Strike vote begins at UK universities in disputes over pay, conditions and pensions

Ioan Petrescu

Balloting is underway at over 150 higher education institutions in the UK as lecturers prepare to strike over cuts to pensions, declining pay, the use of insecure contracts in the sector, and unmanageable workloads.

Their fight is part of a worldwide upsurge in the class struggle, which has seen autoworkers in the US, educators in Sri Lanka, metalworkers in South Africa, and many other sections of workers involved in disputes for better pay and working conditions.

The University and College Union (UCU) is organizing the ballots and has been threatening strike action for the past year. But its rhetoric is belied by its reluctance to mobilise its membership of over 100,000 in a genuine struggle. Even as it finally sanctioned ballots, the UCU sought to bring university management back to the table and head off industrial action, declaring that employers have “three weeks to save term.”

Strikers and students on the picket line at UCL in London during the national strike in February 2020 (WSWS Media)

The UCU only gave the go-ahead for strike ballots due to mounting anger from university staff, who are seeing their conditions worsen without respite and are itching for a fight against their employers. The union bureaucracy’s main calculation is that a strike ballot now is the best way for its members to let off steam while it negotiates a backroom deal with employers.

As in previous disputes, the union is seeking to sabotage unified action by splitting workers across two disputes (over pay and pensions) and calling on staff at most universities to strike for just one of them. Of the 152 institutions balloted in total, six will be balloted purely on the University Superannuation Scheme (USS) pensions dispute. Another 78 are to be balloted solely over pay and working conditions. A further 68 institutions will vote in two ballots over both USS and pay and working conditions.

The USS fund is facing a huge deficit, and the body has called on both the employer group Universities UK (UUK) and the UCU to provide proposals for “reform” to its Joint Negotiating Committee (JNC). In a meeting at the end of August, the JNC accepted UUK’s proposal, due in no small part to the unwillingness of the universities to underwrite UCU’s proposals to the same level as their own.

The UUK proposals involve cuts to the more generous Defined Benefit pensions scheme and shunting lower earners to an inferior Defined Contributions pensions scheme. The cuts to the Defined Benefit plan will mean a USS member aged 37 earning £41,526 (the current starting salary for a lecturer in many institutions) can be expected to build up an annual guaranteed pension of £12,170—if they continue to work full-time in the sector until age 66. This compares with £18,857 under the current arrangement. The same 35 percent cut would also apply to the guaranteed cash lump sum which the member would receive when they retire.

The UCU’s proposal, however, is not a significant departure from the status quo. It essentially gives its blessing to the all the cuts that have taken place. According to the UCU itself, a typical member’s pension has already been slashed by £240,000 through changes introduced since 2011.

UCU suggest a negligible increase to employers’ contributions (from 21.1 percent to 24.9 percent) together with an even smaller reduction in members contributions (to 8.1 percent from 9.6 percent). Moreover, the proposal depends on USS changing its March 2020 valuation, which identified the current deficit. The union claims the pensions fund can lower its deficit by investing in riskier, higher return assets—thus gambling even further with its members’ accumulated pension contributions.

The pensions dispute has been ongoing for years, erupting in two massive strikes in 2018 and 2020. In 2018, the UCU—as it tried to enforce a rotten deal—faced a rebellion from its members, who accused it of being “objectively on the side of the employers.” The general secretary at the time, Sally Hunt, was forced to resign, but not before being given a £400,000 golden goodbye by the UCU. Her replacement, Jo Grady, demobilised mass resistance on the part of workers and students to establish a corporatist Joint Expert Panel (JEP) on pensions with the employers. UUK’s current proposal is partly based on suggestions from the JEP. In early 2020, the UCU utilized the COVID pandemic to end another national strike over pensions.

The second issue at stake—the so-called “Four Fights” dispute over pay and working conditions—has also been ongoing for years. Since 2009, the wages of higher education staff have increased by 13 percent, while inflation has increased by 37.3 percent—meaning a 24.3 percent real-terms wage cut. Employers have continually insisted on further below-inflation offers, despite university income from tuition fees growing by a third in the last five years. The latest pay offer from University and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA) was just 1.5 percent. At the same time, the last 10 years have seen a massive increase of zero-hours, precarious contracts.

In response, the UCU is calling for a measly £2,500 increase in wages, an amount that is not even close to making up for the income lost by staff since 2009. If wages had kept up with inflation, a lecturer who earned £42,790 in 2009 (the average salary in the field) would be making £58,352 now. However, the average salary now ranges between £48,000 and £50,000—almost £10,000 less.

The union pairs this with demands that employers offer vague promises to “address” excessive workloads and unpaid work and a “framework” to eliminate precarious employment practices and casualised contracts, including zero-hours contracts, from higher education. These ambiguous appeals are designed to allow the union to present even the most token “commitment” by UUK towards addressing workers’ grievances as a “victory.”

The UCU will do everything it can to ensure the fight by academic workers is maneuvered into a dead-end, as it has numerous times in the past. The issue is not just with this or that corrupt or incompetent union bureaucrat, but with the corporatist perspective of the trade unions, which defend the capitalist system by suppressing the class struggle. Contrary to claims by the UCU Left faction and its pseudo-left supporters, including the Socialist Workers Party, it is impossible to transform the UCU into an accountable defender of workers’ rights.

The pandemic has gone unmentioned by the UCU in any discussion of national strike action. Despite numerous reports that the reopening of campuses has led to outbreaks in many universities, there is no unified tracking mechanism that shows case numbers for all higher education institutions. Each university is being allowed decide on their own whether and how to track CIVID infections on their campuses. The UCU has backed the government in insisting that its members are back on campuses despite no sign of the pandemic retreating.

