Four years after Grenfell, millions live and work in unsafe buildings as the criminals remain at large

Charles Hixson & Robert Stevens

Monday June 14 marked four years since the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire when 72 people perished in the middle of London in an act of social murder.

To this day, not a single person or organisation responsible in political and corporate circles has been brought to account for this terrible crime. Moreover, the risk of dying by fire in an unsafe building today is greater than ever. It was estimated last June that 56,000 people were still living in high rises with the same type of aluminium composite material (ACM) cladding that enveloped Grenfell. The ACM cladding was the main reason a small fourth-floor kitchen fire became an inferno in matter of minutes.

But this is only a fraction of the true number affected. According to an assessment last June by Inside Housing—and based on the average household size of 2.4—at least 600,000 people (equivalent to the population of Glasgow) live in unsafe tall buildings and millions more in medium rise towers. Grenfell was 24 storeys, 67 metres, tall. Inside Housing warned, “There are an estimated 100,000 medium-rise buildings—between 11m and 18m—across the UK and no work whatsoever has been done to establish the extent of dangerous cladding materials on the outside… Both the Barking Riverside fire in June last year [2019] and the Bolton fire last November occurred in buildings below 18m with dangerous cladding systems, and both came very close to causing loss of life.”

The burnt out Grenfell Tower tower block building nine days after the June 14, 2017 fire. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)

Many more buildings used by the public remain in use despite being unsafe. Since the Grenfell fire, over 70 schools have been built with the same combustible insulation used on Grenfell, as well as 25 hospitals, care homes and sheltered housing. Although combustible materials have been banned on facades greater than 18 metres, the Department of Education recently drafted fire safety proposals for school buildings allowing for flammable materials in structures below that height. In the last five years, 47 primary and secondary school buildings have been destroyed by fire in England alone.

Set up in September 2017, the government’s Grenfell Tower Inquiry has heard more than 200 days of evidence from corporate and government officials, as well as firefighters and numerous technical experts.

Over the last weeks it has finally taken testimony from survivors, including residents, who had voiced concerns over their safety, worries about the Tower’s refurbishment, and the hostile attitude of the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Association (KCTMO) which ran the Tower on behalf of the Conservative council. Among these was 16th-floor resident and member of the Grenfell Action Group (GAG), Edward Daffarn. Just months before the fire, GAG posted a November 2016 blog article reading: “It is a truly terrifying thought but the Grenfell Action Group firmly believe that only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord, the KCTMO, and bring an end to the dangerous living conditions and neglect of health and safety legislation that they inflict upon their tenants and leaseholders.”

It emerged that Daffarn was accused internally at the KCTMO of “scaremongering”. Rydon, one of the main builders on the “refurbishment” contract that ended with Grenfell being clad in flammable material described Daffarn and other residents who raised concerns as “rebel residents”. Daffarn presented the inquiry with a 127-page statement which included seven complaints relating to fire safety made before the fire. He denounced the authorities for treating residents with “hostility”, “neglect” and “contempt”, and for allowing the tower to deteriorate into a “slum-like condition”.

In 2010, a serious fire began on the 6th floor and spread to the 15th, injuring three people, including Sayeda Ahmed. Sayeda’s husband Shahid Ahmed made legal claims which revealed improper seals in the smoke ventilator system that spread smoke throughout the building rather than removing it. Nothing was done until the 2016 refurbishment and, even then, the “improved” system failed to work the night of the fire. According to Ahmed, who chaired the Grenfell Tower Leaseholders’ Association (GTLA), set up after the 2010 fire: “I thought that the complaints procedure was a way for the TMO to be judge, jury and executioner.”

When gas pipes in the tower were found to be improperly boxed in, GTLA Secretary Lee Chapman wrote in a March 2017 email, “I am seriously concerned about how I will get out of the building alive in the event of a fire with this added risk. If we cannot get out, people will die or at best suffer serious injury.” He joined other GTLA members in calling for an investigation. Their proposal was rejected just four days before the fire.

The testimony of KCTMO officials and others in the ensuing weeks substantiated claims of mistreatment and harassment. By September 2015, the growing backlist of needed repairs in KCTMO properties had reached 2,300, growing to over 5,400 by January 2017. By 2014, some 1,400 of these were fire risk assessment actions, which they failed to disclose to the London Fire Brigade (LFB) because of a fear “this would result in more scrutiny from the LFB and also possible enforcement action.”

KCTMO Grenfell refurbishment project manager, Claire Williams, was questioned by Richard Millett QC over her failure to fix Grenfell’s automatic opening vent (AOV), which failed on the night of the fire. The LFB had issued the TMO with a deficiency notice for the system in March 2016, giving them six weeks to repair it. Nothing was done and residents were unknowingly left to live under these conditions for at least a year. Former KCTMO health, safety and facilities manager Janice Wray wrote Williams, “Let’s hope our luck holds and there are no fires in the meantime.”

In the same period, it took the organisation more than six months to fix a broken dry riser—the pipe used to connect to a pressurised water source for firefighters.

No personal emergency evacuation plans (PEERs) were made for residents with disabilities, despite 52 of the 120 flats having disabled occupants.

A few months before the blaze, the Conservative Party-run Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) decided against an inspection programme of borough fire doors despite being advised to do so by the LFB.

Amanda Johnson, RBKC’s head of housing commissioning, requested the TMO check on Daffarn’s tenancy after he raised concerns about services. KCTMO director of assets Peter Maddison wrote colleagues in April 2015: “Mr. Daffarn is continuing to agitate in Grenfell Tower. He is clearly distributing misleading information. I wonder if you could advise on the point at which his comments become libelous.”

The organisation also blocked its staff from accessing the Grenfell Action Blog on their servers from 2013 onwards. Some KCTMO employees discussed not including the broken AOV system in a Freedom of Information request initiated by Daffarn.

