The destruction of jobs, pay and working conditions in UK further education has accelerated in the wake of the 2023 sellout by the University and College Union (UCU) of a wave of strikes.
The picket line at Hallam University design school, February 2023
The marketisation of higher education in the UK can be seen more and more overtly in this social assault waged on the direct insistence of the major banks.
Queen Mary, University of London lists 44 institutions currently affected by redundancies. Stated job losses are around a thousand but many more are concealed behind non-specific announcements of “voluntary severance schemes.”
On March 1, a strike ballot opened at Goldsmiths, University of London in response to a threatened scrapping of 130 jobs as part of management’s “transformation programme”.
In moves described as “a horrifying act of cultural and social vandalism” by one professor, up to a quarter of all academic roles are threatened at the world-renowned institution.
The former children’s poet laureate and professor of children’s literature, Michael Rosen, who has worked at Goldsmiths for 10 years, said of the work done by the university in the areas of education, libraries, literature and scholarship that he found it “unbearable to think that any of this is under threat from yet more mass redundancies.”
Angela McRobbie, cultural theorist and emeritus professor at Goldsmiths, said, “Goldsmiths is unique. It’s an institution that has trained young people who go on to do socially and culturally valuable jobs across the world. The possible redundancies on this scale is unprecedented and it is a terrible outcome in a national scenario that has pitched universities against each other.”
Staff redundancies will mainly hit the departments of theatre and performance, history, English and creative writing, visual cultures, politics and international relations, music, anthropology, sociology, educational studies, psychology, social, and therapeutic and community studies.
Across the UK, as many as 100,000 university staff, 50 percent of the total, are employed on short term contracts, so the cuts will impact far more than the 130 employees identified at the university.
In an email announcing the job cuts, Goldsmiths said the redundancies were due to “a significant financial shortfall arising from lower than budgeted student recruitment for the academic year 2023-2024.”
Staff and students staged a protest in October 2021 calling on the institution to reveal the terms of a loan deal with banks Lloyds and Natwest. Redundancies are believed to have been demanded by the university’s “banking partners” as a condition for receiving a loan worth up to £7 million. Goldsmiths’ £60 million property assets were also thought to be included in the deal as collateral. Staff began a series of strikes in February 2022, when a “recovery plan”, in conjunction with Lloyds and NatWest, was announced involving the loss of 46 jobs.
On March 8, a consultative vote on industrial action over job cuts was passed by staff at the University of Winchester who have been placed on notice of redundancy which would result in the university having to close its English language programme; institute for climate and social justice; centre for religion, reconciliation and peace; managed housing, and apprenticeships. The university claims it needs to make the cuts due to a £6 million structural deficit. There are 40 on the line in the current phase, with further job cuts expected.
On March 13, 47 staff at the University of Portsmouth were placed at risk of redundancy as part of a major restructure dubbed “Academic Reset”. The university recently announced a £250m investment project to create links between campus and the city.
On March 14, over 120 staff at Sheffield Hallam University were issued with “risk of redundancy” letters and given until March 18 to apply for voluntary redundancy or one of a “limited number of roles”. The institution recently carried out a voluntary severance scheme under which 140 academic staff have left or are planning to leave. Striking lecturers at the university were among those who spoke to the World Socialist Web Site from their picket lines last February, during a national strike.
On March 14, the University of South Wales, which has around 23,000 students, confirmed it is looking to reduce staffing. A spokesperson told WalesOnline: “The university has opened a voluntary exit scheme for colleagues… This is one of a range of measures being taken to address a financially challenging environment.”
According to its latest published financial accounts, cited by WalesOnline, to the end of July 2023, the university generated around £151 million from tuition fees and educational contracts but hada net debt of £14.8 million.
On March 21, Dr Emily Guerry posted to Twitter/X: “Today it was confirmed that Art History will be ‘phased out’ at the University of Kent – along with Anthropology, Journalism, Philosophy, Religious Studies and Music. What a tremendous loss.” The post has been viewed 700,000 times and received scores of supportive responses, such as, “They’ve gotten rid of every subject that adds beauty, depth, meaning, humanity & understanding to life.”; “I’m horrified to hear that”; and “They will continue to call themselves a university because they are conmen & charlatans.”
In November, based on data obtained in a series of Freedom of Information requests, the overseas student organisation Edvoy revealed that UK higher education institutions laid off up to 3,000 staff in the first wave of the pandemic, between March and September 2020. The University of Manchester (UoM) made 528 redundancies, the highest number of any university in the country.
The pandemic raised to new heights critical questions about the defence of education as a social right against its transformation into a market serving private financial interests.
The Guardian’s Gaby Hinsliff, noting that up to 40 percent of UK universities are expected to go into the red this year, wrote that “some are asking how the sector would cope if an established university goes bust. Since that’s never happened before, nobody seems entirely sure how it would work: what would happen to students halfway through their degrees, or whether one failure might spook creditors into pulling the plug on others.”
