Refugees Are in the English Channel Because of Western Interventions in the Middle East

Patrick Cockburn

A black rubber inflatable boat was found abandoned earlier this week on the shingle at Dungeness on the Kent coast. Eight men, reportedly Iranians or Kurds, were later found close to the beach or in the nearby village of Lydd.

An Iranian living in south London was later charged with helping the migrants to cross the Channel illegally from France to the UK.

Sea crossings by small numbers of asylum seekers are highly publicised because the short but dangerous voyage makes good television.

The number of migrants over a period of months is in the low hundreds, but politicians believe that the impact of their arrival is high, as was shown by the home secretary, Sajid Javid, rushing back from holiday and declaring the crossings “a major incident”.

Nobody forgets the effect of pictures of columns of Syrian refugees, far away from UK in central Europe, had on the Brexit referendum in 2016.

Three days after the little inflatable boat beached at Dungeness, the US secretary of state Mike Pompeo made a speech in Cairo outlining the Trump Middle East policy, which inadvertently goes a long way to explain how the dinghy got there. After criticising former president Obama for being insufficiently belligerent, Pompeo promised that the US would “use diplomacy and work with our partners to expel every last Iranian boot” from Syria; and that sanctions on Iran – and presumably Syria – will be rigorously imposed.

Just how this is to be done is less clear, but Pompeo insisted that the US will wage military and economic war in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Syria, which inevitably means that normal life will be impossible in all of these places.

Though the US and its allies are unlikely to win any victories against Iran or Bashar al-Assad, the US can keep a permanent crisis simmering across a swathe of countries between the Pakistan border and the Mediterranean, thereby ensuring in the long term that a portion of the 170 million people living in this vast area will become so desperate that they will take every risk and spend the last of their money to flee to Western Europe. Keep in mind that these crises tend to cross-infect each other, so instability in Syria means instability in Iraq.

Given the seismic impact of migration fueled by war or sanctions in the Middle East and North Africa on the politics of Europe over the last seven or eight years, it shows a high degree of self-destructive foolishness on the part of European governments not to have done more to restore peace. They have got away with it because voters have failed to see the linkage between foreign intervention and the consequent waves of immigrants from their ruined countries.

Yet the connection should be easy enough to grasp: in 2011, the Nato powers led by UK and France backed an insurgency in Libya that overthrew and killed Gaddafi. Libya was reduced to violent chaos presided over by criminalised militias, which opened the door to migrants from North and West Africa transiting Libya and drowning as they try to cross the Mediterranean.

In Syria, the US and UK long ago decided that they would be unable to get rid of Assad – indeed they did not really want to since they believed he would be replaced by al-Qaeda or Isis. But American, British and French policy makers were happy to keep the conflict bubbling to prevent Assad, Russia and Iran winning a complete victory. A result of prolonging the conflict is that the chance of the 6.5 million Syrian refugees ever returning home grows less by the year.

The economic devastation inflicted by these long wars is often underestimated because it is less visible and melodramatic than the ruins of Raqqa, Aleppo, Homs and Mosul. I was driving in northeast Syria last year, west of the Euphrates, through land that was once some of the most productive in the country, producing grain and cotton. But the irrigation canals were empty and for mile after mile the land has reverted to rough pasture. Our car kept stopping because the road was blocked by herds of sheep being driven by shepherds to crop the scanty grass as the area reverts to semi-desert because there is no electric power to pump water from the Euphrates.

The British and other governments try to distinguish between refugees seeking safety because of military action or because of economic hardship; yet they increasingly go together. Syria and Iran are both being subjected to tight economic sieges. But the casualties of sanctions – as was brutally demonstrated by the 13-year-long UN sanctions on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq between 1990 and 2003 – are not the members of the regime but the civilian population. Mass flight becomes an unavoidable option.

Iraq never truly recovered from a period of sanctions during which its administrative, education and health systems were shattered and its best-educated people fled the country. The first casualties of sanctions are always on the margins and never those in power, who are the supposed target. An example of this was the re-imposition of US sanctions on Iran in 2018, which led to the exodus of 440,000 low paid Afghan workers who are not going to get jobs back in Afghanistan (where unemployment is 40 per cent) and who in many cases will therefore try to get to Europe.

Wars that are not concluded trigger waves of migrants even when there is no fighting because all sides need to recruit more soldiers from an unwilling population. In Syria, families are terrified of their sons of military age being conscripted not only by the Syrian army but by the Kurdish YPG military forces or al-Qaeda type militias.

There is a clear connection between western intervention in the Middle East and North Africa and the arrival of boat people on the beaches of southeast England. But much of the media does not highlight this and, by and large, voters do not seem to notice it.

David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy never suffered political damage from their ill-advised role in destroying the Libyan state. A couple of years later Cameron was pressing for Britain to join the US in air attacks on Syria, which would certainly not have got rid of Assad without a prolonged air campaign similar to those in Iraq and Libya.

Support free-thinking journalism and subscribe to Independent MindsThe outcome of these interventions is not just the outflow of refugees from zones of conflict: the weakening or destruction of states in the region enables groups like al-Qaeda and Isis to find secure base areas where they can regroup their forces. A fragmented Syria is ideal for such purposes because the jihadis can dodge between rival powers. Pompeo’s bombast will be a welcome development for them.

The only solution in northeast Syria is for the US to withdraw militarily under an agreement whereby Turkey does not invade Syria, in return for the Syrian government backed by Russia absorbing the Kurdish quasi-state so hated by the Turks and giving it some degree of internationally guaranteed autonomy. Any other option is likely to provoke a Turkish invasion and two million Kurds in flight – a very few of whom will one day end up on the pebble beaches of Dungeness.

The Founder of Islam

Nauman Sadiq

In all, Prophet Mohammad married thirteen wives. But he married his first wife Khadija when he was 25 years old and she was 40. All other marriages were contracted after the death of Khadija when Mohammad was 50 years old.

