, which would otherwise call for an even stronger monetarily policy response.”

European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde in Frankfurt, Germany, June 15, 2023 [AP Photo/Michael Probst]

This is an example of how the so-called “fight against inflation” is used to cover up the essential class agenda of the central banks—the attack on wages.

Rolling back subsidies means that working class families will have to spend more of their income on energy and power. Increased spending on these necessities leaves less income available for spending in other areas, thereby lowering demand and producing a slowdown in these industries and services and exerting a downward pressure on wages.

The same agenda was revealed in the call by the ECB for fiscal policies, that is government spending, to “make our economy more productive and to gradually bring down high public debt.”

The more government social services are reduced, the more working-class families must provide for themselves in these areas and the less they have to spend on other goods and services, thereby adding to the economic slowdown and increasing unemployment which the ECB and other central banks regard as their key weapon in suppressing wage demands.

The reduction in public debt is becoming a key issue for central banks and governments around the world with the International Monetary Fund publishing data this week showing that after a decline in the growth of public debt in 2022 it was on the rise again.

It said policymakers would have to be “unwavering over the next few years in their commitment of preserving debt sustainability.” They had to take “urgent steps to help reduce debt vulnerabilities and reverse long-term debt trends.”

As Lagarde alluded to, this means cuts in government services as living standards are hit by rising inflation and interest rate hikes aimed at reducing real wages by increasing unemployment.

Millionaire speculator blurts out ruling class strategy of mass unemployment and wage-slashing

Patrick Martin

There are certain times when an individual makes a statement that encapsulates the thinking of an entire social class. Such is the case with the remarks Tuesday of multi-millionaire property developer Tim Gurner before the Property Summit of the Australian Financial Review.

In the comments, which were widely shared and condemned on social media, Gurner identified what he considers to be the essential “problem” produced by the COVID-19 pandemic. It is not that 25 million people have died and millions more are suffering from debilitating illness.

No. According to Gurner, “I think the problem that we’ve had is that people decided they didn’t really want to work so much anymore through COVID, and that has had a massive issue on productivity.” 

Singling out building trades workers, whom he confronts every day in his $10 billion construction business, Gurner said they “have definitely pulled back on productivity. They have been paid a lot to do not too much in the last few years, and we need to see that change.”

The claim that workers have been “paid a lot to do not too much” is an absurd and self-deluded lie. According to the International Labor Organization, wages around the world outside China fell by 1.4 percent in 2022 alone as a massive surge in the cost of living eroded workers’ living standards. As for doing “not too much,” the COVID-19 pandemic was a death knell to the 40-hour work week, with 50-hour weeks in the auto industry and 70-hour weeks on the railroads and docks becoming the norm.

“We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around,” Gurner continued. “There’s been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them, as opposed to the other way around. So it’s a dynamic that has to change.”

Gurner’s prescription for the problem of the working class refusing to accept their status as wage slaves is simple: “We need to see pain in the economy.” This includes “massive layoffs,” which have already begun and will lead to “less arrogance in the employment market.” He continued, “We need to see unemployment rise—unemployment has to jump 40 to 50 percent, in my view.”

Around the world, 220 million people are unemployed. Gurner wishes this number to grow by another 110 million, with the immeasurable suffering caused by hunger, malnutrition, substance abuse and broken homes that accompany mass unemployment.

After an explosion of anger online, Gurner has since said he “deeply regrets” his comments. This insincere statement was perhaps motivated by the fact that such a blurting out of the truth has, in the past, encouraged the erection of the guillotine.

Gurner, who has an estimated wealth of $929 million AUD, or $600 million USD, was not speaking for himself alone. In his remarks, delivered in all earnestness, he was giving voice to the sentiments of the entire capitalist class, which is using mass unemployment as a bludgeon to ensure that workers’ wages continue to plummet. 

His recommendation that the “problem” of working class arrogance should be remedied with mass unemployment is, although perhaps stated more directly, the policy of central banks all over the world. In August 2022, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell declared that the COVID-19 pandemic had created an “out of balance” labor market, and that reducing inflation would require “pain.”

