Australia’s Lockdown Troubles

Thomas Klikauer

By early August, more than half of all Australians (60%) were in lockdown. It should be clear even to the mathematically challenged in and around Sydney that Covid-19 cases slowly go up every day. And so do hospitalizations and, sadly, deaths – hitting even the unvaccinated young. Meanwhile, on a world-scale, Australia’s just below one thousand Corona deaths are a rather small number. Having a low death rate may well be the upside of what Australians commonly call The Tyranny of Distance. It pays to be a country surrounded by water at the end of the world. Yet this has not protected Australians from home-made and self-inflicted Corona troubles.

As Corona death rates still remain rather low, they are on a recent upward trajectory. Simultaneously, what goes down rather rapidly in Sydney is the government’s ability to trace those people who wandered around carrying the virus and infecting unvaccinated others. In the last week of July, the state of New South Wales had 780 Corona infections where the source of the infection could had been traced to its origin. In a further 384 cases, this was no longer the case.

A week later (early August), the state already had 641 cases where the origin of the Corona virus infection was no longer known – almost double the number. In other words, we increasingly no longer know where Corona infections in NSW’s eight million people (of which 5.4 million live in Sydney) come from.

In recent weeks, all of these numbers have been getting worse. Even more problematic is the fact that Australia’s vaccination rate remains stubbornly low. By early August it was slightly above 20% of the nation’s population. In other words, 80% of all Australians were not fully vaccinated.

Worse, the number of vaccinated people climbs painfully slow. If vaccination numbers do not go up dramatically very soon and Covid-19 case numbers do not go down dramatically, Sydney will have to have several more lockdown extensions. This comes in addition to the already six weeks of lockdown Sydney had been experiencing by early August. All indications are that it will get worse.

For some time, New South Wales neoliberal state Premier Gladys Berejiklian has been talked about a so-called gold standard for months. During the last few days, this gold standard has vanished into thin air very fast. Apart from her public relations talk, the stark reality on the ground contradicts her fiction. Even in Berejiklian’s daily press conferences at 11am every morning, her self-re-assuring announcements are starting to sound more grim every day. Yet some of Sydney’s woes are home-made.

Only a few weeks ago, her government oversaw the vaccination of 163 school boys in an elite boarding school. Even though this was later claimed to have happened ‘by error’, conservative Gladys Berejiklian believes that unfairly favoring her equally conservative constituency – the rich and powerful – at the expense of the not so rich and not so powerful is okay.

This sort of corrupt politics is known as pork barreling. According to Ms Berejiklian’s own assertion she strongly believes that pork barreling is not a crime. Hence very quickly, the vaccination of the 163 elite school boys was framed “an accident” by her government. Of course, the boys were asked accidentally whether they wanted to be vaccinated; their parents accidentally gave approval; the school accidentally checked that all forms were filled in and returned; then the school accidentally set up a date for the vaccination; they accidentally hired busses and the boys were accidentally vaccinated; of course, they accidentally received the Pfizer vaccine – rather than the cheaper AstraZeneca.

While this might sound funny, what was not so funny was that while all this was happening –    accidentally of course – essential workers in Sydney where not vaccinated. Among them was a bus driver who carried not only airline crew into Sydney but also the SARS-CoV-2 virus. As a consequence, Sydney had countless infections and virus transmission rates that were about to overwhelm the government’s contact tracing ability.

By early August, the first signs emerged that all this might overwhelm hospitals that had been deliberately run down by years of successive Liberal governments hooked on the ideology of neoliberalism. To make matters worse, Australia’s neoliberals – federally and at state level – have an almost in-bred obsession against state run institutions like hospitals.

Yet, underfunded hospitals are only one of prime minister Scott Morrison’s worries. Worse for him is the ever-looming party-internal battle. For one, if his approval ratings stay low for too long, other Liberals will put a knife into his back – a recent favorite of the Liberal Party. Like some of his predecessors, Scott Morrison will be cut down and replaced in a split second by his very own party mates.

Beyond all this looms the ideological battle between the Liberal party’s staunchly neoliberal free-market wing and its Christian-fundamentalist wing. To add a bit of spice to this, Scott Morrison’s most recent pork barreling in favor of Sydney not only dismayed people in Melbourne but even offended the more neoliberal Melbourne faction of the Liberal party.

Above and beyond all this, Scott Morrison as well as Berejiklian are not only fighting a political PR battle – never mind rising death rates, infections and hospitalizations – they also fight their own neoliberal ideology. The Coronavirus pandemic has forced Australia’s (neo-)Liberals to do the exact opposite of what their ideology tells them. For one, the much hated public service of the state is in great demand and so are publicly funded hospitals, government funded vaccinations centers and Corona tests facilities.

Worse, the neoliberal belief in the free market has been utterly undermined by the Coronavirus pandemic. Fighting the pandemic means coordinated state action. Leaving this fight to the free market, would leave the virus to do what it does best: infect and kill people on a massive scale.

Even worse is the fact that the much hated “red tape” is also in great demand as those eligible for state support during the lockdown need to be separated from those who are not. In short, the Coronavirus pandemic is a nightmare for the ideology of neoliberalism and its political henchmen and -women (e.g. Miss Berejiklian).

