Labor government plans biggest-ever restructuring of Australia Post

Jim Franklin

On March 2, federal Finance Minister Katy Gallagher and Communications Minister Michelle Rowland announced the start of a “community consultation process” on a major proposed reorganisation of Australia Post (AP).

CWU National President Shane Murphy with Michelle Rowland, the current federal communications minister, at an Australia Post Distribution Centre in May 2022. [Photo: CWU Central]

What is being discussed by AP management and the top echelon of the Labor government is the most dramatic restructuring of the state-owned postal service in its 214-year history. It would result in the destruction of thousands of jobs and drastically reduce services to the community.

Among the measures under consideration is a reduction in letter delivery frequency from five days a week to once or twice. This would require legislative change to remove the current requirement for AP to serve 98 percent of Australian addresses every business day. Also up for discussion is a substantial increase in the cost of postage.

Following the announcement, the Communications Workers Union (CWU) told members in an email it would make a submission to the government, demanding that any changes to AP must “enhance our community services” and “provide quality, secure jobs.”

No postal worker should be fooled by these weasel words. The fact is, the CWU bureaucracy has been involved in these discussions for months, behind the backs of workers, and is already playing the leading role in implementing the initial stages of the restructure.

Last month, the union’s top bureaucrats, together with AP management, visited depots to tell workers about a trial of a proposed new delivery model, which will take place at the Hornsby facility in New South Wales from April to June. While the meetings were called by management, the union bosses did all the talking, delivering the news in order to shut down opposition from workers to the changes.

The CWU confirmed these plans in a March 1 email, timed to reach workers’ inboxes ahead of the widely reported government announcement. The new model being trialed will recast and expand “beats” (delivery routes) served by Electric Delivery Vehicles (EDVs), motorbikes and pushbikes.

At the Kingsgrove workplace meeting, CWU secretary Shane Murphy told workers that beats would be expanded by as much as 50 percent, although this figure was not included in the email.

CWU National President Shane Murphy addresses Australia Post workers at Kingsgrove, NSW on January 24, 2022 [Photo: CWU Central]

Ordinary letters and junk mail will be delivered to half the beat on alternate days, while parcels, large letters and priority mail will continue to be delivered each day along the entire route.

The approach is not new. Under the Alternative Delivery Model (ADM), a failed restructuring attempt introduced in mid-2020 under the phony pretext of COVID-19 safety, workers were given two beats, which they delivered on alternate days, virtually doubling their workload overnight. The ADM could not have been implemented without the full support of the CWU, which, behind the backs of its members, signed a no-strike deal with AP management, preventing workers from legally taking action against the hated model.

Knowing that everyday delivery is a red line for postal workers, and determined to stifle opposition to the proposed model, Murphy insisted in the March 1 email that it is based on the “principle” of “one postie, completing one round, delivering five days per week.”

The reality is that the new model amounts to “ADM 2.0.” What functional difference is there between delivering half of a larger beat on alternate days and delivering one or the other of two smaller beats on alternate days?

The March 1 email explains that the Hornsby trial will be “monitored closely by a CWU Official from each State Branch of the Union.” Their primary concern will be to determine “whether efficiency can be achieved” and “any changes required to supporting infrastructure.”

In other words, an army of CWU bureaucrats from around the country will descend upon the Hornsby facility to ensure the trial proceeds smoothly, without interference from workers, and help management assess whether the new model will deliver the productivity increases demanded by management.

The email claims the union “has secured important job security commitments—ensuring that no job losses will occur.” Such “commitments” mean nothing. In the very next paragraph, Murphy admits that the new model will likely cause beats to be “impacted by potential efficiency gains,” i.e., some will be eliminated.

Murphy writes that, in this case, “members will be voluntarily redeployed to a permanent role based on parcel delivery duties.” In other words, should your beat be broken up and redistributed, you will be shunted to “parcel delivery duties,” possibly in a different facility. If you disagree, you will be shown the door.

The CWU and AP management know from the experience of the ADM that the introduction of more onerous working conditions, along with forced retraining and relocation, will prompt many postal workers to leave “voluntarily.”

The planned restructuring goes much further than the ADM and will have a devastating impact on Australia Post workers. Labor, in close collaboration with the Communications Workers Union (CWU), is seeking to do what previous Liberal-National governments could not: Permanently remove the regulations standing in the way of long-running efforts to degrade letter mail and transform AP into a highly profitable parcel delivery service.

AP management and the government claim this is necessary because of the decline in the letters business. According to figures in AP’s half-yearly financial report the number of letters delivered has declined 66 percent since its peak in 2008. Despite the result in the letters business, AP still posted a before-tax profit of $23.6 million, off the back of parcel revenue of $3.8 billion. Senior AP executives collected bonuses totaling $28 million in 2022.

Ultimately, the restructuring operations are directed at preparing AP for full or partial privatisation. While the Labor government denies this, AP CEO Paul Graham made clear in a recent interview with the the Australian Financial Review that “all options are on the table.”

The CWU leadership is fully prepared to enforce this, just as it did at Telstra, the formerly government-owned telecommunications service, resulting in the destruction of thousands of jobs.

AP workers must take a sharp warning. The Labor government’s “consultation process” and the proposed new delivery model are just the beginning of the next assault on jobs and conditions.