The implementation of “pain” is working its way throughout every industry and country. If American autoworkers want to know what CEOs like Mary Barra and Jim Farley really think, they have only to watch the one-minute video of Gurner’s remarks. The auto bosses are planning to create mass unemployment through the shift to electric vehicles (EVs), which require far less labor. Wages and benefits at EV battery plants will be slashed even below the level of the temporary part-time work force at GM, Ford and Stellantis.

And behind the auto bosses stand the major banks and the financial oligarchy as a whole, which hold the whip in hand. They dictate policies in every industry and to their political servants in the Biden administration and in capitalist governments throughout the world.

The ruling class policy of slashing jobs and living standards and imposing ever more brutal conditions of exploitation has broad social and political implications. Such measures cannot be imposed democratically. They require the direct intervention of the state to suppress or smash the struggles of the working class. The Biden administration gave the first glimpse of this with its intervention last December to ban a strike by railway workers and impose on them a contract many of them had already voted to reject.

In country after country, the capitalist rulers are moving towards mass repression and dictatorship and building up authoritarian and fascist movements to serve as the instruments of the attack on democratic rights. In the US this is personified by the transformation of the Republican Party under the aegis of Donald Trump. Similar forces are being developed in Germany (the AfD), in France (the party of Marine Le Pen), in Italy (the fascist Giorgia Meloni is now prime minister) and in many other countries.

Earlier this year, the television series Succession showed a billionaire media family—a thinly fictionalized version of Rupert Murdoch and his Fox News empire—turning to the buildup of fascist politicians to enforce its class interests. With Gurner’s comments, one is not sure if it is a case of art imitating life or the other way around.

Libyan officials warn Derna flood death toll could reach 20,000

Alex Lantier

The horrific scope of the death and destruction caused by Storm Daniel across eastern Libya continues to emerge, as rescuers and reporters arrive in the flood zone. Towns across eastern Libya are devastated, with 11,300 confirmed dead as of last night in Derna, which was flooded by a massive wall of water after two dams burst. Its mayor, Abdulmenam al-Ghaithi, has warned that the death toll in his city alone could reach 20,000.

A general view of the flooded city of Derna, Libya, is seen Wednesday, September 13, 2023. The rainwater that gushed down Derna's mountainside and into the city has killed thousands and left thousands more missing, washing entire neighborhoods out to sea. [AP Photo/Muhammad J. Elalwany]

“The estimated number of deaths in the city could reach between 18,000 to 20,000, based on the number of buildings in the districts destroyed by the flood,” Gaithi told Al-Arabiya television. “We actually need teams specialised in recovering bodies. I fear that the city will be infected with an epidemic due to the large number of bodies under the rubble and in the water.”

The failure to maintain basic infrastructure and to prepare emergency response policies, flowing from the 2011 NATO war in Libya that plunged the country into an ongoing 12-year civil war, has exacted a horrific human cost.

Inhabitants of Derna heard what sounded like explosions when the two dams burst, and shortly afterwards the city was submerged under seven-meter high waves. “I heard a whoosh, I thought it was an aeroplane. The force of the water collapsed my neighbour’s house,” one man told the Financial Times. When he left his home after the flood waters receded, he added, “I was walking on corpses.”

Another survivor said that he and his mother barely managed to reach safety by scrambling inside a house that was not carried off by the flood waters. He added, “The scene I saw afterwards, whatever I say, it’s impossible to describe. Bodies were floating on the water, cars were floating by, girls were screaming. It lasted an hour or an hour and a half, but if felt like more than a year.”

A quarter of Derna was swept out to sea, and thousands of bodies are still trapped under the rubble of buildings or are washing up ashore. The victims “are being buried in mass graves. There’s no time or space to bury them in single graves. We removed 500 bodies in a single operation,” said Osama Ali, a spokesman for the Ambulance and Emergency Center in Libya. Rescuers are calling for emergency shipments of body bags to the region.