At the same time as Corona infections are on the rise and deaths increased steadily, Australia’s vaccination rate remains at the bottom of comparable OECD countries. By early August, Australia ranked 37 out of 38 OECD countries when it came to the proportion of a country’s population that had been fully vaccinated. Yet in August 2021 Australia was about 1½ years into the Coronavirus pandemic that was detected at the beginning of the year 2020.

In other words, Gold-Standard Scott Morrison – Australia’s neoliberal, conspiracy theories believing, and Christian fundamentalist prime minister – has been sitting on this hands for 1½ years. Morrison, also known as Scotty from Marketing because of his ability to see politics as a PR opportunity, has for months been failing to secure enough Pfizer vaccines to get Australians vaccinated.

Yet Scott Morrison was not totally sitting on his hands. He managed to attend the G7 meeting in 2021 – of which Australia is not a member. Whilst there, he went to a pub, visited a graveyard and had lunch in Paris on the way back to Australia. At the same time, Australians were unable to travel.

Worse, under Scott Morrison’s border security regime, a right-wing English “media personality” (read: I have no skills) was allowed into Australia. Yet the former Holocaust-denier-conference attendee was quickly sent home rather quickly after a public outcry of her mocking the state’s quarantine regulations.

In another instance, Australians wanting to come home where threatened by their very own prime minister Scott Morrison with fines and even prison if they tried to come home. Of course, this does not apply to a G7-holidaying prime minister or British right-wing TV nutcase who believes that the Coronavirus pandemic is just another flu.

Meanwhile, 38,000 Australians cannot come home to their own country. Those 38,000 waiting to come are not right-wing chitchats. They are ordinary Australians. Yet, in Scott Morrison’s worldview, some – elite boys in a private boarding school, right-wing TV ideologues, and of course he himself – are more equal than others – ordinary Australians. Adding insult to injury, Scott Morrison has virtually made no provision to get the 38,000 Australians home. After 1½ years, no quarantine facilities have been constructed to quarantine these returning Australians.

In eighteen months, Scott Morrison and his government have done nothing. In 2020, China constructed a hospital in Wuhan in ten days. Instead of vilifying China and trumping China up as the new super enemy, perhaps warmongering Scott Morrison could learn from China? What an evil and heretic thought.

Just when you think it cannot get any worse, rest assured with Scott Morrison it always does. By early August 2021, Scott Morrison had outright rejected Labor’s proposal to give everyone who is vaccinated $300. The plan is to get as many Australians as possible quickly vaccinated. This is, after all, a highly viable strategy to fight the Coronavirus pandemic – get vaccinated. How wonderful it would be if Scott Morrison would adhere to US President Joe Biden’s advice, “if you are not helping, get out of the way!”

At the same time, the Australian army, who has now been called into Sydney to safeguard the lockdown, thinks that such payments actually work. Surprise, surprise it is working in other countries, in Europe and even in the USA. Incentives do work, just ask Dan Pink. They also work in the case of vaccinations. And they continue to work even though Scott Morrison thinks otherwise.

If Australia spent $300 on every single vaccinated Australian, it would roughly cost $7.5 billion dollar to vaccinate a substantial number of Australia’s 25 million people. $7.5bn is way cheaper than a lockdown until Christmas. Some people say, that the lockdown in Sydney will cost the economy $10bn.

In other words, Labor’s plan would have saved $2.5bn. It would also have made very serious inroads into the fight against the Coronavirus pandemic. Yet, if there is no PR opportunity in all this, it is irrelevant for Scott Morrison. Even worse is the fact that since it is a Labor plan, Scott Morrison will never do it.

Still worse, if the lockdown extends until Christmas, say good night to the Christmas sales which for many businesses are the biggest earner in a year. Ironically, it is often small business owners who vote (neo-)Liberal in Australia – the political party that has, at federal (Scott Morrison) and state (Berejiklian) level, comprehensively failed to deliver in the Coronavirus pandemic.

Yet Labor’s $300 offer to encourage vaccination would have the ability to end or at least cut down the lockdown time. Overall, Labor’s $300 offer is substantially more than Scott Morrison’s skimpy $25 food voucher – a mini-compensation for the economic hardship during the 2020 lockdown. Well, the $25 vouchers were just another PR joke.

While Scott Morrison rejects returning $300 per person of tax-money to Australians, he is very happy to waste “almost $3.4m for each person in offshore detention”. Tormenting the innocent in remote detention centers does not come cheap as the case of the Biloela family shows.

In any case, Labor’s $7.5bn vaccination incentive plan is rather minuscule compared to the $100bn we spent on twelve submarines which, let’s face it, are of no help in a Coronavirus pandemic. Yet each and every one of Australia’s 25 million people will have to fork up $4,000 for the U-boats.

Most obviously, Australia’s conservatives put their money – well, our tax money actually – where their mouth is. Scott Morrison’s right-wing government rejects a comparatively small incentive but is very happy to spend thirteen times as much on militaristic toys-for-the-boys. Meanwhile, Australians are months away from reaching a vaccination rate well above 80% which would allow Australia to end the lockdown in a safe way.