Mohammad was 40 years old when he received his first divine revelation and Khadija was the first person to convert to Islam. It’s worth noting that Mohammad was illiterate and couldn’t read and write, whereas Khadija was a rich and erudite merchant belonging to the ruling tribe of Mecca, the Quraysh.

She frequently sent trade caravans to the Levant and appears to have been well-versed in the history and theology of Judaism and Christianity which were the dominant religion of the Levant then. Therefore it doesn’t come as a surprise that most of Islamic theology is based on those Abrahamic religions.

It was during the course of one such trade transaction to Syria that Khadija employed Mohammad as her agent. She was impressed by his skills and honesty, and subsequently sent a marriage proposal which Mohammad accepted.

Thus, it appears that the driving spirit behind the prophethood of Mohammad was actually Khadija, and most verses of the holy book of Muslims, the Quran, were inspired by her, particularly the knowledge of pre-Islamic Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Christianity, found in the Islamic scriptures.

If we look at the evolution of Islamic religion and culture throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, it hasn’t been natural. Some deleterious mutations have occurred somewhere which have negatively impacted the Islamic societies all over the world.

Social conditioning plays the same role in social sciences that natural selection plays in biological sciences. It selects the traits, norms and values which are most beneficial to the host culture. Seen from this angle, social diversity is a desirable quality for social progress, because when diverse customs and value systems compete with each other, the culture retains the beneficial customs and values and discards the harmful traditions and habits.

A decentralized and less organized religion, like Sufi (mystical) Islam, engenders diverse strains of beliefs and opinions which compete with one another in gaining social acceptance and currency. A heavily centralized and tightly organized religion, on the other hand, depends more on authority and dogma than on value and utility. In addition, a centralized religion is also more ossified and less adaptive to change compared to a decentralized faith.

The Shi’a Muslims have their Imams and Marjahs (religious authorities), but it is generally assumed about Sunni Islam that it discourages the authority of clergy. In this sense, Sunni Islam is closer to Protestantism, at least theoretically, because it prefers an individual and personalized interpretation of scriptures and religion. Although this perception might be true for educated Sunni Muslims, on the popular level of the masses of developing Islamic countries, the House of Saud plays the same role in Sunni Islam that the pope plays in Catholicism.

By virtue of their physical possession of the holy places of Islam – Mecca and Medina – the Saudi kings are the de facto caliphs of Muslims. The title of the Saudi king: Khadim-ul-Haramain-al-Shareefain (the servant of the house of God), makes him the vice-regent of God on earth; and the title of the caliph of Muslims is not limited to a single nation state, the Saudi king wields enormous influence throughout the commonwealth of Islam, the Muslim Ummah.

Islam is regarded as the fastest growing religion of the 20th and 21st centuries. According to World Religion Database, the share of world population by religion during the last century was:

Christianity: 1910: 34.8% ; 2010: 32.8%

Islam: 1910: 12.6% ; 2010: 22.5%

Hinduism: 1910: 12.7% ; 2010: 13.8%

Agnosticism: 1910: 0.2% ; 2010: 9.8%

Chinese folk religion: 1910: 22.2% ; 2010: 6.3%

Buddhism: 1910: 7.9% ; 2010: 8%

Thus, while the number of adherents of all other religions has remained static or dwindled, the proselytization of Islam has nearly doubled during the last century.

The only feature that sets Islam apart from the rest of major cosmopolitan religions, like Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism, and which is also primarily responsible for this atavistic phenomena of Islamic resurgence in the modern era is that Islam as a religion and political ideology has the world’s richest financiers.

After the 1973 collective Arab oil embargo against the West in the wake of the Arab-Israeli war, the price of oil quadrupled; and the contribution of the Gulf’s petro-sheikhs towards the ‘spiritual well-being’ of Muslims all over the world magnified proportionally. This is the reason why we are witnessing an exponential growth of Islamic charities and madrassas (religious seminaries) all over the world and particularly in the Islamic world.

The phenomena of Islamic radicalism all over the world is directly linked to Islamic madrassas that are generously funded by the Gulf’s petro-dollars. These madrassas attract children from the most impoverished backgrounds in the Third World Islamic countries, because they offer the kind of incentives and facilities which even the government-funded public schools cannot provide: such as free boarding and lodging, free meals for destitute students, no tuition fee at all and free of cost books and stationery; some generously funded madrassas even pay monthly stipends to their students.

Moreover, it’s a misconception that the Arab sheikhs of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and some conservative emirates of UAE generally sponsor the Wahhabi-Salafi sect of Islam. The difference between numerous sects of Sunni Islam is more nominal than substantive. Islamic charities and madrassas belonging to all the Sunni denominations get generous funding from the Gulf Arab states as well as from wealthy private donors.

Besides madrassas, another factor that promotes the Gulf’s Wahhabi-Salafi ideology in the Islamic world is the ritual of Hajj and Umrah. Every year, millions of Muslim men and women from all over the Islamic world travel to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina to perform the pilgrimage. When the pilgrims return home to their native countries, after spending a month or two in Saudi Arabia, along with cleansed hearts and purified souls, they also bring along the tales of Saudi hospitality and their supposedly ‘true and authentic’ version of Islam, which some Muslims, especially the backward, rural folks, find attractive and worth-emulating.

Yet another factor which contributes to the rise of Wahhabi-Salafi ideology throughout the Islamic world is the migrant workers. Millions of Muslim men, women and families from all over the developing Islamic countries live and work in energy-rich Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman. Some of them permanently reside there but mostly they work on temporary work permits.

Just like the pilgrims, when the migrant workers return home to their native villages and towns, they also bring along the tales of Saudi hospitality and their version of supposedly ‘authentic Islam.’ Spending time in the Gulf Arab states entitles one to pass authoritative judgments on religious matters, and having a cursory understanding of Arabic, the language of Quran, makes one equivalent of a Qazi (a learned jurist) amongst illiterate, rural Muslims; and such charlatans simply reproduce the customs and traditions of the Arabs as the authentic version of Islam to their backward, rural communities.

