Australian COVID surge the worst in at least six months

Oscar Grenfell

As in many countries internationally, including the US and in Europe, Australia is in the midst of a substantial surge of COVID-19. Newer highly infectious variants of the coronavirus are spreading unchecked and the limited indices available point to a substantial increase of illness and hospitalisation.

The general global rise in transmission is likely compounded by the fallout from the Christmas/New Year holiday season, with the virus spreading in indoor and large outdoor gatherings. The past two years, the December/January period has witnessed substantial spikes of the virus, including the 2021–22 Omicron tsunami, when governments lifted successful public health measures and millions of people were infected.

To an extent greater than even last year, governments and health authorities are covering up the surge. It is occurring under conditions where daily reporting of infections, illnesses and deaths ended long ago, and the media references the pandemic in the past tense.

In a sign of the extent of the crisis, health officials have felt compelled to belatedly acknowledge what is underway.

Today, New South Wales Health issued its latest surveillance summary for the fortnight ending January 6. It stated: “COVID-19 activity remained at high levels across all indicators in the past fortnight. COVID-19 polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test positivity was 17.9 percent.” The positivity rate is higher than any time over the past year, though PCR testing is difficult to obtain, limiting what can be extrapolated from that metric.

The advisory added: “Indicators suggest COVID-19 activity in the past fortnight is higher than the 2023 winter peak, and across greater Sydney is approaching levels observed in December 2022.”

New South Wales COVID-19 hospital presentation and admission figures [Photo: NSW Health]

An accompanying graph tracking hospital presentations and admissions in New South Wales shows a dramatic rise in recent weeks. Presentations have been increasing since late November. But they surged from around 800 COVID-related hospital presentations per week in the first fortnight of December, to more than 1,400 at the end of the year.

For some weeks, hospital admissions had remained static, at around 200 per week, despite the trend of increasing presentations. Entirely unexplained, the discrepancy suggests people were being turned away from the overstretched public hospitals, which were maintaining some sort of quota on the number of patients each week.

Whatever the case, hospital admissions reached 400 per week by the end of the year, doubling in little over a fortnight.

Kerry Chant, NSW chief health officer, said today: “Currently, the Omicron variants EG.5 and JN.1 appear to be driving the majority of transmission in the community, with JN.1 increasing in prevalence, in line with what we have seen in other countries.” Authorities have described a “wave on a wave,” with JN.1 increasing transmission, which was already at high levels amid a surge of earlier Omicron variants over the past two months.

Chant continued: “No one wants to see high levels of transmission in the community, but we do know what works to limit transmission in these circumstances and I am calling on the community to do those simple things that will make a big difference.”

That is a cynical attempt to blame the population for the developing health crisis. The measures that “work,” including indoor mask mandates and density levels were overturned by all governments, well over a year ago. In NSW, a centralised directive requiring that masks be worn in patient-facing areas of public hospitals was abolished mid-last year, ending any pretence of limiting hospital-acquired infections and protecting the most vulnerable.

Infection numbers have been unreliable and understated since the testing system was deliberately overwhelmed by the 2021–22 Omicron surge. Now, they are completely meaningless. NSW case numbers remain almost static, with only a limited increase registered despite the spike in hospitalisations.

The surveillance report’s reference to the 2023 winter peak underscores how much COVID is circulating. Already, the infection numbers were a gross underestimate, but even still, in June last year official case numbers for NSW approached 15,000 per week. In December 2022, also referenced in the report, weekly case numbers exceeded 40,000. Those infection levels were associated with a major increase in deaths, with more than 100 recorded in two weeks of January 2023, compared with low double-digits prior to the surge.

That is a warning that the mass transmission now underway will lead to a further spike in mortality.

The surge is not limited to NSW. In neighbouring Victoria, the second-largest state, COVID hospitalisations reached 377 on January 5. That compared with 266 on December 15 and is the highest level since June last year.

In Queensland, 322 were hospitalised in mid-December. The current number is not known. That compares with 68 hospitalisations in the beginning of October.

This is an indictment of governments, Labor at the federal level and in every state, except Tasmania, and the health authorities, who actively encouraged the spread of the virus over the holiday period.

Paul Kelly, the national chief medical officer, infamously described Omicron as a “Christmas present” in December 2021, because it provided a pretext for ending health restrictions to ensure maximum business and profit-making activities.

Last month, Kelly declared: “If you’re feeling vulnerable yourself for whatever reason, from a health perspective, then feel free to wear a mask. That’s people’s choice that they can do that to protect themselves.” One would have no idea that he was referencing a virus that has officially killed almost 24,000 Australians, more than 20,000 of those fatalities over the past two years.

Kelly obscenely suggested that people visiting relatives in aged care facilities could “consider” wearing a mask, emphasising that it was not mandatory. As of January 4, there were active outbreaks at 413 such facilities across the country. Throughout the pandemic, they have been transformed into killing fields, with more than 6,100 confirmed fatalities.