Universities Minister Michelle Donelan told the House of Commons October 12 that cases had been reported on 68 campuses across the country. These institutions, she said, had reported about 9,000 coronavirus cases within the past seven days. Among the worst hit were the University of Nottingham with 1,510 cases among students in the week ending October 9, plus another 20 cases affecting staff, and the University of Bristol with 393 confirmed cases among students, plus three staff cases. The minister rejected calls to halt face-to-face teaching across the country to prevent the spread of COVID warning that this would amount to “punishing young people.”

Higher education workers and students must reject all attempts by the government to divide them with its nauseating and fraudulent statements of concerns for young people and their education.

With COVID resurging everywhere, ahead of the winter, face-to-face learning must be ended and fully funded and resourced remote learning implemented, to be paid for by the super-rich whose fortunes have ballooned during the pandemic.

Austerity policies in England linked to 57,550 extra deaths in five years

Simon Whelan

The BMJ Open journal published by the BMJ (British Medical Journal) has released findings from the largest study yet of its kind into the cost in human lives of the savage austerity spending cuts initiated in the UK from 2008 onwards.

Analysing the combined impact of cuts to healthcare, public health and social care in the four years between 2010 and 2014, researchers from the Centre for Health Economics at the University of York found 57,550 more deaths than would have been expected.

Professor Karl Claxton of York’s Department of Economics and Related Studies told the Guardian: “Restrictions on the growth in health and social care expenditure during ‘austerity’ have been associated with tens of thousands more deaths than would have been observed had pre-austerity expenditure growth been sustained.”

The team of researchers found that social care spending rose by 2.2 percent per capita between 2001-02 and between 2009-10 but fell by 1.57 percent between 2010-11 and again between 2014-15. This loss alone in social care funding caused an astonishing 23,662 additional deaths, according to the research findings.

A homeless person sleeping on Euston Road in London last winter (credit: WSWS Media)

The University of York research found that a slowing in life expectancy improvement coincided with the Cameron government’s severe reductions to health and social care spending. Professor Claxton said, “Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that the slowdown in the rate of improvement in life expectancy in England and Wales since 2010 is attributable to spending constraints in the healthcare and social care sectors.”

Speaking to the Guardian on the University of York’s’ findings, David Finch, assistant director of healthy lives at the Health Foundation think tank, said even before the COVID-19 pandemic there was “an extremely concerning pattern of stalling life expectancy, particularly in the poorest areas of the country” and subsequently the pandemic had “laid bare the tragic consequences of underlying poor health”.

Separate research by Imperial College London (ICL), published in the LancetPublic Health journal just days before the York findings, reached similar conclusions. Analysing all deaths in England between 2002-2019, the ICL researchers found that life expectancy in many working-class communities was declining years prior to the arrival of the pandemic in the UK in early 2020.

The research conducted by the ICL is the first of its kind to analyse longevity trends in microscopic detail capable of identifying where life expectancy declined with greater precision than any previously conducted research.

A sample of 8.6 million records were analysed by the ICL research team with each record assigned to the community where the person resided at the time of their death. A total of 6,791 local communities were examined and the researchers assessed life expectancy trends over time for each of these almost 7,000 people. The research tracked life expectancy in communities of around 8,000 people, with other research typically based on much larger areas containing some 140,000 subjects.

The research reveals how class inequality in UK life expectancy is growing. In 2019, men living in some areas of Kensington and Chelsea in London—the wealthiest district in the country—had a life expectancy a staggering 27 years longer than that of males living in parts of Blackpool. In the ailing north-west coastal town life expectancy has now fallen beneath 70 years for men and 75 for women. Some men in parts of Kensington and Chelsea were living on average to 95.3 years and in parts of Blackpool to just 68.3 years.

The ICL’s research found that the communities with the lowest life expectancy, just beneath 70 years for men and 75 years for women, are situated in the north of England’s inner cities and social housing estates.

In the richest districts of the British capital and across the affluent home counties, the trajectory of growing longevity continues. Simultaneously, life expectancy has fallen fastest in working-class districts in northern cities like Leeds, Newcastle, Manchester and Liverpool.

For example, women living in the inner London borough of Camden can expect to live to approximately 95 years of age, almost 21 years longer than women in the working-class communities with the lowest life expectancy in the west Yorkshire city of Leeds.

The ICL research discovered that as life expectancy rose across much of the country during the first decade of the 21st century, then beginning an ongoing steep decline in the poorest working-class districts in 2010. The research findings assert that from 2014 until 2019 life expectancy fell in almost one in five communities for females, and one in nine communities for males.

The ICL research points out that declines in life expectancy were once rare in wealthier countries like the UK. The existence of the post-war welfare state in Britain, now massively eroded, led to sustained increases in life expectancy. Professor Majid Ezzati from ICL’s School of Public Health told the Independent that this period was at an end: “These data show that longevity has been getting worse for years in large parts of England.”

Declines in life expectancy in wealthy countries, explained Ezzati, have previously occurred only during wars and pandemics. “For such declines to be seen in ‘normal times’ before the pandemic is alarming and signals ongoing policy failures to tackle poverty and provide adequate social support and health care.”

Further damning research released earlier this month was based on an analysis of official government data by the King’s Fund think tank. The research suggests that disparities in expected lifespan between some of the wealthiest and poorest districts of the country has at least doubled since the early 2000s.

“There is a growing chasm in health inequalities revealed by the data,” says Veena Raleigh, a fellow at the think tank. Raleigh continued “Our analysis shows that life expectancy has continued to increase in wealthier areas but has virtually stagnated in deprived areas in the north with the result that the gap in life expectancy between the richest and poorest parts of the country has grown by almost two-and-a-half years over the last two decades.” There is a “deprivation divide” in life expectancy between the more affluent areas in the south of England and poorer areas in the north.

As the Kings Fund research findings were released, a report by the Longevity Science Panel (LSP)—a group of doctors, statisticians and NHS leaders—found that male and female life expectancy fell by 1.3 years and 0.9 years respectively in 2020 as a direct result of coronavirus. The LSP warned that possible new variants of COVID, the impact of Long COVID and the delayed diagnosis and treatment caused by an enormous NHS care backlog could still negatively impact the public’s expected lifespans.