Officials continue to shed crocodile tears at the Inquiry. Quentin Marshall, RBKC’s chair of the housing scrutiny committee, felt obliged to bemoan his organisation’s pre-fire attitude toward the tenants: “I don’t think we addressed the emotional side and I think we lacked a little humanity.” Marshall, a private banker, should know. At the time he dismissed the residents’ complaints on the refurbishment as “grossly exaggerated,”, describing himself as “not massively sympathetic to general ‘It’s all terrible’ complaints” and claiming Daffarn had made “wild and unsubstantiated claims.”

Another nauseating display came from Rock Feilding-Mellen, RBKC Deputy Leader and its Cabinet Member for Housing, Property, and Regeneration between 2013-2017. He admitted to having only “skimmed” LFB documents that spell out councils’ legal responsibilities for fire safety and did not act on an LFB recommendation to ask questions about the fire safety of council housing. The Inquiry revealed that, in 2014, Feilding-Mellen was involved in deliberations that saw plans for Grenfell’s new cladding switched from far more fire-resistant zinc cladding to ACM. This was done to save the council and the private developers a few hundred thousand pounds.

Feilding-Mellen told the Inquiry that he was “shattered” by the loss of life and would “probably be haunted” by whether or not he could have acted differently for “the rest of my life”.

This week, Nabil Choucair, who lost six members of his family in the fire, expressed the concerns and anger felt by many: “Four years on I fear that those responsible for the fire are going to get away with murder. It’s a shame that the public inquiry cannot be stopped and the criminal investigation is completed and prosecutions put in place immediately.”

What is taking place is a systematic cover-up in which the Inquiry serves as the mechanism to protect the guilty. No-one is being prosecuted as the Metropolitan Police long ago declared that its own glacier-paced “investigation” would wait until the inquiry finished and produced its report before even considering doing so. The Inquiry may not even conclude next year, five years after the fire.

The corporate and governmental figures responsible for Grenfell know they can turn up at the Inquiry, parade their criminality and then walk away—after the necessary handwringing—with no further consequences.

The public investigation was organised by the government under the terms of the 2005 Inquiries Act brought in by Tony Blair’s Labour government. Under the Act, Inquiry head Sir Martin Moore-Bick “has no power to determine, any person’s civil or criminal liability” over the Grenfell events. Last year, representatives of major corporations and other institutions demanded and were granted even more protection, as the government ruled that “any individual who gives evidence to the Inquiry… cannot have that evidence used in any prosecution against them in the future.”

All those fighting for justice for the Grenfell victims must demand an end to this charade and the immediate arrest and prosecution of the government and corporate officials responsible for social murder.

US nonprofit arts, culture organizations have lost estimated $17.3 billion in pandemic

David Walsh

While hundreds of people in the US and 10,000 globally continue to die each day, American media outlets lose no opportunity to assure their viewers and readers that the pandemic is “over.”

In fact, the suffering of the population continues, long- and short-term physical and economic suffering. For example, Feeding America reports that more than 50 million people in the US experienced food insecurity in 2020, up from 35 million in 2019, while more than 42 million face the same condition this year. A new study also indicates that one-third of Americans planning to retire now say the pandemic has delayed their retirement.

The sign for the Ernest Hemingway Birthplace Museum in Oak Park, Illinois, threatened with closure. (Credit: The Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak park)

Artists are faring badly, along with other vulnerable and unprotected portions of the population. This alone should encourage the radicalization of more thinking elements among the artists.

A June 14 update from Americans for the Arts estimates that nonprofit arts and culture organizations in the US have lost some $17.3 billion to date since the outbreak of the pandemic. Ninety-nine percent of producing and presenting organizations have canceled events, a loss of an estimated 541 million canceled ticket admissions. Local area businesses have experienced enormous declines in revenue, as have local governments. The survey calculates that “1.01 million jobs have been negatively affected as a result of canceled events.”

The statistics are mind-numbing, but revealing: some 46 percent of arts and culture organizations have laid off or furloughed workers. More than a third of this group had more than 50 percent of their staff affected. Less than half expect to return to pre-pandemic employment levels, and not until 2022 or beyond at that. Arts employment as a whole is still down 25 percent from its level before the pandemic. Many positions are never coming back.

The June 14 report indicates that more than half of arts organizations “with in-person programming remain closed to the public. 36% have targeted a 2021 re-open date. 38% have no target date. 42% lack the financial resources needed to restart in-person programming. 68% of those report it will take 3+ months to assemble those funds, and 14% are not confident they can do so at all.”

The US Census Bureau’s Small Business Pulse Survey suggests that “arts, entertainment, and recreation” businesses are among the most likely to take longer than six months to recover from the pandemic.

The Americans for the Arts report asserts that artists and creative workers “remain among the most severely affected segment of the nation’s workforce, having lost an average of $34,000 each in creativity-based income since the pandemic’s onset. At the height of the pandemic in 2020, 63% experienced unemployment. … 37% have been unable to access or afford food at some point during the pandemic and 58% have not visited a medical professional due to an inability to pay. 95% have lost creative income. 74% had events canceled.”

Logo of Indianapolis Contemporary art museum, now closed

Arts and entertainment in New York City and state have sustained particularly sharp blows. According to Creatives Rebuild New York, 50 percent of performing arts jobs statewide have been lost, with that figure rising to 72 percent in New York City. The city’s arts and recreation sector suffered a 60 percent drop in employment between February and April 2020.

Many museums in the US, where government subsidization of arts and culture is pitiful, also face a bleak future. A “National Snapshot of COVID-19 Impact on United States Museums,” prepared for the American Alliance of Museums in April, revealed that three-quarters of the museums surveyed report their operating income “fell an average of 40 percent in 2020 while their doors were closed to the public an average of 28 weeks due to the pandemic.”