In the end, British philosopher John Stuart Mill might have been right when he said, “Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.” Australia’s conservatives may not only be stupid, they are also trapped in their very own ideology of neoliberalism. As the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno once said, “Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them.”

Biden Must Call Off the B-52s Bombing Afghan Cities

Medea Benjamin & Nicolas J. S. Davies

Handover ceremony at Camp Anthonic, from US Army to Afghan Special Forces, Helmand province, Afghanistan, May 2, 2021.

Nine provincial capitals in Afghanistan have fallen to the Taliban in six days – Zaranj, Sheberghan, Sar-e-Pul, Kunduz, Taloqan, Aybak, Farah, Pul-e-Khumri and Faizabad – while fighting continues in four more – Lashkargah, Kandahar, Herat & Mazar-i-Sharif. U.S. military officials now believe Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, could fall in one to three months.

It is horrific to watch the death, destruction and mass displacement of thousands of terrified Afghans and the triumph of the misogynist Taliban that ruled the nation 20 years ago. But the fall of the centralized, corrupt government propped up by the Western powers was inevitable, whether this year, next year or ten years from now.

President Biden has reacted to America’s snowballing humiliation in the graveyard of empires by once again dispatching U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad to Doha to urge the government and the Taliban to seek a political solution, while at the same time dispatching B-52 bombers to attack at least two provincial capitals.

In Lashkargah, the capital of Helmand province, the U.S. bombing has already reportedly destroyed a high school and a health clinic. Another B-52 bombed Sheberghan, the capital of Jowzjan province and the home of the infamous warlord and accused war criminal Abdul Rashid Dostum, who is now the military commander of the U.S.-backed government’s armed forces.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that U.S. Reaper drones and AC-130 gunships are also still operating in Afghanistan.

The rapid disintegration of the Afghan forces that the U.S. and its Western allies have recruited, armed and trained for 20 years at a cost of about $90 billion should come as no surprise. On paper, the Afghan National Army has 180,000 troops, but in reality most are unemployed Afghans desperate to earn some money to support their families but not eager to fight their fellow Afghans. The Afghan Army is also notorious for its corruption and mismanagement.

The army and the even more beleaguered and vulnerable police forces that man isolated outposts and checkpoints around the country are plagued by high casualties, rapid turnover and desertion. Most troops feel no loyalty to the corrupt U.S.-backed government and routinely abandon their posts, either to join the Taliban or just to go home.

When the BBC asked General Khoshal Sadat, the national police chief, about the impact of high casualties on police recruitment in February 2020, he cynically replied, “When you look at recruitment, I always think about the Afghan families and how many children they have. The good thing is there is never a shortage of fighting-age males who will be able to join the force.”

But a police recruit at a checkpoint questioned the very purpose of the war, telling the BBC’s Nanna Muus Steffensen, “We Muslims are all brothers. We don’t have a problem with each other.” In that case, she asked him, why were they fighting? He hesitated, laughed nervously and shook his head in resignation. “You know why. I know why,” he said. “It’s not really our fight.”

Since 2007, the jewel of U.S. and Western military training missions in Afghanistan has been the Afghan Commando Corps or special operations forces, who comprise only 7% of Afghan National Army troops but reportedly do 70 to 80% of the fighting. But the Commandos have struggled to reach their target of recruiting, arming and training 30,000 troops, and poor recruitment from Pashtuns, the largest and traditionally dominant ethnic group, has been a critical weakness, especially from the Pashtun heartland in the South.

The Commandos and the professional officer corps of the Afghan National Army are dominated by ethnic Tajiks, effectively the successors to the Northern Alliance that the U.S. supported against the Taliban 20 years ago. As of 2017, the Commandos numbered only 16,000 to 21,000, and it is not clear how many of these Western-trained troops now serve as the last line of defense between the U.S.-backed puppet government and total defeat.

The Taliban’s speedy and simultaneous occupation of large amounts of territory all over the country appears to be a deliberate strategy to overwhelm and outflank the government’s small number of well-trained, well-armed troops. The Taliban have had more success winning the loyalty of minorities in the North and West than government forces have had recruiting Pashtuns from the South, and the government’s small number of well-trained troops cannot be everywhere at once.

But what of the United States? Its deployment of B-52 bombers, Reaper drones and AC-130 gunships are a brutal response by a failing, flailing imperial power to a historic, humiliating defeat.

The United States does not flinch from committing mass murder against its enemies. Just look at the U.S.-led destruction of Fallujah and Mosul in Iraq, and Raqqa in Syria. How many Americans even know about the officially-sanctioned massacre of civilians that Iraqi forces committed when the U.S.-led coalition finally took control of Mosul in 2017, after President Trump said it should “take out the families” of Islamic State fighters?

Twenty years after Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld committed a full range of war crimes, from torture and the deliberate killing of civilians to the “supreme international crime” of aggression, Biden is clearly no more concerned than they were with criminal accountability or the judgment of history. But even from the most pragmatic and callous point of view, what can continued aerial bombardment of Afghan cities accomplish, besides a final but futile climax to the 20-year-long U.S. slaughter of Afghans by over 80,000 American bombs and missiles?