In comments last October, NSW Chief Health Officer Chant went even further, repudiating the most basic principles of medical ethics and scientific method. Chant discouraged young people who were ill from finding out what virus they were afflicted with. She contemptuously instructed them to remain at home and tough it out, in the manner of a hotel doorman, shooing the hoi polloi away.

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data, released last month, showed that for the first eight months of 2023, deaths were estimated at 6.1 percent above expected levels. That equates to thousands of lives lost that should not have been. The ABS described COVID as a “key contributor” to the ongoing excess mortality.

The ABS report pointed to the class character of the toll, overwhelmingly afflicting the poor and vulnerable. It stated: “In 2021, the number of people who died due to COVID-19 was 6 times higher for in those in quintile 1 (most disadvantaged) than those in quintile 5 (least disadvantaged). This ratio declined to 2.8 times higher in 2022, and has fallen further to 2.4 times higher in 2023.” Whatever the causes of that narrowing, a major social discrepancy remains.

The situation will only worsen. Governments are continuing to roll back the last vestiges of a public health response, with federal Labor last month shutting down the National Coronavirus Helpline, which had been fielding roughly 130 calls a day from people seeking assistance.

Vaccination, falsely presented as a silver bullet justifying the end of all other essential restrictions, has now also been dropped. An article posted on the Conversation website in late November noted that only 38 percent of people deemed to be at high risk due to their age or underlying health conditions had received a COVID vaccination over the previous six months.

Ongoing COVID-19 surge heralds another winter of death

Bryan Dyne

Registered nurse Erin Beauchemin monitors an Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) machine connected to a patient in the COVID-19 Intensive Care Unit at Harborview Medical Center Friday in Seattle [AP Photo/Elaine Thompson]

Another winter of death is now unfolding in the United States and across the Northern Hemisphere as the JN.1 variant of the coronavirus continues to surge globally. Wastewater data from the United States released Tuesday indicate that upwards of 2 million people are now being infected with COVID-19 each day, amid the second-highest wave of mass infection since the pandemic began, eclipsed only by the initial wave of the Omicron variant during the winter of 2021-22.

There are now reports on social media of hospitals being slammed with COVID patients across the US, Canada and Europe. At a growing number of hospitals, waiting rooms are overflowing, emergency rooms and ICUs are at or near capacity, and ambulances are turned away or forced to wait for hours to drop off their patients.

According to official figures, COVID-19 hospitalizations in Charlotte, North Carolina, are now at their highest levels of the entire pandemic. In Toronto, Dr. Michael Howlett, President of the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians, told City News, “I’ve worked in emergency departments since 1987, and it’s by far the worst it’s ever been. It’s not even close.” He added, “We’ve got people dying in waiting rooms because we don’t have a place to put them. People being resuscitated on an ambulance stretcher or a floor.”

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Dr. Joseph Khabbaza, a pulmonary and critical care specialist at the Cleveland Clinic, told TODAY, “The current strain right now seems to be packing a meaner punch than the prior strains. Some features of the current circulating strain probably (make it) a little bit more virulent and pathogenic, making people sicker than prior (variants).”

Indeed, two recent studies indicate that JN.1 appears to more efficiently infect cells in the lower lung, a trait that existed in pre-Omicron strains which were considered more deadly. One study from researchers in Germany and France noted that BA.2.86, the variant nicknamed “Pirola” from which JN.1 evolved, “has regained a trait characteristic of early SARS-CoV-2 lineages: robust lung cell entry. The variant might constitute an elevated health threat as compared to previous Omicron sublineages.”

The toll on human life from the ongoing wave of mass infection is enormous. It is estimated that one-third of the American population, or over 100 million human beings, will contract COVID-19 during just the current wave. This will likely result in tens of thousands of deaths, many of which will not be properly logged due to the dismantling of COVID-19 testing and data reporting systems in the US. When The Economist last updated its tracker of excess deaths on November 18—before the JN.1 wave began—the cumulative death toll stood at 27.4 million and nearly 5,000 people continued to die each day worldwide.

The current wave will also induce further mass suffering from Long COVID, which has been well known since 2020 to cause a multitude of lingering and often debilitating effects. Just last week, a pre-print study was published in Nature Portfolio, showing that COVID-19 infection can cause brain damage akin to aging 20 years. The consequences are mental deficits that induce depression, reduced ability to handle intense emotions, lowered attention span, and impaired ability to retain information.

Other research indicates that the virus can attack the heart, the immune system, digestion and essentially every other critical bodily function. The initial symptoms of COVID-19 might resemble those of the flu, but the reality is that the virus can affect nearly every organ in the body and can do so for years after the initial infection. While vaccination slightly reduces the risks of Long COVID, the full impact of the virus will be felt for generations.