Fifteen percent (over 5,000 US museums) confirmed there was a “significant risk of permanent closure” or they “didn’t know” if they would survive the next six months absent additional financial relief.

The institutions responding to the American Alliance of Museums survey reported having, on average, “16 months of operating reserve on hand, but one quarter of respondents had 4 months or less remaining. Fifty-nine percent of responding museums had to cut back on education, programming, and other public services due to budget shortfalls and/or staff reductions.”

At the time of the April survey, nearly 30 percent of responding museums were still closed. Those that were open were experiencing an average of only 41 percent of pre-pandemic attendance. Of those that were closed, “64 percent had identified an opening date, with 79 percent identifying a reopening date by July 2021 or earlier.”

“Museums,” the “Snapshot” continues, “have largely been unable to offset losses by cutting expenditures. Nearly two-thirds of institutions (61 percent) report that their net operating performance decreased, by an average of 38 percent.” The average pandemic-related loss per museum was nearly $700,000, an intolerable loss for smaller organizations.

Behind these dull figures lies a social and cultural crisis, organizations and museums closed or damaged, thousands of individual lives harmed or even ruined. And all of this unnecessary, all of it because of the homicidal policies of US governments at every level, under Republicans and Democrats alike, designed only to protect and extend the assets of the very wealthy.

Delta variant spreads to 74 countries as data suggests it will become dominant coronavirus mutation worldwide

Bryan Dyne

The Delta variant of the coronavirus, first detected in India, has now spread to at least 74 countries, according to reports aggregated by the World Health Organization, threatening a massive resurgence of the pandemic as reopenings worldwide continue apace.

The variant was first sampled last October, and is most likely responsible for the 35-fold increase in cases reported in India from February to May, reaching a peak of more than 390,000 cases each day, with a corresponding 45-fold increase in daily deaths, topping out at 4,500 reported fatalities. To date, India has suffered 29.6 million known coronavirus cases and at least 377,000 officially counted deaths, a number widely understood to be far lower than the actual death toll.

SARS-CoV-2 (Image: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

There have been more than 177 million cases of the pandemic worldwide, and at least 3.8 million deaths.

Now, the Delta variant is surging throughout the United Kingdom. Since mid-May, new cases in the country have more than tripled to nearly 7,500 a day, of which at least 90 percent are a result of the Delta variant, according to Public Health England (PHE).

In the United States, there is a concern that a similar trend will occur. The mutation now accounts for about 10 percent of new cases, with former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb warning on CBS that those with the Delta variant “have higher viral loads” and “shed more of the virus.” According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Delta is the third most common variant of coronavirus in the United States, after the Alpha (UK) and Gamma (Brazil) variants, and is the second most common variant in Health and Human Services regions 2, 7 and 8, encompassing Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Puerto Rico, South Dakota, Utah, the Virgin Islands and Wyoming.

Moreover, the number of cases caused by the Delta variant have more than tripled in the past two weeks, a trend which indicates it will likely become dominant in the US by the end of June if it continues to spread at the same rate.

Cases have also risen in Indonesia by 37 percent over the last seven days as a result of the new mutation. Further outbreaks have been detected in China, South Asia, the Pacific rim and across Africa.

As a result of such outbreaks, the decline in daily cases worldwide has begun to slow. According to the World Health Organization, while the number of new cases has declined for seven weeks in a row largely thanks to vaccination efforts, the global decline is concealing a growth in cases caused by the Delta variant, especially in regions with low rates of vaccination. “That means,” as stated by WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, “the risks have increased for people who are not protected, which is most of the world’s population.”

The risks are manifold. A study by PHE of Delta variant cases in England found that it causes 2.61 times more hospitalizations than the Alpha variant, and causes about 4.1 times more hospitalizations than the original variant. The Delta variant is also much more transmissible, somewhere between 50 to 60 percent more infectious than the Alpha variant, thus more than twice as infectious as the wild coronavirus.

The ability of the Delta variant to spread has been quantified by a variety of researchers and public health officials. In Australia, Victoria’s Deputy Chief Health Officer Allen Cheng noted that the reproduction number (R0) of the Delta variant is likely about 5, meaning that one person infected with the virus would spread it to five others if uncontrolled. Disease modelers at Imperial College London estimate the R0 value for the Delta variant could be as high as 8.

In comparison, the R0 for the original coronavirus was estimated to be between 2.0 and 2.5. Put another way, if 10 people were infected with the original variant, about 1,520 people would be infected after four weeks if there were no measures to contain the virus. Ten people infected with the Delta variant, in contrast, would infect 4 million people over that same period. Such high reproduction rates are why viruses like measles are so dangerous and why so much effort is spent to develop and distribute vaccines.

Of course, viruses do not in general spread so quickly, mitigated by public health measures, vaccines and our own immune systems. The coronavirus vaccines, for example, have been shown to be largely effective at preventing serious illness and death caused by the Delta variant.

The much higher transmissibility, however, means that more people will have to become vaccinated to stop the spread of the variant if it becomes dominant, which it is currently poised to do. While earlier estimates of the herd immunity threshold called for at least 70 percent of the world’s population to become vaccinated, the Delta variant implies a needed vaccination rate of 80-85 percent, a difference of between about 800 million and 1.2 billion humans.

Moreover, vaccines have only been effective against the Delta variant after the full vaccine regimen has been completed. Protection against infection after just a single dose of the Pfizer vaccine, for example, is at best 36 percent effective at preventing a serious infection, according to figures from PHE. As a result, there have been thousands of patients in the UK that have so far contracted the Delta variant after receiving only their first vaccine dose.

Such infections present an added danger to the British and world population: while the Delta variant is not itself immune to the vaccine, its ability to infect partially vaccinated individuals means there is a distinct possibility that it will evolve to be completely immune to the vaccine. If such an “escape” variant were to develop, it would reignite the pandemic with an even greater virulence than ever.