The intellectually and strategically bankrupt U.S. military and CIA bureaucracy has a history of congratulating itself for fleeting, superficial victories. It quickly declared victory in Afghanistan in 2001 and set out to duplicate its imagined conquest in Iraq. Then the short-lived success of their 2011 regime change operation in Libya encouraged the United States and its allies to turn Al Qaeda loose in Syria, spawning a decade of intractable violence and chaos and the rise of the Islamic State.

In the same manner, Biden’s unaccountable and corrupt national security advisors seem to be urging him to use the same weapons that obliterated the Islamic State’s urban bases in Iraq and Syria to attack Taliban-held cities in Afghanistan.

But Afghanistan is not Iraq or Syria. Only 26% of Afghans live in cities, compared with 71% in Iraq and 54% in Syria, and the Taliban’s base is not in the cities but in the rural areas where the other three quarters of Afghans live. Despite support from Pakistan over the years, the Taliban are not an invading force like Islamic State in Iraq but an Afghan nationalist movement that has fought for 20 years to expel foreign invasion and occupation forces from their country.

In many areas, Afghan government forces have not fled from the Taliban, as the Iraqi Army did from the Islamic State, but joined them. On August 9th, the Taliban occupied Aybak, the sixth provincial capital to fall, after a local warlord and his 250 fighters agreed to join forces with the Taliban and the governor of Samangan province handed the city over to them.

That very same day, the Afghan government’s chief negotiator, Abdullah Abdullah, returned to Doha for further peace talks with the Taliban. His American allies must make it clear to him and his government, and to the Taliban, that the United States will fully support every effort to achieve a more peaceful political transition.

But the United States must not keep bombing and killing Afghans to provide cover for the U.S.-backed puppet government to avoid difficult but necessary compromises at the negotiating table to bring peace to the incredibly long-suffering, war-weary people of Afghanistan. Bombing Taliban-occupied cities and the people who live in them is a savage and criminal policy that President Biden must renounce.

The defeat of the United States and its allies in Afghanistan now seems to be unfolding even faster than the collapse of South Vietnam between 1973 and 1975. The public takeaway from the U.S. defeat in Southeast Asia was the “Vietnam syndrome,” an aversion to overseas military interventions that lasted for decades.

As we approach the 20-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, we should reflect on how the Bush administration exploited the U.S. public’s thirst for revenge to unleash this bloody, tragic and utterly futile 20-year war.

The lesson of America’s experience in Afghanistan should be a new “Afghanistan syndrome,” a public aversion to war that prevents future U.S. military attacks and invasions, rejects attempts to socially engineer the governments of other nations and leads to a new and active American commitment to peace, diplomacy and disarmament.

Propaganda offensive proclaiming end of UK pandemic wave unravels as COVID case decline ends

Tania Kent

The UK recorded 23,510 new COVID-19 cases yesterday, meaning the total number of cases in the last seven days is 7.3 percent higher than the week before.

This significant development will not halt the ongoing efforts to proclaim the predicted extent of the third wave of the pandemic greatly exaggerated, or the insistence that the vaccination programme means that we can all “learn to live with the virus.”

A drop in COVID infections from the end of July became the occasion for demands that no mitigating measures be considered going forward, and above all that there be no talk of re-implementing a lockdown.

Daily recorded infections had more than halved from mid-July over a two-week period from a high of 54,674 on July 17 to 22,287 on August 2. The drop continued into a third week, prompting some scientists to claim that we have “turned a corner” and others to suggest that “herd immunity” had been reached. There were even demands to stop recording infections as this was misleading given that only the declining rate of hospitalisations mattered.

The “dip” has, however, been short-lived. The virus spread is speeding up once again as the impact of “Freedom Day” on July 19, when Prime Minister Boris Johnson ended all compulsory measures to reduce the spread of the virus and opened up night clubs and mass social events, begins to be felt.

On what has been dubbed "Freedom Day", marking the end of coronavirus restrictions in England, people walk over London Bridge a popular walking route for commuters from London Bridge train and tube stations in London, towards the City of London, during the morning rush hour, Monday, July 19, 2021. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham)

But even as this became apparent, Neil Ferguson, epidemiologist from Imperial College London and a former member of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), who first called for the national lockdown in March of 2020 and predicted that “Freedom Day” could lead to 200,000 daily infections, was wheeled out to assert his belief that “further lockdowns are unlikely” to be required.

Despite acknowledging that COVID cases are expected to rise again in September, when school and university terms begin and more workers return to the office, he insisted, “The UK, like elsewhere, would probably have to accept the continuing presence of COVID-19 as a potentially lethal threat.”

“I suspect for several years, we will see additional mortality,” he continued. “There’s a risk in the winter coming of thousands to tens of thousands more deaths”.

