UK Tory government manipulated statistics to play down COVID-19 danger to educators

Henry Lee

As far back as June, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) published data showing that 148 education workers in the UK had died of COVID-19, including 81 teachers, 21 teaching assistants and 18 in nurseries and childminding.

In the face of such shocking evidence, the Conservative government, in enforcing its policy of herd immunity, has rubbished any conclusion that teaching is a high-risk occupation using a combination of manipulated statistics and outright lies.

This was exposed in a recent response from the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) to a complaint about the government's attempt to manufacture a scientific justification for keeping schools open throughout the limited second national lockdown.

On November 3, the Department for Education (DfE) Twitter account posted a comment made by the chief medical officer for England, Professor Chris Whitty, that “[A]ll the data, including ONS [Office for National Statistics] data, do not imply that teachers are a high-risk occupation, unlike, for example, social care workers and medical staff like myself."

This was met with incredulity among experts, with Dr Sarah Rasmussen, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge who has reported extensively on statistics concerning the coronavirus pandemic, tweeting, "What is Whitty talking about? There’s no UK data to answer this." She suggested Whitty was referring to data collected during the first wave of the pandemic, when schools were largely closed.

Since schools fully reopened in September, teachers have reported conditions which guaranteed the rapid spread of the virus, with a lack of masks and social distancing. ONS data for October shows that the rate of infection among secondary school-aged children was far higher than the rates for age groups over 25. It would be perverse to claim that the spread of the pandemic in schools today is the same as it was between March and May, yet the OSR states that this is exactly what Professor Whitty was saying.

ONS data show that conditions in schools have rapidly worsened since they were opened at the start of September, revealing the rapid spread of the coronavirus among school-aged children.

Three days after Whitty’s comment, the ONS Coronavirus Infection Survey’s weekly bulletin included an "ad-hoc analysis" section, not present in any previous weeks. This presented new analysis of the data collected between September 2 and October 16, which it claims showed "there is no evidence of difference in the positivity rate between teachers and other key workers" in the COVID-19 test results gathered by the survey.

This prompted a complaint by Rasmussen to the OSR, about what seemed to be the leak of this analysis by Whitty, and also about the analysis itself. The use of unpublished ONS statistics was, according to Dr Rasmussen, a breach of the "trustworthiness principle" of orderly release contained in the OSR's Code of Practice for Statistics. The code, which applies to all government bodies, states that the trustworthiness principles are based on the notion that "no-one can just expect to be trusted. An organisation must provide testable evidence to demonstrate that they have the interests of the public at heart" —a key democratic principle on which all ethical use of public statistics is based.

Dr Rasmussen quoted two sections of the code Professor Whitty would have breached by referring to the November 6 report in his comments, which assert, "Policy, press or ministerial statements referring to regular or ad hoc official statistics should [...] contain a prominent link to the source statistics" and "ahead of their publication [...] no indication of the statistics should be made public".

The breaches outlined can only leave the public without the ability to independently scrutinise claims from highly political figures such as the chief medical officer, and vulnerable to dishonest and misleading statistical manipulations.

The means by which subtle statistical manipulations are used to conceal the truth from the working class are revealed by the other part of Dr Rasmussen's complaint about the ONS report itself. The analysis used two main methods to manipulate its results to justify Professor Whitty's conclusion that the data "do not imply that teachers are a high-risk occupation": the separation of teachers into four categories, and the presentation of an average figure for the whole period September 2nd to October 16th.

From the November 6th ONS report. The category of teachers ("unknown type") with the highest infection rate and the largest sample size (i.e. the most reliable data) is separated from the first three categories of teachers by the inclusion of university lecturers. The large error bars indicate the unreliability of the data for the categories with smaller sample sizes.

The sample of 12,201 teachers was separated into four different categories: three based on the age of the children, and one extra "teacher of unknown type" category. The name of this final category, separated from the other three categories by the entry for university lecturers, is intended to suggest that it is a small, insignificant sample, and that teachers reading the survey ought to look at the positivity rate for the type of school in which they work, which for primary and secondary teachers is lower than the figure for other key workers. This is extremely misleading. The "unknown type" category contains every respondent to the survey who wrote "teacher" as their profession. More teachers are contained in this category than in any of the other three, as can be seen by the small "error bars" which describe the size of the fluctuation caused by a small sample size: small error bars indicate a large, reliable sample.

In the most reliable "teacher of unknown type" category, 0.51 percent of respondents tested positive for COVID-19, compared with 0.40 percent of those categorised as "other key workers", a category including care home and healthcare workers. As the value of 0.40 percent still lies within the error bars for teachers of "unknown type"—and it is impossible to rule out the possibility that the difference is due to the small sample size—the ONS concludes pedantically that "there is no evidence of difference". However, Dr Rasmussen notes that as dividing the data into four categories reduced the sample sizes (and so increased the size of the error bars), this really means "we disaggregated and restricted the data in such a way as to make the analysis too underpowered to generate significant evidence."

In response to this complaint the ONS published a new analysis combining all teachers into one category, of which 0.43 percent tested positive for COVID-19 in the survey. Considering the small sample size, Dr Rasmussen's criticism of the analysis as "underpowered" still holds for the updated version. It is disingenuous to draw any conclusion about the risk to teachers from the results presented.

The other issue is that the figure presented in the ONS analysis is based on data collected over the entire period between the start of the school year on September 2 until October 16, three weeks before the analysis was published. While collecting data over a long period can increase the sample size of a study and may be appropriate when studying something which changes quite slowly, such as the average height of the population, it is misleading when presenting analysis of a rapidly developing coronavirus pandemic.

As Dr Rasmussen points out, the data collection started on September 2, but many schools were closed to pupils for teacher training until September 7 and so infections would have been low during this period, making the average figure over the whole period far lower than the true value on November 6 when the results were published.