This is an international process and Australian postal workers confront the same attacks as their counterparts overseas. The surge in parcel profits experienced during lockdowns early in the pandemic has now plateaued with the removal of public health measures by governments worldwide. Mail carriers around the world are undertaking restructuring operations and are implementing harsh attacks on wages and conditions.

This has resulted in the outbreak of major struggles involving tens of thousands of postal workers in the UK, Germany and elsewhere. The response of the union bureaucracies has been to do everything possible to stifle and suppress workers’ opposition in order to ram through the cuts demanded by management.

Deepening debt and currency crises hit poorer countries

Nick Beams

A wave of economic devastation is sweeping across a growing number of poorer countries and so-called emerging markets as the result of spiraling inflation, interest rate hikes by the US Federal Reserve and other major central banks, and the surge in the value of the US dollar over the past year.

The most widely known case is Sri Lanka where a mass uprising last year drove out the Rajapakse government and where a new upsurge is now developing against the Wickremesinghe government. It is seeking to impose an International Monetary Fund austerity program to pay off the country’s debts to international finance capital by impoverishing the working class and toiling masses.

Sri Lankan port workers protesting against the newly increased PAYE income tax outside the entrance to Colombo port in Sri Lanka, Wednesday, March 1, 2023. [AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena]

But the situation in Sri Lanka, where basic social services are increasingly no longer being provided, is being replicated in many other countries.

Such is the shortage of dollars, Bloomberg recently reported that international flights have been suspended in Nigeria, and car factories are being closed in Pakistan.

In Bangladesh power companies may have to halt production unless they receive dollars to buy fuel. Unless there is power, the irrigation of paddy field rice, the country’s staple food, cannot continue during the dry season.

As the Bloomberg report commented: “In some of the world’s most vulnerable developing nations, the situations on the ground are dire. Shortages of dollars and crimping access from everything from raw materials to medicine. Meanwhile governments are struggling with their debts as they chase rescue packages from the International Monetary Fund [IMF].”

As in Sri Lanka, that “struggle” consists in devising mechanisms to meet the rapacious demands of finance capital by imposing ever greater hardships on the working class, including those holding what have been considered to be middle class jobs, along with the urban and rural poor.

Financial analysts are predicting that the situation is only going to worsen.

John Marret, senior economist as the Economist Intelligence Unit in Hong Kong commented to Bloomberg: “These countries are mired in economic collapse, and some like Pakistan are teetering on the edge of another default. Major parts of their economies are struggling. The currencies are worth far less too.”

That situation is only going to worsen with the clear indication by the US Fed and other major central banks that rate increases will continue.

In Pakistan some factories have stopped production because they have run out of hard currency, principally US dollars, to pay for imports of raw materials.

Pakistan must meet around $7 billion in debt repayments in June and the prospect of a default is looming ever larger. Foreign reserves are plunging and the country, like so many others around the world, is being hit by the highest inflation in decades.

When it cut the country’s credit rating last week, Moody’s said that “in the current extremely fragile balance of payments situation, disbursements may not be secured in time to avoid a default.”

As a result of dollar shortages, the health situation, which was hit because of the refusal of major capitalist governments to pursue a policy of global elimination of COVID-19, is worsening everywhere with shortages of medical supplies.

More than 20 countries are seeking aid from the IMF and countries such as Pakistan have seen the value of their currencies plunge.

One of the biggest falls has been in the value of Ghana’s currency, the cedi, which dropped by 55 percent between January and October last year. This dramatically increased the price of all imported goods in terms of the domestic currency on top of the price hikes carried out because of the profit gouging by the giant global food and energy corporations.

The vice-like grip in which so many poorer countries are held is revealed in the overall debt levels, which escalated as a result of the pandemic.

In 2019, before the pandemic struck, the Institute for International Finance (IIF) calculated that the total debt burden for some 30 large low- and middle-income countries was $75 trillion. It leapt to $98 trillion by December last year with most of the increase coming in 2020 and 2021.

At the same time, there has been a major increase in government debt leading to restrictions in vital areas of social spending. According to the IIF, total government debt for the 30 selected countries reached almost 65 percent of gross domestic product at the end of 2022. That is an increase of 10 percentage points from pre-pandemic levels and the highest ever total.

Interest rates were very low in 2020–2021 as central banks pumped in trillions of dollars into the financial system, following the onset of COVID. But last year, in response to the rapid rise in inflation and the fear of the movement it would spark in the working class, they began interest rate hikes at the fastest rate in four decades.

One of the consequences was to increase the value of the US dollar, leading to a surge of inflation because so many international commodities are priced in dollars. The movements in currency markets means that even when the dollar price of some commodities began to fall in dollar terms, the inflationary surge continued in many countries because of the fall in the value of their currencies against the dollar.

A recent study by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), published as part of its Quarterly Review this month, revealed an important shift in the operation of the global financial system, which is having a major international impact, particularly on poorer countries.

It found that in the past there tended to be offsetting movements in the price of commodities. That is, when prices went up, the value of the dollar tended to fall, and so importers were to some extent shielded from the effects of commodity price increases.

But this relationship has changed. Up until 2021 commodity prices and the value of the dollar tended to move inversely. Now they are moving together.

“Thus, the whole effects of commodity price and dollar gyrations on stagflation risks used to offset each other, they compounded each other in 2012–2022,” the BIS study said.