Educators have conducted a series of regional and national strikes over the past decade. The government, the employers and the UCU have worked to limit these disputes to single issues to undermine the fight that must be waged, all while a lucrative market in higher education has been created. The wholesale assaults on jobs, pay, conditions and pensions are the symptoms of this marketisation and must be fought based on a socialist programme.
Expensive buildings, land acquisitions and other vanity projects are themselves tied up with the financialization of the universities and take resources away from staff salaries and the maintenance of entire educational departments.
The twin pressures of the need to compete for student funding—the recent government clampdown on immigration visas has meant a 33 percent fall in foreign student numbers compared with the same time last year—and the need to meet the demands of private investors are leading to the destruction of the jobs, pay, conditions and pensions of staff as well as educational standards and provision for students.
The latest United Nations Human Development Report details vastly uneven economic and social development that is leaving the world’s poorest people behind, worsening inequality and stoking political polarization.
The 2023/24 Human Development Report, Breaking the Gridlock: Reimagining cooperation in a polarized world, reveals that the post-pandemic rebound in the global Human Development Index (HDI)—a summary measure reflecting a country’s Gross National Income per capita, education and life expectancy—has been partial, incomplete and unequal.
People line up to be vaccinated against COVID-19 in Lawley, south of Johannesburg, South Africa, Wednesday, Dec. 1, 2021. (AP Photo/ Shiraaz Mohamed)
The pandemic precipitated the world’s greatest recession since World War II, with global output falling three times more than during the 2007–2008 global financial crisis and far more abruptly, as economic activities came to a halt. Global unemployment rates have not yet returned to pre-pandemic levels, pushing more workers into the informal sector where they work for a pittance.
The report, despite the bland and under-stated language of such official publications, makes important points about the world’s growing interdependence amid “prolonged power imbalances.”
While the advanced countries are experiencing record-high levels of human development, half of the poorest countries have failed to reach their pre-COVID-19 levels. The pandemic led to at least 15 million deaths, the report states, more than all the recent pandemics combined (Asian Flu, Hong Kong Flu, Swine Flu, SARS, Ebola and MERS). The HDI’s estimate of global COVID deaths is a conservative one with the more accurate Economist survey estimating approaching 30 million excess global deaths up to the end of 2023. It not only reduced life expectancy at birth in most countries but also impaired other components of the HDI, interrupting access to education and leaving enduring scars on the economy.
This was compounded by what the report described as the “mismanagement of global interdependences,” more accurately described as the criminality of the major powers in the interests of the financial oligarchy. It cited the refusal of the most advanced countries and pharmaceutical companies to ensure the universal and equitable access to effective COVID-19 vaccines—whose development was the result of international scientific cooperation—both within and between countries. Similarity it referred, without explanation, to “the huge disparity in measures taken by governments,” meaning the refusal of all governments to take the stringent measures initially embraced by China that would have stopped the virus spreading.
The global HDI value has rebounded to a projected highest level ever in 2023. But this is still below its projected trend pre-pandemic and masks profounds divergence across countries. All 38 members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) achieved higher HDI scores compared to their levels in 2019. But among the 35 least developed countries that saw their HDI decline during the pandemic, more than half (18 countries with 328 million people) have not yet recovered to their 2019 levels.
None of the “developing” regions have met their expected HDI levels based on their pre-2019 trend, shifting instead to a lower HDI trajectory and indicating that these losses are likely to be permanent. This is seen most sharply in Afghanistan and Ukraine, with Afghanistan’s HDI set back by a staggering 10 years and Ukraine’s HDI to its lowest level since 2004.
It warns that the global HDI value, while an important value, is a crude yardstick for measuring human development. It reflects incompletely, if at all, to important factors such as the debilitating effects of illnesses, including Long COVID, spikes in mental health disorders, violence against women and loss of schooling, while some losses—including 15 million lives lost—can never be recovered. Self-reported stress, sadness and worry rose in most countries, even before the pandemic, which along with the rising sense of dissatisfaction which recent Human Development Reports had covered, had resulted in numerous social protests in 2019.
The report warns that inequality is compounded by substantial economic concentration. For example, it states that almost 40 percent of global trade in goods is concentrated in three or four countries, while the market capitalization of each of the three largest tech companies in the world in 2023 surpassed the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of more than 90 percent of countries in that year.
The UNHD also drew attention to the world’s growing interdependence.
Trade in intermediate goods now slightly exceeds trade in final goods, with goods travelling twice as far as and across more borders than they did 60 years ago.
Financial interdependence has grown, with levels of debt servicing by low and middle-income countries ballooning since central banks hiked interest rates to combat inflation following the outbreak of the US/NATO led war against Russia in Ukraine.
