Inquiry confirms brutal repression at UK’s Brook House detention centre but provides no redress

Robert Stevens

The report of a public inquiry into conditions at Brook House immigration removal centre in Sussex, England, lifts the lid on the savagery deployed by successive Labour and Tory governments in their detention of migrants.

Brook House immigration removal centre (IRC) opened in March 2009 under Gordon Brown’s Labour government to hold 448 detainees, with the capacity increased to 508 in 2017. It is located in the grounds of Gatwick, one of the main airports serving London.

Brook House [Photo: screenshot from video/Brook House Inquiry/YouTube]

Private security company G4S ran the centre from March 2009, with its contract extended in 2018 to end in May 2020. In that month, another outsourcing company, Serco, took over after winning a tendering contract worth up to £260 million over 10 years—which also included nearby Tinsley House.

The inquiry was prompted by a BBC Panorama programme in September 2017, “Under-Cover: Britain’s Immigration Secrets”, which broadcast undercover footage of brutal abuse of detainees by detention officers. The outcry at the time forced G4S to suspend a nurse, six detention custody officers and two managers, and to place five other members of staff on restricted duties pending investigation.

A subsequent report by HM Inspectorate of Prisons found that incidents of self-harm had significantly increased at Brook House, with 40 percent of detainees saying they had felt suicidal at some point while in the centre.

A public inquiry, which this week’s report is the conclusion of, was launched in November 2019. It had a very limited remit, being set up to investigate “mistreatment of individuals who were detained at Brook House IRC between 1 April 2017 and 31 August 2017”, and seeking only “to understand what happened at Brook House IRC, to identify learning and to make recommendations that would help to prevent a recurrence of such events.” It had no powers of prosecution.

Under the terms of the Brook House Inquiry, “mistreatment … is interpreted to mean treatment contrary to Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, namely torture, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

Inquiry chair Kate Eves writes in the executive summary of “19 incidents in which there was credible evidence of acts or omissions that were capable of amounting to mistreatment ‘contrary to Article 3’”. She added it was of significant concern that, within a limited time frame [five months], I identified 19 such incidents.”

One of the worst, “was the moment Detention Custody Officer (DCO) Ioannis (Yan) Paschali placed his hands firmly around the neck of one detained person (referred to by the Inquiry as D1527), leaned forward over him and said in a quiet voice: ‘You fucking piece of shit, because I’m going to put you to fucking sleep.’”

Other incidents “included the repeated use of an inherently dangerous restraint technique, which has previously been associated with the death of a detained man, Jimmy Mubenga, in 2010”.

Mubenga had been detained at Brook House prior to deportation to Angola. In 2013, an inquest jury found that he was unlawfully killed by three G4S security guards. Pinned down in a plane seat by G4S guards, Mubenga shouted, “I can’t breathe” and “You’re killing me”.

According to the inquiry report, detainees were choked, abused, forced naked from their cells and forced to share dirty, poorly ventilated cells and with unscreened toilets. Staff used “abusive, racist and derogatory language” and confronted detainees with riot shields and balaclavas. The inquiry “saw footage of occasions where staff, talking about a detained person, used the phrase if ‘he dies, he dies’”.

G4S made millions overseeing this abuse, avoiding even any financial sanction.

A 2019 report by the National Audit Office (NAO) found that “The Home Office pays G4S around £13 million a year through a fixed monthly fee with deductions for performance failures.”

It went on, “The abuses documented in BBC’s September 2017 Panorama were not a contractual breach and did not lead to substantial penalties under the contract. Under the contract, the Home Office can only award deductions for specific incidents of underperformance. Inappropriate use of force or verbal abuse of detainees are not counted as a performance failure under the contract.”.

Furthermore, the “Home Office concluded that the behaviour depicted in Panorama did not constitute evidence of systemic failures or a material breach of the contract and that it was not necessary to try to terminate G4S’s contract”.

While the inquiry compiled masses of evidence and produced an 800-page report—providing just a snapshot of the inhumane practices rife throughout a system for the imprisonment and deportation of the vulnerable—it does nothing to challenge this set-up. The Times noted, “A lawyer representing people who were held at Brook House had told the inquiry the centre should be shut down, but Eves stopped short of calling for it to close.”

The Brook House Inquiry report [Photo: screenshot: brookhouseinquiry.org.uk]

Her conclusion is extremely tame: “Under the Home Office and its contractor G4S, Brook House was not sufficiently decent, secure or caring for detained people or its staff at the time these events took place. An environment flourished in which unacceptable treatment became more likely.”

Eves half acknowledges the futility of the whole affair. “My report comes as the latest in a long line of reports and investigations into immigration detention—many, with depressing regularity, making broadly similar findings and recommendations. It has long since been time to act on recommendations, rather than simply keep repeating them.”

More and more people are at risk of this abuse. Brook House is one of 10 immigration removal centres across Britain, including Harmondsworth, near Heathrow, the largest detention centre in Europe that can hold up to 630 people. Eves notes, “When I was commissioned to conduct this Inquiry, the use of immigration detention was falling and a number of immigration removal centres had been closed. The government has made clear its intention to expand the use of immigration detention.”

The bankruptcy of the inquiry is summed up by the main recommendation that immigration removal detainees be held for no more than 28 days.

Even this will be ignored by the Conservative government, which is only interested in intensifying the oppression of migrants. Under its newly passed Illegal Migration Act, migrants can be detained indefinitely, with the timeframe at the discretion of what the home secretary of the day deems “reasonably necessary”.

The Tories’ agenda is shared by all the main parliamentary parties. Labour
Party shadow immigration minister Stephen Kinnock said some of the evidence put before the inquiry was “utterly harrowing”, showing that the Tories had “delivered neither control nor compassion”. But only in August Kinnock committed Labour to keeping the entirety of the migrant detention system in place, including using barges and former military bases, newly opened by the government.

In the weeks since, party leader Sir Keir Starmer has sought to position Labour even further to right on immigration policy. In response to government claims that Labour in office would oversee 100,000 extra migrant arrivals to the UK—under a European Union-wide migrant quota scheme—Starmer dismissed this as “complete garbage”.