The exclusion of data collected in the three weeks before the analysis, during which time the ONS data shows a sharp increase in positivity rates nationally, and an even faster increase among school-age children, was justified by the ONS as the additional time required to sort the data into categories based on profession, but had the same distorting effect on the average figure.

The presentation of data on infection rates in the general population in the November 6th report follows the ONS's own procedure for presenting data about the pandemic which evolve over time, a procedure which was not followed in presenting the infection rates for teachers. It is clear from this chart that the behaviour of the pandemic at the start of the term in early September was very different from a few weeks later, suggesting that the actual infection rate among teachers was far higher in mid-October than the average figure presented by the ONS for the period 2nd September to 16th October suggested.

The ONS is aware of the problems with presenting a single average figure calculated from rapidly evolving data. In fact, the ONS deals with these issues competently in most of the bulletin: in every other section which analyses data collected over a period of more than two weeks, the result for each fortnight is presented separately.

This has been the standard procedure the survey has followed since June, so even if the additional time needed to process profession data were a valid reason to exclude three weeks of data (which Dr Rasmussen disputes), the only reason to avoid showing the change in infection rates among teachers over the period covered is to conceal data revealing that the risk to teachers has increased over time, and for the most recent period is higher than other professions.

These issues alone are enough to render the ONS analysis untrustworthy, with Dr Rasmussen comparing the report to the lies about "weapons of mass destruction" used to justify the Iraq War. She wrote, "If you push hard enough for the manufacture of evidence, evidence will be produced, whether it’s valid or not."

The National Education Union’s joint general secretary, Kevin Courtney, feigned outrage at the ONS report, posting on Twitter the day the complaint was reported, "The outcome of this complaint to the UK statistics authority is very important to teachers and support staff... @NEUnion will write to UK Stats asking for urgent decision on this complaint."

Also very important to teachers and support staff is last month’s vote of the NEU National Executive against a national ballot for strike action in opposition to the dangerous conditions in schools.

Waiting for the outcome of the complaint is another in a long list of manoeuvres intended to provide excuses for the NEU's lack of action to defend its members.

The response from the OSR to Dr Rasmussen's complaint concedes some of the criticisms of the analysis, but makes mealy-mouthed excuses for each, stating, "We do not think that ONS intentionally presented the analysis in a misleading way".

When responding to the allegation that the chief medical officer was referring to the unpublished report in the comments tweeted by the DfE, the OSR reports a damning admission. It said, "We have been told that the evidence which informed the CMO’s [chief medical officer’s] response on 3 November included other published ONS data." The OSR including a link to the report on deaths analysed by occupation over the period March 9 to May 25.

Either this is true and Professor Whitty used data collected when schools were closed to claim that teachers are not currently at high risk, or it was a lie and he was merely making use of more recent heavily manipulated statistics. Either scenario reveals the dishonesty and abuse of science rife in ruling circles to justify their campaign to keep schools open—a key objective in their push to get parents back to work producing profits.

That the supposedly independent ONS is used as a weapon against the working class in this campaign demonstrates, as the World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth International have insisted, that the fight against COVID-19 is not a medical issue, but a political struggle.

French government announces mass closure of mosques in continuing anti-Muslim crackdown

Samuel Tissot

In the latest step of the extreme-right anti-Muslim campaign by the Macron government in France, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin announced on Wednesday that dozens of mosques are to be forcibly closed or investigated.

Darmanin tweeted that “as per my instructions, the state services will be launching a massive and unprecedented action against separatism.” He added that “76 mosques suspected of separatism will be investigated in the coming days and those which must be closed, will be.”

The Grande Mosquée de Paris (Wikimedia Commons)

The action had already been outlined in an interior ministry document dated November 27, which was leaked to the right-wing daily Le Figaro. The newspaper reported that of the 76 mosques, 18 will face “immediate action,” i.e., closure, and that another 58 would be investigated by the end of the year. It noted that the national intelligence services had conducted a review of 2,623 mosques across the country.

Speaking to Le Figaro, Darmanin stated that “ever since taking on my post at [the interior ministry], I have asked that we change classifications to be able to identify the separatist centers that have declared war on the Republic.” He added that “up until now, the government has been interested in radicalization and terrorism. Now, we will also attack the terrain of terrorism, where can be found those people who create the intellectual and cultural space to secede and impose their values.”

Darmanin’s statement amounts to a blunt declaration that the government’s target is not terrorism but is directed against the Muslim population. His reference to “people who create the intellectual and cultural space to secede” is defined so vaguely and sweepingly as to encompass every Muslim church and cultural association in the country.

The Macron government is using the attack on Muslims to build up a fascistic police state. Its policy is aimed at whipping up a pogromist atmosphere to strengthen the far-right and justify far-reaching attacks on the democratic rights of the entire population. This is under conditions of mass left-wing demonstrations of hundreds of thousands last Saturday in opposition to police violence and the government’s attempt to criminalize the filming of police violence.

More than 70 mosques have been closed since the beginning of the year. The campaign has been intensified in the wake of the terrorist killing of Samuel Paty on October 15.

Following the attack, Darmanin conducted a tour of television and radio shows, declaring that he was personally “shocked” when he saw supermarket aisles with international—i.e., kosher and halal—foods, and stating that the mere presence of such food aisles led inexorably toward “separatism” and terrorism.

At the same time, Darmanin had announced the closure of the Pantin mosque in Northern Paris, which regularly served around 2,000 Muslims, on the sole grounds that its Facebook page had shared a video prior to the attack criticizing Paty for having shown students in his class an anti-Muslim caricature by Charlie Hebdo. Following the attack, the mosque had immediately pulled down the video and denounced Paty’s murder.

The government has also ordered the dissolution of 52 Muslim associations, including legal rights advocacy groups, charities and other cultural organizations. This includes the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF), one of the largest Muslim charities in the country, which primarily offers legal aid to Muslims in discrimination cases. On November 27, it published its “final statement” pronouncing its self-dissolution according to government orders, and shortly thereafter removed its website and social media accounts.

