India’s highest court upholds life sentences for framed-up Pricol workers

Kranti Kumara

India’s Supreme Court has again demonstrated its inherent, implacable hostility to the working class and its struggles, upholding the life sentences imposed on two Pricol workers—the union militants Manivannan and Ramamurthy—on frame-up murder charges.

Based in Coimbatore in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Pricol is a multinational auto parts manufacturer.

India’s highest court announced late last year that it would not even hear an appeal of the convictions of Manivannan and Ramamurthy, although the case against them has all the hallmarks of a crude frame-up. These include gaping holes and inconsistencies in the police/prosecution narrative and the lack of any incriminating forensic evidence.

At the same time, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the company’s appeal of the acquittals of seven other Pricol workers on charges of murder and criminal trespass with intention to kill.

Six of these workers were exonerated by the High Court in Dec. 2016 after a lower court had sentenced them, along with Manivannan and Ramamurthy, to double life sentences for the unexplained September 21, 2009 killing of Pricol Human Resources Vice President Roy George.

The seventh was among 19 others whom the first court to hear the case had conceded were innocent of any and all involvement in George’s death.

All but one of the 19, including four women workers, were fellow militants at Pricol’s Coimbatore operations. The lone non-Pricol worker was S. Kumarasamy, the General-Secretary of the AICCTU, the national union federation to which the two unions formed by the Pricol workers in Coimbatore belong.

There are striking parallels between the struggle and the company-state frame-up of the Pricol workers and the travails of the victimized workers at Maruti Suzuki’s car assembly plant in Manesar, Haryana.

In both cases the workers encountered ferocious resistance from their employer—a globally-connected auto company—when they sought to challenge poverty wages and brutal working conditions. And in both cases the state has worked hand-in-glove with management to frame up and exact savage legal punishment on those in the leadership of the workers’ resistance.

The World Socialist Web Site has provided a detailed exposure of the frame-up of the Maruti Suzuki workers and is mounting a campaign to mobilize workers around the world to fight for the immediate release of the 13 workers—including all 12 executive members of the Maruti Suzuki Workers Union—who have been unjustly condemned to life imprisonment for the death, by asphyxiation, of Human Resources Manager Avineesh Dev.

As in the case of Dev’s death, George’s murder was used by the company and police to launch a vendetta against workers who had been leading the fight to build new unions. And as with the Maruti Suzuki workers, Indian authorities, including the country’s highest court, have connived in the frame-up of the workers, with the aim of intimidating the entire working class and enforcing the sweatshop conditions demanded by Indian and international capital.

Pricol, which began as a family-owned concern in the 1970s, now has six plants in India, including in Manesar, where the victimized Maruti Suzuki workers were employed, producing a wide range of components for cars, trucks, and motorcycles. It also has plants in Brazil and Indonesia, and business offices in the US, Germany, Japan and elsewhere, with a total global workforce of 5,500.

Pricol has justifiably earned a reputation for imposing a backbreaking work regime for minimum pay. In 2007, when the Coimbatore workers began to organize to challenge management, a worker with 25 years’ experience was earning around Rs. 8,600, or just $215 US per month. Today a worker with a quarter-century of service at Pricol reportedly receives a monthly wage of Rs. 25,000, or $390, which due to inflation represents only a modest improvement.

Many workers are employed as apprentices or as contract workers, meaning they earn only a fraction of the wages of full-time employees.

Such conditions are the norm across India. Moreover, companies enforce production quotas, attendance and other work rules with heavy fines, suspensions and dismissals. Pricol management is notorious for such practices.

To push back, the Coimbatore workers staged a sustained campaign of militant actions in open revolt against existing unions allied with management, and turned to the AICCTU, a small trade union federation affiliated to the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation. The latter is a Maoist organization that increasingly works in alliance with the main Stalinist parliamentary parties, the CPM and CPI, which were integrated into the bourgeois political establishment decades ago.

In the two years prior to George’s murder, Pricol management sought to break the workers’ resistance through a campaign of intimidation. Hundreds of workers were terminated and more than 150 fired. The company refused to negotiate with the workers unless they repudiated their new AICCTU-aligned unions, and it transferred top union office-holders to its plant in Uttarakhand, well over a thousand miles away. Management also threatened to close down the plants and worked with police to file criminal charges against workers on more than 40 separate occasions.

The workers responded by intensifying their struggle. This included large rallies, petitions to the government, and “stay-in” strikes where they would occupy the plants for hours at a time. On one occasion when the police tried to enter to violently eject workers on a “stay-in” strike, women workers doused themselves with petrol (gasoline) and kerosene and threatened to set fire to themselves.

The legal case against the Pricol workers cannot withstand serious scrutiny. As it is, convictions have been upheld against just 2 of the 27 persons the police and prosecution argued had entered into a criminal conspiracy to murder George.

The police and prosecution claimed there was CCTV footage showing some of the accused carrying out a murderous assault on George with metal rods. But when they couldn’t produce such footage in court, they claimed the CCTV had in fact malfunctioned.

Eight rods that were supposedly used in the attack were entered as evidence. But none had George’s blood on them, nor could they be linked via fingerprints to any of the accused.

The state argued that because George’s body had eight wounds, eight rods must have been used and eight persons must have been involved in the attack. Not only is there no basis for such inferences, the post-mortem showed George had suffered just three wounds.

Prosecution witnesses who supposedly witnessed the attack repeatedly failed to identify or correctly identify workers they had implicated in the attack on George.

The police First Information report was tampered with to add the names of additional workers.

The courts dismissed much of the testimony of the one eyewitness, a Pricol official who implicated Manivannan and Ramamurthy, as not credible.

Among the most curious aspects of the case is that an investigating officer was outside the company Human Resources office at the very time in the late morning of September 21, 2009 that the attack is said to have taken place, yet he heard and saw nothing.

Moreover, company officials did not inform him, anyone among the detachment of Armed Reserve Police that had been deployed at the plant for over a year, or the local police office that George and four other company officials had been attacked until the late afternoon—hours after they had been transported to hospital.

The Pricol workers falsely implicated in George’s death have suffered greatly, including long terms in jail awaiting the outcome of the legal proceedings against them. The verdict in the first trial was only rendered in 2015, more than six years after they were arrested. During this ordeal one of the framed-up workers committed suicide, as did the wife of another.

French President Macron turns his labor decrees against rail workers

Alex Lantier

On Monday, French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe announced plans to end the French rail workers’ statute and privatize the French National Railways (SNCF). Aware of deep anger among workers at his agenda, amid rising class struggles across Europe and internationally, he declared he would unilaterally impose the reform using President Emmanuel Macron’s labor decrees. This aims to give him time to drum up support from legislators and pro-corporate trade unions.