Others also insisted that “living with the virus” means accepting large numbers of fatalities. Professor Paul Hunter, an infectious disease expert at the University of East Anglia, warned that numbers of positive COVID cases will “remain high for our lifetimes” and the coronavirus will never be eradicated. It will, he said, become endemic and circulate throughout the country for generations.

The Mail Online commented that “Scientists believe the virus—called SARS-CoV-2—will eventually morph into one that causes a common cold as immunity builds up over time.”

In contrast, more serious scientists warned against a “premature” interpretation and systematically unraveled the complex circumstances that produced the short-term decline in cases.

Epidemiologist John Edmunds at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), referring to the initial dip, said, “One thing it doesn’t mean, is that the United Kingdom has built up enough population immunity through vaccination and natural infection to stop the virus spreading.”

According to Edmunds, the drop might appear more pronounced because of an additional spike in infections in England in mid-July, caused by large crowds watching the delayed Euro 2020 football tournament in pubs, private homes, stadiums and town centres.

There were also many people alerted by NHS contact-tracing apps that they had recently been in close proximity to someone who tested positive. This spate of alerts, derisively dubbed the ‘pingdemic’, where many people were forced to self-isolate, “might have done its job in slowing the spread of the virus”, according to Edmunds.

Another major reason for the temporary decline is the end of the school term. Although officially schools in England closed around July 23, a school-related decline in cases could already be apparent in today’s data because some finished a week or so earlier, older students were off school after their exams, and around 20 percent of pupils were self-isolating by that point. Schools were a key vector in the spread of the virus once reopened with the support of the Labour Party and trade unions.

There has also been a dramatic drop in testing. On July 15, 1,177,716 lateral flow tests were conducted. On July 25, as schools fully closed, the numbers dropped to 791,044.

Deepti Gurdasani, leading data scientist and staunch opponent of “herd immunity”, wrote of the increase in infections in the latest data, “I was hoping that declines would hold at least until schools re-opened, but much depends on the impact of 19th July on behaviour, and it looks like rises may resume earlier. These will no doubt accelerate with school openings. It’s still beyond me why govt [government] removed mask and distancing mandates, and caps on gatherings, allowing large events to go ahead prematurely, creating surges and continuing high transmission (which we’ve had for over a month now) - while >40% remain not fully vaccinated.

“This will further fuel the fire. Let’s remember we got to 50-60 hospitalisations/day for children - the impact of high infection in children just before term ended. What level of illness in children does our gov’t consider acceptable?”

The proportion of those in hospital aged 18-34 years now stands at 20.4 percent, a fourfold increase from the height of the pandemic in January. Despite around 75 percent of the UK adult population now being fully vaccinated, there is still a large pool of susceptible and mainly young people. The highest rate of infection is currently in people aged 16-24, most of whom are either unvaccinated or have not yet received both jabs.

An estimated 34,000 children in the UK are already suffering from Long COVID. This includes 11,000 children aged 2-11 and 23,000 aged 12-16, according to a survey conducted by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The ONS estimates also suggest that 380,000 people in the UK have experienced Long COVID for at least a year. Overall, just under one million people are thought to be suffering from the syndrome.

Many researchers and scientists are predicting that that the return of school pupils, university students and office workers in September, as well as the possibility that protection from the first round of vaccines will wane, is likely to fuel a larger rise. “I think the summer will be a bit of a firebreak, but that the pandemic will slowly grow again and things will escalate in the autumn,” says Immunology Professor, Alex Richter. “It is by no means all over yet.”

Evidence has also been published showing that vaccinated people infected with the Delta coronavirus variant may be able to spread it just as easily as those who have yet to be immunised. Although the COVID jabs appear to reduce an individual’s overall risk of catching Delta, if infected there is “limited difference” in the viral load between the vaccinated and unvaccinated, according to Public Health England (PHE).

PHE commented, “The vaccine is less effective against Delta than against some other variants, but there are even more evasive variants around in the world.”

Dr Simon Clarke, a microbiology professor at Reading University, told Sky News that if vaccination “only blocks transmission by, say, 50 percent you’ll never get herd immunity even with a 100 per cent vaccine uptake.”

Experts have stressed the need for global surveillance, particularly of new variants, and for vaccination to bring COVID infections under control, warning of the implications of foreign travel over the summer and the return of international students to universities in the autumn.

The pandemic is global and its eradication must be global. The situation confronting the world’s population is at a crisis point. In the United States there is a massive surge of COVID-19 infections due to the spread of the Delta variant, with the seven-day moving average of daily new cases rocketing by over 500 percent.

Israel, one of the world’s front-runners in COVID-19 vaccinations, is reinstating restrictions and warning of a fresh lockdown as serious cases surge. Hospitals could be close to capacity within 20 days based on the current trajectory of the virus. Cases in Australia, touted as a success story in blocking the spread of COVID, are surging.

Ten years after the London riots: More cuts and state repression

Thomas Scripps

Ten years ago, on August 6, riots erupted in London and other major English cities following the police murder of the unarmed father of four Mark Duggan.

The riots blew the lid off a society wracked by poverty and inequality and the collapse of any concern for democracy in the ruling class. A decade later, both of Britain’s main parties are led by politicians who cut their teeth in the mass repression of working-class youth which followed.