Speaking on behalf of the LSP, Professor Debora Price, Professor of Social Gerontology at the University of Manchester, said: “The pandemic has plainly exposed the many structural and systemic inequalities in our societies that people live with from day to day and that have become a matter of life and death. Health inequalities have worsened.”

This plethora of scientific research, synthesizing data from both the natural and the social sciences, reveals that, in the second decade of the 21st century, life expectancy growth has stalled, stagnated and is now falling precipitously among the working class, in the fifth-richest country on the planet.

This health crisis, exacerbated by the pandemic, is first and foremost a class issue. The explosive growth of social inequality over recent decades is the key factor in understanding the disproportionate and devastating impact of reduced life expectancy in working-class communities. The widening of the already huge gap in life expectancy between the classes is one increasingly characterised by stunted lives, early deaths and misery for the working class.

German billionaires’ wealth hits new heights in the pandemic

Elisabeth Zimmermann

Around the world, the richest and wealthiest have benefited enormously from the coronavirus pandemic. In Germany, too, this is taking on very stark forms. The concentration of wealth at the top of society is horrendous. This was most recently confirmed by the latest rich list presented by Manager Magazin at the beginning of October. The annual list of the 500 richest Germans has been published for the 20th year.

The editorial accompanying this year’s list states, “Never before has the average absolute increase in wealth been as high as it is now. Never has Germany had so many billionaires, 213 currently.”

Susanne Klatten at the BMW booth at the IAA 2017 in Frankfurt (Olaf Kosinsky, CC BY-SA 3.0 EN, via Wikimedia Commons)

The magazine explains that its calculations of all wealth figures “are estimates. The basis of the valuations are business evaluations as well as research in publicly accessible archives, trade and real estate registers. In addition, research is conducted with asset managers, lawyers, bankers and representatives of the list itself.”

Thanks to high stock prices and rising real estate values, the wealth of almost all business and industrialist families has increased. The total wealth of the 100 richest Germans included in the list increased from 606 billion euros in 2020 to a projected 722 billion in 2021—a more than 19 percent rise.

This wealth is equivalent to more than one-fifth of Germany’s gross domestic product (GDP) and is higher than at any time since the list first appeared in 2001. Today, the 100 richest Germans are almost three times as wealthy as the top 100 were back then.

This enormous accumulation of wealth is also reflected in the growth in the number of billionaires. While Manager Magazin estimated their number at 69 in 2001, this year it is 213, meaning that almost half of the 500 richest people in the country own more than one billion euros. The assets of the ten richest Germans alone have increased by almost 80 billion euros this year.

This unprecedented enrichment is the product of deliberate policies. The ruling elite has seen the terrible pandemic as an opportunity to redistribute wealth further from the bottom of society upwards and to impose a ruthless class policy.

While nurses and doctors worked themselves to the bone saving lives in run-down hospitals and schools lacked money for even the simplest air filtration, hundreds of billions were handed to the big banks and corporations. These policies drove up stock markets around the world.

In 2020 alone, with the start of the pandemic, the wealth of all billionaires worldwide increased by two thirds. In the first twelve months of the pandemic, their assets increased from eight trillion dollars to the current 13 trillion dollars, according to the Forbes list. It was the highest increase ever recorded.

The German stock markets also grew in tandem with the death toll from the pandemic, making the wealthy richer and richer. At the same time, the “profits before lives” policy was forced on workers, requiring them to labour in unsafe factories and put their children in unsafe schools so as not to jeopardize the profits of the rich. In Germany alone, at least 94,000 people have fallen victim to this policy.

How closely the wealth of the super-rich is linked to the misery and death of the working class can be seen by looking at the individuals concerned.

Siblings Susanne Klatten and Stefan Quandt stand in first place on the rich list again. The family fortune can be traced back, among other things, to the exploitation of forced labour in Hitler’s Third Reich. They own 47 percent of the shares in BMW and also have stakes in other companies. Their assets rose by 9.2 billion to 34.2 billion euros. The auto industry generated huge profits despite the crisis and short-time working in the factories. BMW, like other corporations, maintained its dividend payments and benefited from government aid, while workers were hit by short-time working and the massive job cuts announced.

Dieter Schwarz sits in second place. The owner of Lidl and Kaufland, his fortune grew by 3.5 billion to 33.5 billion euros. His Lidl/Kaufland discount empire generated 122 billion euros in sales, with healthy profits generated by 500,000 employees worldwide. Sales staff and warehouse and logistics workers are among the core personnel particularly at risk from COVID-19, who worked through the entire pandemic.

In third place comes Klaus-Michael Kühne. His fortune has risen by 19.7 billion to 33 billion euros. Share prices of the logistics company Kühne & Nagel, in which he holds a 53.3 percent stake, and the Hamburg container shipping company Hapag-Lloyd, in which he owns a 30 percent stake, have soared to such an extent that the book value of Kühne’s assets has more than doubled.

In fourth place is the Reimann family, whose businesses include beverages, cosmetics and veterinary clinics. Their assets are the only ones in the top ten to have fallen by 2.5 billion euros to 29.5 billion.

Fifth place goes to the Merck family, active in the pharmaceuticals and chemicals sectors. Its assets increased by 7 billion euros to 28.5 billion euros.

In sixth place—a new entry among the ten richest Germans—are the brothers Thomas and Andreas Sprüngmann. They are the financiers and largest shareholders of the vaccine manufacturer Biontech, as well as having stakes in other companies. Their fortune has exploded, rising by 18.5 billion to 24 billion euros.

Here it becomes particularly clear how the super-rich increase their fortunes out of people’s suffering. In order to generate profits, far too few vaccines are produced and sold at extortionate prices, so that the majority of the world’s population is still unvaccinated.