The solution to such a potential catastrophe is both to accelerate the distribution of vaccines worldwide and to maintain and expand comprehensive public health measures. As Dr. Mike Ryan, WHO Executive Director noted on Monday, “I would just maybe remind us all that, I think, in 2020, we spent nearly $2 trillion. I think that was around $1,981 billion in defence spending around the world. $16 billion [needed by WHO to vaccinate the world] represents less than 1 percent of one year’s spending on military defence around the world. Surely, we can afford 1 percent of that to save lives and bring this pandemic to an end.”

And as Dr. Tedros noted, while “high vaccination rates have helped cases and deaths from COVID-19 to near record lows” in the world’s wealthier countries, most “continue to rely solely on the public health and social measures,” including lockdowns, masking, testing and contact tracing, “that have been the backbone of the response to date.”

Such measures, however, are being abandoned wholesale. In the United States, for example, with the administration of Democrat Joe Biden leading the charge, mask mandates have been largely dropped and schools and workplaces are slated to fully reopen by the fall. Little thought is given to the 600,000 lives that have been lost in that country alone, or to the further heights of mass death to come as virtually all public health measures are discarded even as the most dangerous coronavirus variant to date continues to surge.

Alfred Friendly Press Partners Fellowship 2022

Application Deadline: 31st August 2021

Eligible Countries: Developing Countries

To be taken at (country): Missouri School of Journalism and U.S. newsrooms, USA

About the Award: The Alfred Friendly Press Fellowships are aimed at providing fellows with experience in reporting, writing and editing that will enhance future professional performance; transferring knowledge gained during the program to colleagues at home; and fostering ties between journalists in the United States and other countries.

Type: Fellowship

Eligibility: To be eligible, candidates must be:

• Early-career professional journalists from developing countries with proficiency in English
• 25-35 years old
• have at least three years of experience as a journalist at a print, online or broadcast media outlet.
• Participants who work as staff reporters in their host newsrooms are required to develop training plans that they implement when they return to their home newsrooms. ​

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Program: Fellows receive travel, health insurance and basic living expenses.

Duration of Program: 6 months. The ​all-inclusive ​fellowship starts in mid-March and ends in early September.

How to Apply:  Click here to apply 

Visit Programme Webpage for details

Stanford Biodesign Innovation Fellowship 2022

Application Deadline: 13th August 2021

About the Award: The Biodesign Innovation Fellowship is a 10-month experience that equips aspiring innovators with a proven, repeatable process to identify important healthcare needs, invent novel health technologies to address them, and prepare to implement those products into patient care through start-up, corporate channels, or other channels. In addition, the Innovation Fellows become part of the Stanford Biodesign community, which is a life-long, worldwide network of innovators passionate about improving healthcare.

Type: Fellowship

Eligibility: Individuals with advanced degrees and/or substantial work experience in the engineering, science, computer science, business, product design, law, medical, or nursing fields are encouraged to apply. Fellows will be selected based on their experience, passion, and drive, as well as their potential to become leading innovators in the health tech field. Applicants are welcome from any country.

Eligible Countries: Any

To be Taken at (Country): Stanford Biodesign Fellows become members of the Stanford Biodesign team at the James H. Clark Center on the Stanford University campus. Clinical immersion is completed at Stanford Health Care, as well as a variety of other settings across the continuum of care.

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award: The Stanford Biodesign Innovation Fellowship is a launch pad for initiating, redirecting, or accelerating a career in health technology innovation. Stanford Biodesign graduates apply their talents to:

• Catalyzing innovation inside major health technology companies
• Building their own health technology start-ups
• Teaching and/or leading translational research programs for world-class universities
• Driving innovation initiatives within academic or private medical centers
• Becoming specialists in design, investing, or other aspects of the health technology innovation ecosystem

They also become part of the Stanford Biodesign community, which is a life-long, worldwide network of innovators passionate about improving healthcare.

Duration of Award: 10 months. The fellowship is a full-time, intensive experience that runs from the beginning of August through early June each year. Stanford Biodesign Innovation Fellows receive a monthly stipend and health benefits during their fellowship period.

How to Apply: Apply here

• It is important to go through all application requirements in the Award Webpage (see Link below) before applying.

Visit Award Webpage for Details

Google Indie Games Accelerator 2021

Application Deadline: 1st July 2021

Eligible Countries:

• North America: United States, Canada.
• Latin America: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.
• Asia Pacific: Australia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Laos, Brunei, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Myanmar, New Zealand, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Thailand and Vietnam.

• Europe: Austria, Belgium, Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom (including Northern Ireland).
• Middle East & Africa: Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Nigeria, South Africa and Tunisia. 

About the Award: According to Google, the Indie Games Accelerator programme is a “special edition of Launchpad Accelerator and is focused on helping top indie game developers from select emerging markets achieve their full potential on Google Play.”

The Indie Games Accelerator programme was previously available for gaming talent from India, Pakistan and Southeast Asia. But Google says they are bringing it back in 2019 and expanding to “select markets in Asia, Middle East & Africa and Latin America to support indie game startups.”

For Middle East and Africa, developers and startups from  Egypt, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Nigeria, South Africa, Tunisia and Turkey are eligible to apply.

Type: Entrepreneurship

Eligibility:

• You must be a registered developer on Google Play.
• You need to be based in one of the eligible countries: Bangladesh, Brunei, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam, Egypt, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Nigeria, South Africa, Tunisia, Turkey, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.
• You must be at least 18 years old* at the time of entering the competition.
• You must be the developer of the game you are submitting for review.
• If you are submitting an unreleased game for review, it must have a playable demo APK (Android Package Kit) submitted to Google Play as private beta through the Google Play Console and made accessible to the program team by inviting iga2019test@gmail.com as a beta tester within the Submission Period.