Digital services exports now account for more than half of global trade in services. Almost everyone is now within range of a mobile broadband network, with 5.4 billion of the world’s 8 billion population using the internet in 2023.
The number of people living outside their country of birth has tripled since 1970, from 84 million to nearly 280 million in 2020, equal to 3.6 percent of the world’s population. As well as increasing social, cultural and economic ties, it drives cross-border financial flows.
In addition, the report cites the pandemic, climate change, biodiversity loss, the cross-border implications of pollution and new and reemerging zoonotic diseases potentially resulting in future pandemics that recognize no borders. It warns that every corner of the globe is feeling the effects of dangerous planetary change driven by political choices, while geopolitical tensions, wars and conflicts harm human development—both for the countries directly involved and often for many others as well. These conflicts are spilling across not only geographical but generational boundaries, with the wars in Gaza, Ukraine and Yemen reversing human development gains made over generations and shrinking the prospects for young people.
The number of countries involved in conflicts outside their own borders has risen fivefold over the past decade. Of the 55 state-based conflicts in 2022, 22 were internationalized, compared with just 4 of the 37 state conflicts in 2000. This, along with persecution and human rights violations, forced 108 million people to flee their homes, the largest number since World War II and two and a half times that of 2010, not including the latest displacements—Palestinians in Gaza and the Armenia refugee crisis, among others.
One in five children globally lives in or is fleeing conflict. Around 80 percent of the world’s refugees are living in mostly low and middle-income countries. The number of people in need of humanitarian aid is expected to reach 300 million in 2024, while the funding available for humanitarian aid comes nowhere near the level needed.
The report laments the growth of “populism”, which it says has been fueled by social inequality and the pervasive “uncertainty complex” that “has cast a very long shadow on human development writ large, with recent years marking perhaps an unfortunate and avoidable fork in its path rather than a short-lived setback.” It cites research showing that countries with populist governments have lower GDP-growth rates—10 percent lower than might be expected under a non-populist government scenario.
Like all such reports, its authors called for “multilateralism” to play the key role in developing and implementing “a new generation of global public goods” to confront these challenges and promote equity. Such a bankrupt perspective flies in the face of all the evidence that these same multilateral agencies, dominated by the major capitalist powers acting in the interests of their own global banks and corporations, have fueled the processes they have documented.
As the six-year term of Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) draws to a close and the country prepares for the upcoming presidential election, plenty of attention has been given by the pseudo-left press to the cash transfer programs as well as to the raises to the minimum wage that have been implemented under his administration.
Artisan in Capácuaro, Michoacán, May 19, 2020. [Photo by A Lo Mexa / CC BY-SA 4.0]
These programs, which have been grouped under the term “Programas para el bienestar” (welfare programs,) have been a central component of the so-called “Fourth Transformation” (4T). This phraseology has been fraudulently employed by the president and his pseudo-left supporters to elevate the historical import of the government policies to that of the War of Independence against the Spanish monarchy, the liberal reform movement and war against France, and the Mexican Revolution at the turn of the 20th century.
But the governmental policies under AMLO, and in particular the modest cash transfers that have taken place under his leadership, are nothing of the sort. These programs serve two primary purposes.
First, they are designed to ensure that the Mexican working class continues to fulfill the role assigned to it by the imperialist powers, i.e., as a pool of cheap labor for capitalist exploitation as Washington steps up its economic warfare against China in the predatory drive for a new re-division of the world.
And second, they are aimed at keeping the rising class struggle in check, ensuring that international capital can continue its plundering unimpeded. As Mexico’s wealthiest man Carlos Slim recently commented in lauding AMLO’s policies, “the attitude of the population is, in general, very positive. […] There is social peace, there is no confrontation.”
Social welfare programs
The largest of the cash transfer programs, named “pension for the well-being of the elderly,” is a supplementary pension payment for people over 65. It provides a monthly payment of 3,000 pesos ($145) and has reached about 11 million elderly people, about 8 percent of the population. The program has a 2024 budget of 465 billion pesos ($22.5 billion), which represents about 85 percent of the total budget of the “welfare programs.”
Other programs include:
• “Pension for the well-being of disabled people,” providing a monthly pension of 1,550 pesos ($75) to disabled people under 30. The program has a 2024 budget of 28 billion pesos ($1.3 billion) and has reached about 1.5 million people, or 1 percent of the population.
• “Support program for the well-being of children of working mothers,” which provides a monthly cash transfer of 1,600 pesos ($77) to children of working mothers. The program, with a budget of 3 billion pesos ($175 million), has benefited around a quarter of a million children, or 0.2 percent of the population.
• “Benito Juárez scholarships,” providing monthly payments of 920 pesos ($55) and 2,800 pesos ($168) to poor students in public schools and universities respectively. With a budget of 80 billion pesos ($4.8 billion,) the program has reached 12.5 million students, or 9 percent of the population.