In the first weeks of this year there was speculation that interest rates may start to ease and the pressure on poorer countries and so-called emerging markets could lessen. But in the recent period, with the continuation of what the central banks refer to as “tight labour markets” in the major economies, there is not going to be a turnaround.

The pace of the interest rates hikes may lessen in some cases, but they are going to continue, intensifying the already intolerable conditions for the working class and oppressed masses in poorer countries who comprise major portions of the world’s population.

The necessity for a unified struggle of the working class against the entire profit system, embracing those in so-called advanced and less developed economies alike, is being hammered home in developing daily reality.

Australian “youth barometer” survey highlights growing poverty, precariousness

Sofia Devetzi

A report issued by Monash University has shed light on the increasing pressures faced by young people in Australia, including widespread financial precarity, underemployment, poor mental health and anxiety about the future. Bank accounts are so tight that over half of the youth surveyed went without eating for a whole day at some point during the past twelve months.

The 2022 Australian Youth Barometer—conducted by the Monash Centre for Youth Policy and Education Practice—examined the experiences of young people on a range of topics including the economy, working conditions, education, health and wellbeing, and civic participation. Researchers surveyed more than 500 people aged between 18 and 24, and interviewed another thirty.

2022 Australian Youth Barometer [Photo: Monash University]

The survey reveals that financial struggles are a common problem across all but the wealthiest demographic groups, with 90 percent of young Australians experiencing financial difficulties at some point in the past year. Many reported that they worked multiple jobs and still struggled to make ends meet; their situations were particularly precarious during extended periods such as work placements or exams, when they were unable to work.

Future economic prospects are regarded as bleak. More than half of the surveyed young people think they will be financially worse off than their parents, and only half believe that it is likely that they will achieve financial security in their future. Many cited barriers such as rising costs of living, housing unaffordability and a lack of stable and sufficient employment. Home ownership is regarded as increasingly beyond reach, and only 58 per cent of young people thought it is likely that they will live in a comfortable home.

The report found that working conditions have deteriorated for young people. Of those surveyed, 45 percent experienced unemployment at some point in the past year, while 61 percent experienced underemployment (that is, working fewer hours than they would like). In rural areas, these figures rose to 69 percent and 76 percent respectively. More than half of young Australians also reported earning income from gig work in the past year; Indigenous youth were particularly likely to have done so (78 percent).

As noted by the researchers, working in the gig economy often leaves already-vulnerable young people completely unprotected by even the inadequate employment laws that exist.

The substantial economic strain on young Australians means that many have gone without food at some points in the past year. The survey asked young people if there was a time in the past 12 months when they had run out of food and were unable to purchase more; a quarter responded in the affirmative. Such food insecurity affected even those with full-time jobs and from higher socio-economic backgrounds; many said they had not been able to afford food between pay cycles.

As one interviewee, aged 24, told researchers: “There have been quite a few times when I have been down to my last two or three dollars to last me a week and, most of the time, [that] means that I live off a loaf of bread and some two-minute noodles. Yes, I would say there have been times when I have not been able to eat the food I wanted, if any food at all.”

Another interviewee, aged 22, said, “I’ll have a week of being able to eat whatever I want to eat and then, you know, next week, I have no money, so I basically just have to live off bread.”

Young workers queuing outside an inner-western Sydney Centrelink office in early 2020. [Photo: WSWS]

The survey also revealed that at least once in the past year, due to lack of money, 68 percent of young Australians ate less than they thought they should, 67 percent were not able to eat healthy and nutritious food, 66 percent were hungry but did not eat, and 51 percent had to go without eating for a whole day.

The findings on mental health and wellbeing follow directly from the above indices. Almost one quarter (24 percent) of young people rated their mental health as poor or very poor, and the vast majority (85 percent) reported feelings of worry, anxiety or pessimism. Researchers found that 40 per cent of young people are worried about their ability to live a happy and healthy life in the future.

When asked which issues needed immediate action in Australia, the surveyed young people identified housing (61 percent), employment (47 percent) and climate change (46 percent).

Only a very small number said that they felt properly represented in political discussions; many pointed out a lack of input in decision-making processes and the fact that their concerns were not taken seriously in the political sphere. In a telling indictment of the current system, almost one-third of young Australians (29 percent) thought it was unlikely that climate change would be effectively combated in the future.

In fact, none of the above issues confronting young people—be they climate change, financial and job security, housing affordability, or cost of living—can be properly addressed under capitalism. The profit system creates and exacerbates these issues by its very nature. Big business and finance capital rely on the impoverishment of young people and other sections of the working class as a means of ensuring the continued supply of readily exploitable cheap labour.

Parts of the “Youth Barometer” findings suggested emerging anti-capitalist sentiments among young people. The report’s authors noted “an unshakable feeling of a world in transition” when summarising their discussions with research participants. One interviewee stated that current structures and systems have been “designed to maintain and continue the status quo.”

To meet the crises confronting them, working class youth in Australia and around the world need to fight to build a movement against capitalism and for a rationally planned world socialist society.

This is a political struggle pitting young people against all of the defenders of capitalism, chief among them Labor and the trade unions. For decades they have presided over an assault on jobs, wages and working conditions that is now being intensified by the federal Labor government, as it seeks to make the working class pay for the crisis of capitalism. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Albanese’s administration is deepening Australia’s alignment with a US war drive against China that threatens an unprecedented global catastrophe.