Some of the most prevalent symptoms of Long COVID

The latest winter wave of infections and hospitalizations takes place just eight months after the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Biden administration ended their COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE) declarations without any scientific justification. This initiated the wholesale scrapping of all official response to the pandemic, giving the virus free rein to infect the entire global population ad infinitum.

A virtual blackout of any mention of the coronavirus in the corporate media accompanied the swan song of official reporting. From then on, if illnesses at hospitals or among public figures were referenced at all, it was always with the euphemism “respiratory illness.” The words COVID, coronavirus and pandemic became all but blacklisted and the facts of the dangers of the disease have been actively suppressed.

Summarizing the cumulative results of this global assault on public health, the WSWS International Editorial Board wrote in its New Year 2024 statement:

All facts and data surrounding the present state of the pandemic are concealed from the global population, which has instead been subjected to unending lies, gaslighting and propaganda, now shrouded in a veil of silence. There is a systematic cover-up of the real gravity of the crisis, enforced by the government, the corporations, the media and the trade union bureaucracies. Official policy has devolved into simply ignoring, denying and falsifying the reality of the pandemic, no matter what the consequences, as millions are sickened and thousands die globally every day.

In response to the latest wastewater data, there have only been a handful of news articles, most of which sought to downplay the severity of the current wave and largely ignored the deepening crisis in hospitals.

The official blackout has given rise to an extraordinary contradiction in social life. The reality of mass infection means that everyone knows a friend, neighbor, family member or coworker who is currently or was recently sick, or even hospitalized or killed, by COVID-19. Yet the unrelenting pressure to dismiss the danger of the pandemic means that shopping centers, supermarkets, workplaces and even doctor’s offices and hospitals are full of people not taking the basic and simple precaution of masking to protect themselves. Every visit outside one’s home carries the risk of being infected, with unknown long-term consequences.

As the pandemic enters its fifth year, it is critical to draw the lessons of this world historical experience. The past four years have demonstrated unequivocally that capitalist governments are both unwilling and incapable of fighting this disease. Their primary concern has always been to ensure the accumulation of profits of corporations continue unabated, no matter the cost in human lives and health.

The real solution to the coronavirus is not to ignore it, but to develop a campaign of elimination and eradication of the virus worldwide. To do so requires the implementation of mask mandates, mass testing and contact tracing, as well as installing updated ventilation systems and the safe deployment of Far-UVC technology to halt the spread of the virus. The resources for this global public health program must be expropriated from the banks and financial institutions, who are themselves responsible for the mass suffering wrought by the pandemic.

Wells Mountain Education Scholarship Program 2024

Application Deadline: 1st March 2024

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries; Developing Countries

Accepted Subject Areas? All fields are eligible although WMF intends to favor helping professions such as health care, social work, education, social justice, as well as, professions that help the economy and progress of the country such as computers, engineering, agriculture and business.

About the Wells Mountain Education Scholarship Program:

Wells Mountain Foundation offers undergraduate scholarships to students from developing countries to study in their home country or any other developing country. The foundation hopes that by providing the opportunity to further one’s education, the scholarship participants will not only be able to improve their future, but also that of their communities. The foundation believes in the power and importance of community service and, as a result, all scholarship participants are required to volunteer for a minimum of one month a year.

Applicants are only allowed to select a university in a developing country. Applications to study in UK, USA, Europe and Australia will not be accepted

Offered Since: 2005

Type: Undergraduate

Who is qualified to apply for Wells Mountain Education Scholarship Program? To be eligible to apply for this scholarship, applicant must be a student, male or female, from a country in the developing world, who:

• completed secondary education, with good to excellent grades
• will be studying in their country or another country in the developing world*
• plans to live and work in their own country after they graduate
• has volunteered before applying for this scholarship and/or is willing to volunteer while receiving the WMF scholarship
• may have some other funds available for their education, but will not be able to go to school without a scholarship

*Scholars planning to study in the United States, Canada, Australia, UK or Western Europe will not qualify for a WMI Scholarship

Number of Awards: 10 to 30 per year

What are the benefits? Maximum scholarship is $3,000 USD.

• tuition and fees
• books and materials
• room rent and meals

How to Apply for Wells Mountain Education Scholarship Program: 

• Applicants must submit two letters of recommendation written by someone who knows you, but is not a family member, who can tell why you deserve to receive a WMF scholarship. What qualities will make you an excellent student, a successful graduate and a responsible citizen who will give back to his or her country? These letters of recommendation may come from a teacher, a religious leader, volunteer supervisor, or an employer.

Visit Scholarship Webpage for details

UK Post Office scandal implicates all main political parties in injustice against hundreds of postmasters

Robert Stevens

The scandal over the terrible plight of hundreds of Post Office sub-postmasters wrongly accused of theft and false accounting, is rocking the ruling elite following last week’s broadcasting of a four-part ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office.