Selection Criteria: All eligible entries will be reviewed by Google teams and program participants will be selected on the basis of:

• Game submitted for review, evaluated on innovation, fun, design, technological and production quality
• Ratings, reviews and performance of previously launched games on Google Play
• Developer’s ability to receive coaching 

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award: Successful participants will be invited to two all-expense-paid gaming bootcamps in Singapore, where they will receive personalised mentorship, invites to events, and other exclusive benefits to help them grow on Android and Google Play.

How to Apply: APPLY NOW 

• It is important to go through all application requirements on the Programme Webpage (see link below) before applying

Visit Award Webpage for Details

Britain is a Parasite on Other Countries

Patrick Cockburn

The British government pretends that, despite the drastic cut to its foreign aid budget, subsidies flow in one direction only, which is from the UK to poor countries. At the G7 summit, Boris Johnson is making much of Britain’s generosity in donating surplus vaccines to places where health systems are collapsing under the impact of the pandemic.

But the nasty secret about British aid is that, in reality, the subsidies are often going in the opposite direction because Britain deliberately trains far fewer doctors and nurses than it needs. It makes up the difference by recruiting great numbers of trained medical staff from impoverished countries where they are already in critically short supply.

In Kenya, for instance, where 20 million people live in extreme poverty, on less than $1.25 (89p) a day, the country loses $518,000 for every doctor and $339,000 for every nurse who emigrates to the UK. Britain gives substantial aid to Ghana to fight malaria and reduce infant mortality, but these sums are exceeded by the £65m Britain saves by employing 293 doctors trained in Ghana and a further £38m saved on 1,021 Ghanaian nurses who work here.

“The situation will never be turned around until we train more doctors here,” says Rachel Jenkins, professor emeritus of epidemiology and international mental health policy at King’s College London, who has long campaigned on the issue.

What makes the government’s position so culpable is that the Treasury is well aware of the financial advantages of training too few doctors and filling the gap by recruiting doctors and nurses who have already been trained at some other country’s expense.

A precise figure for the shortfall is difficult to calculate, but the then health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, told the Health Select Committee in 2017: “It is interesting that Health Education England estimates that we were training about 6,500 doctors a year and we needed to train about 8,000 a year to be self-sufficient.” Hunt’s expressed concern was not about the damage to poor countries of losing scarce doctors, but that there might not be enough of them to recruit.

Prof Jenkins says that Hunt’s figure is an underestimate of the number of doctors needed in Britain, particularly of GPs, psychiatrists and in emergency care. There is no shortage of people in the UK who want to become doctors and nurses, but the government has been unwilling to spend the money to train them. “Loads of people are disappointed because they cannot get into medical schools,” she says. “They should double the number of places for medical students.”

The reason this has not happened is the high cost of medical training, which in 2005 was already £220,000 for a doctor and £125,000 for a nurse, and has greatly increased since then. Medical schools are expensive and the training period is long. Even with what amounts to the poaching of trained medical staff from abroad, the number of doctors in the UK per capita is still one of the lowest in Europe, second only to Poland. A study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) shows that the UK has 2.8 doctors for every 1,000 people compared with an average of 3.5 doctors in the OECD’s member countries as a whole.

For all the self-congratulatory talk about Britain donating vaccines to the world’s poor, it is in practice knowingly parasitic on their ill-funded health systems. Of the 289,000 licensed doctors in the UK in 2021, two-thirds were trained in this country and one-third trained elsewhere. The losers are overwhelmingly poor and middle-income countries in southeast Asia and the Middle East, with the largest number of doctors coming from India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Sudan, South Africa and Ghana.

Because of the desperate need for more medical staff during the Covid-19 pandemic, Britain – along with other rich countries – has eased visa restrictions and stepped up active recruitment by the NHS, so doctors in the Philippines are retraining as nurses in order to emigrate. The country is now so short of nurses that hospital wards are shutting down.

Ways of mitigating this drainage of health professionals from poor countries to the rich include discouraging recruitment in countries where there is a critical shortage of health workers, and a ban on any recruitment at all in the 57 poorest. This is something that Britain long ago pledged to do under the World Health Organisation code of practice, which says that countries should create an adequate health workforce of their own through long-term planning, education, training and retention, so they will not rely on raiding the healthcare systems of others.

“The UK has failed massively on all these counts,” says Prof Jenkins. She suggests that Britain should pay compensation to countries that lose the benefits of expensive and ill-afforded investment in medical training and then suffer the consequences of having an understaffed health system in a time of crisis.

The NHS – and the health services of other well-off countries – can claim that doctors and nurses emigrate voluntarily, but this argument is disingenuous. Impoverished governments unable to pay decent salaries or provide modern working and living conditions are never going to be as attractive to medical staff as places able to provide these advantages.

The poaching of doctors and nurses has grown worse since the 1980s, but the outflow from poor countries has become a flood since the start of the pandemic. In the last 18 months, the number of doctors trained abroad but licensed to practice in the UK has risen from 66,000 to 80,000.

This is bad news for everybody. It has become a cliche to say that in dealing with a disease as infectious as Covid-19, nobody is safe until everybody is safe. The idea is to discourage rich countries from monopolising vaccine supplies and to make sure the poorer ones get enough to inoculate their populations. But this saying applies equally to rich nations ensuring that they have sufficient trained doctors and nurses at the expense of others. This hidden subsidy from the poor to the rich means that countries in the former category will become strongholds for Covid-19, where it can develop variants with which to renew the attack on the rest of the world.

A gain for an importer of medical expertise such as Britain is a loss for an exporter where already-inadequate healthcare provision is disproportionately degraded by the loss of skills. When one psychiatrist emigrated from Nepal to Britain some years ago, Nepal lost a quarter of all its trained psychiatrists.