He told the Sun newspaper “strong borders are non-negotiable” because “they exist to protect us and those we love from harm.” He told Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips that he favoured a policy of “smashing” smuggling gangs and would respond to the arrival of small boats over the Channel with anti-terror legislation. Those who know of a crossing but do not report it—for example, family members already in the UK—would be guilty under such legislation, “bracketed as terrorists” in Starmer’s words.

Ibram X. Kendi’s “antiracism research center” squanders $43 million, lays off staff

Tom Mackaman

On Wednesday, Boston University announced that it would open an inquiry into Ibram X. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research, after Kendi last week laid off most of its staff— and amidst revelations based on extensive investigation by the Daily Free Press, the university’s independent student paper, that the Center, which has been showered with tens of millions of dollars from wealthy individuals and major corporations, has somehow lost all the money and has little work to show for it.

Ibram X. Kendi [AP Photo/Steven Senne]

The episode at Boston University reveals—once again—the pecuniary, intellectually bankrupt, and essentially fraudulent character of racialist ideology. It follows exposures of another duo of celebrity “anti-racists,” Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nahesi Coates, who have likewise accepted millions of dollars from corporations for an institute at Howard University that has produced negligible work, as well as the ongoing revelations that Black Lives Matter, presented to the public as a “movement,” is little more than a hollow shell created to disorient the youth and suck up corporate cash for the personal use of the grifters who run the organization.  

The episode shines a light on the seedy underside of racialist politics, which was elevated to the status of an official ideology of American capitalism in the wake of the killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, at the hands of Minneapolis police. The murder triggered a wave of spontaneous protests against police brutality across the US, from the big cities to the small towns in all 50 states, as well as in a number of other countries. The demonstrations, notable for their interracial character, shook the American ruling class.

The Trump administration responded to the Floyd protests by threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act, in effect menacing the population with a presidential dictatorship. But decisive ruling layers favored a different course. The Democratic Party, the military, the corporations, the universities, and most of the giant media monopolies responded by embracing racialism—and by deepening the war drive against Russia, which now bears its bitter fruit in Ukraine.

Emblazoned across platforms ranging from beer commercials to professional basketball courts to streaming media, “Black Lives Matter” replaced “e pluribus unum” as the nation’s motto. Americans were told: The decisive issue is not police violence or the capitalist system it upholds, but “anti-black racism,” which, the New York Times 1619 Project explained, is an ineradicable “original sin” imprinted in a national “DNA.”

The Floyd protest movement was soon disoriented by toxic racialist ideology. Protest organizers began to demand the hiving off of white participants to form “safe spaces” for “people of color.” Egged on by Hannah-Jones and her many social media acolytes, demonstrations were diverted to attack monuments to the American Revolution and the Civil War, including those dedicated to revolutionary leaders such as Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Grant, and even to martyrs for equality such as the abolitionists Christian Heg (1829-1863) and Robert Gould Shaw (1837-1863).

It was in this immediate context of the summer of 2020 that Kendi was gifted the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. Indeed, the center was announced just ten days after Floyd’s killing, with protests still ongoing. Jack Dorsey, the billionaire founder of Twitter, handed over $10 million. Major corporations followed suit, and soon Kendi found himself sitting on a mountain of cash.

But what were Kendi’s qualifications? He was the author of two books that had been heavily promoted in the media, Stamped from the Beginning and How to be an Antiracist. The former, very much like the 1619 Project, argues that racism is an immutable feature of American society stretching back to the Enlightenment, which the author views to be a racist conspiracy. The latter falls into the execrable self-help genre, a reliably lucrative branch of American publishing.

Like all such books, Kendi argues that racism is essentially an individual matter. If white people of good conscience take certain steps—including of course purchasing Kendi’s books!—only then can they move toward casting off their inner racism, which, like repentant sinners at a camp revival, they first must admit. In Kendi’s view of things the very worst type of white person is the sort that does not see her- or himself as racist.

Corporations, universities, and the American pseudo-left swallowed Kendi’s writing hook, line, and sinker, along with the 1619 Project, then at the height of its fame, and the parallel work of another race guru, Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility. Here was a ready-made means of diverting workers and students from the COVID-19 pandemic, mounting social inequality, global ecological crisis, and the threat of nuclear war! All that matters is race. Race yesterday, race today, race forever!  On this basis, Kendi was handed his very own center.

And after just three years it has all fallen apart.  

The immediate cause of the collapse seems to be that the Center for Antiracism Research has somehow burned through most of the $43 million corporate sponsors gave to it. This necessitated gutting the staff. Starting two weeks ago, Kendi hosted a series of Zoom meetings in which he laid off “almost all” of the Center’s workforce, reportedly 20-30 employees. Sounding very much like a corporate PR spokesman, Kendi said that the firings pained him terribly. But the firings raised an obvious question: What had become of the $43 million?

“I don’t know where the money is,” said Saida Grundy, a sociology professor who had a position in the center for a year. Grundy revealed that she had raised concerns with Boston University administration almost two years earlier. In a December, 2021 letter to Provost Jean Morrison she pointed to a “pattern of amassing grants without any commitment to producing the research obligated.” She added, “[t]o the best of my knowledge, there is no good faith commitment to fulfilling funded research projects” at the center. Grundy says the Center retaliated for her whistle blowing by refusing to offer a renewal of her affiliation.

Another faculty member affiliated with the Center, political scientist Spencer Piston, told the Boston University student newspaper, The Daily Free Press, that it “has been a colossal waste of millions of dollars.”

“It’s pretty hard for me to imagine they blew through $30 million in two years,' said Phillipe Copeland, a professor in BU’s School of Social Work. “There’s been a lack of transparency about how much money comes in and how it’s spent from the beginning, which comports with a larger culture of secrecy.”

According to the Boston Globe “current and former employees” of the center have “described a dysfunctional work environment that made it difficult to achieve the center’s lofty goals.” An anonymous manager, recently laid off by Kendi, told the Daily Free Press that the work of the institute was subordinated to Kendi’s persona. “It was mostly about him, rather than the work,” the manager said. Copeland, who recently resigned from the center, said that it “was just being mismanaged on a really fundamental level.”

Copeland also explained that Kendi was inaccessible. As a matter of fact, when Kendi appeared at Boston University to announce the layoffs, he was returning from an extended “leave of absence.” What work Kendi was on leave from is unclear, but during his hiatus from his academic duties he had been quite busy making money away from the university. As the Globe reports,

Kendi has completed a number of personal projects since 2020, including a graphic novel focused on the history of racist ideas, a podcast called “Be Antiracist,” and a five-episode TV show scheduled to debut Wednesday on ESPN+.