Finally, regarding the regression of Islamic culture and religion in the modern era, the designation caliphate was used to describe enlightened and majestic Islamic empires of yore, such as the Umayyads of Damascus, the Abbasids of Baghdad, the Ottomans of Turkey and the Mughals of India.

And now, it is being used as a slur to revile the repressive and medieval rule of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and two-bit warlords like the Taliban’s deceased chief, Mullah Omar, and the Islamic State’s fugitive leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, have appropriated the exalted Islamic titles of Ameer-ul-momineen and the caliph of Muslims.

Sri Lankan government proposes pay “formula” to end plantation workers’ struggle

W.A. Sunil 

Sri Lanka’s government has suggested a meagre wage increase over three years for plantation workers to suppress their demand for a 100 percent pay rise. For the past three months, workers have been campaigning for an immediate doubling of their daily wage, from 500 rupees ($US2.74) to 1,000 rupees. They launched an indefinite strike in December, but the trade unions shut it down after nine days.

Workers previously rejected a 20 percent or 100-rupee increase proposed by the Employers’ Federation of Ceylon (EFC), which represents the plantation companies.

In separate meetings with the EFC and trade unions last Thursday, Plantation Minister Naveen Dissanayake and Labour Minister Daya Gamage suggested a three-year wage formula. During the first year, the basic wage would rise by just 125 rupees, or 25 percent. In the second year, it would increase by 25 rupees, or 4 percent, with another 25-rupee rise in the third year.

Dissanayake said workers could earn 1,000 rupees or more with various allowances. He noted that the pay increase would improve according to the “amount of tea leaves plucked.”

This means a worker could earn 1,000 rupees only with allowances directly tied to productivity, as proposed by the companies. Many workers are usually unable to meet the targets set for regular attendance and productivity. Allowances are also tied to price fluctuations in the global tea and rubber markets.

Dissanayake asked the companies and the unions to sign collective agreements accordingly. Together with the employers, the government wants to end the wage protests and impose these agreements with the unions acting as an industrial police force for driving up workloads.

Echoing the companies, Dissanayake declared that the unions needed to show “concern” about the industry and “it was not possible to add pressure on the companies.”

The employers requested time to decide on the proposal. According to the media, unions have “rejected” the proposal and said they were “firm” over the 1,000-rupee demand. This is bogus posturing. Well aware of the widespread opposition among workers to lowering the demand for a 100 percent increase, the unions are seeking ways to deflect the unrest in the plantations.

The unions participating in the discussions included the Ceylon Workers’ Congress (CWC), Lanka Jathika Estate Workers’ Union (LJEWU) and Joint Plantation Trade Union Centre (JPTUC). They have been engaged in secret talks with the employers and the government for several months and have shut down workers’ strikes and protests.

Exposing the so-called firmness of the unions, LJEWU general secretary Vadivel Suresh, who is also the state minister of plantations, said his union could agree to a 150-rupee rise this year, just 25 rupees more than the government’s proposal, with another 50-rupee increase next year.

National Union of Workers (NUW) leader P. Digambaram, another government minister, earlier told the Lanka newspaper the 1,000-rupee demand was “unjustified” at the moment because the plantation companies’ profits had dropped. Lanka, which is controlled by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), published his declaration without any comment, indicating agreement with the NUW leader.

The Planters’ Association made essentially the same assertion in a statement issued last month. “The demands of trade union leaders far exceed the capacity,” it insisted. “We urge all stakeholders, especially, those whose daily living depends on this industry, to consider the fatality of the industry.”

The plantation companies continually complain that low tea prices make it impossible to meet the workers’ demand for higher wages. They say the industry is hampered by factors beyond their control.

The low prices are a result of intensifying competition among tea-producing countries, including China, India and Kenya. As a result, Sri Lanka’s annual average tea export earnings declined from $1.63 billion in 2014 to $1.53 billion in 2017. Between January and August last year, the country’s tea export income dropped from $1 billion to $970 million, compared to the corresponding period the previous year.

To impose the burden of this crisis onto the workers, the government and the plantation companies insist on scrapping the wages system and implementing a so-called revenue-share system that aims to increase output several-fold.

Under this system, workers are given a plot of land with 1,000 or more tea bushes. The company sells them fertilisers and agrichemicals, deducting the cost from workers’ income. Where this system has been introduced already in some estates, the workers have rejected it, complaining they cannot earn enough income to live, even with their entire families doing the work.

All the indications are that the EFC and the unions, backed by the government, plan to enter into collective agreements soon, behind the backs of workers, which will include terms tying workers to supposed revenue-share schemes and other productivity requirements.

The plantation workers must reject these proposals and organise a common struggle, uniting with other sections of workers in Sri Lanka and internationally. Without a political fight against the government and the capitalist class, and the unions that prop up them, workers cannot defend their interests.

To carry out this struggle, workers should establish their own action committees in estates, workplaces and neighbourhoods, totally independent of the trade unions. Workers at the Abbotsleigh plantations, near Hatton, have taken such an initiative, forming an action committee under the guidance of the Socialist Equality Party.

Workers need a socialist program to defend their interests against the drive by the ruling class to impose the burden of its crisis. It is necessary to fight for a workers’ and peasants’ government that would nationalize the large estates, banks and all major enterprises under workers’ control, as part of the struggle for socialism internationally.

US, Turkey clash over Turkish plan to buy Russian S-400 missiles

Baris Demir

Amid intensifying negotiations between Turkey and the United States over Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria and Turkey’s threats to invade the country, a US technical team is visiting Turkey today and tomorrow. The US team is expected to stress that Turkey’s purchase of Russian S-400 air defence systems is unacceptable to Washington.