Philippe confirmed that he intends to eliminate the social rights granted to French rail workers in recognition of their participation in the defeat of Nazi Germany, led above all by the Soviet Union, in World War II. He said, “To new generations, apprentices, all those looking to join the SNCF, we say that they will enjoy the guarantees on working conditions enjoyed by all Frenchmen, those of the Labor Code. … In the future, at a date that will be worked out, there will be no further recruitment based on the rail workers’ statute.”

Claiming the SNCF’s situation is “alarming,” Philippe called on parliament to pass an enabling act to allow the government to impose its reform using Macron’s labor decrees. He said, “Faced with urgency, the government is determined to get key principles passed before the summer. … In mid-May we will submit a draft Enabling Act to the parliament. Using the decrees will allow for broad negotiations” with SNCF management and the unions. He also called for privatizing the SNCF, which would be transformed into a corporation whose shares are partially owned by the state.

The policy of Philippe and Macron is illegitimate and anti-democratic, both in its form and content, and deserves to be rejected with contempt.

The claim that there is not enough money to maintain the French rail workers’ statute and, more broadly, workers’ living standards across Europe, is a political lie. While attacking SNCF workers, Macron is handing over billions of euros in tax cuts for the rich (ISF). The French state gave the banks €360 billion in loan guarantees overnight during the 2008 Wall Street crash, and supported the European Central Bank’s lending of trillions of euros to the banks since then.

What is driving this reactionary policy is the war drive of the major imperialist powers: Macron is intending to finance a surge of French militarism at the workers’ expense.

On February 17, at the Munich Security Conference, French Defense Minister Florence Parly announced a 35 percent surge to a €300 billion military budget for 2018-2024. To join in the ongoing militarization of the European Union (EU), carried out together with Berlin, Macron intends to throw the workers back decades in order to finance wars in Mali, Syria and beyond, including wars directly between the major nuclear powers.

The government’s vision of the future, as shown by its plans to impose its labor decrees on PSA autoworkers and the SNCF rail workers, is to reduce all workers to temps without any social rights. Philippe’s promise to offer rail workers the protections of the Labor Code is a cynical fraud. The labor law passed with Macron’s participation in the 2012-2017 Socialist Party (PS) government of President François Hollande allows the bosses and union to agree to violate the Labor Code. Even the protections Philippe claims to offer are, in fact, being repudiated.

That is what was shown when the unions and the French chemical industry agreed last year on a contract in which workers are paid under the minimum wage, which is defined in the Labor Code.

No real struggle can be mounted against Macron’s regressive policies without carrying out a struggle against war and social inequality in the working class across Europe.

As Macron presents his plan to liquidate the SNCF, there is rising opposition and militancy in the working class internationally after a decade of accelerating social attacks since the 2008 crash. Since the beginning of 2018, there have been mass workers protests in Iran and Tunisia, strikes by German and Turkish metalworkers, British rail workers, and by Greek workers against the Syriza (“Coalition of the Radical Left”) government’s austerity policies.

In the United States, the powerful American proletariat is entering into struggle. Amid rising anger among autoworkers over the corporate bribing of United Auto Workers (UAW) union officials to impose a reactionary contract, teachers across the entire state of West Virginia are defying a right-wing governor and mobilizing to demand better wages and working conditions.

And in France, the rail workers face the necessity of organizing a struggle amid growing strikes by Air France and health care workers.

To oppose Macron’s attacks, workers cannot accept the straitjacket of a few symbolic trade union protests organized at the national level. The key question is to take the struggle out of the hands of the union bureaucracy and its political allies, who are leading the “negotiations” with Macron, and organize independently to wage a political struggle against the anti-democratic and militarist policies of Macron and the EU.

The government is counting on a purely national mobilization of rail workers in France, isolated from other layers of workers already targeted by Macron—auto, chemical workers, and retirees. He aims to divide and rule, exhausting or breaking up protests in various industries, isolated from their class brothers and sisters internationally. The French trade unions are adamant that the struggles now taking place inside France should not be unified, and sections of the press are gloating that it will be possible to inflict a humiliating and demoralizing defeat on the rail workers.

Speaking to Le Monde, pollster Jérôme Sainte-Marie advised Macron as follows: “For him it would be best for the reform of the SNCF to take on the appearance of a battle. If victory were too easy, he would get less out of it politically. It would be better if it were like the miners strike for Thatcher, a heroic struggle against the dreaded fantasy of the trade union monster that he ultimately wins.”

The reference to the 1985 miners strike in Great Britain, in which the trade unions isolated a strike controlled by the National Union of Mineworkers, and allowed British Prime Minster Margaret Thatcher to wage a broad assault on workers’ living standards, is a warning as to Macron’s plans.

The bourgeoisie’s strategy depends critically on the treachery of trade unions who fundamentally share the nationalist and militarist perspective of Macron. The call by leading members of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France (LFI) to spend billions more on the army is a clear reflection of the reactionary outlook of these layers, which include the so-called “class struggle unions” linked to LFI, like the Stalinist General Confederation of Labor (CGT).

Willing to “modernize” the country and promote its “competitiveness” and its power on the world stage, they are willing to accept any of the social attacks they are negotiating with Macron.

The unions are desperately seeking to posture as forces for opposition, while avoiding organizing any opposition. The CGT initially called for a symbolic one-day strike on March 22, and even the French Democratic Labor Confederation (CFDT), which hailed Macron’s labor decrees and voted the sub-minimum wage contracts in the chemical industry, briefly declared it wanted to launch an “extendable strike starting on March 14.”

Yesterday, however, it was announced that the unions would postpone all decisions on strike action over the SNCF reform until March 15.

US airstrike kills dozens amid mounting Western war propaganda over Syria

Bill Van Auken

A US air strike in Syria’s eastern Deir Ezzor province killed at least 25 civilians Monday, the majority of them women and children.

The American bombing raid, which struck the settlement of Dahra Alounik, was reported by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitoring group that is hostile to the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad.

A Pentagon spokesman provided the standard and indifferent US military response to the exposure of such atrocities. “We take all allegations seriously and as we always do we will put it into our civilian casualty assessment and we will publish the results of those on a monthly basis,” Col. Ryan Dillon told the Reuters news agency.

The American air strike was reported by the Turkish Anadolu agency to be part of a broader bombing campaign in Deir Ezzor aimed at halting the advance of forces loyal to the Assad government on strategically important gas and oil fields and facilities that had been under the control of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which handed them over to the US military and its proxy ground forces dominated by the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia.

The same area saw a savage onslaught by US warplanes and artillery batteries on February 7 against a column of Syrian government forces in which at least 100 were killed, including a number of Russian military contractors.

The latest killing of Syrian civilians by US bombs—carried out in open violation of a supposed 30-day truce mandated by the United Nations Security Council last Saturday—attracted scant attention in the Western media, which has returned to the kind of full-throated outcry over alleged atrocities by the Syrian government and its principal military ally, Russia, which has not been seen since the siege of Aleppo at the end of 2016.