Barakacity, another charity, was also dissolved, and police conducted a violent night-time raid against its president, Idriss Sihamedi.

In the latest announcement, the 76 mosques targeted will supposedly be closed if they have hosted an imam suspected of promoting Islamic terrorism, have violated rules for receiving public funds, have spaces or rooms inside the facility that are not registered with the state, or if they are already subject to a request for the dissolution of an association. The wide scope provides a multitude of possible charges to justify mass closures.

This has been timed to coincide with the government’s efforts to pass its “anti-separatism law,” which will be introduced into the National Assembly on December 9. Cynically renamed the law “confirming republican principles,” it is to be introduced as a bill on the 115th anniversary of the 1905 secularism law. In fact, Macron’s law is a repudiation of the 1905 law and the most basic democratic rights defended and advanced in the French Revolution, including freedom of expression and association, as well as the separation of church and state.

It will force Muslim institutions and imams to sign a humiliating “secular charter,” agreeing that all future imams will be trained with the oversight of the French state; patients who refuse to be examined by a doctor of the opposite sex will be fined up to 75,000 euros; and French school-aged children will be required to register with an identification number to ensure their attendance at school. The last measure, to illegalize home-schooling, was deemed unconstitutional by the Council of State on December 3.

The response of the majority of French and international media to the latest anti-Muslim measures has been either silence or support. One can only imagine the response of Le Monde and other publications had mass closures of mosques and anti-Muslim measures been imposed against the Muslim minority of Russia or China.

Macron and Darmanin have repeatedly declared that that a “war” is being waged against the Republic. Macron stated that “Islam is a religion that is in a crisis all over the world today,” “we must save our children from the clutches of the Islamists.” The government’s declarations, implying the existence of a country-wide Islamic conspiracy to form a break away Muslim theocracy in France, were once restricted to the ramblings of the extreme right. They have been adopted wholesale by the French state.

The government’s actions are aimed at promoting the far-right and anti-Muslim hysteria. In a report published earlier this year, the CCIF found that 789 Islamophobic incidences took place in 2019, up from 446 in 2017.

These developments confirm the warnings of the Socialist Equality Party (France) prior to the 2017 election, that Macron offered no alternative to oppose the neo-fascist policies of Marine Le Pen.

With thousands dying every week as a result of the government’s de facto herd immunity policy and unprecedent levels of social inequality, the French ruling class is preparing for an explosion of social opposition. Its promotion of fascist forces and its building up of police powers will be directed against the entire working class.

1.5 million dead from the coronavirus pandemic worldwide

Bryan Dyne

The world passed a grim milestone Thursday morning: 1.5 million lives lost worldwide from the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. More than 10,000 people are killed by this deadly disease every day, 50 percent more than the height of the first wave of the pandemic in April and more than double the daily death rate at the start of October.

Another measure of the spread of the pandemic is the number of confirmed cases of the infection, which has just passed 66 million. Nearly 600,000 people contract the virus each day, up from less than 300,000 new daily cases two months ago. The doubling of both the daily case and daily death rates are stark indicators that the virus has been allowed to rage totally unchecked through the world’s population by governments in every country.

Medical personnel transfer a COVID-19 patient from a state to a private clinic which has been appropriated, in the northern city of Thessaloniki, Greece, Sunday, Nov. 29, 2020. Greece's Health ministry has forcibly appropriated two clinics and their staff in the country's second populated city, where the outbreak is the most severe. (AP Photo/Achilleas Chiras)

In response to the surging cases worldwide, World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned in a recent press briefing, “This is no time for complacency, especially with the holiday season approaching in many countries and cultures.” He noted that while some areas of the world had seen a reduction in new cases in recent days, “Gains can easily be lost and there was still an increase in cases in most other regions of the world and an increase in deaths.”

This is truest in the United States, where the situation remains most dire. There are now more than 14.7 million cases and 285,000 dead across every state and territory, more than any other country in the world. More than 100,000 people in the country are hospitalized from the disease. An average of more than 175,000 people are newly infected each day and nearly 2,000 die. It is projected that the daily death rate will exceed 3,000 this month.

As President-elect Joe Biden said Wednesday, “I don’t want to scare anybody here, but understand the facts—we’re likely to lose another 250,000 people dead between now and January.” Yet, instead of calling for a national lockdown and an emergency halt to all nonessential production to save lives as one of the necessary measures to end the pandemic, Biden declared, “We no longer have to shut down.”

Such statements fly in the face of reality. Forty-seven out of the country’s 50 states have “uncontrolled spread” of the coronavirus, according to the website CovidExitStrategy. On a national scale, the number of those now testing positive for the coronavirus exceeds 1 in 10. Contact tracing is essentially impossible, meaning that those exposed to one who is infected are not alerted and the myriad chains of COVID-19 transmission remain unbroken.

The death toll for Europe as a whole is even higher than that of the United States, currently at more than 416,000. There are more than 5,000 deaths on the continent, meaning that at the current rate, the number of coronavirus deaths in Europe will reach 500,000 before Christmas day. The number of new cases now exceeds 200,000 each day, and total infections broke 18 million on Friday.

Italy now has an average of more than 700 deaths each day, only slightly lower than its peak in March and April. Its number of new infections, while trending downward because of recent lockdown measures, currently still stands at more than 20,000 each day, about four times the known daily cases during the peak of the country’s first wave.

Similarly in the UK, there are still more than 400 deaths in the country each day. The Johnson government’s de facto policy of “herd immunity,” now adopted by governments in all the major capitalist countries, has brought the total number of dead above 60,000. Moreover, the number of “excess deaths” in the country, which research shows is a better measure of the true scale of the pandemic, is well over 70,000.

Belgium now has the highest per capita death toll of any country in the world, currently 1,467 deaths per million people. This has been in large part driven by the government’s abandonment of medical care for residents in retirement homes in Belgium throughout the coronavirus epidemic. At the same time, the new prime minister, Alexander De Croo, declared when he took office in October that he will not consider a lockdown in the country no matter how many lives are lost. “Let me be very clear,” De Croo asserted, “Our country, our economy and our businesses can’t handle a new general lockdown.”