Previously, Washington had indicated that it could respond to a Turkish agreement with Russia to buy S-400 surface-to-air missile systems by blocking Turkey from buying F-35 warplanes, and would bring Turkey’s relations with the United States and the NATO alliance to a breaking point. The S-400 purchase would have vast military ramifications. By obtaining its first long-range air and anti-missile defence system from Russia, Turkey could conceivably close its skies to NATO fighters if necessary.

On December 18, the day before US President Donald Trump tweeted his announcement of the withdrawal of all 2,000 US troops from Syria, the State Department informed the US Congress of a proposed $3.5 billion deal to sell Turkey Patriot anti-ballistic missile systems made by Raytheon.

Washington has long urged Turkey to cancel its plans to purchase the Russian-made S-400 anti-ballistic missile system, but Turkey has replied that it would buy Patriot systems from Washington, but not on the condition of cancelling the purchase of S-400 system from Russia.

On January 10, Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu declared that Turkey would never accept US pressure to drop its purchase of S-400s from Russia to deploy Patriots. “The U.S. made its first offer for the Patriots. But we are not in a position to change our deal with Russia on the S-400s. We have an immediate need to cover air space. In fact, we may purchase Patriots in the future as well. … The S-400s are an accomplished deal. We never break our promises.”

Turkey’s attempts to purchase air defence systems has long been a sore point in Ankara’s relations with NATO, especially with the US. Ankara first decided to buy a long-range air defence system from a Chinese state-run company in 2013. Under US pressure, the Turkish government was forced to scrap the $3.4 billion programme altogether in November 2015.

After the project was cancelled and the Turkish air force shot down a Russian bomber on November 24, 2015, threatening all-out war with Russia, Ankara expressed its intention to independently develop a missile defence system. This aim was not realised, however. After Russia retaliated by escalating its military posture and imposed economic sanctions against Turkey, however, Ankara tacked back toward Russia, agreeing to purchase the S-400 air and missile defence system.

The decisive factor in Ankara’s shift closer to Russia and China was its violent hostility to Washington’s cultivation of the Kurdish nationalists as proxies in the Syrian war. As the Islamic State (ISIS) militia grew in Syria and invaded Iraq, the imperialist powers turned to the Kurdish nationalist groups as a proxy ground force against ISIS. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan could not adapt himself to these sudden, violent shifts in imperialist war policy, and Ankara’s imperialist allies rapidly came to see him not as a “strategic partner,” but as an unreliable one.

The imperialist powers responded in July 2016 with an attempt to organise a military coup in Turkey to oust and murder Erdoğan. A section of Turkey’s military launched an abortive putsch out of NATO’s Incirlik air base, encouraged by Washington and Berlin. The failure of the coup attempt undermined Ankara’s relations with the NATO imperialist powers.

Ankara opposes Kurdish autonomy in Syria, fearing that it will provoke demands for Kurdish autonomy in eastern Turkey. To crush Kurdish nationalist forces still backed by Washington, Erdoğan has twice ordered the Turkish army to launch bloody invasions of Syria: “Operation Euphrates Shield” (in August 2016) and “Operation Olive Branch” (in January 2018), directed against the US-backed YPG.

In recent months, the Turkish government has threatened a new outright military occupation of large parts of Syria, targeting the YPG and other Kurdish forces, that could provoke war with Syria and a direct clash with US forces.

After Erdoğan’s threats, the Trump administration announced a withdrawal from Syria that flowed directly from an agreement reached between Trump and Turkey’s president during a telephone conversation on December 18.

As the WSWS previously noted: “While Washington is no doubt anxious to avoid a potential military confrontation with Turkey, a member of the NATO alliance, the Trump White House has taken other measures aimed at restoring US-Turkish relations, which have been strained since the abortive July 2016 military coup, which enjoyed covert backing from Washington.”

Despite the Turkish government’s repeated attempts to work out a deal with Washington to coordinate their policies, however, disagreements continue to mount. The conflict over a potential Turkish S-400 purchase comes just shortly after Trump threatened Turkey with economic destruction on Twitter if it attempted to attack the Kurds.

Whatever the outcome of the dispute within the US ruling class, Turkey seems determined to launch a bloody military occupation in north Syria. Its preparations for a possible operation east of the Euphrates river in Syria are continuing “intensely,” Turkish Defence Minister Hulusi Akar said on January 11, on a visit to Turkey’s border with Syria.

“We have Manbij and the east of Euphrates [River] ahead. Necessary plans have been made regarding this. Our preparation continues intensely,” Akar said.

Top UK executives earn average worker pay within three days

Alice Summers 

A new report into the pay gap between workers and the ruling elite has laid bare the extreme levels of inequality that pervade economic and social life in the UK.

According to research carried out by the High Pay Centre (HPC) and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), within the first three working days of January, the highest paid Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 100 bosses had already raked in as much money as the average full-time worker will earn in a year.

New research for “Fat Cat Friday” found that by lunchtime on January 4, top executives had already made the UK median annual salary of £29,574, needing only to work 29 hours, at a rate of around £1,020 an hour. This means that over the course of the year, the median FTSE 100 CEO will earn approximately £3.9 million.

This equates to 133 times the annual pay of a full-time worker, up 11 percent on the previous year, when FTSE 100 CEOs had a median pay packet of approximately £3.5 million. This represented a salary 120 times higher than the average UK worker at the time.

The economic gulf separating the working class and the super-rich has massively expanded in recent years, creating inequality on a scale unseen for almost a century. While today top executives earn 133 times the salary of the average worker, this has rocketed up since 1998, when the ratio stood at roughly 47 to 1. This represents a pay gap increase of a staggering 183 percent in 20 years.

According to the CIPD and HPC’s report from August 2018, FTSE 100 CEOs’ mean pay saw an even bigger increase—jumping a massive 23 percent in a year—from £4.6 million in 2016 to £5.7 million in 2017 (the latest year for which figures are available).