One suspects that with demands like these, Kendi has very little time to teach classes in Boston University’s History Department, of which he is listed as a member.

Boston University’s inquiry appears to be an effort at damage control. It was announced publicly, according to the Globe, only hours after reporters approached the university administration with “extensive questions about the center’s operations.”

Indeed, the suggestion of corruption at the Center for Antiracism Research, and its failure to produce substantial work, are as damaging to the university administration as they are to Kendi. This was perhaps the most high-profile initiative undertaken by Boston University in recent years. While university administrators have been promoting Kendi and his Center since its founding in 2020, over the same period they have forced custodial staff to work through the COVID-19 pandemic, imposed hundreds of layoffs on faculty and staff, and have continued to demand as much as $60,000 in tuition per undergraduate student.

There is nothing left-wing, much less radical or oppositional, about figures like Kendi, Hannah-Jones, and Coates. They decry “institutional racism,” but have been handed millions upon millions of dollars by numerous institutions of American capitalism, through book contracts, corporate foundation grants, hefty lecture fees, and academic sinecures. If their ideas were at all challenging to the capitalist status quo, then none of this would be happening. In a very real sense, these individuals are not just the loyal servants of capitalism, but its creations.

Perhaps Martin Luther King, Jr. had something like this in mind when, near the end of his life, he criticized this sort of racial politics, then in its infancy. “What you’re saying may get you a foundation grant,” he said to right-moving leaders of the Civil Rights movement. “[B]ut it won’t get you into the Kingdom of Truth.”

King was observing a tendency that has become much more pronounced in the more than half-century since his assassination. For those willing to tell the American ruling class what it wants to hear—that there are no problems outside of race—there are careers to be had and great money to be made. The major newspapers, publishing houses, universities, and corporate foundations stand ready, checkbook in hand.

But something much more important is involved than money. Racial ideology has always been a crucial pillar of capitalist rule in America. Its essential purpose, now as ever, is to divide the working class. Racialism, with its pretensions to antiracism, aims to disorient radicalizing youth who are driven by the crisis of capitalism to confront social problems. And it aims to subordinate black workers to the Democratic Party through the the African American elite—an elite of which Kendi, Coates, and Hannah-Jones are members in good standing.

Far-right Polish government threatens to halt new arms shipments to Ukraine

Alex Lantier

Poland's Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, 2nd right, walks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as they meet in Warsaw, Poland, Wednesday, April 5, 2023. [AP Photo/Michal Dyjuk]

On September 20, amid mounting tensions between the Polish and Ukrainian governments, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said Warsaw would send “no further weapons to Ukraine.” The statement, which seemed to directly contradict the NATO alliance’s policy of arming Ukraine to wage war with Russia, was denounced by ruling circles across Europe. 

Yesterday, Polish President Andrzej Duda tried to downplay Morawiecki’s remarks. Referring to Poland’s massive rearmament program, which aims to devote 4 percent of its economy on defense and develop a 1,500-tank army, Duda said: “The prime minister only meant that we will not transfer to Ukraine the new weapons we are acquiring to modernize the Polish army.” Duda complained that Morawiecki’s remarks had been “interpreted in the worst possible way.”

In reality, Morawiecki’s threat undeniably reflected deep-rooted conflicts between Poland’s far-right Law and Justice (PiS) government and the NATO-backed regime of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which are mounting amid the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine.

It came shortly after the Zelensky regime in Kiev sued the Polish government at the World Trade Organization (WTO) for imposing unilateral tariffs on Ukrainian grain exports. After the European Union (EU) lifted tariffs on Ukrainian grain amid the war in Ukraine, Poland, as well as Slovakia and Hungary, imposed unilateral tariffs last week to limit the collapse in grain prices for its farmers. Facing a Polish general election next month, the PiS hoped to maintain support among small farmers, who account for around 40 percent of Poland’s population.

After bringing his lawsuit against Poland at the WTO, Zelensky made further remarks aimed at Warsaw on Tuesday at the UN General Assembly meeting in New York.

To explain why NATO should escalate its war on Russia, Zelensky denounced not only on Russia but also NATO countries that, he charged, are insufficiently supportive of Ukraine. “It is impossible to stop this war because all efforts are confronted with a veto by the aggressor or by those who support the aggressor,” Zelensky said. He attacked unnamed European countries which, he claimed, are “indirectly supporting Russia.”

Zelensky’s remarks immediately provoked a diplomatic crisis with the bitterly anti-Russian, far-right regime in Warsaw. The PiS government summoned Ukrainian Ambassador to Poland Vasyl Zvarych to denounce Zelensky’s insinuations that the PiS government had any sympathy for Russia. The Polish Foreign Ministry’s statement reported that Deputy Foreign Minister Pawel Jablonski had conveyed a “strong protest” against Zelensky’s statement that “some EU countries feigned solidarity [with Ukraine] while indirectly supporting Russia.”

It added that “putting pressure on Poland in multilateral forums or sending complaints to international tribunals are not appropriate methods of resolving disputes between our countries.”

Polish officials went on, however, to criticize Ukraine’s catastrophic summer “counter-offensive,” which is estimated to have brought Ukraine’s death toll in the war to around 400,000. “Ukraine is behaving like a drowning person clinging to anything available,” Duda said. “A drowning person is extremely dangerous, capable of pulling you down to the depths … simply drown the rescuer.”

Morawiecki, for his part, called for making no further new weapons deliveries to Ukraine. He added that the PiS government would focus “mainly on rapid modernizing and arming of the Polish army, so it becomes one of Europe’s most powerful land armies, and in a short time frame.” At the same time, he made clear that the PiS government is still committed to waging NATO’s war on Russia. He pledged that Warsaw would still allow NATO arms deliveries to Ukraine to pass through the Polish military base at Rzeszow, near the Polish border with Ukraine.

Major European Union (EU) governments and press outlets denounced the PiS for making any criticism, however limited, of NATO’s war with Russia. Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung set the tone, bemoaning a “Breaking of the Dam in Poland” and writing: “It is breathtaking how the PiS government is making Ukraine a plaything of its electoral maneuvers. It reveals a narrow-minded view of Polish interests and cheapens Poland’s previous stance on the war.”