• “Youth building the future,” which provides a state-sponsored minimum wage for unemployed young people aged 18-29 enrolling in an apprenticeship program with participating companies. The program has a 2024 budget of 24 billion pesos ($1.4 billion) and has reached about 2.9 million young people, or 2 percent of the population.
• “The school is ours,” which provides direct funding to schools for infrastructure improvements and maintenance. The program has a 2024 budget of 20 billion pesos ($1.2 billion) and has reached about 100,000 schools or 75 percent of the total.
• There are a few other minor initiatives such as “Sowing life,” a farming program, and “Installments for well-being,” a microcredit program for small businesses.
Minimum wage increases
In addition to social programs, the increases to the minimum wage have also been presented as significant.
In absolute numbers, the raises to the minimum wage may seem significant. Since the 1980’s and the imposition of austerity by the predatory international financial institutions, the minimum wage saw a steady decline, eventually bottoming out in 2016 at $7 per day in adjusted 2024 US dollars.
In contrast, under the AMLO administration, the minimum wage has increased from 88 pesos in 2018 to 249 pesos or $15 per day in 2024, an average of 12 percent per year.
Minimum daily wage (Data from CEFA, CONEVAL) [Photo: CEFA, CONEVAL]
But in spite of having more than doubled in the last eight years, it remains a poverty wage.
In fact, up until this year, the minimum wage remained well below the poverty line, which is defined by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) as the cost of the basic food basket and other essential goods. It wasn’t until this year that the minimum wage finally cleared the poverty line, if just barely. The minimum wage is, essentially, a state-sanctioned poverty wage, currently standing at 10 percent above the official poverty line.
Minimum wage as a fraction of the poverty line (Data from CEFA, CONEVAL) [Photo: CEFA, CONEVAL]
In any case, in a country where three people out of every five are employed in the informal sector, minimal wage regulations are largely meaningless.
All told, these measures have had an insignificant impact on overall poverty rates, which remain at very high levels throughout the country.
Impact on poverty rates
The most recent figures from the INEGI show that the percentage of the population living in poverty decreased from 41.9 percent in 2018 to 36.3 percent in 2022. During the same time period, however, the percentage barely subsisting in extreme poverty remained virtually unmoved, going from 7 percent to 7.1 percent.
This means that, during these four years, and accounting for the growth of the population, nearly 400,000 people joined the ranks of the extremely poor. Poverty figures for the year 2023 are not yet available but are expected to be released by INEGI shortly after the presidential elections.
A study prepared by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) supports the argument that poverty hasn’t been impacted in any meaningful way. The study published in the journal Nexos, found that the cash transfers themselves played a minimal role in reducing poverty rates. It instead attributed their modest improvements to the increase in income levels after the slump during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the raises to the daily minimum wage.
Meanwhile, the study points out, the way in which poverty is measured was changed in 2016. While INEGI introduced a model to correct for the change, the study found that the model, when applied to the 2022 figures, yielded significant discrepancies, pointing to a possible underestimation of poverty rates in that year.
Other economists andsocial scientists have pointed that these cash transfer programs exhibit a regressive character given that they have reduced their reach to the poorest sections of the population. For example, from 2018 to 2020, the population earning the lowest 10 percent of income saw their cash transfer receipts reduced by 42 percent in real terms. The transfers ended up instead directed towards households higher in the income distribution brackets, who have better means to find out about the programs and get access to them.
A report by Acción Ciudadana Frente a la Pobreza (Citizen Action Against Poverty) produced similar conclusions. In addition to pointing to the increase in extreme poverty, it highlighted the more than doubling of the number of people unable to access health services, which went from 16 percent in 2018 to 39 percent in 2022. This represents a total of 30 million people who lost access to health services under the AMLO administration.
The report also found that the cash transfers under the “Youth building the future” program haven’t had any substantial effect on the employment situation of its target population of people aged 18 to 29. In fact, the number of young people employed in formal jobs has seen a decrease from 2018 to 2022.
The international context
As Washington leads the world toward world war with China, the Mexican government has been keen to position itself as a reliable partner, serving US interests in the region.
In spite of his nationalist rhetoric, AMLO has been a loyal servant of US imperialism, militarizing the country through the deployment of the National Guard to the southern border, and implementing a “Remain in Mexico” policy that has forced thousands of Central American migrants to wait in Mexico while their asylum claims are processed in the US.
As the US steps up its warmongering efforts against China, the Mexican government will seek to further align its policies with US corporate interests.
As plainly stated in a recentarticle in Foreign Affairs, the opportunities for US corporations to nearshore their operations away from Asia towards the Americas are contingent on the low labor costs in the region and the ability of Latin American governments to assure a stable and competitive environment for investment, i.e., their ability to suppress the class struggle.