By comparison, figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) indicate that mean salaries for all workers in the UK increased by a mere 2.5 percent from 2016 to 2017, barely keeping pace with, or even falling behind, inflation rates. According to the CIPD and HPC, it would take the average (mean) UK worker “on a salary of £29,009 a total of 195 years to earn the mean FTSE 100 CEO reward package.”

While top executives have seen their annual pay grow rapidly year on year, for the vast majority of Britons the picture is very different. Workers in the UK have suffered a decline in wages unsurpassed for over a century, falling further than any European country except Greece.

At least 6 percent of the workforce is on zero-hour contracts, rising from 1.7 million to 1.8 million in 2017. Over 14 million people, including 4.5 million children, one-third of all children, live below the poverty line. More than two-thirds comprise the “working poor.” At least 320,000 people are homeless, meaning 1 in every 200 adults is without a permanent place to live. At least one person dies on the streets each day, yet the majority of homeless are in employment.

While many workers struggle to meet their basic living costs on poverty wages, corporate executive remuneration has shot up, with the highest paid FTSE 100 CEO, Jeff Fairburn of housebuilding firm Persimmon Plc, receiving an obscene salary of £47.1 million in 2017. This is more than 20 times his pay packet the previous year, and roughly 1,130 times the average (mean) pay of his company’s employees.

On top of this, Fairburn pocketed a £75 million bonus in mid-2018, supposedly awarded for “outstanding performance.” The Guardian calculated that this is more than enough to house all 760 homeless families in the Yorkshire and Humber region where the firm is based, with around £15 million to spare. Fairburn was eventually forced to step down from his position, as the media controversy surrounding his pay packet was negatively affecting the company’s reputation.

Simon Peckham, CEO of Melrose Industries, also received a massive pay boost, with his pay packet rising a staggering 4,233 percent, from roughly £987,000 in 2016 up to £42.8 million in 2017.

These enormous income windfalls are not just reserved for FTSE 100 companies. In 2017, Denise Coates, CEO of online gambling site Bet365, became Britain’s highest paid boss, raking in a staggering £265 million. This was up from £199 million the year before, based on salary and perks, and is nearly 10,000 times more than the average UK salary.

In response to the HPC and CIPD reports, Tim Roache, general secretary of the GMB union, labelled the revelations “sickening.”

“Three days into the year and fat cat bosses have already made what average workers will earn all year. … It’s not fair, and it makes no sense in how we value people’s contribution to society and it makes no sense for the economy—I don’t know any care workers who squirrel their wages away in offshore accounts, they spend it in their local areas and on paying their bills.”

Frances O’Grady, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), commented: “There are millions of hardworking people in Britain who give more than they get back, but greedy executives are taking more than they’ve earned.

“We need to redesign the economy to make it fair again,” she continued, “and that means big reforms to bring fat cat pay back down to earth.”

Even these limited criticisms ring hollow. For years, the trade union bureaucracy has consistently acted to suppress any significant working-class action to fight for better pay and conditions. Functioning as industrial police on behalf of the government and employers, they have worked to systematically limit strikes and to prevent coordination by workers across national borders. That such a gap between the pay of workers and their bosses exists is evidence of the extent of the collaboration between the unions and employers, which has accelerated over the last decade with the drive by the ruling class to impose the burden of the economic crisis onto the working class.

The CIPD and HPC report limited itself to calling for “greater diversity among those responsible for setting CEO pay, both in terms of their ethnicity and gender, for example, but also their professional backgrounds and expertise in order to combat ‘group think.’ “

The widening chasm between the working class and the ruling elite cannot be solved by tweaking the racial or gender composition of those occupying the top jobs, or by calling for a “fairer” or kinder form of capitalism, as advocated by Labour’s nominally “left” leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

Social inequality is not some aberration of capitalism that can be reformed away, but is its essential feature. Capitalism is predicated upon the exploitation of the working class in order to ensure the profits of the corporate and financial oligarchy and is incapable of providing economic security and a decent standard of living for working people.

Society must be reorganised along socialist lines, so that the accumulation of wealth is subordinated to the needs and requirements of its producers and users, controlled and regulated by them.

UK parliament to vote on Brexit deal today

Chris Marsden

Tonight will see Britain’s parliament finally vote on Prime Minister Theresa May’s proposed deal with Brussels on Britain’s exit from the European Union (EU).

May is almost certain to be defeated, largely as a result of opposition in the Conservative Party and the Democratic Unionist Party to “backstop” arrangements to prevent the return of a hard-border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, an EU member state. However, whatever follows, British workers will still confront escalating attacks on their jobs, wages and essential services.

Today’s “meaningful vote”, as far as the pro-Brexit faction of the Tories is concerned, must not be allowed to cut across their efforts to free themselves from the restraints associated with EU membership to securing independent trade deals with the US, China, India, etc., taking advantage of Britain’s role as a centre for global speculative finance and deepening its transformation into a cheap labour investment platform modelled on Singapore.

However, all claims by the advocates of “Remain”—in the Conservative Party, the Blairite wing of the Labour Party and the smaller opposition parties—to represent an alternative are false. They are belied by their own history of defending big business and imposing cuts, and their embrace of the EU, even as it continued to impose austerity on workers throughout the continent on behalf of the major corporations, banks and its constituent governments.

What is being fought out in Westminster is a conflict over which is the best means of advancing the interests of British imperialism under conditions of a ferocious trade war for control of global markets: within the European trade bloc, or as a junior partner of the US—hopefully without losing access to the Single European Market that accounts for 40 percent of UK exports.

Such has been the exposure of the reactionary nationalist agenda of Brexit and its impact that most polls show a shift of public support back towards Remain. But whichever side wins today, the struggle to be “globally competitive”, especially under the threat of a second economic crash to rival that of 2008, means a deepening offensive against working people.