The sole focus of attention regarding the ceasefire has been the Damascus suburb of Eastern Ghouta, which has been under the control of Islamist militias since 2013. Syrian and Russian forces have carried out an intense bombardment of the semi-rural district for the past 10 days, reportedly killing between 400 and 500 people. The Syrian military has massed troops around the district for a planned offensive to retake one of the last strongholds of the Al Qaeda-linked “rebels” armed and funded by the CIA and Washington’s regional allies.

The hypocrisy of the Western media’s denunciations of the brutal methods employed by the Syrian government and its allies in eastern Ghouta is underscored by their near total silence on the far more extensive slaughter wrought by the US military in its devastating sieges against the Iraqi city of Mosul and Raqqa, the so-called Syrian capital of ISIS. Both cities were effectively razed to the ground by US airstrikes and artillery bombardment, while the number of casualties is estimated in the tens of thousands.

The same television networks and newspapers now repeating the phrase that eastern Ghouta has been turned into a “hell on earth”—or as USA Today put it a “tragedy beyond words”—summoned up no such outrage as Mosul and Raqqa were reduced to rubble. While in Ghouta, they have faithfully repeated every allegation made by the so-called “White Helmets,” an ostensible civil defense group that functions as a propaganda outlet for the Al Qaeda-linked forces, no expression was given to the suffering of the populations subjected to the Pentagon’s onslaught.

The one result of the UN ceasefire resolution has been Russia’s imposition beginning on Tuesday of a five hour—9 a.m. to 2 p.m.—daily truce in Eastern Ghouta with the aim of allowing civilian to leave the war-ravaged enclave.

The so-called rebels, however, no doubt acting with the approval of Washington, sought to sabotage the initiative, launching fresh mortar attacks on Damascus on Monday night and firing rockets against a humanitarian corridor and checkpoint designated for evacuation to prevent anyone from leaving. They also reportedly launched an attack on Syrian army positions as the truce was to take effect.

The UN-affiliated Reach Initiative, which monitors humanitarian crises, has reported that the “rebels” have consistently blocked civilians, including women and children, from leaving the zones under their control. “Women of all ages, and children, reportedly continued to be forbidden by local armed groups from leaving the area,” the aid agency said in a recent report.

While in both Mosul and Raqqa, the Pentagon and its stenographers in the US and other Western media routinely charged ISIS with using civilians as “human shields,” the phrase is never applied to eastern Ghouta, where it is clear that the Al Qaeda-linked militias are forcibly detaining civilians to serve just that function.

The denunciations of Damascus and Moscow over civilian deaths in eastern Ghouta has been joined by a series of unsubstantiated allegations of the Assad government’s use of chemical weapons against the area’s population. The first such alleged attack came immediately after the Russian government issued a warning that the “rebels” had brought chlorine and gas masks into the region with the aim of staging an incident that could then be blamed on the government, providing a motive for Western intervention.

A gas attack in the same area in 2013 brought the US to the brink of direct military intervention against the Syrian government before the Obama administration accepted a Russian-brokered agreement to secure the complete destruction of the Syrian military’s chemical stockpile. There was strong evidence that that attack had also been staged by the “rebels.”

Similarly, a chemical weapons incident in Khan Sheikhoun last April was seized upon by the Trump administration as the pretext for launching 59 cruise missiles at Syria’s Shayrat airbase. Damascus insisted that it had not carried out the attack, and indeed had no discernible motive to use such a weapon, which was certain to provoke Western retaliation.

The US, British and French governments have all issued threats to stage military attacks on Syria in the event of another chemical weapons attack. British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson reiterated this threat on Tuesday, saying that his government would carry out strikes if there was “incontrovertible evidence” of Syrian government responsibility.

Adding fuel to the fire, the New York Times Tuesday published a front page article titled “ U.N. Links North Korea to Syria’s Chemical Weapon Program,” which consisted of a series of unsubstantiated allegations and what amounts to propaganda for US wars against both countries.

The article echoes similar charges published in the Times about Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” in the run-up to the US war of aggression in 2003. It states that an unpublished UN report has alleged trade between North Korea and Syria that could “allow Syria to maintain its chemical weapons while also providing North Korea with cash for its nuclear and missile programs.”

Having constructed this new “axis of evil,” the Times goes on to acknowledge that the alleged shipments involved “materials that could be used for both military and civilian purposes” and that “Experts who viewed the report said the evidence it cited did not prove definitively that there was current, continuing collaboration between North Korea and Syria on chemical weapons.”

Joining the drumbeat for a major escalation of the US military intervention against Syria—and with it the prospect of a far more dangerous armed confrontation between US imperialism and both Iran and Russia—a group of 200 “activists” issued an open letter entitled “Stop pretending that you can’t do anything to save Syrians.”

Published by the New York Review of Books on Tuesday, the letter dismisses the United Nations as “ineffectual” and directly appeals to the major imperialist powers to act under the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine. “For the agony of the people of Syria to come to an end, it must be forcibly stopped,” the letter states.

Among the signatories are Eric Ruder, a writer for the International Socialist Organization’s Socialist Worker in the US, Gilbert Achcar, a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London and the principal spokesman on the Middle East for the Pabloite United Secretariat and its web site International Viewpoint and Michael Karadjis, a leading member of the Australian organization Socialist Alliance.

The appeal for armed action issued by these pseudo-left elements, reflecting a privileged upper middle-class layer whose interests are directly tied to imperialism, is an unmistakable warning that a major new war is being prepared.

Media, Democrats silent as US Supreme Court rules immigrants can be indefinitely detained

Eric London

In a 5-3 decision handed down on Tuesday, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Jennings v. Rodriguez that the government can arrest and indefinitely detain immigrants, depriving them of the fundamental right to bail.

As a result, hundreds of thousands of immigrants will be locked up in internment camps as their immigration cases proceed, with no opportunity for release until their cases are decided—a process that often takes years. Roughly 450,000 immigrants were jailed in detention centers at some point during the last year, and that number will increase astronomically after yesterday’s ruling.

The decision makes no distinction between undocumented immigrants and those with legal permanent residency. It means millions of immigrants living in the US are subject to arrest and indefinite detention.

This milestone event has passed with virtually no comment in the corporate-controlled press. As of Tuesday evening, the online front pages of the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC and Politico had no coverage of the ruling, while the New York Times had a single article far down its page. At the same time, these five sites featured a combined 23 front-page articles on the anti-Russia witch hunt.

No major Democratic Party official has made a statement on the ruling, and the Twitter accounts of Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, Charles Schumer, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are all silent.

The case was initiated by Alejandro Rodriguez, a Mexican citizen who was jailed in 2004 and held in detention without bond as his case made its way through the arduous immigration appeals process. In 2007, after being imprisoned for three years, he filed a habeas corpus petition challenging his long detention. The District Court for the Central District of California ultimately certified a class of plaintiffs including thousands of similarly situated immigrants on whose behalf the suit was fought. Many class members have been detained for longer than six months.

Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion shows the depth of support within the ruling class for police-state methods of rule. “Detention during [immigration] proceedings gives immigration officials time to determine an alien’s status without running the risk of the alien’s either absconding or engaging in criminal activity,” the decision reads. The ruling overturns a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision mandating bond hearings after six months of detention. Alito scolded the Ninth Circuit for the “implausible” argument that indefinite detention “raise[s] serious constitutional concerns.”

Alito, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Anthony Kennedy, Neil Gorsuch and John Roberts, mocked the three-justice dissent for “devoting the first two-thirds of its opinion to a disquisition on the Constitution.” Thomas and Gorsuch agreed with the result but said the court should throw the challenge out because immigrants do not have the habeas corpus right to even question the legality of their detention.

Justice Stephen Breyer, whose dissent was joined by Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Sonia Sotomayor, warned:

“No one can claim, nor since the time of slavery has anyone to my knowledge successfully claimed, that persons held within the United States are totally without constitutional protection. Whatever the fiction, would the Constitution leave the Government free to starve, beat or lash those held within our boundaries? If not, then, whatever the fiction, how can the Constitution authorize the Government to imprison arbitrarily those who, whatever we might pretend, are in reality right here in the United States? The answer is that the Constitution does not authorize arbitrary detention. And the reason that it is so is simple: Freedom from arbitrary detention is as ancient and important a right as any found within the Constitution’s boundaries.”

Elsewhere, he added, “We need only recall the words of the Declaration of Independence, in particular its insistence that all men and women have ‘certain unalienable Rights,’ and that among them is the right to ‘Liberty.’”

Although the Democratic appointees’ dissent makes additional warnings about the impact of yesterday’s decision, there has been no comment on the role of the Democratic Party in paving the way for the decision. Democratic nominee Elena Kagan recused herself from the decision because she was solicitor general when the Obama administration argued against granting the plaintiffs a bond hearing in the lower courts and in support of indefinite immigrant detention.

The statutes cited by the Alito majority were passed with bipartisan support. When Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch argued that immigrants have no right to even file habeas corpus petitions based on final deportation orders, they cited a statute enacted as part of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, which had bipartisan approval in Congress, including from Democrats such as Harry Reid, Dianne Feinstein, Elijah Cummings, Steny Hoyer and Sheila Jackson-Lee, and was signed into law by Democratic President Bill Clinton.

The case now heads back to the Ninth Circuit. In rejecting the six-month bond requirement set by that court, the Supreme Court remanded for further deliberation on the merits of the immigrants’ constitutional claims.

Jennings v. Rodriguez is further proof that the Bill of Rights is a dead letter. Both parties have signed off on mass surveillance, illegal war, state torture, black site prisons and drone assassinations of US citizens without warrants or trials. The decision of the political and media establishment to downplay the significance of Tuesday’s ruling shows that there is no constituency for the defense of democratic rights in the American ruling class.

The authorization for a regime of mass indefinite detention is an existential threat to workers of all national origins, regardless of immigration status. There is a history in the US, including during miners’ strikes in Bisbee, Arizona in 1917 and Colorado from 1901 to 1903, of the government indefinitely detaining and even deporting striking workers from one state to another at the behest of the corporations. Not only will the decision be cited as the Trump administration expands the network of immigrant internment camps across the country, it will soon be turned against US citizen workers as well.

Amid continuing crisis, Sri Lankan government leaders continue fragile coalition

K. Ratnayake 

After more than a week of political wrangling, Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe decided to continue the national unity government, in which Sirisena’s Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and Wickremesinghe’s United National Party (UNP) are partners.

Speaking in parliament last Wednesday, Wickremesinghe declared “there is no reason to end the unity government.” Mahinda Amaraweera, a senior minister and general secretary of the SLFP-led United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA), concurred, despite earlier calling on Sirisena to split from the UNP and form a UPFA government.

On Sunday, at Sirisena’s insistence, Wickremesinghe reshuffled the cabinet, altering the role of some UNP ministers. Sirisena later tweeted: “These changes, as well as those to be made of the UPFA side of the government, will strengthen us to better serve the people.”

No one should be hoodwinked by the pretence that the government is stable and serving the people. The ruling coalition was on the point of breaking up before the US and India intervened to demand that the UNP and UPFA maintain the government, which has aligned with Washington against China.

The coalition crisis was triggered by disastrous results in local government elections on February 10, which exposed widespread opposition to the ruling parties. The newly-formed Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), led by former President Mahinda Rajapakse, won control of the majority of local councils.

The outcome was not a vote of support for Rajapakse, who lost the 2015 presidential election amid intense hostility to his anti-democratic methods of rule and attacks on living conditions. Rather it was a protest vote against the present government’s austerity program dictated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Sirisena immediately blamed Wickremesinghe for the election defeat and demanded he resign as prime minister if the government were to continue. The president threatened to form a government led by his own SLFP and UPFA allies, and tried to garner support from the Rajapakse-led SLFP faction. Wickremesinghe refused to resign and threatened to form a government based on the UNP.

With the government about to collapse, the US and India intervened via their diplomats in Colombo to pressure Sirisena and Wickremesinghe to maintain the coalition government. An Indian Express columnist wrote last Wednesday: “New Delhi is said to be counselling both leaders against any precipitate action,” adding that “the best outcome for India would be if Wickremesinghe and Sirisena patched up.”

The US, backed by India, orchestrated a regime-change operation at the 2015 presidential election to oust Rajapakse and install Sirisena in power. Washington, which is seeking to undermine Chinese influence throughout Asia, was hostile to Rajapakse’s close relations with Beijing and certainly does not want him returning to office.

However, the main concern of the Sri Lankan ruling class is the country’s deepening economic crisis and growing protests and strikes by workers, the rural poor and students. The fear is that the weakened government could prove incapable of implementing the IMF’s austerity agenda and containing social unrest.

Power workers began protest actions last week to demand the reinstatement of their trade union leaders. Last Wednesday, thousands of university students marched in central Colombo to oppose the privatisation of education.

Wickremesinghe told a special meeting of UNP leaders on Sunday: “We have to accept the fact that the government’s programs have been rejected by the people.” He was referring to the local government election. Deputy leader Sajith Premadasa declared that the government must implement a “welfare package” in a bid to head off popular hostility.

The government decided last week to lower the price of fertiliser and provide cash directly to farmers to buy it. The finance ministry announced the provision of housing loans at a low interest rate—a measure that will largely benefit the middle class.

These moves, however, are purely cosmetic as the government is confronting a worsening financial crisis. On February 16, Central Bank Governor Indrajit Coomaraswamy called for “political stability as quickly as possible,” warning that the country’s massive loan repayments will continue to rise, even as economic growth slowed to 3.8 percent last year.