The above-mentioned people exemplify the staggering wealth at the top of society, whose assets were increased so fabulously through massive exploitation and the billions they were gifted by the European Central Bank and federal government.

In the exploratory talks about forming a new government coalition, one of the issues under discussion is how to squeeze this money out of the working class again by reinstating the debt ceiling and other measures. In addition to already announced mass layoffs and plant closures, other harsh attacks on the social gains of the working class are on the agenda. The widening of social inequality is being pushed further by all the establishment parties.

Modi government seeking to tighten India's repressive film censorship regime

Yuan Darwin

India’s Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government is seeking to tighten the country’s already intrusive and pervasive film censorship regime with its Cinematograph (Amendment) Bill, 2021. The proposed legislation would amend India’s existing film censorship law, the Cinematograph Act, 1952, to give the central government “revisionary powers,” thereby enabling it “to order recertification of an already certified film.” This will add an additional layer of direct government censorship to the existing censorship regime, overseen by the Central Board for Film Certification (CBFC), or Censor Board.

The CBFC is a statutory body under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting tasked with regulating the public exhibition of films. It has the power to compel changes before films can be legally presented to the public or to prohibit their release outright.

Scene from Ashvin Kumar's "No fathers in Kashmir," which was only released in India after the filmmaker appealed to the now abolished Film Certificate Appellate Tribunal.

The board consists of a chairperson and 23 members, all of whom are appointed by the central government, and has its headquarters in Mumbai, the centre of India’s film industry. It has nine regional offices in Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, Thiruvananthapuram, Hyderabad, New Delhi, Cuttack and Guwahati, which are assisted in their examination of films by Advisory Panels whose members are also appointed by the Union government for a period of two years. The CBFC regularly orders directors to remove anything it deems offensive, including depictions of sex, nudity and violence, or “politically subversive” material. It can and does routinely make certification conditional on the cutting of “objectionable” scenes.

Under the proposed Cinematograph (Amendment) Bill, the Narendra Modi-led BJP government is seeking to nullify an Indian Supreme Court ruling in a case named Union of India vs KM Shankarappa, 2001 that found the Union government cannot interfere with a film’s distribution or demand changes to it once it has been certified by the Censor Board.

The Modi government’s bid to arrogate new censorship powers follows hot on the heels of its abolition of the Film Certificate Appellate Tribunal (FCAT), which was established in 1983 as a forum for filmmakers dissatisfied with CBFC decisions to seek redress. The government arbitrarily abolished the FCAT under an executive order, the Tribunals Reforms (Rationalisation and Conditions of Service) Ordinance 2021, and a subsequent bill, the Tribunal Reforms Bill, it pushed through parliament in August.

The Modi government’s tightening of cinema censorship is part of its broader assault on democratic rights. In February, it enacted the Information Technology (Guidelines for Intermediaries and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 with the aim of controlling and censoring OTT platforms and social media.

Many film directors, producers, screenwriters and actors, including Anurag Kashyap, Hansal Mehta, Vetri Maaran, Nandita Das, Mira Nair, Shabana Azmi, Farhan Akhtar, Zoya Akhtar and Dibakar Banerjee, have spoken out against the new censorship measures.

More than 3,000 people involved in film production in India have signed a letter of protest to the Information and Broadcasting Ministry. “The government’s proposal to amend the Cinematograph Act is another blow to the film fraternity,” the letter declares, “and will potentially endanger freedom of expression and democratic dissent.” It goes on to warn that the proposed amendments would render filmmakers “powerless at the hands of the state” and “more vulnerable to threats, vandalism, and intimidation of mob censors.” The reference to “mob censors” concerns repeated instances of far-right Hindu supremacist and fundamentalist mobilizations, often directed and encouraged by BJP politicians, aimed at shutting down film productions or screenings.

Summing up the significance of the expanded censorship powers, the letter noted they “will effectively give the Central Government supreme power over cinema exhibition in the country.”

Veteran Indian filmmaker Adoor Gopalkrishnan told the Hindu, “Even at present, the filmmakers have not much say in the certification process, with the censor officers implementing the will of the government. ... We are not an autocracy. Every citizen has a right to criticize the policies of the government in power.” Anand Patwardhan, a prominent left-wing documentary filmmaker, said, “The Centre’s proposed amendment to the Cinematograph Act seeking to recall a film already certified by the Censor Board is dangerous and meaningless.”

In a July 1 Politburo statement, the Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPM, said it “strongly opposes these atrocious amendments designed to throttle cinematic talent and freedom” and urged “the restoration of the Appellate Tribunal as demanded by noted filmmakers.” In other words, the Stalinists, although nominally opposing the new changes by the Modi government, fully support the existing regime of film censorship created by the Indian capitalist state, which was itself born out of the abortion of the anti-imperialist struggle by the national bourgeoisie.

Marxists oppose state censorship of art. It is a tool of the capitalist elite to suppress freedom of expression, thought and criticism and to inculcate conformity, national chauvinism and reaction. Genuine art can only flourish if those engaging in it are given unfettered freedom to explore their ideas, free from all attempts by the bourgeois state and self-appointed moral guardians to police them.

India’s film censorship laws and regime have their roots in the British colonial state, which used them to suppress ideas and artwork that supported the anti-colonial struggle. They were taken over by the Indian bourgeoisie as part of its 1947 independence and partition deal with British imperialism. Under the political leadership of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, the Indian ruling class took control of the entire apparatus of state repression that had been created by South Asia’s departing colonial masters and enforced the subcontinent’s bloody division into a Hindu-dominated India and an explicitly Muslim Pakistan.

The Modi government’s turn to increased censorship and repression takes place under conditions of a massive economic, political and social crisis, which has been intensified by the global COVID-19 pandemic. Officially the pandemic has killed just over 450,000 Indians, but a series of scientific studies has demonstrated that the Modi government’s criminal prioritization of corporate profits over saving lives has resulted in some 5 million deaths.