In France, where Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna criticized Polish statements as “regrettable” and dictated by “internal political considerations,” the press also dismissed them as electioneering. In its editorial, the French daily Le Monde complained that “Poland has lost its way,” adding: “Until now Ukraine’s most solid ally, the Polish government is turning against Kiev for electoralist reasons. This tactic is dangerous for Ukraine and for Europe.”

This line was echoed by Poland’s main bourgeois opposition party, the pro-EU Civic Platform of former Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. Tusk charged the PiS with a “moral and geopolitical scandal of stabbing Ukraine in the back politically … just because it will be profitable for their campaign.”

The PiS unquestionably pursues a far-right nationalist agenda hostile to the working class. Its rearmament campaign and its arming of the Zelensky regime have gone hand-in-hand with its impoverishment of Polish workers, as inflation hit 18 percent, and its establishment of kangaroo courts to try enemies of the state, such as those accused of sympathy for Russia. However, pro-EU forces’ attempts to dismiss the Polish-Ukrainian conflict as just PiS electioneering are political lies.

The statements of Biden and Zelensky at the UN have made clear that, despite the bloody failure of Ukraine’s “counter-offensive,” NATO is committed to escalating war with Russia. Poland—which borders both the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad and Belarus, a Russian-allied former Soviet republic—is on the front lines of this escalation. Quite independently of the intentions of the PiS government, such plans for a third, all-European world war raises explosive political issues.

Over 5 million people died in Poland in World War II, about one-sixth of its pre-war population, overwhelmingly at the hands of Nazi occupation forces. Poland was liberated from Nazi rule in 1944 by the Red Army. However, at the war’s outset, Poland was divided between Germany and the Soviet Union, under the reactionary terms of the 1939 Stalin-Hitler Non-Aggression Pact. In this initial period of the war, Soviet NKVD secret police loyal to the Stalin carried out acts of mass murder in eastern Poland, such as the Katyn Forest massacre. 

After Hitler launched his war of annihilation against the Soviet Union in 1941, moreover, Nazi SS units worked with Ukrainian Nazi-collaborationist forces led by Stepan Bandera, who carried out a campaign of genocide aimed at both Jews and Poles. 

The PiS, though it contains neo-fascistic and antisemitic elements, has therefore felt compelled to issue limited protests of the NATO-backed Ukrainian regime’s promotion of Bandera. In January, when Bandera’s memory was hailed by the Ukrainian parliament and Ukrainian General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the PiS issued a statement euphemistically declaring that Bandera’s commemoration “must raise objections.”

These conflicts, together with the possibility that Poland could invade Ukraine to retake lands around Lviv in western Ukraine that were once controlled by Poland, underlie the current spat between Warsaw and Kiev.

They point to the historic bankruptcy of imperialism and Stalinism. The Stalinist regimes’ restoration of capitalism in 1989-1991 has undeniably led to disaster. The former Soviet republics of Russia and Ukraine are fighting a fratricidal war stoked by the NATO imperialist powers. The parties that emerged from Polish Stalinism’s 1989 restoration of capitalism are either open supporters of war with Russia or far-right advocates of Polish rearmament—a policy that only sets the stage for an even bloodier clash between NATO and Russia.

Signs of political instability in Chinese regime

Peter Symonds

China’s Defence Minister General Li Shangfu has not been seen in public for the past three weeks, sparking speculation in the Western press that he is under investigation over corruption. He was last seen publicly when he gave a speech to the China-Africa Peace and Security Forum on August 29. Earlier in August, he travelled to Moscow and Minsk to meet with top Russian and Belarusian officials.

China's Defense Minister Gen. Li Shangfu during a visit to Military Academy of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in Moscow, Russia, Monday, April 17, 2023. [AP Photo/Russian Defense Ministry Press Service]

Li had been expected to travel to Vietnam on September 7‒8 to attend a meeting but the trip was cancelled at the last minute, ostensibly for “health reasons.” US ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel drew attention to Li’s absence last week when he claimed that the defence minister had not met with Singapore’s Navy commander.

Questioned a week ago about Li’s apparent disappearance, a foreign ministry spokeswoman told reporters she was not aware of the situation. Requests for comment by Reuters to China’s State Council and Defence Ministry elicited no response. No official statement or comment has appeared subsequently this week.

According to unnamed sources cited by Reuters, Li is under investigation for corruption over equipment procurement, along with other senior officials of the Equipment Development Department of the Central Military Commission, which he headed from 2017 to 2022. The US imposed sanctions on Li in 2018 for his involvement in the purchase of Russian military equipment.

Although the defence minister is not the top-ranking defence post, Li serves on the Central Military Commission chaired by Chinese President Xi Jinping, which is in overall command of the military. Moreover, he is one of China’s five state councillors—a position that outranks that of ordinary ministers.

The absence of Li from public view comes in the wake of the disappearance of Foreign Minister Qin Gang—also in unexplained circumstances. Qin vanished from public view for a month before he was removed from office in late July and replaced by state councillor Wang Yi, the former foreign minister. His non-appearances over that month were also for “health reasons.”

Speculation in the Western media about Qin’s fate ranged from investigation over corruption, resentment in the foreign ministry over his young age, to an alleged affair with a TV anchor while serving as Chinese ambassador to the US.

The Wall Street Journal gave more credence to the last explanation in an article this week. It claimed, citing unnamed sources, that a meeting of senior Chinese officials was briefed last month on the party’s investigation into Qin and told he was dismissed over “lifestyle issues.” It found that had he had a child as a result of an extramarital affair and that concerns were raised about whether China’s national security had been compromised.

China’s State Council, however, still lists Qin has one of the five state councillors. According to the Wall Street Journal, China’s foreign ministry and the State Council information office did not respond to questions about Qin.

In the absence of any official statement, and limited information, there are more questions than answers about what has happened to Li and Qin and why. Sex scandals and charges of corruption are exploited by the ruling classes worldwide as the means for destroying political opponents in internal factional warfare.

The most significant aspect of the clouds hanging over two top Chinese ministers is that they were both handpicked appointees of Xi. They were installed in March as the National People’s Congress voted a third term for Xi as Chinese president. Qin, who is just 57, in particular, was regarded as one of Xi’s protégés who had been catapulted into top positions within foreign affairs.