Cutting foreign aid is popular among voters who feel that charity should begin at home and suspect its utility abroad. But training more British doctors and nurses, even though vastly expensive, would get far greater public backing and would provide an effective way of aiding poorer countries instead of covertly leeching off their overstrained healthcare systems.

The Coup That is Taking Place in Peru

José Carlos Llerena Robles & Vijay Prashad

Pedro Castillo of the Perú Libre party has already begun to receive congratulations from around the world. It is beyond doubt that he won the June 6 presidential election. The Peruvian Electoral Authority – ONPE – announced the final results: Castillo won 50.137% of the vote (8.83 million votes), while his opponent in the second round Keiko Fujimori of Fuerza Popular won 49.893% (8.78 million votes). This is with 100% of the votes. By all accounts, Fujimori has lost the election.

However, Fujimori – the candidate of the right – has refused to concede. In fact, she has hired the very best of Peru’s legal minds to challenge the election results. Within hours of the election tallies being available, Fujimori’s team filed 134 challenges within the window of opportunity; they have another 811 challenges in hand. Anyone who knows the Peruvian legal fraternity will realize that some of the most important names are on the Fujimori roster: Echecopar; Gersi; Miranda & Amado; Payet, Rey, Cauvi, Pérez; Rodrigo, Elías & Medrano; Rubio Leguía Normand; Rebaza, Alcázar & De las Casas. In Lima alone the team had over thirty lawyers at work. The Fujimori team had assembled these lawyers before the vote, anticipating the possibility of a Castillo victory and the need to tie him up in the courts. The white collar legal army put in place a racist lawfare strategy; their entire game has been to invalidate the votes that are at the core of Castillo’s support base, namely the indigeous communities of Peru.

The United States appointed a new ambassador to Peru. Her name is Lisa Kenna, a former advisor to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a nine-year veteran at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and a US Secretary of State official in Iraq. Just before the election, Ambassador Kenna released a video, in which she spoke of the close ties between the US and Peru and of the need for a peaceful transition from one president to another. The “presidential transition sets an example for the whole region,” she said, as if anticipating a serious challenge. If anyone would know about interference in the electoral process in Latin America, it would be the United States.

It would also be key members inside the team of Keiko Fujimori, such as Fernando Rospigliosi. Rospigliosi, a former interior minister under President Alejandro Toledo, joined the Fujimori team for just this kind of contest (for years, Rospigliosi had been very critical of the crimes committed by Fujimori’s father, President Alberto Fujimori, who is now serving a prison sentence). Working with the US embassy is on the resume of Rospigliosi. In 2005, the former left-leaning military officer Ollanta Humala was set to enter the presidential race in April 2006. Every indication suggested that Humala, who had attempted a coup against Keiko Fujimori’s father President Alberto Fujimori in 2000, has mass support. Some even thought that Humala would follow both Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales to draw Peru leftwards. In that period, Rospigliosi went to the US embassy to seek support in preventing a Humala victory in 2006.

On 18 November 2005, Rospigliosi and ex-Director of National Defence Ruben Vargas came for lunch to the embassy. They offered their “concern over prospects that ultranationalist Ollanta Humala is establishing himself as a political force to be reckoned with.” Rospigliosi and Vargos both worked for an NGO called Capital Humano y Social (CHS), which was under contract with the US government’s Law Enforcement and Narcotics Affairs Section (NAS). Both Rospigliosi and Vargas asked the US embassy to urge their communications contractor Nexum to “monitor coverage of Humala and promote anti-Humala news and commentary in the coca regions.” They wanted the US embassy to use its considerable resources to undermine Humala. This is old fashioned dirty tricks.

The US was worried about Humala, about his statements against the US military presence in Peru and his ties to Hugo Chávez. What Rospigliosi and Vargas said to the US embassy pleased them. Humala lost the election in 2006. He would win in 2011, beating Keiko Fujimori; but by 2011, Humala had estalished himself as a candidate of the neoliberals, someone that the US saw as harmless and useful. On 19 May 2011, Humala signed a text that yoked him to the neoliberal agenda (“Compromiso en Defensa de la Democracia”). At the gathering, he was blessed by Peru’s right-wing godfather, the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa.

Vargas Llosa is a key figure here, using the prestige of his 2010 Nobel Prize for literature as weight. As results came in that Pedro Castillo has swept rural Peru, Vargas Llosa disparaged voters in the rural areas; he warned that Peru would become like Venezuela and that it would a catastrophe for Peru. Marinated in the bile of racism, Vargas Llosa joined other intellectuals of the extreme right to belittle the Peruvian working-class and peasantry, hoping that such remarks would give sufficient cover to the coup process underway inside the ONPE.

Everything seems prepared: the US ambassador with CIA credentials, a dirty tricks man with a habit of going to the embassy for help and with a record of asking the US to malign the left, a grand old man with an allergy to his own people, and a candidate whose father was backed by the oligarchy when he conducted a self-coup in 1992.

Pedro Castillo continues to hold the streets. The crowds will gather. They do not want their election to be stolen. But there is fear in Peru. Darker forces swirl about. Will the people be able to defeat them?

Miss Universe Meza was unemployed before crowning and an ILO report: A capitalist reality of “democracy”

Farooque Chowdhury

Andrea Meza’s life forever changed when she heard the words “Viva Mexico”, said a June 13, 2021 media report. But, there were some more facts from a reality, which is out-and-out capitalist.

In May, Meza was crowned the 69th Miss Universe. The pageant was broadcast from the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino Hollywood in Florida. It was aired to more than 160 countries and territories.

The 26-year-old spoke to Fox News, US, recently. She said some difficult facts. Fox News questioned her: What was it like participating during the pandemic? Meza’s answer: “It was a totally different experience. I didn’t have work. My family was struggling with their business.”