Believing the claims that EU membership is a means of opposing the xenophobia and right-wing reaction that characterises Brexit demands only a wilful blindness to the EU’s long record of crimes against refugees and to the growth of far-right movements such as the Alternative for Germany, France’s National Rally, and their taking a governmental role in Italy, Austria, Hungary and elsewhere.

The advocates of Remain have no such illusions themselves. Their sole concern, whether the Blairites or pseudo-left groups such as Socialist Resistance and Left Unity operating under the umbrella “Another Europe is Possible,” is with securing the place of British imperialism within the EU on which the privileged lifestyles of their upper-middle class constituency is based. They are even arguing against Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s pro-forma attempts to prioritise a no confidence motion in the government and the demand for a general election over supporting a second referendum to reverse Brexit.

“A general election will not resolve Brexit,” write the Pabloites of Socialist Resistance. A “general election is unlikely… The key to the situation remains the issue that Jeremy Corbyn continues to ignore the issue of a second referendum.” Left Unity adds cynically that it “agrees with the socialist critiques of the EU but believes the possibility of international worker unity together with the democracy of the European Parliament provide the basis of seeing the EU as a ‘terrain of struggle’.” [Emphasis added]

The pseudo-left advocates of “left leave” in 2016 now all claim that a Corbyn-led Labour government is the only answer to continued austerity, even if this means retreating from their past support for a “workers’ Brexit.”

The Socialist Party writes, “The ‘people’s vote’ that is urgently needed is a general election—so the Tories can be ousted and a Corbyn government brought in.” After this, “Exactly what deal Corbyn’s future negotiators could extract from the EU leaders can’t be predicted in advance…”

This a priori endorsement of whatever manoeuvres Corbyn will conduct with the EU, should he come to office, is proof that the pseudo-left groups, pro-or-anti-Brexit, are all appendages of rival factions of the Labour and trade union bureaucracy and of Britain’s ruling elite.

Corbyn is not genuinely animated politically by his occasional use of anti-austerity rhetoric, but by a desire to protect British capitalism and save it from a deepening economic and social crisis by breaking “the deadlock” in Brexit.

He frames his call for a general election and promise to table a no confidence motion in the government “soon” alongside a pledge to extend Article 50 to delay Brexit and conduct “new negotiations” with the EU. His aim would be to secure, “At the very minimum, a customs arrangement with the European Union” and “if we can, to stop the danger of a no-deal exit from the EU on 29 March which would be catastrophic for industry, catastrophic for trade.”

Opposed to any struggle against big business, he has stressed, “What I’m saying is we’re campaigning for a country that is brought together by investment … What we’re saying to the EU is: this is the political situation in Britain, where we have a country that’s divided on this issue. We want to bring them together. A trade relationship helps to bring people together.”

Corbyn and his allies have already accepted that, should his no-confidence motion fall, he will then assume a statesmanlike role in ensuring a second referendum—prioritising restoring EU membership over any defence of the working class against the attacks of the Tories and the employers.

The Blairites are either demanding Corbyn gets his no-confidence motion out of the way or accept that Labour must be committed immediately to Remain. But Corbyn will inevitably fall into line, as he has so often before. His Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry was only the latest to confirm Corbyn’s trajectory of travel. “The prime minister must call an election,” she told parliament. “But if she refuses, if Labour’s no confidence motion fails, and if we have to move to other options, including campaigning for a public vote, we will take no lectures from her about respecting our country’s democracy.”

The key to opposing austerity is not to place hopes in a general election and a Labour government, whether inside or outside the EU. It demands a unified struggle against the British, European and international capitalist class by the British, European and international working class.

In every country, though largely unreported by the media and deliberately ignored by Corbyn, strikes and anti-austerity protests are breaking out—always in a rebellion against the stranglehold imposed by the labour and trade union bureaucracy.

This initial upsurge will inevitably escalate as the crisis of the profit system deepens. Against the political apologists for Corbyn and Labour, the Socialist Equality Party urges workers to take up the strategy of international class struggle and socialism under its leadership.

World Bank warns of “storm clouds” over global economy

Nick Beams 

The World Bank has added its voice to those warning of a worsening outlook for the global economy this year, amid signs that some major economies could experience a recession.

In its Global Economic Prospects report issued last week, entitled “Darkening Skies,” it stated that “storm clouds are brewing for the global economy” and contrasted the situation with that of a year ago.

“At the beginning of 2018 the global economy was firing on all cylinders, but it lost speed during the year and the ride could get even bumpier ahead,” the World Bank chief executive Kristalina Georgieva said.

Pointing to the main reasons for the slowdown, the bank said international trade and investment had softened, trade tensions remain elevated and several large emerging markets experienced “substantial financial pressures last year.” Growth in emerging markets and developing economies is expected to remain flat, the pickup in economies that rely heavily on commodity exports is likely to be much slower than hoped for and “growth in many other economies is anticipated to be decelerate.”

The bank cut its June forecast for global growth of 3 percent this year to 2.9 percent and warned that “the risks are growing that growth could be even weaker than anticipated.” It predicted that growth in world trade will slow to 3.6 percent this year, down from 3.8 percent in 2018 and 5.7 percent in 2017.

After downgrading its forecasts for global growth last November, saying “global expansion has peaked,” the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) issued a series of leading indicators yesterday pointing in the same direction.

“In the United States and Germany, the tentative signs of easing growth momentum, that were flagged in last month’s assessment, have been confirmed,” it stated. For the third consecutive month, the OECD’s index for the US was below the 100 mark, which points to steady growth, and the index for Germany was below 100 for the fourth straight month.

One of the clearest indications of economic weakening comes from Europe. Data published last week showing that eurozone labour productivity had stopped growing for the first time in almost a decade. Since the financial crisis of 2008, eurozone productivity growth has been around half its previous levels. But in the third quarter of last year it dropped to zero compared to the same period in 2017. In Germany, Europe’s leading economy, it contracted at an annual rate of 0.3 percent, the first decline since 2009.