The regime headed by Xi confronts mounting economic difficulties at home even as the US intensifies its confrontation and preparations for war against China. The government has set a modest target for economic growth of just 5 percent for 2023—well below the 8 percent regarded by the regime as necessary to maintain employment and social stability. The property market has been hit by the failure of prominent developers. High debt levels, particularly at the provincial government level, are raising questions about the stability of the finance system.

Urban youth unemployment, which is contributing to social tensions and signs of political radicalisation among young people, soared to more than 20 percent this year before publication of the figures was discontinued. Moreover, the ending of the zero-COVID policy that has led mass infection and millions of deaths, is fueling hostility and opposition to the regime.

Xi is coming under intense pressure from Washington on all fronts—diplomatically, economically and militarily. US President Biden has maintained the huge tariffs imposed on China under Trump and intensified bans on the export of the most advanced chips and chip-making equipment to China in a bid to cripple its hi-tech industries. Even as the US wages war against Russia in Ukraine, it is ramping up a web of military alliances directed against China, expanding joint war games in the region and continuing its military provocations in waters close the Chinese mainland.

In this context, there is certainly the potential for rifts to emerge within the Chinese regime and Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The Western media routinely portrays Xi as an unchallenged strongman or, in the words of Biden, as a “dictator.” In reality, he is in a precarious position—a Bonapartist, balancing between CCP factions, between social classes and on the international stage.

An article in the Japanese newspaper, Nikkei Asia, on September 5, highlighted the internal tensions that apparently emerged last month at the annual beachside retreat of party leaders at Beidaihe. Written by senior staff writer Katsuji Nakazawa, who had served as correspondent in China, the report said party elders had been unusually critical of Xi for his handling of the country’s multiple crises.

According to the Nikkei, the party elders convened their own meeting ahead of the retreat before dispatching representatives to Beidaihe to confront Xi and other leaders face-to-face. “The gist of the message was that if the political, economic and social turmoil continues without any effective countermeasures being taken, the party could lose public support, posing a threat to its rule,” article stated.

The article claimed that Xi responded by venting his frustration and pointing the finger at his three immediate predecessors—Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. “All the issues that were left by the previous three leaders are on my shoulders,” he reportedly told his top aides. “I’ve spent the last decade tackling them but they remain unresolved. Am I to blame?”

In the aftermath of the Beidaihe gathering, Xi did not attend the G20 summit in New Delhi earlier this month. He deputised Premier Li Qiang to go instead. Xi has not attended the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly taking place in New York, sending Vice President Han Zheng in his place.

There may be many explanations for Xi’s absences, as well as the removal of Qin as foreign minister and the apparent disappearance of defence minister Li. However, taken together and in the context of the mounting problems and crises confronting Beijing, they do point to rising tensions and conflicts within the CCP bureaucracy and more broadly of political instability in China.

Australia: Molycop slashes 250 steelworker jobs in Newcastle

Martin Scott

Steel manufacturer Molycop announced this week it will slash 250 jobs, around half of the existing workforce, at its plant in Newcastle, a major regional city north of Sydney, New South Wales (NSW).

Inside Molycop’s Waratah plant [Photo: Molycop]

The cuts are part of a major restructure of Molycop’s Australian business. Primary steel production, including the plant’s electric arc furnace and bar mill, will be shut down, after more than a century of steelmaking at the facility. The factory will continue to produce railway wheels, grinding balls for the mining industry, and other specialty products, from steel milled elsewhere.

The workers, including some who have been at the factory for decades, were informed at the start of their shifts on Thursday of the cuts, which will take effect from early next year.

With no other steel mills in the surrounding Hunter region, sacked workers are likely to be forced into lower-paid jobs or long-term unemployment. This is a devastating blow for workers, amid soaring inflation and interest rates, and on top of real wage cuts imposed in previous years.

The unions covering workers at the plant publicly denounced the sackings, but accept the partial closure of the factory as a finished question. The union leadership is promoting the conception that “nothing can be done” in order to allow the plant to run without disruption, both before the shutdown, and after, in the section that will continue operating.

This is a lie. The company is not going out of business—it is worth an estimated $2 billion and has billions of dollars in annual revenue from the ever-more lucrative mining sector.

The multinational corporation was acquired for $1.6 billion in 2016 by American Industrial Partners (AIP), a US-based private equity firm, after the collapse of Molycop’s previous owner, Arrium. Now, AIP is cutting jobs to boost profits and make Molycop more attractive to potential investors as it prepares to float the company on the Australian Stock Exchange.

The slashing of jobs at Molycop can and must be fought, but only if workers take matters into their own hands. Such a struggle is impossible behind a union bureaucracy that insists that management’s decision is final, and which is collaborating with the company to prevent opposition.

After declaring the move a “sad day for the Hunter and a sad day for the Australian manufacturing industry,” Australian Workers Union (AWU) NSW secretary Tony Callinan told the Newcastle Herald the union would work with Molycop to “minimise the pain.”

The “pain” the union bureaucracy is seeking to “minimise” is not that of workers, but of management, by ensuring the smoothest possible transition of workers onto the scrapheap.

“Expressions of interest for voluntary redundancies from across the entire site will hopefully minimise forced redundancies,” Callinan continued. In other words, workers who have escaped the first blow of management’s axe will be pressured to sacrifice their own livelihoods to save their coworkers.

Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) organiser Brad Pidgeon echoed this, cynically suggesting there might be an upside to the mass sacking of workers he supposedly represents. He said: “There’s a lot of mixed emotions, we do have some members that are looking at retirement options, so redundancy may be beneficial for them.”

Pidgeon continued to plead the company’s case, telling the Australian Broadcasting Corporation the shutdown was the result of “ongoing cost pressures, energy market, transport costs as well.” The steel used to make Molycop’s finished product was, he said, “cheaper now to import from overseas as opposed to manufacturing it here through scrap steel.”

Last year, the AWU, along with other trade unions, went hand-in-hand with business lobbyists to demand that the federal Labor government introduce a cap on gas prices for major manufacturers.

The result of this was the Energy Price Relief Plan, rammed through parliament with support from the Greens in less than nine hours last December. Falsely presented as a means of protecting ordinary people from skyrocketing energy bills, the scheme was, in reality, aimed at slashing the energy bills of big corporations, while still protecting the profits of fossil fuel companies. 