Coomaraswamy warned: “If the political situation leads to a loosening of fiscal policy, the Central Bank would have to lean against that and tighten monetary policy”—that is, increase interest rates. He added: “To be frank, there is no scope at all for loosening fiscal policy.”

Significantly, in his cabinet reshuffle, the prime minister took charge of the law and order ministry in the context of demands within the coalition for a crackdown on the Rajapakse grouping. The government has been criticised internally for failing to investigate corruption charges against Rajapakse and his associates, thus facilitating his comeback.

Former army commander Sarath Fonseka, who is already a government minister, was reportedly considered for the post of law and order minister. Although the proposal was dropped, it is a warning that the government is preparing to target, not only political opponents such as Rajapakse, but the working class and youth. General Fonseka was ruthless in the war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam that ended with the killing of tens of thousands of civilians.

Purawesi Balaya (Citizen’s Power), an NGO that supported Sirisena’s election, urged the government to appoint Fonseka to the law and order post. After a meeting with Wickremesinghe, Dambara Amila, a Purawesi Balaya leader, said police operations should be allowed to take place outside “democratic norms” with Fonseka in charge.

Purawesi Balaya and pseudo-left Nava Sama Samaja Party leader Wickremabahu Karunaratne have previously attacked protests by workers and students as conspiracies in support of Rajapakse and backed the government’s crackdown on protesters.

Rajapakse and his faction announced they will begin a campaign on March 6 to demand the dissolution of parliament and fresh elections. Following the local election, Rajapakse declared: “There is instability in the country. This cannot be continued. An election must be called and a stable government must be established.” Rajapakse’s call for a “stable government” is nothing but a call for police-state measures against workers and youth.

Both rival factions of the ruling class are committed to implementing the IMF’s dictates and determined to use any means to suppress social unrest.

The advent of “pop-up” schools in Australia: Yet another assault on public education

Erika Zimmer & Linda Tenenbaum

Australian state governments have responded to the increasingly serious public school infrastructure crisis by launching “pop-up” public schools. These are based on the relatively new model of local “pop-up” designer label stores, located in recently vacated retail premises and featuring the cheapest possible infrastructure and staffing. This is commensurate with their goal: holding mega sales to quickly shift excess stock at extremely cheap prices.

The very name, not to speak of its origins, underscores the contemptuous attitude of the political establishment towards the democratic right of public school students to a high quality, fully-resourced education. That would include, at the minimum, adequate numbers of classrooms located in safe, well-designed and constructed buildings, as well as all the amenities for play, sports and creative pursuits that every child requires.

“Pop-up” schools, on the contrary are becoming yet another means of pressuring parents to send their children to expensive private schools, thus expanding the private system at the direct expense of public education. They are temporary, consist of cheap “demountable” classrooms, which are easily dismantled and moved, and often located in areas where there are no facilities for children to play.

Over the past three decades, hundreds of public schools across the country have been shut down, while funds have been showered onto the private sector. The result has been one of the most privatised and unequal school systems in the world.

The shift towards private school enrolments has declined, however, in the past three years, partly due to the skyrocketing of private school fees.

This has led to a major and ever-burgeoning public school infrastructure crisis. According to the Grattan Institute, a public policy think tank, an estimated 650,000 students will enrol in public schools nationally during the next decade, requiring the construction of between 400 and 750 new schools, at a cost of $6 to $11 billion.

Overcrowding is a severe problem, particularly in Sydney and Melbourne, the main metropolitan cities. At Willoughby Public School, a few kilometres from Sydney’s central business district, more than 2,000 students share a site with the high school, on an area designed to accommodate 450 students. Last month, hundreds of students arrived for the first day of the school year to find there were not enough classrooms available. At Bondi Beach Public School, in Sydney’s east, two classes were held in the school’s library and learning centre. Parents and Citizens (P&C) president Rob Keldoulis complained that the student overflow meant that the rest of the school was unable to access computers or the full catalogue of books.

At Carlingford West Public School, in Sydney’s north-west, six classes were held in the school hall, the library or in shared classrooms. The vice-president of the school’s P&C told the media, “A lot of the kids haven’t been able to start their educational programs because they’re crammed into one area or they’ve been sitting in the library for the past week.”

Schools are attempting to cope by rostering playground use, since there is insufficient space for all students to play at the same time, while libraries and storage rooms are being utilised as classrooms. Some schools have just one toilet for up to 60 students.

Documents obtained under Freedom of Information laws reveal that one in ten public school classrooms in New South Wales (NSW), Australia’s most populous state, is now a “demountable.” And their numbers have escalated by 17 percent in the past two years. According to one parent, “Children are now spending their childhoods in tin boxes, which cover playgrounds so overcrowded that active play is an impossibility.”

NSW now has 4,665 demountable classrooms in its 2,211 schools, with those in the state’s working-class areas twice as likely to have them.

Maria Rallas, P&C president of Canterbury Public School, a Sydney suburb with a high immigrant and working-class population, told the media that her school’s three demountable classrooms took up “precious playground space.” “Year by year, children at our school are losing space for physical play, which is vital for helping combat childhood obesity. The students are devastated whenever they see a new one arrive, as they are always placed in a prime position of our paddock, on flat and level ground … where soccer games would normally take place at lunchtime.”

In its response to the infrastructure crisis, the NSW Liberal government has announced it will allocate $4.2 billion to launch “the biggest school building program in the state’s history,” with plans to build schools to “last 100 years or more” and benefit “generations to come.”

In reality, the government is responding to its own wilful neglect in typical knee-jerk fashion. Its agenda has very little to do with developing the quality of the public education that it provides to its public students.

Last month, at the beginning of the school year, NSW Education Minister Rob Stokes launched a “pop-up” school in Ultimo, an inner-city Sydney suburb, claiming this was a “clever, innovative solution” and that “more were likely.”

“We’re going to require a few temporary schools in different locations,” Stokes told the media. Accompanying him, Premier Gladys Berejiklian cynically claimed, “Children will be running around the park, running around the classroom.”

The construction of a new, desperately needed Ultimo Public School is projected to take two years. During that time, according to Elizabeth Elenius from Pyrmont Action Incorporated, students in years 3 to 6 at the temporary “pop up” site have been rationed to two, 40-minute sessions on grassed areas per week. Younger children will be confined to the timber decking area, which connects the classrooms and is unsuitable for running.

A decking area at Ultimo Public School

The current Ultimo Public School has 360 students. It is due to be replaced in 2020 by a high-rise school, projected to enrol 800 students. In the two year interim, children will attend the “pop up” school.

Bernadette, a parent, spoke to the WSWS about her concerns. “So far as I can see, a “pop up” school is simply a fancy, perky phrase to make it not sound like demountable classrooms,” she said. “In reality, that is what the “pop up” school is. Ultimo Public School was perhaps the newest school in Sydney. It had recently been redeveloped, because it was full.