Strikes erupt across French economy after March 7 protest against pension cuts

Samuel Tissot & Anthony Torres

After millions of French workers and youth took to the streets Tuesday for the sixth time against President Emmanuel Macron’s widely despised pension cuts, strikes are breaking out across the French economy. With refineries, energy facilities and mass transit on strike, the prospect of a total cutoff of fuel supplies that would shut down the economy is looming.

Striking dockers occupy a road leading to the port of Bayonne with a banner reading "Dockers striking, dead port" in Tarnos, southwestern France, Wednesday, March 8, 2023. [AP Photo/Bob Edme]

In the energy sector, workers had already decided on longer term walkouts last week. Three of the country’s four liquefied natural gas terminals (two at Fos-sur-Mer and one at Saint-Nazaire) have announced weeklong strikes. Refinery workers, whose strikes were isolated by the union bureaucracy and then forcibly requisitioned by the state to make them accept below-inflation pay raises, went on strike on Monday. With strikes underway at all TotalEnergies’ sites, currently no fuel deliveries are being made in France.

Workers in other parts of the energy sector also mobilized en masse. Beginning last Friday, strikes across nuclear, hydroelectric and thermal power plants cut electricity production by 5,000 megawatts, the equivalent of five nuclear reactors. Strikers turned off the electricity supply to Labor Minister Olivier Dussopt’s neighborhood in the city of Annonay to protest his support for the cuts.

Air traffic will remain heavily disrupted throughout the rest of the week by an air traffic controllers strike. The General Directorate of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has warned that it will cancel 20 to 30 percent of flights for the rest of the week. On Tuesday, 20 percent of flights in Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport and 30 percent in Paris Orly, Beauvais, Bordeaux, Lille, Lyon, Nantes, Marseille, Montpellier, Nice and Toulouse airports were cancelled. 

Strikes are continuing in mass transit in Paris and other major cities. Railway workers at Paris-Gare du Nord station in Le Havre and Toulouse, as well as staff at Paris-Le Bourget Airport, are all on strike.

On Tuesday, striking transport workers slowed and in some cases completely shut down transport networks across France. Across the country, 76 percent of all train drivers were on strike and 55 percent of controllers. Strikes by lorry drivers and the blockage of multiple motorways on the night of Monday to Tuesday also halted goods deliveries across the country.

Eighty percent of TGVs (high-speed interregional trains) were cancelled, impacting service from France to Germany and Spain. In the Île-de-France capital region, more than 80 percent of regional trains did not function, and there was major disruption to the Paris metro service. In Lille, the majority of buses were cancelled. In Marseille the two metro lines and one in three tram lines were closed, with 85 percent of the buses affected by the strike. Tram lines in Nice were shut down. 

Significant sections of private sector manufacturing workers remained on strike yesterday after striking Tuesday. These included workers at automakers Stellantis and Renault and parts supplier Valeo, aerospace firm Airbus, engine maker Safran and naval dockyards at Saint-Nazaire. 

Other critical sections of workers are also walking out. Meatpackers, who are also in the midst of contract negotiations, are also striking across the country for the entire week. Paris garbage collectors and sewer cleaners have also begun a strike since Monday. Four of Paris’ 20 districts have already had waste collections impacted, and 70 staff at the incinerator at Ivry-sur-Seine just outside Paris have walked out, preventing refuse from being burned. 

The onrush of workers’ struggles follows the mass protests against Macron’s cuts on Tuesday, which were the largest since protests began. The one-day action was called by an alliance of all major unions, including the Stalinist General Confederation of Labor (CGT), the social democratic French Democratic Labor Confederation (CDFT), and Workers Force (FO). Ultimately 3.5 million people attended the protests they had called. Over 400 high schools and 40 universities spread across all of the country’s major cities were also occupied by students or forced to close.

In Paris, 700,000 marched, according to CGT figures. In other major cities, the turnout rose dramatically from previous protest marches. Marseille saw 245,000 march, according to the unions, up from 150,000 on January 31. In Nantes 100,000 marched (compared to 65,000 on January 31); in Bordeaux 100,000 marched (compared to 75,000 on January 31) and in Toulouse 120,000 marched (compared to 80,000 on January 31). 

Protesters were met, once again, with brutal police repression. According to Paris Chief of Police Laurent Nuñez, 43 people were arrested in the capital. The cops also fired volleys of tear gas at protesters in Rennes and Marseille. Violence was also meted out against students occupying schools in solidarity with the strike against Macron’s reform. Three high school students occupying the Thiers High School in Marseille were arrested. Later, clashes in the old port saw multiple police officers injured and one person arrested. 

Tuesday’s demonstration and the wave of ongoing strikes show that the working class has the strength to undertake a revolutionary policy: to bring down Macron, stop the ruling class attacks on living standards and halt the reckless escalation of the US-NATO war on Russia in Ukraine.

Despite attempts by the Macron government and capitalist press to demonize all opposition to cuts, the strike enjoys overwhelming public support. The latest Elabe poll found 74 percent oppose Macron’s cuts, 64 percent support strikes against them, and 60 percent support “blocking the country” to halt them.