The 2011 riots took place less than a year after Conservative chancellor George Osborne announced billions in spending cuts to help repay the debt taken on by the government bailing out the banks after the 2008-9 financial crash. This crash followed an orgy of profit-making and the looting of public resources through privatisations. In the 30 years before, the richest one percent had more than doubled their share of national income.

Shop fire in the Party Superstore, Lavender Hill, Clapham Junction, England, 8 August, 2011 (Andy Armstrong, Wikimedia Commons)

Research carried out soon after the events showed that economic deprivation, anger at police brutality and discrimination, and hostility to social inequality were the main drivers of the riots. Investigations since have confirmed these findings.

A January 2019 report, “Re-reading the 2011 English riots”, explains, “Deprivation was the strongest predictor of whether a riot occurred in a London borough”, “The boroughs with more ‘stop and search’ in the two-and-a-half years beforehand were those more likely to see rioting in August 2011” and “Many people saw themselves in opposition to a societal system they perceived as unjust and illegitimate”.

The authors write, “Participants referred to cuts to youth funding, or increasing poverty, or to other economic disadvantages affecting young people, their community or reference group. Many linked particular disadvantages to their long-standing opposition to the government or the social system more generally.”

Faced with this outpouring of anger, the ruling class bared its teeth. In a statement published August 11, 2011, “ Oppose state repression of British youth ”, the Socialist Equality Party explained:

“There is more than a whiff of fascism in the repeated appeals to ‘property owners’ and ‘respectable citizens’ to ‘take back the streets’ from those described as ‘feral rats’…

“The re-called parliament is set to discuss stripping all unemployed people involved in the riots of their welfare entitlements, while the riots are being used to test out domestic counterinsurgency measures in preparation for the far broader struggles of the working class that are foreshadowed by these events.”

Prime Minister Boris Johnson, then Mayor of London, lamented afterwards “you have got to ask yourself: could we have gone in harder?” He demanded, “we need to think about ways of imposing discipline,” suggesting a national citizen service. He purchased three water cannons for the Metropolitan Police.

Around 4,000 people were arrested during and after the riots and more than 2,000 convicted, rushed through kangaroo courts which sat through the night to rubber stamp punishing sentences.

A 2015 article in the British Journal of Criminology, “The 2011 English ‘Riots’: Prosecutorial Zeal and Judicial Abandon,” explains how the Crown Prosecution Service lowered the threshold for pressing charges and encouraged convictions for burglary, which carries a higher maximum sentence, rather than theft. It pushed for cases to be heard in the Crown Court rather than magistrates’ courts, also making longer sentences available.

The percentage of those given an immediate custodial sentence for a riot-related offence by a magistrate’s court was three times higher than the rate for similar offences in 2010. It was more than two times higher in Crown Court. The overall average length of sentence was 17.1 months, four-and-a-half times higher than the average for similar offences in the year before.

Writing on “ One year since the UK riots ”, the World Socialist Web Site commented, “Following the riots, not a single proposal was made for the amelioration of the social conditions that gave rise to the unrest. Instead, social conditions have steadily worsened due to the imposition of billions in austerity cuts”.

The WSWS compared this response to the Thatcher government’s organisation of the Scarman Inquiry after the 1981 riots:

“[I]n the 1980s the ruling elite felt it had to factor in the real possibility of organised opposition to its policies from the working class.” But in the years that followed, this opposition was systematically demobilised by the Labour and trade union bureaucracy who “abased themselves before the Tories, betrayed every struggle of the working class leading up to the historic defeat suffered by the miners in 1984-85, and finally adopted the Tories’ reactionary free market nostrums as their own.

“A quarter of a century later, there was not a single instance during or after the 2011 riots in which the Labour Party or trade unions expressed the slightest degree of sympathy for the socially oppressed. Instead, they faithfully lined up behind the law-and-order bandwagon”.

Another decade on, the social counterrevolution has deepened, and Labour and the Tories stand even further to the right.

The assault on the working class, especially working-class youth, has been unrelenting. Roughly 700,000 more children were living in poverty in March 2020 than in 2011. In that year, there were an estimated 500,000 “forgotten families” in serious financial need but who did not meet the threshold for government support due to spending cuts. The latest data available estimates 829,000 “invisible” children in the same situation and notes another 761,000 receiving an “unclear” level of support. The pandemic will have drastically worsened these figures. Since 2011, the national budget for youth services has been cut by 73 percent.

The slashing of social spending has been matched by a turn to authoritarian forms of rule, epitomised by the government’s snarling response to the George Floyd protestors, denounced as “thugs”, and plans for the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. This draconian legislation gives the state the power to ban “ disruptive ” protests, fine their participants up to £2,500 and send organisers to prison for up to a year. “Causing a public nuisance” or damaging a memorial is made punishable by up to ten years in prison.

Two weeks ago, Johnson announced his government’s crime plan, including putting anti-social behaviour offenders in “fluorescent-jacketed chain gangs” and easing restrictions on police stop-and-search powers.