Between 1999 and 2015, the Post Office prosecuted 736 sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses—an average of one a week—for accounting errors actually caused by a faulty IT system named Horizon, provided to the Post Office by Fujitsu. This was despite sub-postmasters and mistresses complaining about bugs in the Horizon system after it reported shortfalls of many thousands of pounds.

Royal Mail van, outside the Axminster post office [Photo by Felix O / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0]

The legitimate concerns by postmasters, who had never had any such issues before Horizon was implemented, were ignored by the Post Office which prosecuted them instead. Many people lost their jobs, suffered unwarranted prison sentences, bankruptcy and divorces. At least four of the victims committed suicide.

With the first wrongful convictions in 1999, 60 victims have died before finding any justice. Only 93 of 900 convictions linked to the flawed IT system have been overturned and only 11 victims have been compensated in full.

To this day, no executives of the Post Office, Fujitsu, or any of the government ministers involved in running the Post Office have been punished.

The ITV drama, with renowned actor Toby Jones playing Alan Bates, tells the story of some of the victims of the Post Office—and successive Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrats governments—and the fightback campaign Bates led for over 20 years to get justice for postmasters and their families.

Bates, a former sub-postmaster, took over a shop with a post office counter in 1998. He first became aware of issues with Horizon by the end of 2000, when a shortage of £6,000 appeared on his books. This was rectified when he noticed multiple duplicated transactions in the system. However, in 2003 his Post Office contract was terminated when the company claimed £1,200 was unaccounted for. Bates and his partner Suzanne kept their shop but lost the Post Office counter and their investment of around £60,000. In 2009, Bates set up the Justice For Subpostmasters Alliance.

The first episode of the drama was watched by 9.2 million viewers, with the four episodes being the most watched programmes on any channel so far this year.  Feeling the heat building up, the Financial Times editorialised Monday on a “grave British miscarriage of justice… The most talked-about holiday TV viewing in Britain was not a Hollywood blockbuster or a Netflix fantasy drama. It was a dramatisation of the real-life scandal of hundreds of sub-postmasters wrongly accused by the Post Office of theft and false accounting that were in fact the result of a faulty computer system.”

The drama sparked over 1.2 million people signing an online petition, first set up in 2021, demanding that former Post Office boss Paula Vennells hand back her Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) award.

Vennells was awarded her CBE in the New Year honours list of 2019—fully 20 years after the scandal first broke—for “services to the Post Office”. Having been hired by then Tory Prime Minister David Cameron with a remit to eliminate the £3 million-a-week subsidy to the Post Office his government wanted to make, Vennells played a critical role in the persecution of postmasters in her role as Post Office CEO from 2012 to 2019. On Tuesday, Vennells announced she would hand back the CBE with immediate effect.

In December 2019, following a class action case, Bates & Ors v Post Office Ltd—fought for by the Justice For Subpostmasters Alliance—the High Court ruled that the Horizon system was faulty and 550 sub-postmasters were awarded over £58 million in compensation.

The ruling class gives up nothing easily and even the £58 million was held back. After costs only £11 million was paid out to the postmasters in the class action to compensate for false prosecutions. This equated to around just £20,000 each but many received only £8,000. In April 2021, the Court of Appeal quashed 39 convictions, a tiny fraction of the many hundreds more that remained unsafe. A BBC Panorama documentary aired in 2022, The Post Office Scandal, further exposed the outright criminality in the prosecution of postmasters.

With the scandal again in the spotlight, more than 100 people have come forward seeking legal advice. The Guardian reported that among these are expected to be postmasters who were involved in a Horizon pilot scheme rolled out in 1995 and 1996 to hundreds of branches in northeast England under a Labour government.

The Conservative government, which ignored the crisis for years before setting up a highly restricted ongoing public inquiry in 2020, has held high-level meetings in Downing Street in the last 48 hours, including receiving legal advice on how to quell a mounting crisis.

Politico reported that the government has had to put aside £1 billion to cover the expected compensation payments bill. On Monday, after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was forced to declare that he intended to “get the money to people as quickly as possible,” Justice Secretary Alex Chalk met with Post Office Minister Kevin Hollinrake to find ways of speeding up compensation to victims of the scandal.

To keep a lid on a mushrooming social opposition, the government is considering the mass quashing, via parliamentary legislation, of all remaining 800 unsafe convictions that have not yet been overturned. Hollinrake told Parliament Monday, “The time for quibbling is over. It is a case now of action, action on this day, and delivering that by overturning convictions.”

Asked on Tuesday by Nadhim Zahawi, the former Tory cabinet minister if he would put forward a “simple bill” to quash the convictions, Chalk replied, “The suggestion he made is receiving active consideration.”

Central to this emergency face-saving operation by the Tories—who face a general election this year under conditions in which they are substantially behind in the polls to the opposition Labour Party—is identifying the necessary scapegoats.