Countries in South America are also experiencing a second wave of coronavirus cases and deaths. There are more than 11.3 million cases on the continent as a whole, and more than 330,000 deaths. More than 74,000 new cases were recorded Thursday and nearly 1,300 deaths.

The most hard-hit country in the Southern Hemisphere remains Brazil, which is facing a spike in cases similar to what it faced over the summer, when there were more than 40,000 new cases a day. The country’s daily death rate is currently more than 500 and rising. Its official case count and death toll, figures that fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro has tried to censor, stand at 6.5 million and 176,000, respectively.

A comparable disaster is continuing to unfold in India, which has more than 9.6 million cases and has suffered nearly 140,000 dead. A recent government-appointed committee has estimated, however, that these numbers are far lower than reality, and that it is likely that fully half of India’s population of 1.3 billion people will have been infected by the contagion by February.

That the pandemic has become so entrenched in every city, state and country in the world is a testament to the real priorities of every government. The necessary public health measures needed to end the coronavirus are known and have been shown to work in the limited number of cases where they have been applied. However, instead—from the United States, to Europe, to South America, to South Asia and beyond—corporate profits and stock market dividends are being placed above human lives.

Dr. Tedros said, “The pandemic has brought us to a fork in the road,” and “we cannot—we must not—go back to the same exploitative patterns of production and consumption, the same disregard for the planet that sustains all life, the same cycle of panic and neglect, and the same divisive politics that fueled this pandemic.”

While true, this cannot be done through an appeal to the world leaders and social system that allowed the coronavirus to become so deadly in the first place. Capitalism itself has been revealed as utterly incapable of meeting the most basic and urgent social needs of the day. The solution to the pandemic is thus not renewed bourgeois nationalism, but the fight for international socialism led by the only revolutionary force in society, the working class.

Podemos denies mounting danger of fascist military coup in Spain

Alejandro López & Alex Lantier

Amid the explosive political crisis in Spain caused by revelations of widespread calls for a fascist coup in the Spanish officer corps, Podemos leader and Deputy Prime Minister Pablo Iglesias finally broke his silence Thursday on the matter—but only to insist that the fascist coup plots do not pose any threat.

This is a politically criminal attempt by Podemos to lull workers and youth to sleep in the face of the rising danger of fascism. The day before, Infolibre had leaked WhatsApp chats of a group of dozens of retired top air force officers who proclaimed their loyalty to Spanish fascist dictator Francisco Franco, denounced the left, boasted of close links to the general staff, and called to massacre the Spanish people. Retired Major General Francisco Beca repeatedly called for mass murder to “extirpate the cancer,” writing: “I think what I’m missing is to shoot 26 million people!!!!!!!!”

The night before Iglesias intervened, retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel José Ignacio Domínguez, a former participant in the chat group, went on the radio programme Hora 25. He warned, “there has been and there exists a movement for a pronunciamiento ”, that is, an attempt to shift politics to the right by threatening a coup. Speaking of the participants in the chat, Domínguez added: “They are not monarchists or constitutionalists, they are Francoists and they defend dictatorship. I’m not only talking about the past ones, but the future ones. They aspire to a dictatorship.”

On Thursday morning, however, Iglesias gave a prime-time interview on TVE1 state television to brazenly insist that nothing of any importance had been revealed. He said, “What these gentlemen say, at their age and already retired, in a chat with a few too many drinks, does not pose any threat.”

Podemos party leader Pablo Iglesias (Wikimedia Commons)

Iglesias tried to reassure the public that WhatsApp messages are “not representative of our armed forces.” This had been contradicted the night before by Lieutenant Colonel Domínguez, who reported that fascism is alive and well in the Spanish army: “The Franco regime continues to have a large presence in the army, and Franco continues to be a respected figure.”

Nonetheless, Iglesias insisted that the threats from the officers in the WhatsApp group have no practical significance: “If they had done this while they were in active duty, obviously, it would have had disciplinary consequences, but there they would not have done it.”

Iglesias claimed that this was because they lacked “the guts” to agitate for a coup when on active duty. To support this grotesque argument, Iglesias cited the authority of another leading Podemos member, retired Air Force General and Chief of the Defence Staff Julio Rodríguez. Rodríguez, Iglesias claimed, had told him that “some of those who now say atrocities while they were in the army were sucking up to anyone in order to continue rising [in the ranks].”

Iglesias’ argument trivializing fascist support in the army is shot through with contradictions. If these officers long supported a fascist coup but did not have the “guts” for it, and instead spend their time “sucking up” to the general staff, this only raises the question: Why do these officers now believe that calling for a fascist coup is a good way of “sucking up” to the general staff and the ruling class?

In fact, powerful forces in Spanish bourgeois politics are spreading and legitimizing appeals to the king to support a coup. Indeed, while Iglesias and Podemos were maintaining a confused silence after Infolibre ’s revelations, the fascist Vox party was openly defending the officers’ obscene and fascistic WhatsApp chats in the Congress. Hailing the officers calling for the mass murder of 26 million Spaniards as fighting for “the unity of Spain,” Vox lawmaker Macarena Olona declared: “Of course they are our people.”

Beca was the lead signatory of a group of 39 retired air force officers who wrote to Spanish King Felipe VI to denounce the elected Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government. This came after another similar letter from 73 top retired army officers, parts of which were published in El País. These officers have now circulated a new letter, again denouncing a government of “communists” and stressing their “oath to defend the integrity of Spain and the constitutional order, giving our lives if necessary.”

Iglesias is covering up for fascist coup plotting because the PSOE-Podemos government itself has effectively been exposed as criminal. It implemented a “herd immunity” policy on Covid-19, imposing a return to work and school that left over 65,000 dead and 1.5 million infected in Spain. At the same time, as joblessness and hunger mount, Iglesias is joining a commission handing out billions of euros in EU bailout funds to the banks and corporations.