Fearing mounting opposition, above all, from the working class and rural toilers, the BJP government is seeking to further strengthen the arbitrary powers of the state. Its censorship bill is part of its efforts to suppress dissenting voices and intimidate all those who oppose the government’s neoliberal economic agenda and bellicose Hindu supremacist-laced Indian nationalism. By reinforcing censorship and promoting a reactionary social climate, the Modi regime seeks to make it impossible for artists, filmmakers, writers and other intellectuals to do any serious work that challenges its foul communalist outlook and aggressive big business agenda.

The attack on artistic freedom and fundamental rights by the BJP and its Hindu communalist and fundamentalist allies has a long history. Two decades ago, due to threats and provocations by Hindu fundamentalist organizations associated with the BJP, Indo-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta was forced to abandon shooting her film Water in India. Also in 2000, the BJP-led national government ordered a painting by artist Surendran Nair to be removed from an exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi.

In 2004, the CBFC initially banned Final Solution, a documentary about the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in the western state of Gujarat, which killed close to 2,000 people and left hundreds of thousands homeless. The pogrom was incited by Gujarat’s then chief minister, who was none other than Narendra Modi. The film consists of interviews with both Muslims and Hindus swept up in the violence and shows how Hindu extremists exploited a fire, which broke out in a passenger train at the Godhra railway station, killing dozens of Hindu pilgrims, to unleash horrific mass violence targeting Muslims. As a result of a public campaign against the suppression of Final Solution, the ban on the film was lifted in October 2004.

In 2014, the investigative documentary No Fire Zone: In the Killing Fields of Sri Lanka by Callum Macrae was refused certification by the CBFC on the pretext that it would damage New Delhi’s relations with Colombo. In 2017, the film Lipstick Under My Burkha directed by Alankrita Shrivastava and produced by Prakash Jha, also ran into trouble with the CBFC, which initially refused to certify it on the grounds that it contained “contagious (sic) sexual scenes, abusive words, (and) audio pornography.” The film has been screened in over 35 film festivals around the world and prior to its official release, after substantial cuts, in India had earned 11 international awards.

In 2018, the film drama No Fathers in Kashmir directed by Ashvin Kumar hit a roadblock with the CBFC. It was only released in India the following year, after Kumar had appealed to the now-abolished Film Certificate Appellate Tribunal (FCAT). Kumar’s two previous documentaries, Inshallah, Football and Inshallah, Kashmir, were also initially banned by the Censor Board.

Democracy is incompatible with a political regime which arrogates to itself the right to dictate thought and culture, imposing its beliefs through its control of the public purse and the police powers of the state. The struggle in defence of artistic freedom and against communalism will not be won by appealing to the state institutions and parties of the Indian bourgeoisie—parties and institutions that defend a social order in which the vestiges of feudalism and casteism are overlain by ruthless capitalist oppression.

COVID-19 surge spreads across Europe

Johannes Stern & Alex Lantier

Official propaganda of the end of the pandemic notwithstanding, the spread of COVID-19 in Europe is taking on ever more dramatic forms. Every day, about 220,000 people become infected with the virus and almost 3,000 die.

Last week, the World Health Organisation (WHO) reported a 7 percent increase in the number of COVID-19 cases in Europe. The WHO pointed to uneven vaccination rates across the continent and stressed that the development poses a significant threat. Significantly, according to the WHO, Europe was the only region of the world where the number of daily reported cases is rising.

The situation is particularly acute in Eastern Europe. Yesterday, 1,064 people died of COVID-19 and 37,141 new cases were recorded in Russia. Experts assume that the number of unreported cases is far higher. In Ukraine (614 dead yesterday, 23,785 cases) and Romania (356 dead, 15,410 new cases), more people are dying now of COVID-19 than ever before in the pandemic.

Yesterday, with overflowing emergency wards threatening to swamp the hospital system, Ukraine announced a two-week shutdown of schools in high-infection areas, including in the capital, Kiev. Only 6.8 million of Ukraine’s 41 million population, and less than one in four of Bulgaria’s population, are fully vaccinated.

The situation in the Baltic States is also out of control. The cabinet in Latvia was forced to impose a night curfew and a month-long lockdown on Wednesday. Earlier, according to the health authority in Riga, there had been 1,400 new infections per 100,000 inhabitants in 14 days—a record since the beginning of the pandemic. In many hospitals, intensive care units are already fully occupied, said Health Minister Daniels Pavluts.

In the rest of Europe, the trend is moving in a similar direction. In Poland, the number of new infections is currently doubling from week to week. “If this situation continues, it will break through all the forecasts we have had so far,” warned Poland’s Health Minister Adam Niedzielski in Warsaw on Wednesday.

Great Britain currently has the highest number of recorded COVID-19 cases, with about 50,000 new infections daily and around 200 deaths each day. In France, Italy and Spain, where cases had remained comparatively low after a surge in cases and deaths in the late summer, the number of daily new infections has again begun to rise after hitting a low October 10-15 of 4,203, 2,456 and 1,464, respectively.

Germany has also recorded another drastic increase. For several days now, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) has been reporting an increasing number of new daily infections; on Friday, there were almost 20,000. The seven-day incidence was 95.1 per 100,000 inhabitants, the highest level since mid-May. In its current weekly report, the RKI warns that the increase in the number of cases will accelerate as autumn and winter progress.

Across much of Europe, the situation is worse than it was at the same time last year, when hundreds of thousands died of COVID-19 during the winter. Now a similar scenario is looming.

The WHO warned in early September of 236,000 additional COVID-19 deaths by December 1. Nevertheless, the European governments did nothing to halt the spread of the virus and avert mass deaths. On the contrary: they opened schools and businesses and almost completely dismantled remaining protection measures such as mask mandates and school mitigation procedures. The current mass infections and deaths are a direct result of these policies.