All told, 11 government ministers from three Labour and Conservative-led governments oversaw the Post Office during the period in which postmasters were falsely prosecuted. In recent days pressure has mounted on Liberal Democrats leader Ed Davey, who served as Post Office minister for two years in the 2010-15 Conservative-Liberal coalition.

Bates wrote to Davey five times to demand action over the crisis, as part of correspondence with ministers over the span of three successive governments between 2010 and 2019. In May 2010, Davey refused to meet Bates declaring he did not believe it “would serve any purpose”. Several high profile prosecutions of postmasters had already taken place. On May 11, 2009, the same month that Bates contacted Davey, Computer Weekly magazine published the first major piece exposing the scandal. It revealed the plight of seven sub-postmasters, including Bates, and raised concerns about the suitability of the Horizon IT system.

Bates also wrote to another former Lib Dems leader, Jo Swinson, who served as Post Office minister in the coalition from September 2012-May 2015.

Fujitsu was handed hundreds of millions of pounds after winning the contract for a Post Office IT system. The latest incarnation of Horizon is still used by the Post Office today. As a “strategic supplier” to the government, Fujitsu has secured £3 billion in contracts since 2013, including 150 more in the few years since the Post Office finally stopped prosecuting its innocent staff. Leading Tory and Labour figures, led by Tory peer Lord Arbuthnot and Labour peer Baron Falconer demanded in a Sunday Times column, “The inquiry needs to examine in detail the role of Fujitsu, which provided and managed the faulty software. Was Fujitsu completely unaware of the devastating effect of its actions? Should it not contribute to the compensation claims of hundreds of sub-postmasters?”

Labour Shadow Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds said, “If it is found that Fujitsu knew the extent of what was occurring there will have to be consequences that match the scale of the injustice.”

This is meant to conceal the role played by governments that have overseen terrible injustices for the last 25 years. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, who refused even to back calls for Vennells to hand back her gong, was Britain’s Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) at the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) from 2008 to 2013, before entering parliament. Starmer never lifted a finger to challenge any of the frame-ups of the postmasters, with at least 27 postmaster cases brought by the CPS when Starmer was DPP.

Horizon originated in a Tory government procurement process in 1994. It was announced by John Major’s government at the 1995 Conservative Party conference, with a stated goal not just to computerise the payment of benefits at post offices but of reducing welfare benefit “fraud” by £150 million per year.

Fujitsu and its Horizon system was chosen, with a major factor that in seven out of 11 categories Horizon was the cheapest option available. The £1.5 billion project was funded under the private finance initiative (PFI) set up by the Tories but carried out mainly by the 1997-2010 Blair/Brown Labour governments. The full rollout began in 1999 with deployment to over 13,000 offices in 2000 and 2001. Horizon would eventually cover 18,000 offices.

The faulty data was resulting in prosecutions almost immediately. In 2000, there were six shortfall convictions that relied on Horizon data, with another 41 sub-postmasters prosecuted in 2001, and 64 in 2002. By 2009, with Tony Blair out of office, and succeeded by Gordon Brown, prosecutions had risen to a staggering 525.

2024 begins with 600 UK communication workers at Communisis facing redundancy

Margot Miller

On December 28, 196 workers at printing and business services company Communisis at its base in Liverpool, UK received the gut-wrenching news that they were losing their jobs with immediate effect, victims of the growing use of digital technology in the communications industry under capitalism.

A total of 638 of the company’s employees at its Liverpool, Leeds and Cramlington (in Northumberland) sites will lose their jobs. The business, with its UK headquarters in Leeds employing 1,000 in the UK and 200 overseas, has gone into administration.

Sign outside UK unemployment office Job Centre [Photo by Andrew_Writer / CC BY 2.0]

According to financial advisory service Interpath, the Communisis Customer Experience, the side of the business dealing in printed communications on behalf of high street banks like Lloyds, was hit by declining demand and cost hikes in energy and paper. Figures for 2021 show a 20 percent fall in demand for paper bank statements, postal mail and cheque books.

Communisis had hoped to restructure and modernise, securing a deal with Indian outsource company Tech Mahindra in 2022, but it proved too costly.

The redundancies followed parent company OSG Holdings, based in the US, filing for bankruptcy. It “exited its UK business” in December. With a reported annual turnover of almost £256 million, Communisis was nevertheless hitting shareholders profits of OSG, according to Printweek.

Parts of the business, including delivery of services to the Lloyds Banking Group and the Brand Deployment wing, which provides marketing services for companies such as Proctor and Gamble and operates in 20 countries, were immediately bought up by rival Paragon Customer Communications. The remaining 581 employees are being transferred to Paragon.

Not only is half the workforce being made redundant, but it is unclear to what extent their pensions will be protected. In 2021, Communisis had a £20.8 million deficit in its pension fund accounts.