Thursday’s sackings expose as a lie the pretext—of protecting jobs and working conditions—upon which the unions dragooned workers, including from Molycop, into this pro-business campaign.

The unions have also promoted Molycop’s demands for intensified “anti-dumping” legislation, blaming cheap steel from China for job losses. This has nothing to do with protecting workers’ interests, but is instead about tying them to the company’s ability to compete profitably on the global market.

Equally fraudulent is the broader claim of the union-backed federal Labor government that it is working to build new manufacturing jobs. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visited Newcastle on Wednesday, to promote the National Reconstruction Fund, an initiative ostensibly aimed at boosting employment in the sector.

Albanese declared, “There is nothing we can do that is more important than make more things here.” As the slashing of jobs at Molycop, less than 4 kilometres away and not even 24 hours later, shows, there is something “more important”—the profits of big business.

Following Molycop’s job cut announcement, federal Labor Minister for Industry and Science Ed Husic shed crocodile tears: “I feel for the families who have young kids who are wondering why their parents are so anxious because they are thinking about how they will pay the bills and put food on the table.”

While Husic claimed he was only informed of Molycop’s plans on Wednesday night, he revealed he had been working with the company “over many months… on different issues, particularly on steel industry policy.”

Labor’s aim in such backroom discussions had nothing to do with what workers want and need. Instead, the government is collaborating with management to advance the interests of “Australian” capital, by ensuring that businesses are “internationally competitive,” i.e., that costs are low and profits are high.

The role of the union apparatus is to serve as an industrial police force, ensuring workers make the necessary “sacrifices” to facilitate these government-business cost-cutting demands.

At Molycop and elsewhere, the unions have long used the threat of job losses or plant closure to shut down opposition to wage- and condition-slashing enterprise agreements, and tell workers they must make sacrifices to protect their jobs.

In 2015, the AMWU and Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union of Australia (CEPU) accepted company demands for no wage increase, followed by 1.5 percent in 2016 and 2017. Since then, all three unions at Molycop have helped the company keep pay increases below inflation to maximise profits.

In 2019, the AWU and AMWU used the threat of total closure of BlueScope’s steel plant at Port Kembla to push through wage-cutting agreements. Four years earlier, in 2015, the unions had worked with BlueScope to impose the destruction of 500 jobs and a three-year pay freeze.

This mechanism was also used by the AMWU, in collaboration with Labor and the car manufacturers, to drive down wages and conditions in a decades-long process that led to the destruction of the entire industry.

3,000 job losses planned at Tata Steel as company receives £500 million subsidy from UK government

Simon Whelan

Three thousand jobs are being cut at Tata Steel in the UK “within months not years.” Two thousand will go at Port Talbot in Wales, the largest steel-making plant in the UK, with a further thousand across Tata’s six other UK plants—almost 40 percent of the workforce.

Thousands of local jobs, especially around Port Talbot, in subsidiary industries and supply chains are also threatened, as are small businesses ultimately reliant on wages paid to Tata workers.

Tata Steel works at Port Talbot. [Photo by Phil Beard / Flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

The jobs bloodbath is part of a restructuring plan conceived between Tata and the Conservative government. The corporation will receive a government subsidy of almost £500 million towards a £1.25 billion purchase and installation of two electric arc furnaces at Port Talbot.

Tata executives freely admitted they have worked the existing blast furnaces to the end of their profitable lifespan. The UK government has given them a half-a-billion-pound helping hand to have them replaced and keep the profits flowing. Overall, the Tata Group—with subsidiaries in iron, steel, textiles, tea, automotive and aviation production—is worth an estimated $311 billion.

British Chancellor Jeremy Hunt recently told the Financial Times that the UK’s industrial strategy would not entail big state handouts across the economy. True to his word, they are reserved for the major corporations and the super-rich, while Tata workers get redundancy notices.

The subsidy comes just a few weeks after the government handed Tata another £500 million to build a “gigafactory” manufacturing vehicle batteries for Tata-owned carmaker Jaguar-Land Rover. Ministers are engaged in separate discussions with British Steel over its own £500 million package.

Port Talbot’s current blast furnaces are coal-powered and produce virgin steel. The new electric furnaces are less labour-intensive and can be powered by less-polluting fossil fuels or renewable energy sources. They produce recycled steel from scrap metal, which is readily available in the UK.

Tata Steel and the government have inevitably tried to dress up the move as part of a shift towards a greener economy. But the replacement of the two furnaces will only “reduce the UK’s entire carbon emissions by around 1.5 percent”. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is reneging on already inadequate targets for UK carbon emissions reductions and handing out new oil and gas licenses like candy.

Blast furnaces will be kept in operation at other Tata UK facilities and other steelmakers, since the new electric furnaces cannot reach the temperatures required to produce the same quality steel.

The government’s real motivation, besides protecting profits, was spelled out by Tata’s statement welcoming the subsidy, which noted the project would “bolster the UK’s steel security.”

A UK-based steel industry is central to the geo-political designs of British imperialism, which is heavily involved in supplying the NATO war against Russia in Ukraine and preparing a rapid expansion of its own military to participate in the escalating conflicts with Russia and China.

If Tata had sought to sell their UK-based operations but no private buyer could be found, or threatened to close their steel production facilities, the UK government would have foregone its devotion to the free market and nationalised such critical industrial facilities.

The trade unions are playing a politically criminal role, accepting job losses as a fait accompli while trying to secure a place at the table with management—under the fig leaf of urging no compulsory redundancies. They have overseen a staggering decline of the industry over the past 50 years, from 300,000 workers in the 1970s to just over 33,000 in 2021. One strike after another was sold out following the betrayal of a near-14-week national steel workers’ strike in 1980, paving the way for waves of redundancies and below-inflation pay deals.

When the latest job losses were announced last Friday, General Secretary of the steelworkers’ union Community Roy Richus responded, “Unions should have had a seat at the table throughout this process”. Community’s Assistant General Secretary Alasdair McDiarmid said likewise of the failure to include the union bureaucracy, “Tata and the Government should have consulted with the unions well in advance of the announcement”.

Neither uttered a single word about fighting the redundancies. The word “strike” never crossed their lips.