In response to another question, she told: “I know it’s really hard for some people because they may not have access to the vaccine.”

There were, in Meza’s talks, issues of changing beauty standards, and an “amazing life”, which is “not perfect.”

She wants “to give women a voice.” She wants “to raise awareness of gender-based violence”.

The reality is

• There’s unemployment.
• Families struggle.
• Access to COVID-19 vaccine is difficult to many.
• Violence and gender-based violence.
• A beauty-show while billions struggle with pandemic, unemployment, non-access to vaccines.

Does the reality appear surrealistic or magical? Whatever the reality appears, the fact is: All these are happening in this capitalist world order, which a few MSM propagandist claim “democracy”.

Is it democracy – rule of the people, the majority, where billions struggle with hunger, unemployment? Are not the billions majority? Does the system uphold the billions’ interest? The vaccine-politics of the few powerful countries that assembled on an English shore shows the way the countries played and are playing with the vaccine. Is it democracy, rule of the majority, when voice of billions of people doesn’t find a minute’s space? On the contrary, it’s the few powerful that define “democracy” to market capital’s interest. Is it democracy, a system for rule by the majority, when a few have more than enough money to vaccinate all the poor of this planet, but that money goes secured in safe of the few rich, and is not discussed and planned to spend for vaccination drive although the English-shore moot – the recently concluded Group of Seven (G-7) – discusses a lot about finding and arranging money for the COVID-19 vaccine?

The leaders talk about “democracy”, and talk about vaccination. Although, at the very foundation of their discussion, was interest of concerned capitals – the capitals the respective leaders representing.

The “sweet” reality, the “happy all reality” stands before more questions if someone looks at the recently released International Labor Organization (ILO) report, which said: The ongoing pandemic has wiped/is going to wipe out 100 million jobs. This means at least 100 million families are/will be facing hunger and starvation, facing a life without health care, facing a fear of uncertain future. Michael Yates has discussed this fear in one of his essays in Monthly Review. This fear haunts the poor, the working people. This fear haunts them all through their life. This fear overwhelms them, overwhelms their entire life.

To the unemployed, to the millions of unemployed, this fear is far, far powerful than the fear of death as death diminishes fear while fear haunts the alive all the time, all actions, inactions, all thoughts within brain of the alive.

The ILO report – World Employment and Social Outlook: Trends 2021 (Geneva, June 2, 2021) tells the facts the workers have experienced over the last pandemic-months.

Guy Rider ILO Director-General, said: “Recovery from COVID-19 is not just a health issue.” He raised the issues of economies and societies, decent jobs, the most vulnerable members of society.

These – economies and societies – are political issues, and class related issues.

The ILO chief said: “[T]he lingering effects of the pandemic could be with us for years in the form of lost human and economic potential and higher poverty and inequality.”

Poverty and inequality are also political and class related issues although many economists discuss these issues in an economy-tight compartment. A deceptive practice, this is.

The G-7 leaders “forgot” to discuss this issue – labor and condition of labor – in their beautiful meeting. It’s not that labor doesn’t concern them. Labor concerns them all the time.

But, at least for now, they are able to keep the issue of labor aside as (1) they are busy with questions of competition of capitals, capitals from the US and European countries, and from China; and, (2) they are confident that labor has been “tamed” – under pressure from pandemic-created-devastation, and by the bourgeois leadership that has usurped leadership of most of the labor movement – for the time being. It’s a reality of chained labor.

The ILO report said:

# In 2020, an estimated 8.8 per cent of total working hours were lost – the equivalent of the hours worked in one year by 255 million full-time workers.

# Around half of the working‑hour losses were due to the reduced hours of those who remained employed (and they can be attributed to either shorter working hours or “zero” working hours under furlough schemes). The remaining half were due to out‑right employment losses.

# Relative to 2019, total employment fell by 114 million as a result of workers becoming unemployed or dropping out of the labor force. Had there been no pandemic the world would have created an estimated 30 million new jobs in 2020. Taken together, these losses mean that the global shortfall in employment increased by 144 million jobs in 2020, drastically exacerbating the shortage of employment opportunities that already existed prior to the pandemic.

# Recurrent waves of the pandemic around the globe have caused working‑hour losses to remain persistently high in 2021, leading to a shortfall in total working hours of 4.8 per cent in the first quarter that dipped slightly to 4.4 per cent in the second quarter. This shortfall – corresponding to the working‑hours equivalent of 140 million full‑time jobs in the first quarter and 127 million full-time jobs in the second quarter – highlights that as the first half of 2021 draws to a close, the crisis is far from over. Latin America and the Caribbean, and Europe and Central Asia, are the two worst-affected regions, with estimated working‑hour losses in each case exceeding 8 per cent in the first quarter and 6 per cent in the second quarter of 2021.

# The total working‑hour losses have translated into a sharp drop in labor income and an increase in poverty. Global labor income, which does not include government transfers and benefits, was US$3.7 trillion (8.3 per cent) lower in 2020 than it would have been in the absence of the pandemic.

# For the first two quarters of 2021, this shortfall amounts to a reduction in global labor income of 5.3 per cent, or US$1.3 trillion. Relative to 2019, an estimated additional 108 million workers are now extremely or moderately poor, meaning that they and their family members are having to live on less than US$3.20 per day in purchasing power parity terms. Five years of progress towards the eradication of working poverty have been undone, as working poverty rates have now reverted to those of 2015.

# Informal workers have also been affected disproportionately by the crisis. Roughly 2 ­billion workers – or 60.1 per cent of the globally employed – were working informally in 2019.