Iglesias knows a movement in the working class against the threat of a fascist coup would also enter into struggle against his own government. He is therefore making himself complicit in the fascist coup threat, desperately trying to hide it from the public.

Millions of Twitter users made the retired generals’ fascist messages one of Twitter’s main trending topics on Tuesday. On Wednesday, this was followed by the trending hashtag #YoSoyDeLos26Millones (I am one of the 26 million), in which tens of thousands commented. Thousands more denounced the king for remaining silent. There were many references to Franco’s fascist coup in 1936, the three-year Spanish Civil War that ensued, and the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of left-wing workers by the fascist Francoite regime at the war’s end.

One Twitter user said: “I would also be one of the first. Like my grandfather. He was shot just because he liked to speak and participate in politics. Just like I do. He continues to chew dirt in his mass grave.”

Another said: “I am one of the 26 million people that are not going to allow this happen again. They will have us in front.”

Iglesias waited in silence for four days after the first publication of one of the fascist officers’ letters in El Pais, when anger was boiling over on social media, before taking a public position on the issue. It is self- evident that his mission was to dampen mounting outrage among workers and youth.

Iglesias in his interview promoted the regime and especially the king, who has yet to disavow the letters, disclose the signatories or reveal other coup appeals he has received. Iglesias said: “I don’t have the slightest doubt that he won’t even read the letter.” He blamed the WhatsApp group for putting the king “in an absurdly uncomfortable situation … If some Francoite gentlemen think that by associating the head of state with Francoism they are doing him a favor, I think they do not understand that this contributes to more and more Spaniards feeling republican.”

These are more lies. Firstly, King Felipe and Iglesias himself are no doubt intensively reading the letters fascist officers are sending. Iglesias sits on the board running Spain’s National Intelligence Centre (CNI), one of whose main purposes is to monitor the army’s coup plots. It is known that the CNI identified and stopped coup plots by the Spanish army in 1982, 1985, and 2006. There can be little doubt that the CNI is now reporting on the fascist officers to Iglesias and other government officials.

Moreover, if Iglesias is unhappy that the Francoite officers are putting the king in an “uncomfortable” position, it is not that he fears a movement to make Spain into a Republic. His fear is that the threat of military-fascist dictatorship will provoke an eruption in the working class of strikes and protests and the development of a political movement against fascism. This would inevitably threaten the interests of the financial oligarchy he defends.

Four workers killed in explosion at UK water treatment plant

Richard Tyler

A massive explosion ripped through a large metal tank used to store treated biosolids Thursday morning, killing four workers. The force of the blast at a Geneco water recycling centre in Avonmouth, near Bristol, was so great that one of the bodies was recovered from a lake 150 metres away.

The four who died were named on Friday evening. They were 16 year old Luke Wheaton, who had recently started an apprenticeship at the plant, Michael James, aged 64, Brian Vickery, 63, and Raymond White, 57. The BBC reported “It is understood Mr James was a contractor working at the site, while Mr Vickery and Mr White were employees of Wessex Water…” A fifth worker received non-life-threatening injuries.

The Geneco site in Avonmouth (credit: Google Maps)

The workers were on the roof of the tank when it exploded, tearing it apart. An eyewitness told the media, “They didn’t stand a chance”. Others described the explosion as shaking nearby buildings. A warehouse worker said he and his colleagues had stood rooted to the spot as the walls trembled. Another said, “I thought a bomb had gone off. It was terrifying”.

Within minutes, the police declared a major incident as six fire crews raced to the scene. Specialist search and rescue teams from as far away as Exeter were deployed, using heat-seeking cameras to look for the victims.

Despite no cause having yet been identified for the explosion, which will be investigated by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), Chief Inspector Mark Runacres of Avon and Somerset Police said there were no “ongoing public safety concerns”.

Geneco, a wholly owned subsidiary of Wessex Water, takes “treated sludge” from its adjacent sewage treatment plant, as well as food waste from homes and supermarkets, to convert into biogas, fertiliser, and other products. In the process of creating the fertiliser, large quantities of highly explosive methane gas are produced.

The Bristol Live news site cited the comments of Tony Ennis, “an expert in the field of fire and explosion hazards for over 25 years.” He said, “The explosion appears to have taken place in a silo which stores the output from an anaerobic digester.

“The waste is organic, for example food waste, and is 'digested' to create methane gas, which is the main component of natural gas—the gas can be used to generate electricity."

“It appears likely that there was methane gas in the head space of the tank.

“Depending on the amount of methane, the pressure developed in the tank could be up to 8 bar. Pressure in a car tyre is 2-2.5 bar.

“The tank is not designed for this pressure and appears to have failed catastrophically at the joint between the roof and cylindrical shell."

Wessex Water is one the UK’s 12 water and sewerage companies, privatised under the Thatcher Conservative government in 1989 as part of its massive sell-off of public utilities including rail, gas, electricity and telecommunications.

The GMB trade union, from the standard nationalist perspective of the union bureaucracy everywhere, complains that since privatisation the main problem is that the water industry is owned by “foreign” conglomerates, rather than UK corporations. Its research found that over 70 percent of England’s water industry is owned by overseas companies, including those based in tax havens, banks, hedge funds and “sovereign wealth funds” belonging to foreign governments.

The nine privatised water companies in England are a cash cows for their corporate owners of whatever nationality. In the past five years, shareholders received £6.5 billion in dividends, £1.4 billion in 2017 alone.

Company executives, such as Wessex Water’s CEO Colin Skellett, are richly rewarded for squeezing every ounce of profit out their workers. Over the past five years, the CEOs of England’s water companies have pocketed £58 million.

Wessex Water was originally purchased by the US company Enron in 1998 for $2.4 billion. Following Enron’s collapse, it was bought in 2002 by YTL Power International, based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Under YTL, Wessex Water has seen its capital value almost triple from £1.3 billion to £3.3 billion in 2019.