Trades Union Congress (TUC) General Secretary Paul Nowak was the same: “Ministers must press pause and urgently get around the table with unions. It beggars belief that they have been locked out of talks.”

This Tuesday, the unions got their wish, with Tata executives meeting representatives of the Community, GMB and Unite unions and allowing them sight of the plans to close Port Talbot’s blast furnaces as soon as January 2024.

Fresh from talks with the company planning 3,000 job cuts, the union bureaucrats were much happier.

Charlotte Brumpton-Childs, a GMB national officer, said, “Today’s meeting with Tata bosses was the first step in the long process of consulting meaningfully with our members over steel job losses.” A spokesperson for Community propagandised, “We want to work with Tata and the government to deliver a decarbonisation strategy that respects our red lines and crucially protects our members’ jobs through ensuring a just green transition.”

Ensuring a “just green transition” is not a matter of polite discussion with shareholders and executives, but of class struggle. Left in the hands of the corporations, the move to greener production will be used to increase profits at the expense of jobs and wages. Workers must fight to make the super-rich pay for new technologies and reduced emissions.

In the hands of the unions, “green” talk is just an attempt to prettify the company’s plans and pacify opposition. They do not want a struggle because, like the government, they are totally committed to securing Britain’s military-industrial base.

Last week, delegates at the TUC’s congress overwhelmingly backed a GMB motion supporting British imperialism’s involvement in the NATO war effort in Ukraine, calling for “financial and practical aid from the UK to Ukraine” and “The immediate withdrawal of Russian forces from all Ukrainian territories occupied since 2014”—including Crimea and the eastern Donbas regions.

The congress before, the TUC backed another GMB motion declaring, “Congress … recognises that defence manufacturing cuts have hindered the UK’s ability to aid the Ukrainian people under brutal assault from Putin’s regime. Congress believes that the world is becoming less safe and the policy carried in 2017 in favour of diversifying away from defence manufacturing is no longer fit for purpose.”

Reacting to the Tata job losses, GMB General Secretary Gary Smith commented in this vein, “Our country cannot be secure without a functioning domestic steel industry.”

Events at Tata Steel show what the militarist position of the trade unions means for the working class: subjecting workers simultaneously to the profit demands of the corporations and the military and economic war drive of British imperialism, while the unions forcibly keep the industrial peace.

Canada-India relations in turmoil after Ottawa accuses Modi regime of assassinating Sikh separatist in BC

Keith Jones

Relations between Canada and India are in turmoil following Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s announcement Monday that the country’s security and intelligence agencies are “pursuing credible allegations … agents of the Government of India” were behind the assassination of an Indian-born Canadian citizen in British Columbia last June.

It is unthinkable that Trudeau would have made such a statement without Canada’s security agencies having incontrovertible evidence of Indian government involvement in the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, an outspoken proponent of an independent Sikh state (Khalistan).

Canada and all the western imperialist powers are assiduously courting India as a key element in their efforts to counter and thwart a rising China. Towards that end, they have turned a blind eye to the sweeping attacks Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-supremacist government is mounting on democratic rights and its relentless whipping up of communalism. Dramatically increasing Canada’s economic and security ties with India were key elements of the Trudeau government’s anti-China “Indo-Pacific strategy,” which was drafted in close consultation with the White House and released with much fanfare last December.

Shortly after Trudeau’s announcement, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly told a press conference that Ottawa was expelling an Indian diplomat, Pavan Kumar Rai, whom she identified as the top Canadian-based representative of New Delhi’s foreign intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW).

The Modi government’s response was fast and furious. It dismissed any suggestion India had a hand in Nijjar’s assassination as preposterous, ordered the tit-for-tat expulsion of a Canadian diplomat and accused Ottawa of protecting pro-Khalistan terrorists.

On Tuesday, a chastened Trudeau pleaded, “We are not looking to provoke or escalate.”

New Delhi, however, has only become more belligerent. On Wednesday, India’s Foreign Ministry issued an advisory urging Indians traveling in Canada and especially the large numbers of Indian nationals studying there to beware of “growing anti-India activities and politically condoned hate crimes.” On Thursday, New Delhi indefinitely suspended the issuing of travel visas to Canadians and announced that the number of Canadian diplomatic personnel in India will be sharply reduced.

At a press conference Thursday, External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Arindam Bagchi accused Canada of “interference” in India’s “internal affairs” and reiterated New Delhi’s charge that Ottawa’s claims of an Indian government role in Nijjar’s murder are “politically motivated.” “Canada,” said Bagchi, “should worry about its growing reputation as … a safe haven for terrorists,” adding that its response to some two-dozen Indian requests to extradite persons New Delhi accuses of terrorism and “anti-India” activities “has not been helpful at all.”

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi welcomes Canada Prime Minister Justin Trudeau upon his arrival at Bharat Mandapam convention center for the G20 Summit, in New Delhi, India, Saturday, Sept. 9, 2023 [AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File]

The Modi government has been emboldened by the strong support given it by the Congress Party, the rest of the bourgeois opposition and India’s corporate media, some of whom have coupled their condemnations of Canada’s “outrageous” charges with bald assertions of the Indian state’s right to carry out extrajudicial assassinations. Even more important has been the muted response from Washington, London and other western capitals.

According to Ottawa, Trudeau raised the issue of India’s orchestration of Nijjar’s murder with Biden and the heads of government of other key Canadian allies earlier this month during the G-20 summit in New Delhi. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service is reported to have likewise shared its findings with its closest partners, including fellow members of the US-led Five Eyes global telecommunications spying network.

Imperialist powers choose to ignore crimes of Modi regime

Yet, as has been widely noted in the press, beginning with the New York Times and Washington Post, the US, Britain and the other western powers have for all intents and purposes chosen to look the other way, so as not to harm relations with New Delhi and their efforts to integrate it ever more fully into the US military-strategic offensive against China. In August, it was revealed that at Washington’s prodding, India’s Chief of Defence Staff has ordered an urgent high-level study of what support India would provide the US in a war with China.

On Tuesday, the Washington Post reported, “Weeks before Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau aired an explosive accusation that Indian officials may have been behind the slaying of a Sikh separatist leader in British Columbia, Ottawa asked its closest allies, including Washington, to publicly condemn the murder. But the overtures were rebuffed, underscoring the diplomatic balancing act facing the Biden administration and its allies as they work to court an Asian power seen as a crucial counterweight to China.”