This is the role played by AMLO’s welfare programs and raises to the minimum wage. They are not meant to address poverty and inequality. Instead, they aimed at suppressing the class struggle, while maintaining wage levels that meet the competitive demands of the market. They are ultimately based on the needs of US imperialism.
The creation of a North American free trade zone across the US-Mexico border, in which corporate income taxes were cut to 20 percent and the value-added tax was halved from 16 to 8 percent, is part of a strategy based on creating incentives for corporations. And ensuring wages are kept low remains the most important incentive.
Between ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples together in this country. We shall not achieve our goal if the Arabs are in this small country. There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries—all of them. Not one village, not one tribe should be left.—Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency’s Colonization Department, 1940
The situation of hunger, starvation and famine is a result of Israel’s extensive restrictions on the entry and distribution of humanitarian aid and commercial goods, displacement of most of the population, as well as the destruction of crucial civilian infrastructure. … The extent of Israel’s continued restrictions on the entry of aid into Gaza, together with the manner in which it continues to conduct hostilities, may amount to the use of starvation as a method of war, which is a war crime.—UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk, March 19, 2024
The use of starvation by Israel as a weapon of genocide in Gaza is an objective fact, for which Nazi Germany is the main modern precedent, as Holocaust survivors who remain alive attest. It is in this tradition of the Nazi regime and the genocidal policies toward the Jews and Soviet population that the Israeli government has borrowed a page out of history.
Five-plus months into the military onslaught on the Gaza Strip, a great majority of Gazans are facing emergency or catastrophic levels of food insecurity as a result of Israel’s genocidal policies that have blockaded the entry of food and water trucks into the enclave. The next few months will only exacerbate this grave situation that could see thousands die of starvation every week.
Last week’s report by Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, affirmed in the strongest terms, “[There are] reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of … acts of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has been met. The overwhelming nature and scale of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the destructive conditions of life it has inflicted reveal an intent to physically destroy Palestinians as a group.”
Currently, according to conservative official estimates, casualties in Gaza are at nearly 32,500 deaths, of which over 70 percent have been women and children. The over 8,000 missing are presumed dead, their bodies buried under the rubble of the daily onslaught by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), who have been armed to the teeth with weapons supplied by the US.
At least 75,000 have been injured in the more than five months since Israel initiated its genocidal campaign, many with “life-changing mutilations” for which medical attention is severely lacking, risking a high incidence of fatal consequences when left untreated. Over 70 percent of residential areas have been destroyed, and 80 percent of the 2.23 million people have been internally displaced, with 1.5 million now crammed into Rafah, awaiting the impending military assault that is being planned with Washington’s direct involvement.
A 10-year-old Palestinian boy, Yazan al-Kafarna, who was born with cerebral palsy, lies at a hospital in Rafah, March 3, 2024. Yazan died due to what his doctor said was extreme muscle wastage caused primarily by a lack of food. [AP Photo/Hatem Ali]
The entire enclave is now reliant on aid trucks to bring in food, water and emergency provisions, which are trickling in at a fraction of what is required to sustain life. Many families are having to make do with one meal a day if they are lucky. Limited to a piece of flat bread and some canned cream cheese or a tin of fava beans, the diet provides barely 300 to 400 calories per day, starvation rations that lack the essential nutrition to sustain life for very long. Already, more than 10 children are dying daily by starvation.
The impact of food deprivation
Infants and toddlers, who require at least 1,000 calories a day to sustain their high metabolic demands, are especially vulnerable due to their limited reserves. If their caloric intake is restricted for even the briefest amounts of time, they quickly begin to lose weight as their body breaks down the small amount of carbohydrate and fat stored in their liver and tissues.
Once these are depleted, to preserve the most important functioning organs like the brain, the body then resorts to cannibalizing proteins from muscles, including the intestines and the heart. The immune systems of the very young are weakened, making them much more susceptible to deadly consequences of infection. Indeed, they are the most vulnerable and the first casualties in Israel’s employment of starvation as a weapon of war. They often are the first to die, and they die at double the rate of adults. If they survive, they face the prospect of ill health for the rest of their lives. Their growth may be stunted, their organs affected, and they may have long-lasting cognitive developmental trauma.
Children around 10 years of age require around 1,600 calories. Adult women and men need somewhere around 1,800 to over 2,200. However, mothers who are breastfeeding must supplement their diet to continue feeding their newborns. There are approximately 60,000 pregnant women in Gaza facing severe malnutrition and dehydration and the prospect of giving birth without any medical resources. Around 5,000 women are giving birth each month under hazardous conditions.
Starvation—the prolonged undernourishment of the body that leads to suffering or death from hunger—over several weeks or months can result in specific diseases like anemia from low iron stores or beriberi (vitamin B1, or thiamine, deficiency) that leads to difficulty walking, loss of sensation in hands and feet, paralysis of lower legs, mental confusion, pain, speech difficulties, tingling and eye twitching.