Governments of all stripes—conservative, social democratic and pseudo-left—are pursuing a deliberate policy of herd immunity, putting profits over lives. In order not to jeopardise the orgy of enrichment on the stock exchanges, they insist that parents send their children to school completely defenceless against the virus and that there must be no more closures and that one must “live with the virus.”

Whether or not they claim to be following procedures to “mitigate” the spread of COVID-19, the results of the policies the European powers pursue are largely indistinguishable from the far-right’s calls to develop “herd immunity” via mass infection of the population with coronavirus. Indeed, the far right has long called for an end to all social restriction measures linked to the pandemic.

In Germany, Health Minister Jens Spahn’s plan to end the “epidemic situation” and de facto eliminate all remaining protective measures by November 25 is supported by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) as well as by the Left Party. The Left Party in Saarland, led by party founder Oskar Lafontaine, even wants a “Freedom Day” on October 30, following the British example, demanding that COVID-19 measures be ignored. It is “high time for a ‘Freedom Day’ instead of ‘German Angst’,” the party declared in an official statement.

Hard experience has shown it is impossible to obtain a more rational, scientific policy against the pandemic by voting establishment parties labelled as “left” into office. In France, allies of the Left Party in Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France party, together with the Révolution permanente web site and the Workers Struggle (LO) party, all endorsed participation in anti-vaccine demonstrations despite overwhelming popular support for vaccination. More than 75 percent of the French population is vaccinated.

In Spain, the “left populist” Podemos party is in power together with the social-democratic Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE). Yet there have been over 100,000 excess deaths in Spain during the pandemic, and the courts are now ruling that even the limited lockdowns imposed last year to halt the initial wave of the pandemic—in response to mass strikes in Italy, Spain and across much of Europe—were illegal and unconstitutional.

The ruling elite’s contempt for the massive deaths and suffering caused by the pandemic was on full display at the two-day European Council summit that ended yesterday in Brussels. The discussion centred largely on how to deny Afghan refugees passing through former Soviet republics entry into the European Union (EU), and the Polish government’s attempts to disregard European legal rulings. COVID-19 was barely mentioned in news reports on the summit, though the summit web site briefly called for “efforts to overcome vaccine hesitancy to be stepped up.”

At the same time, the EU countries are pouring hundreds of billions of euros into military budgets, which continue to increase even despite the fall in economic activity due to the pandemic.

Mass death, now unfolding on a scale usually only seen in times of war, must be stopped. Already, over 1.27 million people have died of COVID-19 across Europe. Worldwide, almost 5 million have officially succumbed to the virus. Recent studies suggest that the actual death toll is much higher, with the COVID-19 pandemic leading to approximately 15 million deaths worldwide, including approximately 1.8 million in Europe.

Supreme Court refuses to block Texas abortion ban for second time

Alex Findijs

The Supreme Court refused to block the unconstitutional Texas abortion ban for the second time on Friday. The court has decided to defer a request from the Department of Justice (DOJ) to place the law on hold. Arguments are set to be heard on November 1 on whether the DOJ has the right to challenge the Texas law in court.

The 6-3 conservative majority of the Supreme Court has evaded the constitutional violations of the Texas abortion ban since it was signed into law two months ago. This has been conducted on the flimsy ground that the Supreme Court should not rule on a case while lower courts are still debating its legality, and because the Texas law has an unprecedented form of legal enforcement for its abortion ban.

The Texas law bans all abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, at around just six weeks into pregnancy. Six weeks is well before an embryo may be scientifically considered a fetus, and is considerably before most women even know that they are pregnant. Reports from women’s health providers show that abortions in the state have dropped by 80 percent since the law went into effect.

Republican-led states have attempted to pass similar laws in the past, all struck down by the Supreme Court for violating the 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade.

However, this new law does not have direct government enforcement. Rather, it bars state employees from enforcing the law as a crime and instead passes enforcement on to private citizens, who are encouraged to take vigilante action and sue women and women’s health care providers for receiving or providing an abortion.

Because the state government has shifted enforcement into civil courts, anti-abortion advocates and far-right judges have argued that the Department of Justice cannot sue to obtain a court order preventing enforcement of the law.

If the Supreme Court rejects the arguments of the DOJ and allows the Texas law to remain in effect it will effectively be a soft overturn of Roe v. Wade. While still in effect, Roe will be circumvented by additional laws in states across the country employing similar tactics, using civil law to enforce a criminal ban on abortion rights.

Federal District Judge Robert Pitman—who temporarily blocked the law for two days before the higher ruling of the Fifth Circuit Court reimposed it—warned that Texas had “deliberately circumvented the traditional process” and had “drafted the law with the intent to preclude review by federal courts that have the obligation to safeguard the very rights the statute likely violates.”

This form of constitutional loophole would not only have dire consequences for women’s reproductive rights, but for democratic rights in general. If the law is allowed to remain in effect then “no decision of this Court is safe,” warned the DOJ in a statement released Friday. “States need not comply with, or even challenge, precedents with which they disagree. They may simply outlaw the exercise of whatever rights they disfavor; disclaim state enforcement; and delegate to the general public the authority to bring harassing actions threatening ruinous liability. … Texas should not obtain a different result simply by pairing its unconstitutional law with an unprecedented enforcement scheme designed to evade the traditional mechanisms for judicial review.”

Issuing similar warnings, the DOJ released a statement Friday urging the Supreme Court not to entertain arguments from anti-abortion proponents arguing for the overturn of Roe v. Wade and the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which upheld the right of women to an abortion up to 26 weeks into pregnancy.

Despite the risk to abortion rights nationwide, the Biden administration has done nothing but offer empty words of concern. Just as the Democrats have abandoned any defense of voting rights as Republican state legislatures restrict voting access across the country, they have offered no solution beyond the mercy of the courts in the defense of abortion rights.

Nearly 50 years since Roe v. Wade, the Democratic Party has made no concerted effort to codify abortion rights in law. In fact, abortion rights have been consistently put under attack by reactionary politicians who have imposed more federal restrictions on abortion than there have been protections.