YTL currently derives half of its turnover from the UK and 85 percent of its revenues from abroad, through companies it owns in Singapore, Indonesia, and Australia.

Earlier this year, Skellett told Malaysia’s largest circulation English-language newspaper The Star, “We are contributing about £75 million a year as dividends to YTL Power from £50mil a year when Wessex Water was initially acquired from Enron.”

While shareholders and CEOs in the privatised water industry see their bank balances growing, this is also at the expense of consumers. Since privatisation in 1989, water bills have increased by 40 percent above the rate of inflation, according to the National Audit Office. Some 2.4 billion litres of water are wasted in England because of a lack of investment in old and decrepit infrastructure.

A report commissioned by ocean conservation charity Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) shows that UK water companies were responsible for 3,000 raw sewage pollution incidents between October 2019 and September 2020. The report highlights 153 health incidents because of the discharge of raw sewage into coastal waters used recreationally. These included cases of ear, nose and throat infections, gastroenteritis, and more serious long-term health impacts.

The report highlights several serious failings on the part of the water companies. The UK ranks 25th out of 30 European countries for poor bathing water quality. Southern Water, whose region of operation accounted for a fifth of all water-related ill-health reports, had failed to issue a “sewage spill notification” for most of 2020.

Water companies in England discharged raw sewage into rivers on more than 200,000 occasions last year, according to the information obtained by the Guardian .

The Environment Agency (EA), charged with upholding water cleanliness standards, has drastically reduced its activities aimed at protecting public health, citing the coronavirus pandemic.

As well as cutting the number of water quality tests it carries out, EA has curtailed investigations into water pollution incidents. In the five months from April to August, it carried out 292 visits, compared to 1,726 over the same period in the previous year.

Citing data obtained through a Freedom of Information request, the Guardian reports that despite this 87 percent decline in EA visits, the number of pollution incidents reported remains high. The agency received 9,144 incident reports during the same period, compared to 9,424 in 2019.

According to Environment Agency data, only 14 percent of the UK’s watercourses are currently in good ecological health.

While the tragic incident at Geneco that cost the lives of four workers is generally referred to in the media as an “industrial accident”, there is nothing accidental about the risks workers confront each day in carrying out their jobs. The drive to increase profits and shareholder value inevitably leads to cutting corners when it comes to health and safety.

The Avonmouth explosion is the second serious incident in the area in a matter of weeks. In October as much as 20,000 tonnes of scrap metal went ablaze in a fire at Avonmouth Docks, close to the Geneco plant.

In November, 100 firefighters attended a “major fire” at a tyre storage facility in Bradford, West Yorkshire. A spokesman for the local council said the incident would have “far reaching effects on residents, travellers, businesses and schools”.

A fire at an industrial building in Kent in September led to 200 people having to be evacuated.

A major fire in August at a Newhaven industrial unit required 12 fire crews to bring it under control.

At Tilbury Docks in Essex in July, the roof of one building collapsed following an explosion. One person had to be treated for smoke inhalation.

An explosion in June at an industrial site in Erith, near London, caused burns to three people, requiring hospital treatment.

Beijing intensifies crackdown on Hong Kong political opposition

Peter Symonds

Three young opposition activists—Joshua Wong, Agnes Chow and Ivan Lam—were sentenced on Wednesday to jail terms after pleading guilty to trumped-up charges of organising, participating in and inciting others to take part in an unauthorised assembly last year. Wong has been jailed for 13 and a half months, Chow to 10 months, and Lam for seven months.

The sentences are part of a broader political crackdown by Beijing and its puppet administration in Hong Kong aimed at suppressing large-scale protests that have repeatedly erupted over demands for greater democratic rights. Millions took to the street last year in opposition to legislative changes to enable extradition to the Chinese mainland fearing it would be used against critics of Beijing.

Joshua Wong (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Wong, Chow and Lam were charged over a protest in June 2019 outside police headquarters involving thousands of people over attempts by police to use tear gas and pepper spray to suppress the mounting demonstrations. Chief Executive Carrie Lam was eventually forced to put the extradition legislation on hold but mass protests continued, driven by wider concerns about the lack of democratic rights.

Wong, Chow and Lam were prominent members of a political organisation, Demosistō, established in the wake of the so-called umbrella protest movement in 2014 demanding democratic elections for Hong Kong’s top post of chief executive. Currently, the position is “elected” by a body stacked with pro-Beijing appointees. Demosistō was one of a number of organisations formed by young people disaffected with the timid manoeuvring of the pan-democrat opposition grouping in the territory’s Legislative Council.

Demosistō was disbanded after Beijing rammed a sweeping new national security law covering Hong Kong through the Standing Committee of its National People’s Congress in June. The legislation covers four broad areas—subversion, secession, terrorism and colluding with foreign forces—and can be used to intimidate and suppress political opposition with penalties up to and including life imprisonment. The law also provided for the establishment of an “Office for Safeguarding National Security” in the city and for some cases to be tried by Beijing’s judicial system.

More than 20 people have been arrested under the national security law, including Agnes Chow and Jimmy Lai, who is the wealthy proprietor of the prominent anti-Beijing newspaper Apple Daily. He and two senior managers of his media group were arrested on Wednesday on charges of alleged fraud. Unlike the two managers, Lai was not released on bail.

Beijing justified its national security law by claiming it was necessary to counter “foreign forces” who were responsible for the protest movements in Hong Kong. While the US has attempted to exploit the anti-Beijing opposition in Hong Kong and figures like Lai are well connected in Washington, the scope of protests reflects broad fears about the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime’s heavy-handed approach to any opposition.

An armed soldier from China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) looks on during a confrontation between police and protestors at Hong Kong Polytechnic University from inside a nearby PLA garrison in Hong Kong, Sunday, Nov. 17, 2019. (Credit: AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

Hong Kong was returned to China by Britain in 1997 under the “one country, two systems” schema that supposedly protected the limited democratic rights that had existed under British colonial rule and would extend them in the future. The chief concern of Britain and China was to preserve the well-established corporate framework under which the city became a hub for investment in the Chinese mainland.