The weight loss is substantial, as evidenced by the gaunt faces of children who are half their normal weights. The main disabling symptoms are feeling faint or dizzy. Profound weakness means the starving become bed-bound.
As the body tries to compensate, metabolism slows, and temperature regulation begins to fail, with the feeling of gnawing chill permeating the body. Kidneys cannot function, and the immune system is unable to fight off diseases. The thyroid function becomes substantially reduced. Abdominal cramping and diarrhea are common symptoms which exacerbate dehydration. Without intravenous fluids, blood pressure drops, and heart rates become slow or erratic. Mentally, clinical depression sets in. When nothing is left for the body but to scavenge muscle tissue, death is not far off. Even the muscles of the heart are not spared to provide sustenance.
One danger in attempting to rescue people after prolonged starvation are potential cardiac problems requiring close monitoring of these patients in a medical care unit. If refeeding is suddenly initiated, there is a risk of sudden cardiac failure and ensuing death. There can be a precipitous drop in potassium levels. Increase in fluid volumes can precipitate cardiac failure. With the end of starvation, cardiac compensation mechanisms may overshoot and lead to arrythmia or cardiac arrest. Although the etiology of these uncertain compensatory mechanisms is unclear, these may be related to the loss of cardiac muscle in parallel to skeletal muscle wastage.
Currently, on average, only 126 food trucks are making their way into Gaza. Before October 7, the figure was around 500 to 700 trucks each day. And at that time, Gazans were able to supplement 20 percent of their dietary needs internally through farming and other food industries.
However, the entire food source that had existed within Gaza has now been destroyed, and the population is solely reliant on the aid that Israel allows to come in. The whole of the Gaza Strip is being systematically starved to death as lines of aid trucks linger for days outside just a few miles beyond the enclave. As UN Coordinator Jamie McGoldrick told reporters recently, “[w]e are lucky getting 10 to 15 trucks in at any point in time over a two-day period.”
At the current rate, UN representatives on the scene estimate that the daily death toll from starvation can rise to 200 per day if the blockade continues. In short, this catastrophic development amounts to an inhumanly cruel form of mass torture, which is a clear violation of international laws. The US and imperialist powers who have given Israel their wholehearted blessings are complicit in the act of genocide.
Targeting the young generation
The cruelest element in the use of starvation as a weapon by Israel is the complete annihilation of the new generation of Palestinian children. As Albanese’s report noted, “The savagery of Israel’s latest assault is best illustrated by the torment inflicted upon children of all ages, killed, or rescued from under the rubble, maimed, orphaned, many without surviving family. Considering the significance of children to the future development of society, inflicting serious bodily harm to them [by bullets or through starvation] can be reasonably interpreted ‘as a means to destroy the group in whole or in part’.”
A recent Integrated Food Security Phase classification (IPC) report published by Oxfam International found that 2.13 million Gazans (95.5 percent) are facing high acute food insecurity (considered IPC phase three or above). Of these, 677,000 (32 percent) are in IPC phase five food insecurity defined as being in famine or having a complete lack of access to food and other basic needs. As the World Food Programme notes, “Starvation, death, destitution and extremely acute levels of acute malnutrition are evident.”
With the continuation of hostilities, the number in this category is expected to almost double to more than 1.1 million (50 percent of the population) by mid-July. Another 854,000 will be in Emergency phase four, or a situation where families face large food consumption gaps alongside very high acute malnutrition rates and excess deaths. In basic mathematical figures, 88 percent of Gaza’s population will be on the brink of death. (See Figure from IPC.)
Sally Abi Khalil, Oxfam’s Middle East and North Africa Regional Director, said, “This new report shows that the catastrophic levels of hunger and starvation in Gaza are the highest ever recorded on the IPC scale, both in terms of number of people and percentage of the population. Never before have we seen such a rapid deterioration into widespread starvation.”
Khalil added, “Northern Gaza is days away from famine, and the rest of Gaza faces a similar fate. Children are already dying of malnutrition and starvation under the gaze of the international community. Since December, the number of people in Gaza who have plunged into catastrophic levels of hunger has nearly doubled. Oxfam’s report today shows how Israel is causing these horrifying figures, by deliberately blocking food and aid from going into Gaza. It has been using starvation as a weapon of war for over five months now. … Israel’s deliberate manufacturing of suffering is systematic and of such a scale and intensity that it creates a real risk of a genocide in Gaza.”
What the Zionists learned from the Nazis
The use of starvation as a weapon of war was made clear early in Israel’s assault on Gaza. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on October 9, 2023, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.”
In mid-November, his current adviser, retired Major General Giora Eiland, in an editorial in Yedioth Ahronoth, doubled down: “The international community is warning us against a severe humanitarian disaster and severe epidemics. We must not shy away from this. After all, severe epidemics in the south of Gaza will bring victory closer and reduce casualties among IDF soldiers.”