“While it was being redeveloped, our kids were being bussed to another primary school, to camp in their car park. This proved a major disaster. Our kids were arriving in time for morning tea and leaving in the afternoon break. They lost half their school day to travelling, and sweltered in badly resourced hot boxes. They arrived home completely exhausted. The school was full as soon as it reopened.”

Asked what she thought of the “consultancy process,” Bernadette explained that those participating in the consultancy groups “were told they could not share their meeting discussions with the parents, because they were ‘commercial-in-confidence.’ I believe they had to sign documents to that effect. Effectively, the only opportunity to ask specific questions was at the Parent and Citizen meetings which, during the last year or so, were only held during the day.” This meant that the majority of parents could not attend these meetings, even if they had wanted to.

Referring to the contaminated soil on which the “pop-up” school had been built, where elevated concentrations of lead and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons had been found, Bernadette said, “So far as I can tell they just covered it up with some topsoil and no monitoring is planned.”

She concluded: “History is now going to repeat itself. It will be necessary to redevelop or build a new school in the area almost as soon as this new build is completed. Even if the proposed school had the capacity for 800 students, which it doesn’t, that would not be enough to meet community needs. It is not big enough and cannot be big enough without a bigger site. Our area has the densest population in Australia, and many more developments are under construction locally. The situation is clear in the population statistics and has been for decades. I am not sure if this is a result of corrupt behaviour or gross incompetence, or the situation is being wilfully ignored for political reasons, to try and force kids into the private sector.”

Australian government instability intensifies after deputy prime minister’s removal

Mike Head

The rifts tearing apart both coalition partners in the Liberal-National Coalition government are set to worsen following last Friday’s forced resignation of Barnaby Joyce as deputy prime minister and National Party leader.

It is now clear that Joyce was not removed because of an untested complaint of sexual harassment, as Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, his key ministers and the corporate media have all claimed. Rather the government and the mass media manipulated and seized upon that allegation to politically execute Joyce. It was a calculated #MeToo-style operation of unsubstantiated accusations of sexual misconduct.

None of the sordid details now emerging about the high-level plotting to knife Joyce can be understood outside the broader political context.

As underlined by Turnbull’s trip to Washington, where the prime minister escalated the government’s commitment to US war preparations, the real reasons for Joyce’s ouster lie in the immense tensions wracking the government, driven by both geo-strategic and domestic crises.

There is the growing danger of trade war, and ultimately war, between the US and China, which would have massive consequences for the Australian capitalist class. This is being compounded by the financial elite’s mounting discontent with the Coalition government’s failure to carry through the full corporate agenda of sweeping cuts to company taxes and social spending.

The bitterly divided vote by National Party members of parliament to replace Joyce by a virtually unknown junior minister, Michael McCormack, highlights the fact that these stresses are not just engulfing Turnbull’s government. The Liberal-National Coalition itself, a vital mechanism of capitalist rule, is coming apart, underscoring the fragility of the deeply unpopular parliamentary elite as a whole.

The National Party is split down the middle. Reportedly, McCormack was within one vote in the 21-member party caucus of being defeated by a staunch Joyce supporter, David Littleproud, whom Joyce had elevated into Turnbull’s inner cabinet last year. Despite public calls by the party’s deputy leader Bridget McKenzie for the ballot to be uncontested, Littleproud only pulled after it became evident that McCormack had the numbers.

Nevertheless, right-wing populist George Christensen, who openly called last weekend for the Nationals to withdraw from the Coalition, stood as a protest candidate against McCormack. In an effort to maintain the image of a united front, the National Party refused to divulge the final vote count. But on Facebook Christensen had declared he would rather see “a full cabinet of Liberal ministers than have to compromise our values and the welfare of the good people we represent.”

Christensen threatened to cross the parliamentary floor last year, in order to force the government to call a royal commission into the predatory practices of the major banks and finance houses. Like Joyce, Christensen has long been alarmed by the danger of the National Party losing its base among impoverished rural residents, especially in his home state of Queensland, to the nationalist, anti-immigrant and protectionist Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party.

Inflaming these fissures is the fact that Turnbull and the political establishment, including the big business wing of the National Party, were determined to depose Joyce by any means whatsoever. Yesterday, Turnbull revealed in parliament that last Wednesday, just after he landed in the US, he ordered an investigation by his department head into Joyce’s supposed breach of a ministerial code of conduct by having an affair with his media advisor, Vicky Campion, who is now Joyce’s partner, expecting his child. That investigation was dropped once Joyce quit.

Moreover, to ensure his political demise, the prime minister also made public an inquiry being conducted into Joyce’s official travel expenses claims during the period in which he was often travelling with Campion.

Today, Fairfax Media’s Mark Kenny reported that National Party president Larry Anthony, a former cabinet minister and scion of the party’s corporate establishment, asked a woman who made the harassment complaint against Joyce to put her accusation in writing. Anthony then flew across the country, from Western Australia to Joyce’s home in Armidale, northwest of Sydney, accompanied by a lawyer, to warn Joyce that the complaint was about to become known publicly. In effect, Anthony delivered an ultimatum to Joyce: quit or be disgraced.

National Party supporters of Joyce are doubly furious because the woman who made the original complaint to the National Party, Catherine Marriott, has stated that she never intended it to be made public. At least one Nationals’ member of parliament, Andrew Broad, has accused an unnamed Liberal MP of being involved in leaking Marriott’s name to the media.

Kenny reported: “The sexual harassment complaint that triggered the downfall of Barnaby Joyce continues to stoke division inside the Nationals, with some senior party figures believing the allegations were weaponised to blast the former deputy prime minister from cabinet.”

Today’s Australian Financial Review editorial identified some of the underlying political issues behind Joyce’s ouster. Under the headline, “McCormack must herds Nats out of the populist paddock,” it demanded that he steer the Nationals out of the “populist sideroad” that forced the government’s hand on the banking royal commission.

The editorial insisted that McCormack must “restore some discipline and order” to the government, so it could prosecute its “modestly ambitious plan” to cut the company tax rate from 30 to 25 percent, and “stop wastefully spending so much taxpayer money.” The newspaper insinuated that this year’s federal budget in May, “just 12 weeks away” could be the government’s last chance to prove itself.

Interviewed by the same publication, McCormack vowed to deliver on the required agenda. “I’m not Barnaby Joyce,” he stated. He said the Nationals “realise that we still are in a fiscal position that requires restraint and responsibility, and we will maintain that economic responsibility.”

As McCormack indicated, his main attraction, as far as the ruling class is concerned, is that he is not Joyce. Otherwise, he is, as the editorial put it politely, “little known.” A former regional newspaper editor, his record since entering parliament in 2010 has been lacklustre. He has been a parliamentary secretary, assistant minister or junior minister, shifted from one portfolio to another, without ever being elevated into cabinet. Twice he stood unsuccessfully for the National Party deputy leadership, indicating that he has no base of support.