The real fear in Beijing is that the massive protests that have repeatedly erupted will trigger similar movements on a far broader scale throughout China. In particular, under conditions of a slowing economy and deteriorating social conditions, the CCP is desperate to prevent social unrest in the Chinese working class. Rather than orienting to Chinese workers, and a unified struggle against the Beijing regime, organisations such as Demosistō have promoted a parochial Hong Kong outlook and made futile appeals to Washington and London.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued an utterly hypocritical statement following the sentencing of Wong, Chow and Lam on Wednesday, declaring that the US was “appalled by the Hong Kong government’s political persecution” of the activists. Pompeo is part of the Trump administration that has had no compunction about sending federal paramilitary police to brutally crack down on protests against police violence and continue to try to overturn the result of the 2020 election.

Like every US “human rights” campaign, Pompeo’s posturing about democratic rights in Hong Kong serves the economic and strategic interests of American imperialism. The Trump administration has systematically ratcheted up the US-led economic and strategic confrontation with China, and has used the issue of “human rights,” not only in Hong Kong, but Xinjiang and Tibet, to encourage separatist movements and to weaken China.

Beijing in turn has exploited US propaganda to justify its police-state methods. The jailing of Wong, Chow and Lam is just the latest step in the CCP’s efforts to stamp out open political opposition in Hong Kong.

Last month the National People’s Congress standing committee gave the Hong Kong administration the right to disqualify members of the Legislative Council who promoted independence for Hong Kong, refused to recognise Chinese sovereignty or called for foreign intervention. The measures were condemned by critics who branded them as a “patriot test.”

Four lawmakers—Kwok Ka-ki, Alvin Yeung, Dennis Kwok and Kenneth Leung—were disqualified. Opposition legislators resigned en masse to demonstrate their support for the four and opposition to Beijing’s actions. Just two of the remaining 43 legislators in the 70-member Legislative Council are considered not pro-Beijing. One of those who resigned, Claudia Mo, told the BBC: “They’re lining us up to oust us bit by bit. What’s the point of staying on like this, thinking will I be ousted today or not?”

Beijing through its state-owned media and the Hong Kong administration is increasing the pressure on the courts, educational institutions and the city’s media to toe the line. A number of opposition activists have fled into exile. This week, one of the lawmakers, Ted Hui, who resigned last month, announced that he was seeking refuge in Britain after fleeing to Denmark earlier in the week. Another 12 activists have been detained in mainland China since August after being caught attempting to leave by boat.

More than 10,000 people have been arrested since the protests erupted last year against the extradition laws and 2,325 have been prosecuted on charges including rioting, unlawful assembly and assault. One account, citing police records, indicated that as of the end of October, 372 people have been convicted and 77 acquitted.

US occupational safety agency fails to report hundreds of health care worker deaths

Alex Johnson

A recent Kaiser Health News (KHN) investigation has exposed hundreds of health care worker deaths in dozens of medical facilities and hospitals across the United States that have gone unreported since the COVID-19 pandemic erupted in mid-March. Health care employers have systematically suppressed information on workplace fatalities related to the pandemic, while US Labor Department occupational safety officials have exercised virtually no oversight.

The KHN report examined more than 240 health care worker deaths documented in the Guardian newspaper’s “Lost on the Frontline” database. Out of the 240 cases, KHN found that employers failed to report more than one-third to any state or federal office of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), an agency within the Labor Department. This criminal policy has been based on internal decisions that deem such deaths to be unrelated to workplaces and on conclusions that have never been independently reviewed.

President Donald Trump installed Eugene Scalia, the son of the late far-right Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, as labor secretary in September of 2019.

The nonreporting of health care worker deaths has been aided by OSHA officials nationwide, who have refused to enforce regulatory laws requiring businesses to report deaths tied to workplace settings. State and federal laws mandate that health care facilities alert OSHA officials about work-related employee deaths within eight hours. Regulators, however, have adopted an extremely lenient stance toward health employers during the pandemic, giving them broad discretion to decide internally whether to report worker deaths.

The officially facilitated coverup of worker deaths has continued in the midst of exploding coronavirus infections and deaths over the past month, leading to the highest rate of hospitalizations at any point during the pandemic. The massive influx of COVID-19 patients has already brought entire hospital systems to the brink of collapse, exacting a grim toll on exhausted health care workers, including mounting deaths.

Workplace safety advocates have stressed that investigations into health care staff deaths are necessary to help officials carry out contact tracing and pinpoint the spread of the virus, before it endangers the lives of other health workers as well as patients and people in the surrounding community. By suppressing information on these deaths, health care employers, backed by the government, are also able to conceal shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) and inadequate staffing levels in the health care system.

Much of the effort to even document health care worker deaths has been left to investigative journalists and news outlets. The “Lost on the Frontline” campaign has identified more than 1,400 health care worker deaths over the past year possibly linked to COVID-19. Investigators used family reports, contacts with employers and public records to substantiate the fatalities. These worker deaths were tied to more than 100 health care facilities where OSHA records showed no fatality investigation.

The KHN report cited the tragic case of Walter Veal, a mental health technician who worked at the Ludeman Developmental Center in Chicago. Veal died in May at the age of 53.

As the COVID-19 pandemic began making headway into the city, staff members at the facility increasingly struggled to access basic protective equipment such as masks and other gear. Many staff members were forced to ask family members for donations and wear rain ponchos sent by sports teams.

By mid-May, the number of confirmed COVID-19 positive residents and staffers had ballooned to 247, according to the Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS). Veal died of the virus on May 16. Three of his colleagues had already passed away, according to interviews with workers at the facility, the deceased employees’ families, and trade union representatives. The facility’s administrators, however, refused to report the first death on April 13 as work-related. The same decision was made about the three subsequent deaths, including that of Veal.