# Informal employees were three times more likely than their formal counterparts, and 1.6 times more likely than the self‑employed, to lose their jobs as a result of the crisis, thereby contributing to the observed shift towards self-employment. Moreover, because of their informal status, they were less likely to benefit from social protection. As many of these workers have lower savings rates, they have been more likely to fall deeper into poverty. Their already disadvantaged situation and the severe disruption to their working lives risk jeopardizing their future labor market trajectories. In addition, large regional variations in the prevalence of informality have contributed to the highly uneven.

# The COVID-19 crisis has further highlighted the vulnerable situation of migrant workers. Many migrant workers experienced an abrupt termination of their employment along with non‑payment or delayed payment of wages, and at the same time often lacked access to social protection benefits that could make up for their income losses. This has aggravated the impact of the crisis in both destination countries and countries of origin. In destination countries, sectors reliant on seasonal migrant workers struggled to maintain their workforces because of the widespread travel restrictions. The decline in remittances negatively affected countries of origin. Remittances are a major source of income in many poorer countries, where they are key to supporting both household incomes and domestic demand. The shrinking of remittance flows has thus exacerbated poverty in migrants’ countries of origin.

Therefore, there, in this pandemic-plight world, there is a loss of more than a trillion USD – “reduction in global labor income of … US$1.3 trillion.” This loss is of labor. Labor has lost it. It was not part of labor’s profit; as labor doesn’t profit. It was labor’s necessary – necessary for labor’s survival.

Whose income it was? It’s labor income. So, it’s labor’s problem, not a problem of capital.

This means, labor was not paid. This means, capital had no need to pay labor. This means, the labor has to find out its food, etc. This means intensity of exploitation has increased as (1) capital can’t sit inactive without making profit; (2) capital constantly goes for higher and more profit; (3) capital is making bigger profit despite shedding off more than a million muscles. [This has other meaning related to capital, which is connected to capital’s capacity, efficiency, etc, which question is not discussed in this article.]

The ILO report’s information – additional 108 million workers are now extremely or moderately poor – means: More than a million workers are getting less food, etc. Despite that – less food consumption by a part of labor – capital is not concerned with the issue as the labor’s less consumption doesn’t hurt capital’s reproduction. This also signifies increase in intensity of exploitation.

That’s the reason the concerned capitals, and the G-7 leaders also, are not concerned with the condition of labor; rather they, the G-7 leaders, representing a powerful portion of capitals around the Atlantic and the Pacific, are concerned with competition with capital from China, concerned with Trumpian tax measures on iron and aluminium from Europe, concerned with the slogan “democracy”. They need this “democracy” slogan to confront China although they are not now concerned with labor, the biggest part of people, and people is life and brain of democracy as democracy stands for majority, not for a handful of minority – the rich, the exploiters.

So, the reality appears, a lot, billions including a beauty queen, is not free from unemployment, loss of work in this capitalist beautiful world.

Bosnia commemorates victims burned alive in war

Abdus Sattar Ghazali

Bosnia-Herzegovina on Monday, June 14, commemorated the massacre of more than 3,000 Bosniaks during the war between 1992 and 1995.

Bosnian news agency provided a graphic account of the massacre. On June 14, 1992, more than 70 civilians were burned alive by Bosnian Serb forces in the eastern Bosnian city of Visegrad, where soldiers locked up Muslim Bosniak women, children and elderly people into a house and set it ablaze. The youngest victim was two days old and died in the arms of its mother.

Soldiers threw a hand-grenade on the house and then, from outside, shot anyone who tried to escape through the windows.

Most of the victims were from the nearby village of Koritnik, where soldiers had rounded them up, told them they were taking them to Kladanj, a town held by the Bosnian Army, and ordered them to board busses. Instead, the victims ended up in a house in Visegrad, where they were brutally killed.

The associations “Women, victims of war,” and “Visegrad 92,” commemorate the victims every year by throwing white roses from the historic Ottoman-era bridge into the river Drina.

According to documents of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), based on the victims reports, some 3,000 Bosniaks were murdered during the violence in Višegrad and its surroundings, including some 600 women and 119 children. According to the ICTY, Višegrad was subjected to “one of the most comprehensive and ruthless campaigns of ethnic cleansing in the Bosnian conflict”.

Remembering the victims of genocide in Bosnia, Rep. John W. Olver of Massachusetts told the house on February 7, 2008:

The viciousness of the crimes of violence committed by the Bosnian Serbs in the Višegrad massacres and the effectiveness with which the town’s entire Bosniak population was either killed or deported by Serb forces in 1992, long before similar events in Srebrenica, have been described as epitomising the genocide of the Bosniak population of eastern Bosnia carried out on orders from the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić and his military counterpart General Ratko Mladić.

The head of the “Women, Victims of War” association, Bakira Hasecic, told the Bosnia’s FENA news agency that on that June 14, several of her neighbors were burned to death.

However, one woman survived the massacre and Hasecic welcomed her in her home.

Sumbula Zeba was not looking like a human being, Hasecic remembered. Her account was part of the testimony in the UN court in The Hague, Netherlands.

What Zeba then said was so horrific that nobody believed her at first.

“For at least two hours she was constantly repeating that everybody in that house was burned alive, including her child and other family members. We tended to her wounds and even today I have her image in front of my eyes,” Hasecic said, asking herself how anyone could do such a thing.

Hasecic said that Zeba’s image haunted her for a very long time and she initiated the renovation of the house in Pionirska street because of it and managed to preserve it, although authorities in Visegrad had planned to knock it down.

Tellingly, the remains of at least two victims of the Bosnian war were exhumed on Monday at the Pilakusa Muslim cemetery in the northeastern town of Bijeljina.

According to the BiH Institute for Missing Persons, it is believed that the victims are Bosniak killed in 1992.

The remains of these victims were found under the remains of people who were recently laid to rest at the site.

The skeletal remains that were exhumed will be transferred to the city of Tuzla for further forensic processing to determine the identity of the victims through DNA analysis.