The workers cannot look to their union, Accord, to begin a fight back as it makes clear in a January 2 “Newsflash for Communisis members”. Accord first addresses employees who have not lost their jobs, stating, “We’d encourage questions relating to immediate changes such as pay dates to be directed to Paragon.”

As for members who have lost their jobs: “We’ll be taking legal advice on claims that may be possible as a result of the collapse and immediate redundancy. There’s some guidance on our website which may be helpful including CV writing and ways to find new work.”

Then the final insult: “…you may be able to use the services of either… the Print workers charity… [or for those employed by Lloyds before Communisis] the Bank workers charity”.

According to its website, Accord is a “grown-up union” with staff in the Lloyds Banking Group, TSB and subsidiary companies. It boasts that “by keeping the lines of communication open, even when we disagree or can’t get what we want, we can find a way to make the situation better.”

The job losses at Communisis are only the latest in a series of redundancies in the banking sector announced in the UK in December. Just before Christmas, almost 500 proposed job losses were announced at the Nationwide Building Society, as part of a major restructuring, affecting the chief operating office, retail operations, mortgages and financial wellbeing division.

Lloyds confirmed 2,800 jobs were threatened due to cost cutting which will affect middle management roles such as analysts and product managers.

Up to 2,000 jobs are at risk at Barclays in a £1 billion drive to cut costs and increase profits to shareholders. Jobs affected will be in Barclays Execution Services, which supports its retail and international operations.

The Metro Bank is in line to cut 20 percent of its workforce or 800 jobs to save £50 million a year. Shares fell by 67 percent last year. While bank lending is more lucrative with higher interest rates, borrowing is much riskier with the danger of defaults.

According to consumer group Which, 189 local bank branches will be cut in 2024 as customers switch to online banking. The Bank of Scotland, Halifax and Lloyds were expected to close 276 branches in total over 2023/24.

The UK’s largest recruitment agency, the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, warned the Bank of England ahead of its decision on December 13 whether to increase interest rates further, that the recruitment of permanent staff across different sectors had fallen by its second highest rate since the pandemic.

In response to the strike wave in 2022/23, only prevented from coalescing into a general strike by the betrayals of the trade unions, the Bank of England (BoE) followed the US and raised interest rates from a historic low to 5.25 percent to try and depress wage demands. Bank governor Andrew Bailey said rates would need to stay high to tackle inflation, though the rate remained the same.

Skills and productivity partner Claire Warnes at accountancy firm KMPG said “sustained economic slowdown” due to high interest rates among other factors was impacting the hiring of permanent staff, with London hit hardest, and driving forward redundancies.

Towards the end of the year, the number of those seeking jobs rose as major companies implemented layoffs. The unemployment rate in Britain reached 4.2 percent at the beginning of December, with 1.4 million seeking work, an increase of 13,000 from the previous quarter and 206,000 up from the previous year. The unemployment rate showed an increase of 77,000 from its level before the pandemic hit.

In the second quarter of 2023, the age-group with the highest rate of unemployment was the youngest, between 16 and 24.

PwC recently announced job cuts of between 500-600 due to falling demand for advisory services. PwC partners were awarded £906,000 in 2022.

Deloitte is planning to cull 800 jobs in the UK, while EY and KPMG are looking to hundreds of redundancies in their advisory and consulting departments.

Over the coming year, tech companies globally are expected to make layoffs, a trend begun last year. According to online publisher tech.co, most tech companies including Netflix, Microsoft, Twitter, Shopify, Tesla lost staff in 2023. Amazon and Salesforce have begun the new year with redundancies.

UK based British Telecom has declared it will cut its global workforce by 55,000 or more than 40 percent by 2030, a fifth of which will be replaced by AI.

The rise of social media and turn to online publishing is hitting print newspapers and its advertising revenue hard. Reach, the largest commercial news publisher both print and online in the UK and Ireland, plans to lay off 450 journalists. Reach plc has acquired more than 130 brands, like national dailies the Mirror, Express and Daily Star, as well as local brands such as MyLondon, the Manchester Evening News and BelfastLive.

The National Union of Journalists (NUJ), which accepted previous redundancies in the industry, appealed to the company for it to be party to implementing the job cuts. National organiser Laura Davison said, “Reach must act in the spirit of genuine and meaningful engagement, allowing for a flexible and transparent consultation process…”

The digital revolution and turn to online shopping have had a major impact on retailers, forcing the closure of long- established stores in the UK like Debenhams and more recently 400 Wilco stores.

Uncertainty drives market gyrations

Nick Beams

The New Year has opened with uncertainty the dominant feature of international financial markets. A number of questions are arising including: the direction of interest rate policy by the US Federal Reserve and other major central banks; the impact of the interest rate rises over the past 18 months on corporate debt and the commercial property sector; and the effect of rising government debt on the bond market.

Last year ended with a surge on Wall Street on the expectation that the Fed was going to cut interest rates at least three times this year, possibly as early as March, leading to the longest weekly “winning streak” for the market in almost 20 years.

Traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. [AP Photo/Richard Drew]

But after the party there was what was characterised as a sobering up, with loss of 1.5 percent in the S&P 500 for the first week of the year after nine straight weeks of gains. This week opened with a rise.

The characteristic feature of the swings has been their domination by the so-called Magnificent Seven – Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla, Alphabet (Google’s parent) and Meta (Facebook’s parent). After being responsible for the largest portion of the rise, they accounted for 70 percent of the S&P’s decline in the first week of the year.

Their size and the degree of financial concentration they embody is indicated by calculations which show that their total market capitalisation of around $12 trillion is equivalent to the entire market capitalisation of the Canadian, British, and Japanese stock markets combined.

The reason for the swings is the endless calculation and recalculation of where finance capital believes Fed interest policy will go. The surge, which began in October, was given a significant boost by the Fed’s December 13 meeting and the clear indication by Fed chair Jerome Powell at his press conference that rate cuts were under active consideration. The sobering up came when the minutes of the meeting were issued which showed that the claims of a pivot may have been overblown.

The sharp swings in the market create the conditions for the appropriation of large amounts of money, but also for significant losses for those on the wrong side.

While speculation on the direction of interest rates continues, the longer-term effect of the rate rises carried out since March 2022, which have seen the Fed rate rise from near zero to around 5 percent, is starting to show up.

According to analysis by Bloomberg, non-performing loans, where there has not been a payment for at least 90 days, are expected to rise to a combined $24.4 billion at the four largest American banks—JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup—for the last three months of 2023.

This is an increase of $6.6 billion on the figure at the end of 2022.

One of the key areas of concern over the longer-term is commercial property. Loans taken out at historically low interest rates when the Fed was undertaking quantitative easing now must be refinanced at much higher rates. Moreover, the market for office space is experiencing a downturn.

According to a report by four economists published by the National Bureau of Economics, there is an underlying crisis developing in the banking system as $5 trillion of debt taken out in the zero-rate era becomes progressively due.

Colombia University professor, Tomasz Piskorski, one of the authors, said: “It’s not a liquidity problem; it’s a solvency problem.”

In the three months to the end of September, it has been reported the volume of missed payments for loans on properties rented to others rose by 30 percent, or by $4.4 billion, to $17.7 billion.

At the start of the year the FT reported that billions of dollars “will fall due on hundreds of big US office buildings that their owners are likely to struggle to refinance at current rates.”

The size of this “wall of debt,” as it has been characterised in the financial media, is estimated to be $117 billion.

The situation could worsen because, as Richard Hill, head of real estate at the global investment company Cohen & Steers told the FT: “We are in the very beginning of trying to weather the office markets downturn.” The worsening situation had “everything to do with financing costs going back up.”

Another factor which could bring significant financial turbulence is the rise in government debt. In a report issued in November, the Institute for International Finance said the global debt stock rose by over $9.5 trillion in the first three quarters of last year to more than $307 trillion.

The biggest increases were in so-called mature markets, the US, Japan, France and the UK.

With elections taking place in more than 50 countries this year, the IIF pointed to the interconnection between politics and finance.

“If upcoming elections lead to populist policies aimed at controlling social tensions, the result could be more government borrowing and less fiscal restraint. Budget deficits are already running well above pre-pandemic levels in many countries and are expected to add around $5.3 trillion per year to the global government debt.”

This could increase the interest rate burden for many sovereign debtors, because of the expectation that rates would remain higher for longer and generate boom bust cycles in the fixed-income bond markets.

The report cited the recent volatility in the US Treasury market “partially triggered by speculation about a significant rise in government borrowing” as an example of what could take place.

Referring to the IIF analysis yesterday, the FT reported comments by Jim Cielinski, head of global fixed income at the bond trader Janus Henderson, who said deficits were “out of control and the real story is there’s no mechanism for controlling them.” The issue would become one of serious concern to financial markets in the next six to 12 months.

Robert Tipp, head of global bonds at PGIM Fixed Income, said: “We are truly in an unmoored environment for government debt compared with previous centuries. At present, countries such as the US and Italy were getting a ‘free pass’ but that could change.”

How that could take place was referenced by Sir Robert Stheeman, the outgoing head of the UK’s debt management office, in an interview with the FT last week. Without directly citing it, he recalled the financial crisis of September-October 2022 when the short-lived Truss government in Britain sought to finance tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations by increasing debt.

The bond market went into turmoil as pension funds faced a collapse and a major crisis was only averted through an intervention by the Bank of England.

Steetham noted that “in a world where we have debt to sell, policymaking cannot be divorced from the reality of the market.”

While he did not spell it out, that reality could well assert itself in the form of a crisis as it did just 16 months ago.