Industrial production is falling in the main eurozone economies, bringing warnings that Germany and Italy could record a technical recession with a second consecutive contraction in gross domestic production in the final quarter of last year.

In an editorial comment on Saturday, the Financial Times warned that after a “staggered” economic expansion, “a bout of nerves is now gripping the major economies in an unhelpfully synchronised wave” with “signs of trouble” in China and the US, “accompanied by an ever-extending period of weakness in the eurozone.”

Having “chugged along” for the past five years, the eurozone economy seemed to hit some turbulence in the summer months but “more recently, data seem to suggest the blip is at risk of turning into a sustained downturn” and “eurozone growth ended the year very weakly.”

The slowdown is centred in Germany. Economic problems that started to emerge six months ago were initially attributed to the effect of new emissions regulations in the car industry.

“The longer the weakness has continued, however, the more the slowdown has appeared more fundamental,” the editorial noted, with the most recent data showing German industrial production falling sharply, and imports and exports contracting in November.

Another key area of concern is China. The stock market fell by 25 percent last year and there are indications that growth rate of 6.5 percent could move down to 6 percent over the next year.

The China slowdown made a major impact earlier this month. For the first time in 16 years, Apple was forced to cut its sales forecasts for the coming year, citing the contracting Chinese market and rising trade tensions with the US. It led a 660-point fall in Wall Street’s Dow index.

The fall in the sales of iPhones is only one indicator of the slowdown in Chinese consumption spending which is impacting on all global brands. When the final data for last year are issued they are expected to show that car sales in China fell in 2018 for the first time in 28 years.

The car sector represents about 5 percent of the country’s GDP and around 30 percent of the global car market but the significance of China extends far beyond the auto market.

China accounted for around 16 percent of global GDP last year and over the decade since the global financial crisis has contributed around 30 percent of global growth. This has been largely the result of the vast stimulus package initiated by the Chinese government and financial authorities in the wake of the 2008-09 global financial crisis. But now the government is seeking to rein in credit expansion in order to lower debt levels in the economy.

At the same time, the economic problems to which this gives rise are being compounded by the trade war measures of the US. Anti-China hawks in the Trump administration are actively seeking to weaken the Chinese economy in order to extract greater concessions in negotiations.

Evidence of the impact of the US trade war measures emerged yesterday when government data revealed that exports had fallen 4.4 percent in December, far below the predictions of a 3 percent increase from a poll of economists. Imports also shrank 7.6 percent against expectations of a 5 percent rise.

In the US, the turbulence in financial markets is giving rise to concerns that a recession is in the making as the prospect of a yield inversion in bond markets draws closer. An inversion, which occurs when the yield on long-term bonds fall below that on shorter term bonds, is regarded as an indicator of recession as investors seek a safe haven. Inversion has not yet occurred but the gap between the yield on two-year Treasury bonds and of ten-year bonds has been narrowing.

While growth in the rest of the world slowed in 2018, the US continued to advance largely because of the stimulus effect of the corporate tax cuts enacted by the Trump administration at the end of the 2017. While Trump promised this would boost investment and jobs, most of the money went towards share buybacks in an effort to boost equity values and its effect will now start to wear off.

At least one major investor has countered claims by Trump that he is presiding over a strong economy. According to Jeffrey Gundlach, the head of DoubleLine Capital LP, the US economy is floating on an “ocean of debt.”

“I’m not looking for a terrible economy, but an artificially strong one, due to stimulus spending,” he told a forum organised by the investment and financial news service Barron’s. “We have floated incremental debt when we should be doing the opposite if the economy is so strong.”

Short-term economic data are not the only cause for concern. A major issue is whether the long-term increase in debt, which has continued since the global financial crisis, and rising geo-political tensions, will exacerbate the impact of any significant global slowdown.

In a comment published last week, Financial Times economics correspondent Martin Wolf wrote that the economy appeared to be heading into what he called a “mild cyclical downturn.” However, this was taking place amid profound structural changes, characterised by the growth of debt and major political shifts. These included the rise of nationalism, Brexit, the election of Trump as well as “a trade war between the world’s two most important economies and an erosion of the liberal global economic order.”

The “worry” was not over the short-term cycle, he wrote, but rather “the context in which such a slowdown might occur.”

“It is the political and policy instability, combined with the exhaustion of safe options for credit expansion, that would make handling even a limited and natural short-term slowdown potentially so tricky.”

But, he concluded, there were “no simple mechanisms” for reducing these “deeply ingrained” developments which were more likely to get worse than better.

US ratchets up threats against Iran, Turkey amid Syria withdrawal plans

Bill Van Auken

In the midst of a tour by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, ostensibly aimed at reassuring Washington’s Middle East allies in the wake of President Donald Trump’s announced decision to withdraw US troops from Syria, a series of US actions have escalated tensions, posing the threat of a far wider war in the region.

Pompeo has used his trip to eight countries—seven monarchies and the police-state dictatorship of Gen. Sisi in Egypt—to make clear, as he put it over the weekend, that the Syria withdrawal is merely a change in tactics, while US strategy for asserting imperialist domination over the Middle East remains unchanged.

“The fact that a couple thousand uniformed personnel in Syria will be withdrawing is a tactical change. It doesn’t materially alter our capacity to perform military actions we need to perform,” Pompeo told reporters traveling with him during a stop in the United Arab Emirates on Sunday.

In an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Pompeo insisted that the absence of US troops in Syria would halt neither the US attacks on ISIS nor its military pressure on Iran.

“Those are the real missions,” he said. “The tactical changes we’ve made and the withdrawal of those 2,000 troops is just that—a tactical change. Mission remains the same.”

It is apparent that the strategic focus remains US imperialism’s drive to curtail Iranian and Russian influence in the region, including by means of military force.