The Labour Party is just as filthy. After five years in which Jeremy Corbyn blocked any fightback against the Tory government’s austerity, the party is in the hands of Sir Keir Starmer, the former head of the Crown Prosecution Service who oversaw the crackdown on the riots.

As Director of Public Prosecutions, Starmer went as far as visiting Highbury Magistrates Court in North London at four in the morning to boost prosecutors’ morale. He later praised the railroading of young people into prison, saying “For me it was the speed that I think may have played some small part in bringing the situation back under control”.

Labour’s ongoing lurch to the right has highlighted the reactionary, anti-working-class character of identity politics, which insists that the fundamental division in society is race as a means of advancing a tiny, affluent layer of ethnic minorities and disguising class oppression. Its advocates’ claimed concern for racial inequality was quickly replaced during the riots with law-and-order denunciations of poor workers and youth, black and white alike.

The WSWS commented: “the black and Asian Labour MPs and assorted ‘community leaders’ who have utilized racial politics to bolster their careers and bank balances are the most vociferous in insisting that poverty is ‘no excuse’ for rioting and that the police must respond with force.”

The same response was given this March to confrontations in Bristol between protestors against the Police Bill and police armed with riot gear, dogs and horses. The Labour Mayor of the city, Marvin Rees, denounced the protest as “lawlessness” and the result of “a group of people running around the country looking for any opportunity to enter into physical conflict with the police”.

Rees followed his right-wing rant with a racialist appeal: “I am from a communities who are disproportionately likely to be on the receiving end of the criminal justice system and receive unfair treatment. What they [protesters of the Police Bill] have done has done nothing to make me, and people like me, safer.”

Among the most prominent proponents of racial politics in 2011 was Labour MP and now Shadow Secretary of State for Justice, David Lammy. He wrote in the Guardian last week that in 2011 “peaceful protests were hijacked by violent criminals” and described the “shops, homes and businesses… senselessly turned into ashes by the flames of the mob.”

Like the handful of media and Labour “lefts” who have commented on this anniversary, Lammy adds a few concerned observations—that the “nation’s divides” are widening, social alienation is rising and recommendations for improvement are ignored. All of which is framed around the standard appeal that “lessons must be learned”.

But the ruling class has already learned its lesson. Incapable of carrying out any policy other than the glutting of the rich, and confronted with mass social opposition, they are set on imposing brutal class war against the working class through the most right-wing government and “opposition” in British history.

Canada’s Liberal government clears decks for pandemic election

Keith Jones

According to numerous media reports, Canada’s Justin Trudeau-led minority Liberal government is only days away from dissolving parliament and calling a federal election.

With the country on the cusp of what Canada’s Public Health Officer Theresa Tam and numerous other officials are warning is a “Delta-driven fourth wave” of the COVID-19 pandemic, such an election would be unprecedented. Liberal legislation (Bill C-18) designed to facilitate a pandemic election by expanding voting from one to three days and making it easier to obtain and cast mail-in ballots failed to pass before parliament rose in June for its summer break.

Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, visits the Pfizer pharmaceutical company in Puurs, Belgium, Tuesday, June 15, 2021. (AP Photo/Frederic Sierakowski)

Yet none of this appears to be giving the government pause. Trudeau and his ministers have been demonstrably clearing the decks for an election call with a series of appointments and spending announcements. Liberal candidates have reportedly been instructed to cancel vacations and procure offices for the next two months.

Particularly cynical was Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s July 30 announcement that emergency “pandemic recovery” benefits will be extended one month to Oct. 23. This means the benefits—which have served as a vital lifeline for the millions who have been adversely impacted by the pandemic and its economic fallout—will not expire, potentially damaging Liberal election prospects, in the midst of a campaign for a late September or early October vote. Under Canadian law, election campaigns must be between 36 and 50 days in length.

The opposition parties are criticizing the government for prioritizing its efforts to secure a parliamentary majority over containing the pandemic. Most opinion polls currently show the Liberals, who barely won 33 percent of the vote in the Oct. 2019 election, with a lead of 6 percentage points or more over the Conservatives, the Canadian ruling class’s other traditional party of government.

“My biggest concern right now is the potential fourth wave of COVID-19,” Conservative leader Erin O’Toole told reporters Monday at an election campaign-style event in Belleville, Ontario. “We shouldn't be rushing to an election. Mr. Trudeau always seems to put his own self-interest ahead of the interest of Canadians.”

The fourth wave is a real and present danger. But such comments from O’Toole are utterly hypocritical and self-serving. The Conservative leader has not breathed a word of criticism of Alberta’s United Conservative Party (UCP) government, which has gone further than perhaps any government in a wealthy capitalist country in dismantling all measures to combat COVID-19. As of next Monday, all contact-tracing will be abandoned by Alberta. COVID tests will only be administered to the gravely ill, and even those stricken with the virus will not be required to self-isolate.