“Bodies are everywhere, inside houses, in the streets, at sea. Wherever you go, you find dead men, women, and children. Entire families were lost,” aid worker Emad al-Falah told AP.

Map shows the flood damage extent in Derna, Libya [AP Photo/Phil Holm ]

Rescue efforts are further complicated because only two of the seven roads into Derna survived the floods. Currently, many rescue workers are forced to rely on helicopters for transportation, and water and electricity are cut off in the city.

Other cities near Derna have also been shattered. Journalist Mohamed Eljarh said that rescuers had still not reached the coastal city of Susah and other nearby villages. In Susah, he said, “Hundreds of homes are buried under mud, debris and water. No help has arrived. Other areas have been similarly affected. The death toll is going to be staggering.”

This is the product of the 12 years of fighting since the 2011 NATO war on Libya and the ensuing eruption of civil war between governments in eastern and western Libya. Rival militias whom the NATO powers had supported as their proxies to wage war on Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime have tore the country apart. As Libya’s economy fell by half, and major oil companies plundered Libya’s oil wealth, nothing was spent on dam repair or emergency services.

The risk of a flood catastrophe was well known to scientists and state officials in Libya. Last year, hydrologist Abdelwanees A. R. Ashoor of Omar Al-Mukhtar University published a paper warning that a major flood in Derna would be “likely to cause one of the two dams to collapse.” He wrote, “If a huge flood happens, the result will be catastrophic for the people of the wadi and the city.”

Another scholarly journal also published last year by Sebha University similarly warned of the poor maintenance of the Derna dams and called for urgent action. “The results that were obtained demonstrate that the studied area is at risk of flooding,” its findings stated. “Therefore, immediate measures must be taken for routine maintenance of the dams, because in the event of a big flood, the consequences will be disastrous for the residents of the valley and the city.”

But with local authorities controlled by rival NATO-backed militias focused on waging war against each other, such warnings went unheeded. Moreover, the warnings and evacuation orders that would have been given by Libya’s meteorological service prior to the NATO war were not issued, because the meteorological service has collapsed during the past 12 years of fighting.

Petteri Taalas of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in Geneva told RFI: “Before, Libya had a relatively modern meteorological service, but this is no longer the case. It virtually does not work at all anymore. The observation network is virtually destroyed. Thus, the storm arrived but virtually no evacuation took place. Of course we could not have avoided economic losses, but we could have avoided most of the human losses.”

WMO officials said they issued warnings and contacted Libyan officials 72 hours before the dams collapsed, which led to the declaration of a state of emergency in Libya. But instead of ordering an evacuation of low-lying areas, the eastern Libyan government’s Interior Ministry ordered a curfew. This forced inhabitants of these cities to stay in the path of the flood surge unleashed by the dam collapse.

Libyan prosecutors have now launched an investigation into the disaster response to decide whether to press negligence charges against any officials.

Above all, however, responsibility for the disaster lies with the NATO imperialist powers who launched a war for regime change in Libya with catastrophic consequences. The failure of dams and of critical public services in the Derna region flow from the fact that all of Libya has been plundered for over a decade by imperialism.

There are mounting indications of mounting popular anger at the handling of the floods, and of fear in ruling circles of the working population.

Al-Jazeera reported that the Libyan National Army (LNA) militia of warlord and CIA asset Khalifa Haftar, which controls Derna, is stopping journalists from entering Derna and confiscating their cell phones.

Fadellalah, an IT worker in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, whose family lived in Derna, spoke to the Associated Press (AP). He said he had called his family on Sunday to urge them to move to higher ground, but that now at least 13 members of his family are confirmed dead and 20 are missing. “Some of them didn’t have cars. They didn’t have a way to get out,” he said.

AP noted that Fadelallah “asked that his surname not be used because he fears reprisals from government officials and armed groups who could view his story as criticism of their efforts.”

Government Of Germany DAAD Scholarships 2024/2025

Application Deadline: 2nd November 2023

Offered Annually? Yes

To Be Taken At (Country): Germany

Type: Short courses/Training, Masters

Eligibility for Government of Germany DAAD Scholarships: Foreign applicants who have gained a first university degree in the field of the Performing Arts at the latest by the time they commence their scholarship-supported study programme.