When pressed by reporters on the issue Wednesday, White House spokesman John Kirby bleated that the Biden administration is “deeply concerned” by the allegations India organized an assassination on North American soil. Later, the White House spin doctors—no doubt responding to negative commentary about Biden’s remarks of the same day touting an anti-China US infrastructure initiative together with Modi’s India and the tyrannical Saudi regime—sent out an email that said, “Targeting dissidents in other countries is absolutely unacceptable and we will keep taking steps to push back on this practice.”

All of this is an object lesson in imperialist geopolitics and the western powers’ cynical and hypocritical manipulation of charges of human rights violations and transgressions of international law. When it comes to their own actions or those of prized allies, international law is ever malleable and the most monstrous and blatant violations of human rights can be ignored, downplayed or excused.

Were we speaking of the alleged involvement of Russia or China in an extrajudicial assassination in Canada—America’s neighbour, ostensible closest ally and the only country with which it is bound by a joint defence command (NORAD)—the White House and for that matter the Times and the Post would be speaking of the urgent need to impose punishing sanctions and convene the UN Security Council.

Canadian imperialism of course has its own long record of illegal wars and aiding and abetting criminal violence—including, to name but two examples, the torture of Afghan peasants rounded up in dragnet counterinsurgency operations and working with Islamicists to overthrow Libya’s Gaddafi regime. And it routinely apologizes for or ignores the atrocities and crimes committed by the US, Britain, France and other allies, including Israel’s brutal suppression of the Palestinians.

On Friday, Trudeau will play host to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and present him as the leader of a “democratic” Ukraine subject to an “unprovoked” and “genocidal” attack by Russia. In fact, Canadian imperialism along with the US and its other NATO allies are those principally responsible for the devastation of Ukraine and the horrendous loss of Ukrainian and Russian lives. They goaded Russia into launching its reactionary invasion, by expanding NATO to Russia’s borders, orchestrating a 2014 coup against Ukraine’s elected pro-Russian government and sabotaging the Minsk Accords. They and have relentlessly worked to expand the conflict by pouring in tens of billions of dollars’ worth of weaponry. Canada, through its decades-long promotion of far-right Ukrainian nationalism and assistance in integrating the fascist supporters of the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera and his Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists into Ukraine’s military, has played a particularly foul role.

If the Trudeau government is up in arms over the Indian government’s extrajudicial murder of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil, it is first and foremost because it is a challenge to the sovereignty, legitimacy and authority of the Canadian capitalist state. It also no doubt fears it could trigger violent reprisals, and under conditions where Canada has already seen a huge growth in far-right political violence. The most deadly act of terrorism in Canadian history was the 1985 bombing of Air India’s Flight 182 from Toronto to London by pro-Khalistan terrorists in which 329 people, most of them Canadians, died.

While the murder of a political opponent living in a western country is something new, it is in very much in keeping with the methods of the far-right Modi regime, which is acting with increasing brazenness as a law unto itself. This includes using sedition and anti-terrorism laws to indefinitely detain journalists and anti-government activists without trial; copying the Israeli government tactic of arbitrarily bulldozing the homes of Muslims and/or political opponents; using trumped-up and manipulated criminal cases to sideline bourgeois opposition leaders; and stoking animosity and violence against Muslims with vendettas against cow-slaughter and “Love Jihad” (interfaith relationships.)

The communalist Khalistan demand and the reactionary politics of independent India

Opposition to the Indian government’s murder of Nijjar and the more general exposure of the anti-democratic and criminal methods that New Delhi is using to stamp out support for Khalistan in India and in the Sikh diaspora in no way implies support for the reactionary demand for a Sikh communo-religious state.

The Khalistan movement is the historical outcome of the toxic communal politics (“divide and rule”) practiced by the British colonial regime and which the Indian bourgeoisie adopted after its premier party, the Indian National Congress of M.K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, betrayed the mass anti-imperialist movement and connived in the 1947 partition of South Asia into an expressly Muslim Pakistan and a predominantly Hindu India. The demand for a Sikh state was first raised in the run-up to Partition. Its chief proponent, Master Tara Singh, was one of the principal fomenters of mass anti-Muslim violence in the Punjab in 1947.

In the 1970s, Congress Party Prime Minister Indira Gandhi helped midwife the modern Khalistan movement, when she patronized the Sikh fundamentalist zealot Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who championed the claim Sikhs were a “nation,” as part of her maneuvers against her opponents in the traditional Sikh communal party, the SAD. This reactionary intrigue disastrously backfired, with the rise of an armed militant Khalistani movement, which the Indian state savagely suppressed, including by storming the Golden Temple, the most sacred Sikh religious site, in June 1984 (Operation Blue Star). Some four months later, after Indira Gandhi’s Sikh bodyguards assassinated her, Congress Party leaders incited a pogrom against Sikhs in Delhi and other cities in which many thousands died.

Subsequently, the Indian ruling class succeeded in pacifying the predominantly Sikh Punjab. But the Khalistan demand has continued to be widely promoted in the Sikh diaspora, including Canada, which has the largest Sikh population outside India.

The coming to power of the BJP, which incessantly promotes Hindu supremacism, is no doubt contributing to a strengthening of minority communalist sentiments, including among the Sikhs of the Punjab. In what was a brazen attempt to delegitimize and provide a pretext for the Modi government to suppress the months-long 2020–2021 farmers’ agitation, it claimed that the protest had been infiltrated and was being manipulated by Khalistanis.

There is no support within the Canadian ruling class for the Punjab’s secession from India. Insofar as Canadian politicians have consorted with pro-Khalistan Sikh community leaders, it is as part of the ethnic-identity community political mobilization that is the stuff of the country’s reactionary bourgeois politics.

The political establishment initially rallied around the Trudeau government in denouncing India. But with Ottawa’s ostensible allies leaving it in the lurch to pursue closer ties with Modi, and the diplomatic and potentially economic costs to Canadian imperialism mounting, rifts are rapidly appearing. The far-right leader of the Conservatives, Pierre Poilievre, has suggested the government was far quicker to accuse its Indian ally than to act on intelligence-agency leaked allegations of Chinese electoral interference.