Much the same could be said of the other opposition parties and leaders. At a party rally Sunday, Bloc Québécois (BQ) leader Yves-François Blanchet accused Trudeau of putting his “personal ambitions” ahead of the fight against the Delta variant. The BQ, it need be noted, has never once deigned to criticize Quebec’s right-wing “Quebec First” CAQ government, whose calamitous mishandling of the pandemic has resulted in Quebec recording more than 40 percent of Canada’s 26,600 COVID fatalities. The CAQ is now insisting that all the province’s public schools, colleges (CEGEPs), and universities fully reopen at the end of this month with few, if any, protective measures.

The truth is, throughout the pandemic, Canada’s entire political establishment and all levels of government have systematically placed safeguarding the fortunes and profits of the capitalist elite before protecting the health, lives and livelihoods of working people. This class-war alliance extends from the federal Liberal government and the hard-right premiers of Ontario, Quebec and Alberta, through the ostensibly “left-wing” New Democratic Party (NDP) and the trade unions. In the spring of 2020, they all assented to Ottawa funneling hundreds of billions to prop up big business and the financial markets; then quickly pivoted to a homicidal campaign to force non-essential workers back on the job amid the pandemic. It was the back-to-work/back-to-school campaign—explicitly endorsed and promoted by the Trudeau Liberals in their September 2020 throne speech—that plunged the country into devastating second and third waves of COVID-19 infections and deaths in fall/winter 2020-21 and last spring.

The NDP and its leader Jagmeet Singh have been especially vocal in urging Trudeau and his Liberals not to call a snap election. Singh, reported the Toronto Star on Monday, has sent a letter to Prime Minister Trudeau in which he urged him to recall parliament and promised the NDP would work “constructively” with the government. Through this letter, Singh has in effect reiterated the public pledge he made last February that the NDP would ensure the minority Liberal government’s parliamentary survival until the pandemic is over.

Singh has been true to his word. With the full-throated support of the trade unions, the NDP has kept in office a right-wing government that, in addition to fronting the ruling class’ criminal response to the pandemic, is integrating Canada ever more fully into Washington’s military-strategic offensives against China and Russia; spending hundreds of billions on re-arming the Canadian Armed Forces; further expanding the reach and powers of the intelligence agencies; and continuing to criminalize, as most recently with the Port of Montreal dockers, working class struggles.

For fear the New Democrats will lose the modicum of parliamentary leverage they exert in the current parliament, Singh has also publicly appealed to the Governor General to refuse Trudeau’s request for an early election. On July 27, the day after Mary Simon was sworn in as the Queen’s representative, the federal NDP leader penned an open letter to her in which he appealed to the unelected Governor General to make use of her extraordinary powers to flout the wishes of the sitting government.

In his letter to Simon, Singh made brief reference to the pandemic. His main argument, however, was that an election is unnecessary, because the current parliament is working. Thanks to the NDP’s support, the Liberals have “won every confidence vote they have put to the House,” wrote Singh, “including on the speech from the throne and on the budget.”

The right-wing character of the NDP’s appeal to the Governor General is underscored by Singh’s plea that an election isn’t needed because the social-democrats have helped ensured the ruling class has a stable big-business government. But even if the Governor General were to refuse to heed a request for the dissolution of the current nearly two-year-old parliament in the name of the pandemic emergency, it would be manifestly reactionary. It would further bolster the arbitrary powers of the Governor General, an anti-democratic institution that serves as a safety mechanism for the ruling class.

In a July 29 editorial, the Globe and Mail, the traditional voice of Canada’s financial elite, opposed Singh’s call for the Governor General to refuse Trudeau an election request, no doubt out of concern such action would trigger a political-constitutional crisis. However, it effectively agreed with the NDP leader that an election is “unnecessary.” “There is no pressing reason of national interest or public policy that demands an election,” declared the Globe. “Elections,” it goes on to lament, “are when politicians make easy promises to voters, not hard demands of them.”

The Globe editorial is an admission that, notwithstanding the rhetoric, all the parties are pursuing the same right-wing agenda. This is especially true of their response to the pandemic, where the union-backed Liberal and NDP “progressives” and O’Toole’s Conservatives and their hard-right allies in Ontario and Alberta have joined forces to funnel endless amounts of cash into the coffers of big business, and relentlessly press forward with the “reopening” of the economy.

That said, there are mounting concerns within the ruling class—over the precarious state of the world economy, intensifying global trade and geo-political conflict, the unravelling of the US-led world order, and increasing demands from Washington that Ottawa must do more to sustain the military-security partnership through which Canadian imperialism has asserted its predatory interests on the global arena for the past three-quarters of a century.

As the Globe’s reference to making “hard demands” of the population indicates, as far as the ruling class is concerned, the homicidal pandemic “back to work” campaign is meant to be the opening salvo in a drive to bolster the “competitive” and strategic position of Canadian imperialism through an intensified assault on the working class at home and aggression and war overseas.

This agenda is and will encounter mounting opposition from a working class whose alienation from, and anger with, the establishment has been aggravated by the mass death and huge increase in social inequality caused by its criminal mishandling of the pandemic. As in the US, Latin America and around the world, recent months have seen a wave of militant worker struggles, including strikes by Vale, Cominco, and ArcelorMittal mine and smelter workers, Quebec food processing workers and Quebec public sector workers.