What can be funded?

In this study programme, you can complete

• a Master’s degree/postgraduate degree leading to a final qualification, or
• a complementary course that does not lead to a final qualification (not an undergraduate course)

at a state or state-recognised German university of your choice.
This programme only funds projects in the artistic field of the Performing Arts (Drama, Theatre Directing/Theatre Dramaturgy, Musicals, Performance Studies, Dance, Choreography). Other DAAD scholarship programmes are available for applicants from the fields of Theatre and Dance Studies or for artists with a scientific project.

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Government of Germany DAAD Scholarships:

• A monthly payment of 850 euros
• Travel allowance, unless these expenses are covered by the home country or another source of funding
• One-off study allowance
• Payments towards health, accident and personal liability insurance cover

Under certain circumstances, scholarship holders may receive the following additional benefits:

• Monthly rent subsidy
• Monthly allowance for accompanying members of family

To enable scholarship holders to learn German in preparation for their stay in the country, DAAD offers the following services:

• Payment of course fees for the online language course “Deutsch-Uni Online (DUO)” (deutsch-uni.com) for six months after receipt of the Scholarship Award Letter
• if necessary: Language course (2, 4 or 6 months) before the start of the study visit; the DAAD decides whether to fund participation and for how long depending on German language skills and project. Participation in a language course is compulsory if the language of instruction or working language is German at the German host institution.
• Allowance for a personally chosen German language course during the scholarship period
• Reimbursement of the fees for the TestDaF test which has either been taken in the home country after receipt of the Scholarship Award Letter or in Germany before the end of the funding period
• As an alternative to the TestDaF for scholarship holders who have taken a language course beforehand: the fee for a DSH examination taken during the scholarship period may be reimbursed.

Duration of Program: 

• Masters/Postgraduate study programmes: Between 10 and 24 months depending on the length of the chosen study programme or project
• Complementary studies not leading to a final qualification: One academic year

How to Apply: The application procedure occurs online through the DAAD portal. You are also required to send additional documents by post to the specified application address. 

Visit the Program Webpage for Details

Raac concrete public safety crisis widens in Britain with every type of building affected

Robert Stevens

Almost every type of publicly-owned building in Britain is impacted by the Raac concrete scandal.

Prior to the school term beginning, the Conservative government was forced to fully or partially close over 100 schools due to the danger posed by the presence of Reinforced Autoclave Aerated Concrete—a pre-cast, porous type of concrete that is susceptible to structural failure, particularly when exposed to moisture.

Following concerns over the safety of the material, which has a 30-year life span, construction with Raac was stopped in Britain in the late 1990s, after decades in which it was routinely used as a cheaper building material, mostly in flat roofs but also in walls and floors. The vast majority of buildings containing Raac are still in use despite it having reached or surpassed its life cycle.

The government was forced to act after a school ceiling collapse during the summer holiday, fortunately with nobody in the building. Hundreds more schools are currently being inspected after reporting the suspected presence of Raac in a government survey.

Building work underway at one of the affected schools, Abbey Lane Primary in Sheffield, England, September 1, 2023

But the problem could be wider still. The Department for Education (Dfe) is now sample checking schools which reported no Raac in case a mistake was made—professional inspectors were not used for the initial survey. Jane Cunliffe, chief operating officer at the DfE, told MPs, “If that sample check shows there were false negatives, we will have to think about what we do and whether there’s more surveying we need to do.”

Meanwhile, new schools are closing a week into the start of term. On Monday, a school in Teesside closed to almost all its pupils after potentially dangerous concrete was found in several parts of the building. The same day, Middlesbrough’s Kader Academy closed its doors to all pupils except those in its nursery.

Not just schools but hospitals, social housing, university buildings—including student accommodation—airports, police stations, courts, shopping centres and concert venues are affected. Buildings have been closed at 41 hospitals and 13 universities. At least 10 concert venues and theatres have also been forced to shut.