The US government has developed plans for military strikes against Iran, according to media reports. Monday, The Wall Street Journal cited current and former US official who said that the National Security Council, headed by National Security Adviser John Bolton, had asked the Pentagon last fall for military options for attacking Iran.

The pretext for the attack plans was an incident last September in Iraq in which a Shia militia had fired mortar rounds into an open lot near the US embassy, harming no one and inflicting zero damage. There is no evidence whatsoever that the shelling was carried out on instructions from Tehran.

Nonetheless, Bolton led a series of meetings aimed at preparing plans for a military attack on Iran.

“People were shocked,” a former senior administration official told the Journal. “It was mind-boggling how cavalier they were about hitting Iran.”

Bolton has been a longtime and fervent advocate of regime change in Iran, writing a column for the New York Times in 2015 titled, “To stop Iran’s bomb, bomb Iran,” and becoming the most aggressive proponent within the US administration of Trump’s decision to abrogate the Iran nuclear deal last May and impose a series of escalating economic sanctions that are tantamount to an act of war.

Bolton has repeatedly indicated that US policy in Syria is still aimed at driving out Iranian advisers, who are present in the country at the invitation of the government in Damascus. This posture was echoed by Pompeo in his jingoistic speech in Cairo on Thursday, in which he vowed that the US would continue its intervention in Syria “to expel every last Iranian boot” from the country.

Meanwhile, Axios reported on Monday that Trump had repeatedly asked then-Defense Secretary James Mattis and other aides why the US Navy could not simply blow up Iranian boats in the Persian Gulf.

In response to Pompeo’s statement and the reports of US military threats, Iran’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement Monday insisting that, “The US must learn lessons from the defeat of its numerous warmongering policies in the region over the past decades and know that the Islamic Republic of Iran does not value such US threats and will not be swayed by them.”

Even as it escalated its confrontation with Iran, Washington also heightened tensions with its ostensible NATO ally, Turkey.

Trump tweeted on Sunday that the United States was starting the military pull-out he announced on December 19, while the Pentagon clarified that it had only begun withdrawing some equipment—no troops—and that their pullout would “not be subject to an arbitrary timeline.”

“Will attack again from existing nearby base if it [ISIS] reforms,” Trump tweeted. “Will devastate Turkey economically if they hit Kurds. Create 20-mile safe zone ... Likewise, do not want the Kurds to provoke Turkey.”

Asked in Saudi Arabia what Trump meant by devastating Turkey, Secretary of State Pompeo replied, “You’ll have to ask the president.”

The semi-incoherence of the US president’s tweet—not to mention the threatened eruption of a wider war—is driven in large measure by the centrifugal forces unleashed by the US regime change operation in Syria, which relied initially on Al Qaeda-linked militias—funneling in billions of dollars’ worth of arms and money as well as Islamist “foreign fighters” that ultimately strengthened the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), allowing it to overrun much of Iraq.

Having failed in the protracted and bloody campaign to oust the government of President Bashar al-Assad, Washington shifted to a military campaign to defeat ISIS—all under the Obama administration—utilizing the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia as its principal proxy ground force, backed by devastating US airstrikes.

Turkey, which Trump had indicated will replace the US as the main anti-ISIS force in northeastern Syria, regards the YPG as a branch of the Turkish Kurdish PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party), which Ankara defines as a “terrorist” group and has combatted militarily for decades. The right-wing government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sees rolling back the YPG from its border as its first priority, and the campaign against ISIS as a distant second.

US attempts to square the circle between its NATO ally Turkey and its Kurdish proxies in Syria have thus far proven unsuccessful. Bolton, on a mission to walk back Trump’s announcement that US troops were going to quickly abandon Syria in 30 days, was snubbed in Ankara last week, relegated to meeting with a government spokesman and deputy ministers, after he demanded that Turkey lay off “the Kurds.”

Trump and Erdogan held a telephone conversation on Monday in an apparent bid to smooth over the friction caused by the US president’s tweet.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said Trump “expressed the desire to work together to address Turkey’s security concerns in northeast Syria while stressing the importance to the United States that Turkey does not mistreat the Kurds and other Syrian Democratic Forces with whom we have fought to defeat ISIS.”

Turkish officials said that Erdogan had reiterated his support for the US withdrawal and that he had discussed with Trump the potential creation of a “safe zone” carved out of a 20-mile-wide swath of Syrian territory. The two also reportedly spoke of the situation in Manbij, a Syrian town on the western side of the Euphrates River that had previously been held by the YPG together with US “advisers.”

Turkey has threatened to send its forces into Manbij and has continued to build up troops and armor on its border with Syria. Meanwhile, an Islamist militia backed by Turkey has said that its forces are prepared to attack the area. For its part, the YPG appealed to the Syrian government, which has sent troops into the area around Manbij as the Kurdish militia has withdrawn. The threat of the town turning into a flashpoint involving a clash between the major powers involved in the Syrian conflict remains acute.

Trump’s political opponents within the Democratic Party and the military-intelligence apparatus continue to attack the Syria withdrawal proposal from the right, accusing the administration of bowing to Moscow and Tehran.

The New York Times published an editorial statement along these lines Saturday titled, “John Bolton’s Wars,” expressing sympathy for “bomb Iran” Bolton for his mission of trying “to explain, or even undo, the president’s more impulsive and erratic foreign policy decisions.” The piece praised Bolton and Pompeo—the two leading advocates of an escalation of US militarism in the Middle East—for “trying to at least mitigate the damage caused by some of Mr. Trump’s surprise pronouncements.”

Under conditions in which the Trump White House may well be tempted to provoke a major military conflict with Iran or Russia in order to divert public attention from the crisis conditions created by the government shutdown, the multiple investigations surrounding so-called “Russian meddling” and “collusion,” and the growth of the class struggle in the US itself, the supposed Democratic opposition is only pressing for an escalation of American militarism.