McCormack said he would discuss with Turnbull renegotiating the still-secret Coalition agreement that Turnbull had to sign in 2015, when he ousted his Liberal Party predecessor Tony Abbott. That pact reportedly gave key concessions to the Nationals, who were opposed to Turnbull’s takeover, including control of major cabinet portfolios such as infrastructure and water supply.

Now Joyce has joined Abbott on the parliamentary backbench, from where Abbott increasingly has been openly criticising Turnbull. Abbott’s socially conservative faction of the Liberal Party is aligned with Joyce’s populist wing of the National Party, ensuring further instability.

One crucial issue is not being mentioned in the media, despite Joyce being removed on the eve of Turnbull’s warm political embrace of President Donald Trump in Washington.

Joyce is fully committed to the US alliance. However, in addition to his populism, he was regarded in ruling circles, and no doubt in Washington, as unacceptably susceptible to pressure from the National Party’s backers in the mining and agricultural export industries that depend heavily on Chinese markets that would be jeopardised in the event of trade war and war.

British Columbia NDP retreats on election promises in first budget

Janet Browning & Roger Jordan

The British Columbia New Democratic Party (NDP) minority government’s first budget junked many of the central promises that helped propel the social democrats to power in last spring’s election.

Tabled last week, BC’s 2018-19 budget upholds the austerity social spending and pro-business fiscal regime fashioned during more than a decade and a half of Liberal rule, while offering a few token investments in social infrastructure to sugar the pill.

The budget makes no mention of the NDP’s commitments to build 114,000 new housing units, introduce $10 per day childcare, provide renters with a $400 annual rebate, or offer students a $1,000 completion grant and relief on interest on their loans.

Business in Vancouver, an online publication for the Lower Mainland’s corporate community, wryly observed of the first NDP-authored budget after 16 years of Liberal rule, “This could have just as easily been a budget under the previous government.”

In a province with a severe housing affordability crisis, especially in Vancouver and the entire Lower Mainland, the NDP released a 30-point housing plan, the main goal of which was to cover over the fact that its pledge to build 114,000 new housing units was an electoral ploy.

One of the most important measures was a 5 percentage point increase in the foreign home-buyers’ tax to 20 percent, and its expansion to include properties in urban areas outside Metro Vancouver. Introduced by the Liberals in 2016, the foreign-buyers tax serves to deflect anger over skyrocketing housing away from the profit system, encourages chauvinism against immigrants, and feeds into the reactionary campaign, closely associated with Canada’s military-strategic alliance with Washington, to curb Chinese economic influence in BC and Canada as a whole.

The NDP government is also imposing a new 2 percent “speculation” tax on properties not occupied year-round, with an exemption for most BC residents.

While foreign investors have played a role in the housing bubble that has driven average prices in Vancouver for a family home to over $1 million, the main drivers and beneficiaries of this speculative binge have been domestic investors, including Canada’s banks and other big financial players.

When confronted about the NDP’s retreat on housing, Premier John Horgan cynically sought to blame voters for “misunderstanding” his party’s policies. Horgan told CBC, “The plan certainly is to continue on with the goal over 10 years to get to 114,000 units. That’s, again, not just social housing. I think people misunderstood that, and we tried as hard as we could to correct that. It’s the continuum of housing. What you would find in a community.” Later, Horgan expanded saying the NDP plan includes not just affordable housing but incentives for private developers to build family housing “that British Columbians want to move into.”

In other words, the NDP’s housing initiative is similar to that of Justin Trudeau’s federal Liberal government, which is using billions in public funds to fatten the pockets of private developers under the banner of making housing in Canada more “affordable.”

The NDP’s adoption of such right-wing policies should come as no surprise. On the campaign trail last year, Horgan repeatedly boasted that his party’s spending proposals were based on, and would adhere to, the same reactionary fiscal framework as the big-business Liberals. That framework enshrines years of cuts to health care and education, wage cuts and layoffs for public sector workers, and tax handouts for big business and BC’s corporate elite.

After coming to power, the NDP effectively abandoned its pledge to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour in the face of opposition from both business lobby groups and the Greens, upon whom they rely for their parliamentary majority. Although Horgan has appointed a commission to study the issue, a boost in the minimum to $15 wage will likely not be implemented even by 2021—and this in a province that has the country’s second highest poverty rate.

The NDP’s pro-business agenda was underscored in the budget when Finance Minister Carol James turned to the issue of healthcare, where the NDP has sought to bolster its “progressive” credentials by eliminating Medical Service Plan (MSP) insurance premiums by 2020. This regressive tax, which falls disproportionately on lower-income earners, will be replaced by an employers’ health tax charged at 1.95 percent of a company’s payroll for businesses with a payroll of more than $1.5 million.

“We believe we continue to provide supports to businesses in everything from lowering the small business tax rate, keeping the corporate tax rate competitive … we’re putting the pieces in place that will support businesses,” boasted James, who emphasized that the vast majority of businesses will not pay the full rate under the new payroll tax. Moreover, since many larger businesses already pay MSP premiums for their employees, they in fact will experience no significant change to their overall cost structure.

Determined to make good on its vow to deliver balanced budgets while maintaining “competitive” tax rates for business, the rich and super-rich, the NDP has announced a sweeping attack on the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia (ICBC). The public auto insurer, which was long held up as a great social achievement of the province’s first NDP government in the early 1970s, will cap payouts for minor injuries at $5,500, as well as make other as of yet unspecified changes to premiums and insurance payouts. These “reforms” are projected to produce “savings” of $392 million this year, rising to more than $1 billion annually in 2020-21.

The inevitable premium hikes will hit those on lower incomes especially hard, as they will be obliged to fork over a much larger chunk of their incomes for auto insurance and in return for reduced coverage.

Although the NDP trumpeted its commitment to $10-a-day childcare during last year’s campaign, Horgan is now doing all he can to disavow that pledge. Challenged on the absence of any reference to the goal in the budget, he remarked, “That’s our commitment. That’s what we’re going to drive toward. But it’s also important you remember that the $10-a-day label to drive the childcare plan was put together not by the NDP, but by childcare providers and academics.”

The reality is that the NDP has dropped this proposal under pressure from its Green allies, who have denounced $10 a day as an “unnecessary slogan.” Green leader Andrew Weaver, who enjoyed a close working relationship with former Liberal Premier Christie Clark on a range of issues, has promoted his party, both during the election campaign and since striking an accord to back an NDP minority government on “matters of confidence,” as a fiscally conservative brake on a spendthrift NDP.

The $10-a-day commitment has been replaced by a substantially scaled-back initiative that will see $1 billion invested in childcare over three years. The plan will establish a benefit that ostensibly will provide childcare for free or at reduced rates for families earning less than $45,000. However, these benefits will only be available to the minority of parents who have been able to find a place for their child or children in a licensed childcare facility.

The exact percentage of children being looked after by unlicensed providers is difficult to determine. But in BC there are 570,000 children under the age of 12 and 363,000 mothers in the workforce, yet the province has only 105,000 licensed childcare places. The NDP has committed to expand this number by a paltry 22,000.