The French union bureaucracies have responded to this eruption of the class struggle by yet again impotently begging Macron to withdraw his reforms to try to defuse public anger. The spokesperson for the all-trade union alliance appealed to Macron, stating, “The president’s silence is a serious democratic problem” and asked to be “received urgently” by Macron. 

The “democratic problem” is not Macron’s refusal to talk to union bureaucracies, who in fact coordinate their policy with top officials like Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne. Rather, it is that Macron and the banks are trampling democracy underfoot: They are implementing a concerted policy of impoverishment of the working population and trying to deal with overwhelming popular opposition this creates by sending the cops to assault anyone who protests.

As long as workers remain subordinated to the national union bureaucracies, their struggles will be gradually isolated and repressed by the French state. Indeed, since the union bureaucracies never pay any strike pay, devoting their billion-euro budgets entirely to their own expenses, workers rapidly face enormous financial pressures if they strike longer than a week. Moreover, the union bureaucracies have systematically refused to mobilize workers more broadly to defend strikers whom the state is requisitioning to force them to work.

This reflects the reactionary politics of the union bureaucracies. The CGT apparatus has not only signed statements of support for multitrillion-euro bank bailouts adopted after the 2020 financial crash at the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic but also its support for US-NATO in the war with Russia, even as Macron finances a €90 billion increase in the military budget by slashing pensions. However, committed to a perspective of cutting deals with Macron, the bureaucrats seek to strangle opposition in the working class to these right-wing policies.

Be Obi-dient?

Nick Pemberton

Peter Obi, a candidate for Nigeria’s Presidential election, is by no definition a radical. Bernie Sanders, who was a candidate for the United States Presidency, was only a radical by his own definition. The issue I always had with Bernie was that he wasn’t radical enough (what does this even mean?) but more so that he never tried to win and therefore was not a relevant force in politics.

There is an argument that American politics are higher stakes than Nigerian politics. Marxists have attempted to make the argument that socialism must start in the most developed bourgeois democracies. But there are a couple of problems for the United States. The US is what I call the last second-world country. It has unchecked access to markets and can spend without consequence thanks to the supremacy of its military and therefore its currency. However it has no functioning government and any crisis whether that be toxic trains, guns, police murder, drug prices, college prices or polluted water, cannot and will not be solved by the government. The solution is to buy and work more and turn away from politics because there is no left represented.

The United States is not a group of people in a geographical space but rather a series of individuals who make things that are used to control the rest of the world. The working class consciousness is lacking in the United States because of nationalism. The conclusion of Bernie Sanders was not international socialism but rather democratic socialism where what workers get in workers should get out. The problem is this is only a politics of mutual exploitation and it is this sort of politics of equity that dominates the mind of the bitter American who aims to achieve the American Dream rather than become a serious political person.

Peter Obi comes from a third party, but only recently. The tired debate on the US left is whether or not to form a third party. The answer is obvious. Both sides are wrong. Kazy of Marxist Alternative in Nigeria notes: “The primary role of Obi in these historical events is to act as a brake on the movement. His task is to moderate the anger of the youth and the masses generally and divert this anger to safer and more accommodating channels. This explains why a minority section of the ruling class fully supports him. Whether he has enough authority to achieve this objective or not remains to be seen in the near future. But nevertheless, there is now the prospect of a fight to win the workers and youth who are looking to the Labour Party, wrestling them away from the influence of the bourgeois gangsters who lead it today, and turn these forces into a genuine mass vehicle of the working class.”

Obi sounds a lot like Sanders. An establishment guy who nonetheless can inspire young people into genuine political action. Obi, like Sanders, has the role of sheepdogging this energy back into capitalist politics. The moment comes not before this intervention into politics where we are all nihilistic or after when we are cynical but during this moment when we all have hope and organization and momentum.

Sanders failed to seize this moment but Obi, in challenging the results of the Presidential victory of Bola Tinubu, a figure as bumbling as Joe Biden, is proving to be far less “obedient” than Sanders. Obi’s movement dubbed Obidient has a lot more backbone than the Sandernistas. The state of American hopelessness and mediocrity is especially strong at the moment. At least under Trump, there was hyper-politics, a traumatized liberalism that while ultimately reactionary, was admitting a certain type of crisis, even if it was misnamed fascism or authoritarianism rather than capitalism or climate catastrophe.

For a note on the state of American culture, it is worth quoting from Jeffrey St. Clair’s most recent column: “Ed Sheeran says his new record, Subtract, is informed by “fear, depression and anxiety.” Whatever became of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll?”

Indeed most of the left feels sorry for itself and remains naive about the true stakes of politics and the brutality of modern life. Nigerians on the other hand believe in something. I am not saying this something has to be a god, in fact, it would be better if it wasn’t. But American idealism is ultimately cynical. The things American dream for is not to win the struggle of life but rather to deny and ignore it entirely. The goal of being happy or feeling better is the primary goal of Americans, even in a political context.

Nigerians already have this good-natured attitude. They are a kind and enthusiastic people and the state of their country gives some people the impression that they roll over. But even a bourgeois politician like Peter Obi is proving this isn’t the case. Obi is astute to recognize the timing of a political crisis in Nigeria and is attempting to seize the opportunity.