Amid signs of a COVID surge, Sri Lankan government blocks testing and preventive measures

Kapila Fernando

In the last week of December, three COVID-19 deaths were reported in Sri Lanka, raising serious concerns of a renewed surge in COVID-19 pandemic.

• On December 24, a 65-year-old man died of pneumonia in Kandy Hospital.
• On December 25, a 63-year-old woman died after being admitted to Gampaha General Hospital due to vomiting and respiratory problems.
• On December 29, a 54-year-old mother of three died after being admitted to Anuradhapura General Hospital due to respiratory problems.

All three were confirmed as COVID-infected through tests only after their death. However, it has not yet been confirmed with which COVID variant they had been infected. On January 4, one more death from the COVID-19 was reported.

The bodies of COVID-19 victims placed on hospital stretchers in Sri Lanka. [Photo: Facebook]

The deaths have been reported under circumstances in which the Omicron subvariant, known as JN.1, has rapidly spread throughout more than 40 countries, including the US, in Europe, and in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu that neighbours Sri Lanka. Moreover, the previous strong variant known as BA.2.86 (nicknamed “Pirola”) has not yet gone away.

The reporting of three COVID deaths in a week underscores the danger that many more people are infected across the island under conditions where testing and preventative measures have been all but abandoned.

The government of President Ranil Wickremesinghe and health authorities, however, have refused to increase testing or to take other emergency health care measures such as contact tracing and quarantining to stop the spread of the deadly virus.

Instead, at a press conference held on December 2, Health Minister Ramesh Pathirana said that the people should get used to the health practices followed during the previous COVID period. The government is cynically washing its hands of its responsibility to protect the public from the pandemic and blaming the public instead.

Around the world, capitalist governments have placed corporate profits above human lives. The previous Sri Lankan government of President Gotabhaya Rajapakse in 2021 repeated the lie that the “pandemic is over” and its impact has diminished, even as the Omicron variant continued to spread. The Wickremesinghe government is now following the same murderous policy.

Health ministry spokesperson, Dr G. Wijesuriya, justified the government’s non-implementation COVID testing and other preventative health measures, telling the media on December 29 that “the deaths have nothing to do with the COVID-19 virus.” A day later, he changed his tune, saying: “The public should not have any unnecessary fear of an outbreak of COVID-19.”

In the face of demands from health workers to increase COVID testing, health authorities fraudulently claimed that “sample tests” were conducted by the health ministry and their results were “good”.

The Federation of Health Professionals (FHP) has warned the Health Secretary that “many unnecessary problems may arise by not testing for COVID.” It also asked what tests the ministry is conducting and what are the results.

According to the FHP, even when antibody test kits (antigen tests) are available in hospitals, COVID tests are not being done. Hospitals do not have a system to test health workers with COVID symptoms or suspected COVID patients.

The FHP posed other questions to the Health Secretary including: it is normal to do necessary medical tests in connection with any disease, but why is it not done in connection with COVID; and why are unknown “samples” being tested, even though there are many suspected COVID patients in hospitals?

The media reported on January 4 that rather than increasing testing, the PCR unit conducting COVID tests at the Colombo General Hospital has been completely closed.

Dr. Chandima Jeewandara, director of the Allergy, Immunology and Cell Biology Unit of the University of Sri Jayawardenapura, told the media on December 31 that the new COVID variants may badly affect the elderly and people with chronic diseases and these people needed to get a booster vaccine and wear masks. He also said that he believed that the new subvariant JN.1 may have already come to Sri Lanka.

The Wickremesinghe government and health authorities are creating the conditions for the rapid spread of the deadly COVID virus and its new variants throughout the country without any hindrance.

The criminal disregard of the capitalist ruling class for public health is underlined by the fact that most of the seven million Pfizer vaccines imported into Sri Lanka in 2021/2022 have been allowed to expire. According to former health minister Keheliya Rambukwella, only 13 percent of the imported Pfizer vaccines have been used. The government simply failed to develop a coherent plan to provide vaccinations, especially boosters, in areas outside of Colombo.

The public health care system, which is already suffering from shortages of essential personnel, equipment and drugs, cannot cope with a resurgence of the COVID pandemic. Epidemics of dengue, malaria, encephalitis, leptospirosis and measles in Sri Lanka have already exposed serious public health deficiencies. Most COVID testing, vaccination and treatment are confined to expensive private hospitals which ordinary working people cannot afford.

Sri Lankan governments are not exceptional. Around the world, COVID testing and prevention have all but halted as the deadly virus has been allowed rip through the world’s population. The official global death toll stands at seven million, but many more will have died from the disease as governments insist people “live with COVID.” In Sri Lanka, more than 16,000 have died.

Independent medical scientists are warning that the danger of the pandemic continues with evolution of deadly new strains. Many millions who have been infected suffer from the impact of Long COVID that can seriously harm vital organs and lead to heart attacks and strokes as well as kidney and neurological diseases.