Seven hospitals are made “made nearly exclusively” of Raac. These are Queen Elizabeth Hospital, King’s Lynn; Leighton Hospital, Crewe; James Paget Hospital, Great Yarmouth; Frimley Park Hospital, Camberley; Hinchingbrooke Hospital, Huntingdon; Airedale Hospital, Keighley; and West Suffolk Hospital.

On Monday, ITV reported on the appalling situation at Withybush Hospital in west Wales, which has been forced to close six wards and has more than 150 props holding cracked ceilings up across the site. The hospital is still being used by the local population of 120,000. The chief executive of west Wales’s health board said attempts to make the hospital safe—with the presence of Raac known of since 2019—had been like “trying to rebuild an aeroplane while it’s in the air.”

On Tuesday it was announced that Raac had been discovered in part of the Houses of Parliament, following announcements of its presence in both of London’s main airports, Heathrow and Gatwick. Heathrow’s Terminal 3 was opened in 1961, and Raac was first identified on the site last year. Heathrow management claim there is no safety threat describe the terminal being used by almost 20 million people annually.

This week the National Concert Hall of Wales, also known as St David’s Hall, was forced to close with all events cancelled this month and into October. The building in Cardiff, often packed to its 2,000 seat capacity, has Raac planks in its ceiling. The Classic FM website noted, “Construction for St David’s Hall began in 1977, and the 2,000-seater hall opened in 1982—meaning the Raac planks found in the ceiling of the concert venue have been there for over 40 years.”

Many more buildings are likely affected as Raac was originally available to buy on the open market, so would have been extensively used in the private sector too.

The immediate danger to life is manifest. It was revealed by the Telegraph last week that cracked Raac planks had been found in a still occupied block of flats in Southampton built in the 1970s. The planks formed “both supporting and internal walls of the property,” reported the newspaper. A source explained, “The life expectancy of this concrete is 30 years, and it’s been nearly 50 years. The planks could potentially collapse without demonstrating signs of distress, as we’ve seen in schools. But these planks already have cracks, and they’re not even safe enough to repair. It needs to be condemned.”

On September 8, the Open Democracy website reported from the Knights estate in Basildon, Essex, which “was the first example of Siporex (another name for Raac) being used for housing in the UK and is still standing.” The estate contains 18 homes. “The much larger Laindon 1, 2 and 3 ‘Siporex estate’ was built nearby using the same material shortly after Knights, but was demolished in the 1990s after years of structural issues.”

One Knights tennant told reporters, “There’s a metal bit sticking out and a massive crack and you can see through to the outside from our house. If we’re inside you can actually see daylight.”

In a study of the widespread use of Raac in Essex, one of the most populous counties in Britain with over 1.8 million residents, the Sunday Times noted that Raac was treated as a “wonder material”, and “widely used after the Second World War.”

The newspaper noted, “In Essex, which had been heavily bombed in the war, swathes of public buildings were quickly erected using Raac panels.” However, following the building of the trial Knights estate in 1962 and the 950 houses built at the Siporex estates, “Concerns were immediate. Before construction had even finished, one councillor suggested that ‘a bulldozer should knock the lot down’, claiming that the homes would end up being demolished within 20 years. Within four years families were complaining of cracks in the walls and ceilings.”

But it would be another 27 years before the estate was finally demolished as unsafe. As far back as 1984, even a Tory MP, Sir David Amess, with the estates in his Basildon constituency, was warning about the dangers of the material that “cracks as one walks on it”.

The danger is amplified by the widespread presence of asbestos, which releases deadly fibres when disturbed. The vast majority of schools and hospitals are expected to contain the material, but in most cases the location is unknown.

This July, Tory MP Mark Francois related in Parliament how several schools in his constituency had been found to contain Raac. One of them, King Edmund School in Ashingdon, “had to have a large block demolished because of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete, or Raac.” He added that it was only “when they demolished the building” that they “found that it contained a large quantity of asbestos, which no one realised was there. The school had to be completely closed while the area was thoroughly decontaminated.”