Obi, like current President Muhammadu Buhari before him, has the reputation of being less personally corrupt than others and this is near the top of most Nigerian’s list of demands in a country where as Michael Roberts notes corruption hinders government spending: “General government revenue in Nigeria was 7.3% of GDP for 2021—less than half of the average in countries belonging to the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and nearly a third of the average of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)—and ranked as 191st out of 193 countries in the world! Almost all government revenues are swallowed up by debt service and payment of government salaries.”

The dying Jimmy Carter represents the limits of a neoliberal President who isn’t personally corrupt but it is a basic step that needs to be accomplished. Buhari’s restriction on bank notes was a supposed attempt to limit the bribing from politicians but it resulted in poor people who only had access to cash being hurt the most, causing riots at banks and ultimately voter suppression as many young people who supported Obi could not travel to vote in the place they were registered to.

This is far from the only crisis in Nigeria. Inflation, lack of electricity, terrorism, lack of fuel, floods, drought, and hunger have all picked up recently and been in the international news cycle. This is the moment for a country with a worse life expectancy than Afghanistan.

Nigeria, set to pass the population number in the United States in the near future, represents the limits of peacetime capitalism. For one the supposed peace of capitalism presents an obstacle for those seeking refugee status. Horror stories pop up of people’s desperation. I read about a Nigerian going to fight for Ukraine because he has a better chance than in his own country. I read about this same endless supply of US weapons meant for Ukraine going into the hands of Nigerian terrorists.

Nigerians must live on under two dollars a day. 35% of children are stunted from lack of food. And yet they are doing well in the eyes of the US because there is capitalism. However, it is bit of a backward exercise in capitalist relations. The oil cannot be used in international markets because it is stolen and the only good jobs are in government. The private sector’s practice of selling labor is a pointless exercise. Own your own business or get into government or terrorism or rely on your family. These are the non-capitalist relations possible in capitalist hell.

However, this also presents an opportunity. While the United States still has the majority of its people loyal to capitalist desire, Nigerians have clarity about the brutality, joy, and randomness of life. Americans think good things are earned and this is the ideology of the ruling class which Americans identify through nationalism. The coveted identity of being an American, even if it guarantees you nothing when you fail, is something we believe in because of the things it gets us when we succeed. And we all believe we will succeed because we don’t believe in anything but ourselves.

In Nigeria the global crisis of putting militarism and capitalism before environmentalism and food security is presenting an opportunity and a tragedy. America’s dream of being radical is almost always a posture, a substitution for the gritty work of politics and the decency of ordinary life. Americans think big and grasp for a magical world beyond our own. Americans detest reality because it is too radical for us.

The violence at the center of the means of production is punching us in the face with environmental catastrophe upon environmental catastrophe. We ignore Nigerians because we don’t recognize them. We say who are strange people dancing and laughing and being free? Who are these odd ones? Don’t they know that freedom comes from a political orientation and capitalist relations not from interactions with others?

We say who are these strange people making political demands? Will this not hurt the market and the ability to compete? After all of this we are still waiting for our capitalist God to drop something to us from the sky. We are obedient to Him and Him alone. The joke of Peter Obi, to be Obi-dient, rather than obedient, is lost on American people who like the Scooby Doo cartoon, run fast, go nowhere, and are about to fall flat on their face.

The radical alternative culture of America is a retreat from the production in everyday life. We do not even talk to each other about anything serious or real. We do not ask each other how we are selling our souls and bodies to the reproduction of capitalism. We ask each other about our anxiety and how to fix it. We then pretend we are doing great.

We refuse to examine the life and even worse we refuse to live it. Our obedience is to capitalism and we pretend to be rebels by refusing to be obedient to anything else. We thus all have individual identities, that will mercifully be forgotten, because they are too mediocre to recall.

UK government plans mass detention and expulsion of asylum seekers

Thomas Scripps

On Tuesday, the UK government published details of a plan to immediately and permanently deny the right to asylum to almost all migrants who enter the UK on a small boat.

An Illegal Migration Bill will apply a “rights brake,” severely restricting their ability to appeal to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), to which the UK is a signatory, or to the UK’s own modern slavery laws.

People thought to be migrants disembark from a British Border Force patrol boat after being picked up from a dingy in the English Channel in Dover harbour, England, Thursday, Sept. 16, 2021. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)

People who cross the English Channel on small boats will be immediately detained without bail or judicial review for 28 days. A duty will be placed on ministers to remove them “as soon as reasonably practicable”, with grounds for suspending removal limited to those under 18, medically unfit to fly, or at a real risk of serious and irreversible harm in the country they are being deported to. Home Secretary Suella Braverman pointedly referred to this legal bar in Parliament as “exceedingly high”. All other claims would have to be “heard remotely after removal.”

Those denied asylum after reaching the UK in this way would be permanently barred from entering the UK in the future.

This is the policy of a police state. It was introduced to parliament by Braverman using the fascistic, scaremongering language of Donald Trump, referring to “waves of illegal migrants… 100 million people around the world [the global number of refugees]… They are coming”.

If enacted, the law would deprive tens of thousands of people of their democratic rights every year and lead to the huge expansion of internment camps in Britain.

Roughly 28,000 people entered the UK on small boats in 2021, another 45,000 in 2022, and another 2,950 so far this year—giving an annual projection of 65,000.