The mass protests that took place on October 2 against the attacks on abortion rights demonstrate the overwhelming support among the population for the defense of the right to an abortion. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets determined to demonstrate their commitment to defending democratic rights.

The same cannot be said about the Democratic Party-aligned leadership of these protests. They have consistently worked to channel mass outrage over attacks on abortion behind the electoral campaigns of the Democrats, who have cynically used abortion as an electoral crutch for decades.

A genuine defense of abortion rights cannot take place through the Democratic Party or the courts.

In the Supreme Court’s decision to defer a ruling on the Texas abortion ban, only Associate Justice Sonya Sotomayor expressed any dissent. In her dissension she wrote: “For the second time, the court is presented with an application to enjoin a statute enacted in open disregard of the constitutional rights of women seeking abortion care in Texas. For the second time, the court declines to act immediately to protect these women from grave and irreparable harm.”

Other justices appointed by Democratic presidents held their tongues, potentially swayed by the promise to hear arguments on November 1. Until then the working-class women of Texas will be forced to live under a draconian law in blatant violation of the Constitution.

Looming in the near distance is another scheduled hearing on Mississippi’s anti-abortion law, which attempts to ban abortion after 15 weeks, on December 1. In this case, the state of Mississippi is asking for the Supreme Court to repeal Roe directly.

There is a real potential that the conservative majority may use either law as a justification to overturn Roe v. Wade, in one of the greatest rollbacks of democratic rights in the United States in the 21st century.

Police across US refuse COVID-19 vaccines

Trévon Austin

Across the US, police are refusing to comply with COVID-19 vaccine mandates, with many quitting their jobs or filing lawsuits rather than receive a vaccine.

In August, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot mandated that all city employees not fully vaccinated by October 15 had to undergo COVID-19 testing twice a week. Each unvaccinated employee is required to submit a test every three to four days, on their own time and at their own expense. The testing option is available only until the end of this year. After December 31, city employees must be fully vaccinated, unless they have received an approved medical or religious exemption.

The mayoral mandate sparked opposition among Chicago’s police. Nearly one-third of Chicago’s 13,000-member police department has so far refused to register their vaccination status, putting them on track for dismissal. City officials report that 21 police have been officially removed from active duty so far.

John Cantanzara, head of Chicago’s largest police union, called for the union’s approximately 11,000 members to defy the city’s requirement to report vaccination status. After the city announced the vaccine mandate in August, Cantanzara compared it to Nazi Germany, telling the Sun-Times, “This ain’t Nazi Germany. … ‘Step into the ... showers, the pills won’t hurt you.’”

He said up to half of Chicago’s police force would take unpaid leave rather than report their vaccine status.

“It is the city’s clear attempt to force officers to ‘Chicken Little, the sky is falling’ into compliance,” he said last week. “Do not fall for it. Hold the line.”

A judge granted the city’s request for a temporary order barring Cantanzara from making any public comments encouraging union members to resist the mandate. However, he has continued to post videos on the union’s YouTube channel in defiance of the order. In a video posted online Tuesday, Cantanzara threatened to sue the Lightfoot administration if it tried to enforce the mandate.

Senator Mike Braun, a Republican from Indiana, announced that officers in Illinois who lose their jobs due to vaccine mandates can look to Indiana for new positions, saying that the officers “deserve respect.”

In a statement to Fox News, Braun said, “Our police do the hardest job in the world, and they deserve respect—not losing their pay or being fired for refusing to comply with a ridiculous vaccine mandate.”

The conflict in Chicago reflects a broader trend across America. Police departments have faced resistance in their efforts to get police officers to comply with vaccine mandates, despite reports indicating that COVID-19 is now the leading cause of death of police in the country, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. According to the organization, 133 police officers died of COVID-related causes in 2021, higher than firearm and traffic-related deaths combined.

Some cities have released figures showing that police department employees tend to be vaccinated at lower rates than most other government workers, and at lower rates than the general public. In Los Angeles, where vaccines are required for city workers, more than 2,600 police department employees said they intended to seek a religious exemption.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva said he would not enforce the county’s new vaccine mandate within his agency. He oversees the largest sheriff’s department in the country, with approximately 18,000 employees. LA County set a deadline for county employees to be vaccinated by October 1. Villanueva said his employees are willing to be terminated rather than get vaccinated.

“I don’t want to be in a position to lose 5, 10 percent of my workforce overnight on a vaccine mandate,” the sheriff said.

Los Angeles County has recorded more than 26,000 COVID-related deaths, and health officials report an average of 14 deaths a day, despite slowing hospitalization rates.

The union representing New York City police officers vowed to sue the city government Wednesday, hours after Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for all New York City municipal employees.

Sheriff John Mina of Orange County Florida said he brought in a doctor to answer deputies’ questions about vaccination and offered three days leave to those who got shots. However, the latest figures show about 45 percent of employees, who submitted their vaccination status, were still not vaccinated. The sheriff said he opposed mandates and said that his officers deal with “violent criminals all the time carrying guns, and I think they think that may be more of a threat.”

In Milwaukee, city officials were pressured into an agreement with the city’s police union earlier this month that requires union members to be vaccinated or wear masks while on duty, except when eating or drinking at a safe distance from others.

Firefighters and police officers from across New Jersey gathered in protest against vaccine mandates last week in Newark, the state’s largest city. Multiple unions representing officers and firefighters have filed legal challenges to Newark Mayor Ras Baraka’s vaccine requirement for city workers.

In Seattle, dozens of police officers and firefighters were fired Monday for refusing to comply with a vaccine mandate. On Tuesday, dozens of former cops and firefighters left their boots on the steps of Seattle’s City Hall and posted videos on social media of them feeding the homeless. The Washington State Patrol also lost 127 employees following the mandate, including 67 troopers, six sergeants and one captain.