Although the circumstances surrounding the first death on April 13, including the unmitigated spread of COVID-19 across Chicago and rising case levels, were already shedding light on the dangerous working conditions facing health care workers, no worker safety official arrived to inspect the facility. The IDHS, which operates Ludeman and employs the staff, said it did not report any of the four deaths to the Illinois branch of OSHA.

Since mid-March, staff members at the Ludeman Center had been growing increasingly desperate for PPE and faced frightening shortages of basic supplies, including gloves, gowns and hand sanitizers. The first known Ludeman staff member to lose her life, unit director Michelle Abernathy, was forced to supply her own gloves and died after a resident began showing symptoms in late March.

The Illinois OSHA branch began inquiring into the deaths only after seeing media reports on Abernathy’s death. After a cursory review of IDHS responses and a few phone calls, state OSHA officials determined that Abernathy’s death was “not work-related.”

This ruling was immediately condemned by Abernathy’s family. Her mother told KHN that her daughter was “basically a hermit” who could not have gotten the virus from any source other than the facility. In response to OSHA’s request for evidence that the exposure was not related to the Ludeman facility, administrators simply wrote “N/A,” according to documents reviewed by the KHN.

In a March 27 complaint to Illinois OSHA officials, Ludeman staffers said that it took a week for staff just to be notified of multiple workers who tested positive for the deadly virus. Another complaint in early April was even more candid, saying, “Lives are endangered.” According to Walter Veal’s widow, her husband was tested at the facility in late April, but by the time the results were released weeks later, Walter was already dying.

The number of workplace violations documented by OSHA inspectors is a huge underestimation of the true scope of the dangerous conditions in hospitals and medical centers. Despite there being 1,425 health care worker deaths linked to COVID-19 in the “Lost on the Frontline” database, OSHA inspectors have issued only 63 citations to health care facilities for failing to report a death.

In California, public health officials documented about 200 health care worker deaths, yet only 75 fatality reports at health care facilities have been sent to the state’s OSHA office.

Federal guidelines nominally enforced by OSHA do not apply to more than eight million public employees in the US. Only 28 states with their own state OSHA agencies cover government workers. For almost half of the country, if a public sector worker succumbs to the virus, such as an ER nurse at a public hospital in Florida or a traveling nurse at a medical facility in Texas, there is no requirement to report the fatality, let alone investigate its circumstances.

The criminal indifference of OSHA is a reflection of the class interests upheld by the Democratic and Republican parties, both of which subordinate government policy on the pandemic to the interests of the financial oligarchy. Both parties have refused to implement any serious measures to slow the pandemic and allocate the necessary resources to hospitals and other facilities facing dire shortages of staffing and PPE. The stock market has reached unprecedented heights, while health care workers, autoworkers, teachers, and workers in other industries have to sacrifice their lives for the capitalist profit system.

Number of infections among UPS airline pilots doubled in one month

Steve Filips

One hundred pilots for UPS Airlines were infected with coronavirus last month, double the amount for the rest of the year, the pilots’ union announced on Nov. 30. The UPS Airlines division is based in Louisville, Kentucky, home of its massive Worldport facility. In addition to being the largest employer in Louisville with 25,000 employees, UPS has 3,000 pilots in the Independent Pilots Association (IPA) and 481,000 employees total worldwide.

A UPS airplane (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The president of the IPA, Robert Travis, wrote a letter to UPS CEO Carol Tomé Oct. 29, concurring with management that the sharp increase in infections could possibly disrupt operations. But the IPA’s toothless appeal for more testing of pilots was essentially ignored by UPS. International flight crews from hubs in Miami, Florida, Ontario, California and flight crews from all other domestic flights are not receiving any testing. Workers are also not receiving extra hazard pay in spite of the danger of infection.

UPS Worldport’s Centennial hub was the site of an industrial accident on Nov. 18 which killed 28-year-old David A. Platt. The facility has been handling double the regular volume of packages throughout the pandemic.

UPS is one of the world’s largest airlines, with 500 aircraft flying to over 220 countries, and Louisville, Kentucky, is its largest hub, with capacity of up to 500 flights per day from around the world, and the heart of its operations, because of its geographic position where a major portion of the population in North America is within reach. Another major hub for UPS Airlines is in Anchorage, Alaska, a critical base for its lucrative Asian shipping destinations.

At least 185 FedEx Express pilots have also tested positive for COVID-19 according to figures released Nov. 10 by the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA).

According to a report on Nov. 23 by the Washington Post, UPS has received six Abbott rapid-testing machines as part of government’s Project Airbridge medical supply program. However, according to union officials only one machine in Anchorage, Alaska, was in use for pilots heading to Asia until recently.

UPS’ share value has shot up up over 71 percent since June. The logistics giant also reported $2.4 billion in profits in the third quarter, up 11 percent from the same period last year.

Not to be outdone, shares for rival logistics company FedEx have jumped over 121 percent over the same time frame. The key driver for the bonanza for investors in both companies is the record surge in package volumes as more consumers make purchases online. According to a recent Bloomberg report, both UPS and FedEx are struggling even to purchase enough delivery vans to keep pace with rising demand.

The total number of infections and deaths at both companies is not publicly available, and both companies have largely dropped any regular reporting since the initial wave in the spring. However, at least two employees at Worldport had died as of early April, and a FedEx statement from September suggested that around 8,000 of its workers had been infected. Early in the pandemic, FedEx warehouse workers and delivery drivers complained of being forced to work without even minimal protections such as masks and gloves.

Both companies are strategically positioned to rake in even more profits through the distribution of the vaccine and other pandemic supplies. Tomé declared UPS is increasing its “freezer farm capacity by installing validated freezers that range from negative 20 to negative 80 degrees Celsius.”

The Worldport facility will be utilized by UPS as a key distribution point for the coronavirus vaccine, and has acquired 150 freezers that each can reach the ultra-cold storage temperature for up to 48,000 doses.