One would have to look as far back to role of starvation in the Holocaust to find clear parallels.
Almost 100,000 people in the Warsaw Ghetto—a fourth of its total victims—were killed by hunger and disease prior to the beginning of the great deportations to Treblinka and Auschwitz in the summer of 1942.
The Nazis also developed the infamous “Hunger Plan” for the Soviet Union, a key component of their genocidal war of annihilation against the Soviet population. As part of the Generalplan Ost, it envisaged the targeted starvation of some 30 million people in western and northwestern Russia. The policy was intended to ensure food supplies for Germany’s war effort, while creating living space (Lebensraum) for the expansion of the Nazi empire.
It has been estimated that at least 27 million Soviet citizens were killed as a result of the Nazi invasion. Among these were up to 3.5 million Soviet prisoners of war, the vast majority of whom were murdered through a systematic policy of starvation. Many of them were given on average no more than 420 calories per day. It is inconceivable that the planners of the Gaza genocide are unaware of these historical precedents.
As Christian Gerlach, in his book on the extermination of the European Jews, explained in his chapter on hunger policies and mass murder: “This starvation policy, one of the biggest mass murder plans in human history, was designed earlier than any specific plans to kill European Jews and was intended to kill far more people. Although deeply rooted in pragmatic considerations, it was broadly compatible with important elements of Nazi thinking: racist contempt and enslavement of Slavs, the destruction of communism and long-term intentions to win land for German settlers in the east. Thus, the hunger policy was based on military necessity, but none free of ideology.” (Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization)
The current scale of genocidal intent through starvation in Gaza assumes similar pragmatic and ideological conceptions. Similarly, the starvation policy was not conceived spontaneously as a response to the October 7, 2023 uprising by Hamas against the brutal suppression of Palestinians’ right of self-determination in an open-air prison system called the Gaza Strip.
Diplomatic cables published in 2008 by WikiLeaks between Israel and Washington informed the White House that it intended to keep Gaza’s economy “on the brink of collapse.” Reuters wrote in 2011, “Israel wanted the coastal territory’s economy ‘functioning at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis,’ according to the November 3, 2008, cable.”
It has been well documented that Israel had conducted precise calculations on the minimum number of calories to avoid malnutrition in Gaza Strip to allocate how many trucks would be allowed. This speaks volumes to the premeditated use of starvation as a potential weapon in their policy to rid the strip of all Gazans.
As Fawzi Barhoun, a Hamas spokesman, had said when the cables were published by WikiLeaks that they constituted “evidence that the Gaza blockade was planned and the target was not Hamas or the government, as the occupation always claimed, [but that] this blockade targeted all human beings … this document should be used to trial the occupation for their crimes against the humanity in Gaza.”
Figures from the Department of State and Pensions (DWP) show 25 percent of children in the UK in 2022-23 were living in absolute poverty, up from 23.8 percent the previous year. This is the largest annual increase since records began in 1994-95.
Several charities have referenced the impact of the two-child limit on welfare benefits and the benefit cap, making the most vulnerable sections of society pay for the economic crisis. The two-child limit restricts child universal credit and tax credits allowances to the first two children in a family, unless the children were born before April 2017 when the policy was introduced. Low-income families have lost around £3,200 a year for any third or subsequent child born after April 2017.
A mother with two children sitting on the pavement. Photo taken on November 15, 2012 [Photo by Neil Moralee/Flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]
Peter Matejic, chief analyst from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation said these statistics show “just how far away our social security system is from adequately supporting people who have fallen on hard times”.
A January report by the Resolution Foundation think-tank, “Catastrophic caps: An analysis of the impact of the two-child limit and the benefit cap”, projects that the percentage of children in larger families in poverty will rise to a staggering 51 percent by 2028-29—an increase of 17 percent since 2014.
These two policies together affected nearly half a million families in Britain in 2022-23, including 34,000 affected by both, up from 26,000 in 2013-14 (when only the benefit cap was in operation).
A study by academics at universities in York and Oxford found the continuation of the two-child limit during the cost-of-living crisis was “creating an almost impossible context for affected families, with a risk of long-lasting harm for millions of children”.
The research found that two-child families in poverty would remain at around 25 percent. For larger families in 2021-22, 75 percent were in material deprivation compared with 34 percent with two or less children. Food insecurity is higher among the larger families—16 percent compared to 7 percent.
The Resolution Foundation’s cost of living survey in October 2023 shows that people in families with three or more children were over four times as likely to have used a food bank in the last 30 days (13 percent) compared to those with no children, or one or two children (3 percent).
Scrapping the two-child limit and the benefit cap would boost the incomes of the poorest families by £1,000 next year.
Adam Corlett, principal economist at the Resolution Foundation, estimates the figure for those impacted will rise from 70,000 families in 2018 to about 750,000 by the time the policy has fully taken effect in 2035.