The worsening Raac safety crisis is the result of decades of austerity, deregulation and cost-cutting carried out by successive Tory and Labour governments.

The Financial Times editorialised last week that the “’crumbling concrete’ affair” was “a legacy of years of underspending on construction and maintenance,” which was “compounded by Conservative ‘austerity’ policies in the 2010s.” It noted, “As in many parts of Europe, postwar reconstruction, baby booms and the expansion of the welfare state drove a surge in public investment in Britain through to the 1970s,” adding, “spending later dropped in most countries. But the decline in the UK after Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government arrived in 1979 was sharper than most.”

The editorial added, “Though Tony Blair’s Labour government [1997-2007] began to rebuild capital spending, a study last year found long-term average net public investment dropped from 4.5 per cent of gross domestic product in 1948-78 to 1.5 per cent in 1979-2019. Even under New Labour, Britain’s investment share was smaller than the OECD average or most G7 peers.”

Declassified documents expose UK’s involvement in Pinochet’s 1973 coup

Thomas Scripps

Declassified government papers have further exposed British imperialism’s support for General Augusto Pinochet’s murderous September 11, 1973 coup against President Salvador Allende in Chile.

Pinochet led a military overthrow of the democratically elected government and began a 17-year reign of terror, torturing and murdering tens of thousands of workers and left-wing organisers, driving hundreds of thousands into exile and implementing brutal free-market policies. His operation crushed a revolutionary movement of the Chilean working class and rural poor which had impelled a wave of nationalisations and threatened to spread across South America.

A tank in support of Augusto Pinochet approaches the government palace during the 1973 coup. [Photo by @goodvibes11111 / CC BY-SA 4.0]

There were two factors which contributed to the success of the counterrevolution. The most critical was the role played by Allende himself and his Stalinist and Pabloite supporters in politically and literally disarming the working class.

The second was the extensive support and direction given to Pinochet by world imperialism. The United States was the leading player, but the UK was also heavily involved. Its actions in Chile in the 1960s and 70s are an example of the violently counterrevolutionary role played by British imperialism around the globe throughout its history—continued, even with its more limited resources, to this day.

During the 1964 and 1970 elections in Chile, the UK’s Information Research Department (IRD)—a psy-ops unit under the Foreign Office but working closely with MI6—sought to manipulate the media and sway influential figures in the country against Allende. Declassified UK, the investigative news site headed by Mark Curtis, explained in a 2020 article, the IRD “provided US officers with a list of Chilean journalists who could produce desirable content.”

The exposure in 2018 of the Integrity Initiative—a network of trusted journalists, academics, politicians and military officials throughout Europe run by the Institute for Statecraft—proved the Foreign Office’s continued use of the same tactics today.

IRD operatives in Chile also collected information on left-wing and trade union activity, shared with the US government, and developed close connections with institutions which would serve as centres of opposition to an Allende government. In the words of one of its officers, Elizabeth Allott, the department had “very close contacts with specialist officials in the [Chilean] Ministry of Foreign Affairs, [redacted], and certain student organisations. As elsewhere in Latin America we can cover areas closed to the Americans.”

After the coup, the IRD began sharing information with “the Chilean Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Government information organisations” and “military intelligence” services, directly implicating British government officials in Pinochet’s repression.

Declassified UK also reports on the UK’s contribution to the regime’s counter-insurgency strategy, noting that the idea “was first raised during the visit of British navy chief Sir Michael Pollock to Chile in late November 1973, two months after the coup.”

Allott provided three books plus a “Manual of Counter Insurgency Studies” to government officials three months later, placing British imperialism’s vast experience in subjugating the people of its colonial possessions at the disposal of the Pinochet’s junta. “The Fight Against Communist Terrorism in Malaya”, a “Review of the Emergency in Malaya (1948-57) and “two booklets on the Philippines insurrection” followed.