British government prepares fascistic “push back” of migrants and asylum seekers in English Channel

Simon Whelan

British Border Force staff imposing Home Secretary Priti Patel’s plans to “push back” boats carrying migrants in the English Channel will be granted legal immunity from conviction if refugees drown as a result.

A provision in the Nationality and Borders Bill states that officials would 'not be liable to any criminal or civil proceedings for anything done' when they forcibly “push back” dinghies into a busy commercial waterway carrying refugees seeking asylum in the UK. In September, the Home Office announced it was training Border Force guards to bully and reverse the course of small boats carrying migrants in the English Channel.

Kim Bryan, from the charity Channel Rescue, which observes migrants arriving in small vessels across the Channel, told the BBC Breakfast on Sunday show that from the Dover cliffs her group had recently witnessed local Border Force officials practising “push back” using jet-skis. Bryan warned Patel the consequences of using these controversial tactics would be “horrific”.

The UN Convention on the law of the sea says that all nations are required to give assistance to 'any person found at sea in danger of being lost” and “proceed with all possible speed to the rescue of persons in distress”.

Under existing laws, officers would be in danger of being prosecuted if a migrant is endangered or drowns because of their actions or lack of actions. Schedule 4A, part A1, paragraph J1 of the Conservative government’s new bill is an attempt to give officers immunity from conviction. It reads: “A relevant officer is not liable in any criminal or civil proceedings for anything done in the purported performance of functions under this part of this schedule if the court is satisfied that (a) the act was done in good faith, and (b) there were reasonable grounds for doing it.”

The Guardian described the provision as being “tucked away in an obscure corner of the bill” and questioned whether, by blatantly breaking National Maritime Laws, the Bill will ever become law. But Prime Minister Boris Johnson government is serious in its intention to make deliberate acts of murder official government policy at their maritime borders.

According to the Bill anyone arriving in the UK via what the government calls an “illegal route”, such as by a small boat across the Channel, will automatically have their claim ruled inadmissible, receive a jail sentence of up to four years, have zero recourse to public funds, and have family members barred from joining them. But the only means for migrants and asylum seekers fleeing the wars and devastation created by the actions of British, US and European imperialism across Central Asia, the Persian Gulf, the Levant and North Africa are deemed “illegal routes” by the British government.

A two-tier asylum system is being created whereby the government plans to treat those arriving by “irregular means” and “illegal routes” —such as in small dinghies and boats, shipping containers and other dangerous methods—as having even fewer rights than those who reach British shores by means the government deem legitimate. Such moves are in gross violation of the UN Refugee Convention and the European Convention of Human Rights.

Patel’s Bill breaches international and domestic law in at least 10 different ways, a report from a team of leading immigration lawyers has concluded. It described the Bill as the “biggest legal assault on international refugee law ever seen in the UK”. The 95-page joint legal opinion piece written by four barristers; Raza Husain QC, Eleanor Mitchell, Jason Pobjoy and Sarah Dobbie, on behalf of the campaign group Freedom from Torture, illustrates the unlawfulness of multiple aspects of the Bill.

The Bill is also potentially in breach of the UN Refugee Convention articles 31 and 33. Article 31 states that countries cannot expel a refugee for arriving by irregular means if they are coming from 'a territory where their life or freedom was threatened', provided these people present themselves to authorities and show good cause for entering via illegal means. It also states that nations will not apply restrictions to the movements of refugees other than 'those which are necessary' until their status is confirmed or they gain admission into another country.

Article 33 concerns returning refugees to the area from which they are fleeing and states that this should not happen where the person's life would be threatened on account of their “race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion”. These articles can be contravened only where there are “reasonable grounds” that the refugee is a “danger to the security of the country” or has been convicted of a serious crime which would constitute a threat to the community of the country.

The lawyers conclude, “This bill represents the biggest legal assault on international refugee law ever seen in the UK. The principle at the heart of the bill is the penalisation, both criminally and administratively, of those who arrive by irregular means in the UK to claim asylum and the bill seeks to reverse a number of important decisions of the UK courts, including at the House of Lords and court of appeal level, given over the last 20 years.”

A fascistic media campaign is underway to provide high profile support for the Johnson government’s murderous immigration policies, which dovetail with its “herd immunity” response to the pandemic. Nana Akua, a host on the new right-wing channel GB News, has vocally supported the idea that border patrol staff shouldn’t be prosecuted for the “push back” policy.

Akua, British born with Ghanian parents, appeared alongside author Jemma Forte on the Channel Five Jeremy Vine chat show where she said that it was “fair enough” to know that migrants won’t be rescued if their boat sinks. Akua was allowed to spew her bile at length, declaring, “I personally think… look, as long as you know that if you come across you won’t be rescued if your boat sinks, I think that’s fair enough, and that’s why they’re saying if they come across with jet skis, then they can’t rescue them, it will actually hopefully stop the people trafficking, because if you are supporting that they should be rescued, you’re actually supporting people trafficking which means that more people will come across because they think they’ll be ok.’

Forte replied to Akua’s odious opinions, “I think it’s one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever heard in my life”. She pointed out that the Bill’s provision was a breach of international law and called it “state sponsored manslaughter”. Forte continued, “To dehumanise these human beings who are coming over… why do they do it? Because they’re desperate, they’ve come from war-torn countries, they are fleeing places like Syria…”

A coalition of hundreds of groups, Together With Refugees, has been formed to oppose the Bill. One of several protests and campaigns was a letter to Johnson calling for a “kinder, fairer and more effective asylum system,” signed by 40 prominent individuals, including actors Olivia Colman, Joanna Lumley, Stephen Fry, Fiona Shaw, Simon Callow, Imelda Staunton, Zoe Wanamaker and Thandiwe Newton, the band Kaiser Chiefs, TV personalities Robert Rinder and Gok Wan, as well as comedians Romesh Ranganathan, Frankie Boyle and Shaparak “Shappi” Khorsandi.