People make this dangerous crossing—which is believed to have killed 52 people, including children, since 2018—to flee war, persecution, hunger and poverty at home. Most will already have risked even more perilous journeys—across the Mediterranean Sea or by foot through Europe—to make it to the French coast. Those drowned in the Channel include Iraqi and Iranian Kurds, Afghans, Ethiopians, Somalis, Vietnamese, Senegalese and Egyptians.

These are victims of British imperialism and its allies, whose wars abroad, backing of dictatorial regimes, economic exploitation of oppressed countries, and abandonment of their populations to the consequences of climate change have created the biggest refugee crisis in history.

The government has used a recent increase in the numbers of Albanians making the journey to try to pull the wool over workers’ eyes about what is happening, claiming the UK is being overwhelmed by purely economic migrants with no legal right to stay in the UK. This is a lie.

Albanians made up the largest proportion of any country of origin for small boat arrivals in 2022, but this was still just 28 percent of the total. Secondly, more than half the people from Albania applying for asylum receive it (55 percent in the first half of 2022), because being returned home would infringe their basic human rights.

Overall, fully two-thirds of those who crossed the Channel last year would be granted asylum, according to analysis by the Refugee Council, half of them from Afghanistan, Iran, Eritrea, Sudan or Syria.

These thousands of people use illegal routes because they have no other choice. Outside of specific schemes for some Afghans, Ukrainians, and Hong Kongers with British National (Overseas) status, the UK offers only extremely limited refugee resettlement and family reunion schemes as legal pathways to asylum. Barely more than 6,000 people were allowed into the country in this way in September 2021-22.

Under the proposed law, everyone else who arrives would be subjected to a de facto blanket policy of imprisonment. The UK government currently has no agreements in place to remove asylum seekers to passed-through European countries where they could previously have claimed for asylum, or to their home countries. It’s barbaric plan to ship vulnerable people to Rwanda is not functional.

In these circumstances there is no reason to believe migrants will be detained for just 28 days. There are currently 160,000 people in the UK with pending asylum applications and the government is working night and day to dismantle the current system of housing them in hotels and sheltered accommodation—through underfunding and xenophobic rhetoric. Braverman referred repeatedly on Tuesday to the costs of asylum accommodation and her efforts to end the “farce of accommodating migrants in hotels.”

Asylum seekers denied even a legal hearing will therefore increasingly be held indefinitely in a network of detention camps, holding tens of thousands more people every year.

Conditions in migrant detention and processing centres are already inhumane. Last October, a scandal broke out over the appalling treatment of migrants held in the overcrowded Manston holding centre. Designed to accommodate 1,000 people, the former Royal Air Force base was holding 4,000 in what were described as “wretched conditions”, with detainees suffering violent abuse and outbreaks of scabies, norovirus, diphtheria and MRSA. A coroner’s inquest is ongoing into the death of one migrant who had tested positive for diphtheria.

With state spending cut to the bone and given the explosive conditions which would prevail in dozens of camps of thousands of people, their expansion would depend on the police and armed forces. An army detachment was held on standby during the Manston events. In January 2022, the Navy was involved in policing the Channel through Operation Isotrope, along with 200 personnel mainly drawn from the army.

Given the scale of the operation required and the inevitable legal clashes in the European Court, there is a possibility that the government’s new plans will flounder. Its announcements are an attempt to energise its far-right constituency and whip up xenophobic feeling in sections of the working class abandoned by the Labour Party and the trade unions. But in doing so, the Tories are running ahead of what the state apparatus can accomplish in such a short space of time.

But whatever its time frame or exact form, the extreme right-wing trajectory of the government’s asylum policy is clear and will be facilitated by a complicit Labour Party.

Britain’s nominal opposition offers no defence of democratic rights whatsoever. Its criticisms of Tory policies amount to calls on the government to try harder.

Responding to Braverman in parliament Tuesday, Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper began, “The government has allowed criminal gangs to take hold along the Channel and along our border. At the same time, convictions of people smugglers have halved… costly, inappropriate hotel use has soared, removals of unsuccessful asylum seekers are down 80 percent on the last Labour government”.

Against previous Tory policies to crack down on migration which “did not work” and “didn’t deter anyone”, Labour had “put forward plans for a cross-border police unit, for fast-tracked decisions and returns, to clear the backlog and end hotel use”.

Britain’s capitalist parties are conspiring to create a viciously right-wing, anti-migrant political climate. They are scapegoating a few tens of thousands of people to distract from the crimes committed by British imperialism in their home countries and to turn British citizens against their fellow workers from abroad, rather than the multi-hundred millionaires and billionaires who keep all workers impoverished.

This is done to prepare ever more authoritarian laws directed against the working class. A ruling class prepared to deny rights to tens of thousands of refugees and imprison them en masse is also preparing to deny millions of British workers the right to strike and protest. And the army has been mobilised to break strikes by health workers and to police migrants.

Millions suffer plunge in living standards as cost of living surges in UK

Robert Stevens

Millions of people in Britain are cutting back on meals and being forced to switch off the heating due to soaring prices.

A survey of 2,000 people published this week by the Which? consumer rights and advice organisation revealed that one in seven people 15 percent are skipping meals as prices rise. This is a substantial increase from the one in eight (12 percent) skipping meals recorded just three months ago.