British operations in Malaya (now Malaysia and Singapore) included using starvation as a weapon of war—killing livestock and spraying Agent Orange—extrajudicial killings like the Batang Kali massacre, herding hundreds of thousands of civilians into concentration camps, torture, collective punishment and deportations. The war was begun and waged for its first three years by Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee.

Britain’s collaboration with the Chilean dictatorship continued in full knowledge of the atrocities being carried out by Pinochet’s torturers and executioners. The UK’s ambassador to Chile Reginald Secondé reported how “The extent of the bloodshed has shocked people,” but commented coldly of the repression, “the lack of political activity is, for the time being, no loss”.

In fact, Pinochet was celebrated for reversing the losses suffered by British business interests under the Allende government. Secondé told the Foreign Office, “most British businessmen… will be overjoyed at the prospect of consolidation which the new military regime offers,” with executives, at Shell in particular, “all breathing deep sighs of relief.”

Among the most important British interests was copper, for which it relied on Chile’s exports. Price increases since Allende’s election and US sanctions were costing the UK an extra £500,000 a year.

Secondé summarised, “this regime suits British interests much better than its predecessor… The new leaders are unequivocally on our side and want to do business, in the widest sense, with us”.

A substantial part of that business was UK arms exports. In 1966, Labour Defence Secretary Denis Healey had established the Defence Sales Organisation with the aim of “ensur[ing] that this country does not fail to secure its rightful share of this valuable commercial market.” The Heath Conservative government (1970-1974) acted on this imperative, ensuring Pinochet took delivery of eight Hawker Hunter fighter jets before being turfed out of office and pledging to honour ongoing contracts worth £50 million.

The declassified files show British defence officials plotting, “in due course to make the most of the opportunities which will be presented by the change in government”.

These plans were interrupted by the working class for a period. James Callaghan, foreign secretary in Harold Wilson’s Labour government (1974-76), approved the pending delivery of two Leander Class frigates, two Oberon submarines, the refitting of a destroyer and of Hawker Hunter engines, and several smaller projects. But the government was forced to refuse to enter any new contracts. Workers at the Rolls-Royce factory in East Kilbride delayed the shipment of refurbished jet engines for years.

With the Thatcher government taking power in 1979—the closest ideological allies of Pinochet, sharing his admiration for the ultra-free-market economists the “Chicago Boys”—arms shipments to Chile restarted in earnest, and have continued since. The dictator paid regular friendly visits to Thatcher in Britain.

Besides its commercial interests, the UK shared with the US and all the imperialist powers a powerful political desire to see the revolutionary movement in Chile made a bloody example of.

In the two years prior to the coup, four states of emergency had been declared in Britain in response to a revolutionary wave of industrial action—a fifth was in place at the time of the coup itself. Only a few months later, Heath’s Conservative government would be toppled by the working class, requiring the Labour Party to restore stability through a series of targeted concessions. A section of the ruling class had been making preparations for Britain’s own military coup.

Secondé said approvingly of the popular movement in Chile, “the final seal of failure has now been put on this experiment by the Chilean armed forces,” with “obvious advantages”.

Significantly, the ambassador also noted disadvantages. Namely, that the events would lead the working class to conclude that no peaceful, parliamentary transition to socialism would be allowed by the ruling class. Stalinism and Pabloism—a national-opportunist tendency which had emerged within the Trotskyist Fourth International—played a politically devastating role in preventing this critical lesson, and the related conclusion of the need for an independent vanguard party of the working class, from being drawn and acted upon.

The British ruling class remained a good friend to Pinochet to the end. During a visit by Pinochet to the UK in 1998, a Spanish court issued an international arrest warrant charging him with human rights violations. After a two-year wait in which Pinochet lived in luxury in London, Labour Foreign Secretary Jack Straw contrived a way to refuse Pinochet’s extradition on grounds of ill health, allowing him to return to Chile. He died almost seven years later with 300 charges pending. Straw was praised by Thatcher as “a very fair man.”

Labour’s actions were an expression of its total acceptance of Thatcherite politics and disconnect from any past connections with the working class through which popular hostility to the Chilean dictatorship had made itself partially felt.