The cost of abolishing the two-child limit in 2024-25 is just £2.5 billion, and abolishing the benefit cap with it would bring the cost up to £3 billion. Britain spends over £50 billion on the armed forces.
Olivier De Schutter, the former UN Special Rapporteur on the right to Food, said of Britain that the “single most important” investment would be to remove the two-child benefit cap, adding that Universal Credit should rise “at least 50 per cent” to guarantee a decent standard of living. Universal Credit is Britain’s main monthly benefit payment for low-income households.
As social care services have been almost destroyed, many schools and various charities are being forced to play a key role in ensuring that children are fed and clothed.
In September 2023, the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) reported that 4.2 million children nationwide were growing up in poverty—equivalent to nine children in an average classroom of 30.
Almost all respondents from the schools surveyed for CPAG’s report, “‘There is only so much we can do’: School staff in England on the impact of poverty on children and school life”, believe that child poverty in their school has increased in the last two academic years. Comments recorded include:
“[I’ve noticed] students not having basics of equipment when coming to school. Students waiting for buses in the pouring rain without any raincoats. Pupils’ lack of concentration as they are hungry.” (Secondary school governor, South West).
“Two pupils [were] caught stealing food from other pupils’ lunchboxes.” (Primary school governor, South West).
“Children come to school concerned about their housing and home situations.” (Primary school governor, Yorkshire and the Humber).
“More children are expressing feeling worried about their family finances, or overhearing conversations or arguments about money at home. Children seem more aware of the financial pressures adults are under.
“Some children tell me they avoid asking their parents for essential equipment, or telling them about clubs and trips, as they do not want to add to their financial stress.” (Secondary pupil support and welfare, West Midlands).
“Pupils [are] desperate to find after school or weekend jobs to support family finances.” (Counsellor, North West).
“Children [are] tired and lethargic, extremely hungry.” (Primary teaching assistant, South West).
“Children [don’t have] a water bottle because they don't want to ask parents to buy one, children [are] worrying about the cost of trips.” (Primary teacher, North West).
A report in the Observer this month described how schools are finding beds, providing showers for pupils and washing uniforms in addition to tackling the hunger children are struggling with. A primary school head in a deprived area in north-west England said, “We have a child who we put in the shower a couple of times a week.” The newspaper reported, “His school routinely washed uniforms for children whose families didn’t have a washing machine.” A “school recently stepped in to help after discovering a pupil begging outside a supermarket…|”
Katrina Morley, chief executive of Tees Valley Education trust, told the newspaper, “We have children without beds or they might have to share with siblings… Some don’t have enough bedding and no heating so they can’t sleep because they are cold.” The Observer revealed, “The trust works with local charities to provide families with support on issues like finding beds, and has also discreetly donated blankets over the winter.”
School budgets have been squeezed to breaking point, as social services budgets have been devastated by local authority cuts pushed through by mainly Labour-Party run councils on behalf of the Conservative government.
Increasing demand for social support is happening at the same time as pastoral staff with more experience are being cut. One in eight local authority schools were in deficit in 2023.
Analysis from the New Economics Foundation reveals that levels of child poverty have risen almost six (5.6) times faster in the most deprived areas since 2014/15 compared to the richest.
Laura, a social worker in Bradford told the WSWS, “The city I work in, like many others in the UK is experiencing the worst deprivation it has ever had in modern times. Where there is deprivation there are vulnerable children and their families. It is heartbreaking to see more and more children living in substandard housing causing them lifelong health issues, their parents only able to provide the basics out of foodbanks and parental mental ill health on the rise as a result. What is more heartbreaking is the inability of a broken children’s social care and education system failing them daily.
“Teachers and social workers are organising food, clothing and toy collections amongst family, friends, and colleagues to support children. Teachers are having to perform what were traditionally social work welfare tasks because of safeguarding thresholds rising and the Children’s Trust being on the verge of bankruptcy.
“We have very few services left that can help at an early stage and the brunt of that falls on teachers and social workers. Me and my colleagues work long hours and pay for things out of our own pockets to ensure a child is safe for that day, we don’t have any longer-term solutions. I know that my colleagues in education do the same things and do things that are way out of their teaching remits to protect children.
“Both professions know that this is not sustainable and both services are creaking at the seams. The system pits teachers and social workers against each other, but really they are facing the same horrendous dilemmas daily and should work together to challenge and fight the rottenness of both children’s vital organisations.”
The terrible social crisis tearing apart the lives of children will only worsen with the expected election of a pro-austerity Labour government this year. Labour is committed to retaining the two-child limit on welfare benefits and benefit cap. The Financial Times noted when party leader Sir Keir Starmer announced the policy last June that he was sticking to “its pledge of responsible spending”, with Starmer saying Labour had to be “even tougher, even more focused, even more disciplined” with the election nearing.