An advocacy group involved in the $10 a day childcare campaign has pointed out that there is no provision in the NDP plan to prevent daycare facilities raising their fees in conjunction with the government subsidy, meaning parents could ultimately see little or no savings.

The usual suspects from the trade unions and pseudo left have rushed to praise the NDP budget, claiming it represents a break with decades of austerity. The BC Federation of Labour enthused over the “bold affordability measures” for housing contained in the budget, which the union federation asserted was “full of concrete actions to make life more affordable.”

These positions demonstrate that the unions and pseudo left organizations are indifferent to the plight of working people. Instead, their well-heeled officials are applauding the NDP government for the new opportunities that is it providing them to work with government and big business, through various consultations and tripartite initiatives, in managing capitalist austerity and suppressing the class struggle.

UK local authorities escalate anti-homelessness policies

Barry Mason

At the sharp end of homelessness are rough sleepers, those sleeping on the street. The latest official figures published in January show a rise in those sleeping rough for the seventh year in a row. The figures collated in autumn last year showed 4,751 people sleeping rough, up by 15 percent on the previous year and over twice as many as in 2012.

This figure, while only a snapshot, expresses the upward trend in rough sleeping. Many of those working with the homeless regard the figure as a gross underestimate. The Chain database, maintained by St. Mungo’s homelessness charity, reckoned there were over 8,000 sleepers in London alone according to figures produced for the year 2016-17.

Those on the street are subject to official harassment with measures taken to make their lives as uncomfortable as possible.

In 2015, Bournemouth council used piped bagpipe music to deter people from sleeping in the coach station overnight. In January, a 66-year-old man known only as Kev was found dead under a flyover in Bournemouth. A friend of his accused the council of taking away his sleeping bag shortly before he was found dead. A January 23 Metro article on the issue quoted local homeless charity founder Clair Matthews: “We give out sleeping bags to homeless people and we’ve been told by some of them the council has removed them to clean up the streets.”

Public Sector Build Journal, a magazine for architects and other professionals working in the area of public space building and furniture, published an article in October last year, “How local councils are deterring the homeless from sleeping rough in the public realm.” It notes, “Rough sleepers are seen as the human form of litter within a space.”

It explains how benches are specifically designed to deter rough sleepers. Central armrests are often considered to make sleeping on benches a problem. Furthermore, angled perches at bus stops discourage “hanging out,” metal spikes on ledges and doorways scream “do not sit,” “do not stand,” and “go away.”

Taking a leaf out of the book of anti-social policies imposed by politicians in control of US cities, local authorities in the UK are buying one-way tickets to move the homeless to other areas in what amount to a policy of social cleansing.

Following an 18-month investigation, the Guardian published an article in December revealing a database of over 34,000 such journeys in the US. “People are routinely sent thousands of miles away,” it noted, “after only a cursory check by authorities to establish they have a suitable place to stay once they get there. Some said they feel pressured into taking tickets, and others described ending up on the streets within weeks of their arrival.”

A BBC Victoria Derbyshire news analysis programme aired last October highlighted the extent of the use of buying one-way tickets for homeless people in the UK. The programme approached the 20 English local authorities with the highest number of rough sleepers, in some cases using Freedom of Information (FOI) requests. Of the 11 responding, 10 confirmed they had made purchases of such tickets since 2012.

Manchester City Council told the programme it has spent nearly £10,000 on buying one-way tickets for homeless people to return to their “home” area. Bristol City Council had offered one-way travel tickets to nearly 170 homeless people over the last three years. Exeter City Council reported spending over £4,500 on over 100 rough sleepers in the last 30 months.

The use of such tickets is justified on the basis that they enable homeless people to reconnect with their own area. However, a rough sleeper in Bournemouth told the programme that although he had lived in Bournemouth all his life, he was offered a ticket to Manchester. He thought the council was trying to move out homeless people to make the area more attractive.

Speaking to Derbyshire, Claire Matthews, who runs a soup kitchen in Bournemouth, described the practice of buying one-way tickets as a form of “social cleansing and an abdication of any responsibility on [the council’s] part.”

Manchester City council defends the policy of buying one-way tickets. In a statement to ITV’s Granada Reports, Deputy Council Leader Cllr Bernard Priest said: “For some people, who want to go back to their home town or city where they have a connection to family and friends, we offer support and—only with their agreement—we will offer to buy a train ticket home as many don’t have the means to do this.”

The growing use of buying one-way tickets is an expression of the failure of the authorities to tackle homelessness.

The overall homelessness figure in the UK is on the increase. Housing charity Shelter’s latest report on homelessness was published last November and found there were 307,000 people in Britain classed as homeless—a rise of 4 percent over the previous year. Across the country one in 200 are homeless but some areas are especially hard hit. In the London borough of Newham the figure is one in 25, while it is one in 59 for the city as a whole. Other areas where the figures are high include Luton, Birmingham and Manchester.

Shelter found that the number in temporary accommodation awaiting a permanent home had gone up by 43 percent over the last seven years. Explaining why it was an increasing problem the report concluded: “The single leading cause of homelessness is the loss of a private tenancy. … The number and proportion of households presenting as homeless due to the loss of a private tenancy has soared since cuts to housing benefit began in 2011.”

Also on the increase is the practice of placing homeless households in temporary accommodation, outside their home area. A BBC Radio 5 broadcast showed the numbers placed in temporary accommodation outside their local area had risen by 59 percent over the last five years.

A parliamentary research briefing found “79,190 households in temporary accommodation at the end of September 2017. This marks the twenty-fifth time that the number of households in temporary accommodation has risen compared with the same quarter of the previous year. The 79,190 households include 121,360 children, representing a 73 percent increase since 2010.”

With a figure of 1,143, the London Borough of Southwark had placed the highest number of households outside their area over the last year. In that period, the London Borough of Harrow had moved people out to Bradford, Wolverhampton and Glasgow.

Following the recent announcement that the marriage of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle would being taking place in Windsor in May, the leader of the town’s Conservative council, Simon Dudely, made clear his attitude to the town’s homeless. He wrote to Thames Valley Police to ascertain how they could prevent “aggressive begging and intimidation” by homeless people and how they could stop “bags and detritus” accumulating on the streets. This was followed up by threats of fines of £100 to any homeless person refusing to engage with statutory homelessness services. In addition, the council fitted benches in the town with metal bars to deter rough sleepers.

Living on the streets is a very precarious existence, reducing life expectancy to 47 years compared to 81 years for the average person in the UK. An example of its consequences was a homeless man in his 40s from Portugal, who was found dead in Westminster underground railway station in the shadow of the UK Houses of Parliament. Commenting on his death, Pam Orchard, chief executive of the London homelessness charity Connection, said he would be one of dozens of homeless people expected to die on the streets this year.