A shopper enters a supermarket in London, January 12, 2021 [AP Photo/Alastair Grant]

As well as people skipping meals, almost 10 percent prioritised meals for other family members above themselves.

UK household energy bills began to shoot up at the end of 2021, even before the war in Ukraine forced them to record levels. According to House of Commons research published in January, “Average bills were £760 in 2021 compared to £450 in 2020, a 36% real increase.”

Energy bills have continued to rise. Despite a unit of electricity currently being capped for households at 34p and unit of gas for 10.3p across the country, the average annual bill for a home is around £2,500 a year. This is just an average and for those with extra energy requirement, it can be much larger.

Last month energy regulator, Ofgem, announced that its energy cap—the amount utility suppliers can charge for average dual fuel—is to fall for three months from April 1 to £3,280, from its current £4,279.

The government’s energy discount scheme is due to be slashed at that point, meaning that the actual price paid by an average household will still rise by 20 percent from £2,100 a year in April to £3,000. But even if the government, as mooted, continues some support, energy prices will remain huge at around £2,500 for all but the most vulnerable—with nearly 7 million (6.7 million) people struggling to afford them. Were the government to pull its discount entirely, the numbers struggling to pay bills from April would surge to 8.4 million.

Which? found that heating costs are intolerable. More than seven in ten people (72 percent) are putting their heating on less, almost four in ten (39 percent) are using less hot water and a fifth of people (19 percent) have cooked fewer meals. An 85-year-old man told Which?: “The house is cold due to the cost of heating, so I am continually wearing layer upon layer of clothes. Saving money on heating allows more money for food.”

Which? also found an estimated 2.3 million households missed or defaulted on a vital payment such as their mortgage, rent, credit card, or bill payment in the last month.

There is no evidence of any respite in the continual decline in living standards, with the government’s CPI inflation measure still in double digits at 10.1 percent and the more accurate RPI rate even higher at 13.4 percent. A survey conducted by the Office for National Statistics from February 8 to 19 found that 92 percent of adults in Britain reported an increase in their cost of living in January-February 2023, from the situation a year ago. Even compared with one month previous, 67 percent of respondents reported a cost of living increase. Giving reasons for the rise in their cost of living, 95 percent said it was due to price of food shopping; 79 percent their gas or electricity bills; and for 45 percent the price of fuel.

According to Which?, nearly two-thirds of people (59 percent), or 16.5 million households, have made at least one financial adjustment in the last month. These include cutting back on essential items, dipping into savings, or selling possessions to cover essential spending.

Shoppers are hit with a higher rate of inflation at supermarkets (15.9 percent) in January. However, the price of value items on the shelves supermarkets’ most basic ranges is much higher still, at 21.6 percent. Which? Found, “Among the most alarming items soaring in price include muesli, which went from £1.20 to £2.25 at Sainsbury's (up 87.5%), tins of sliced carrots went from 20p to 33p (up 63%) at Tesco, and pork sausages went from 80p to £1.27 (up 58.2%) at Asda.”

The Barnardo's charity published a report this week which found that 30 percent of people were worried about losing their homes. Almost half (49 percent) were struggling to keep their home warm for their children. The survey found that 16 percent of parents said that during the winter months, their children have had to share a bed with them, their partner or a sibling, due to the household not being able to afford to replace bedding. Almost a quarter of the 1,000 adults surveyed found it difficult to put food on the table for their families.

Millions of people were horrified at the death in December 2020 of two-year-old Awaab Ishak as the result of “prolonged exposure” to mould spores in his family’s rented flat. Awaab was initially hospitalised with flu-like symptoms and difficulty breathing. He was readmitted to urgent care two days after being discharged, suffering respiratory failure, and died of cardiac arrest.

Despite widespread public anger over the death, well over a million children continue to live in cold, damp or mouldy homes. A study issued last month by Citizens Advice found that 1.6 million children in England live in such accommodation in rented homes in the private sector. Thirty percent of renters cannot heat their home to a comfortable temperature, increasing to 45 percent of disabled tenants. The survey of 2,000 renters in the private sector, taken in January, found 2.7 million households had poor living conditions, compounded by high energy bills and a lack of insulation.

Foodbank use is normal for millions of people after more than a decade of austerity in which wages have fallen far behind inflation. Overall grocery price inflation has reached 17.1 percent, adding a crippling £811 to households annual bills.

Foodbank outside a supermarket in Salford, England [Photo: Salford Foodbank/Facebook]

Britain’s largest food bank network, The Trussell Trust, now operates more than 1,300 of them and distributed 1.3 million emergency food parcels between April and September last year alone. This was an increase of a third over the same period in 2021 and over 50 percent up on the number of parcels given out in the same period prior to the pandemic.

The Independent Food Aid Network reported last month that almost 90 percent of food banks surveyed saw increased demand in December 2022 and January 2023.

Research commissioned by Quaker Oats cereal company and carried out by One Poll found that 19 percent of 2,000 UK adults had “benefitted from the use of a foodbank or free food at donation points to feed themselves and their family”. Many people are taking other desperate measures to get their hands on food with the survey finding that 15 percent had asked friends or family for food and 19 percent of people surveyed had taken second jobs to try to keep afloat. Nearly a third of parents (31 percent) had skipped breakfast to ensure their children got a meal.