UK living conditions in unprecedented decline according to Resolution Foundation data

Harvey Thompson

A mass of new data has revealed the long-term decline in the living conditions of millions across the UK and provided forecasts of even worse circumstances for years to come.

On March 20, the BBC broadcast an episode of its investigative current affairs documentary series Panorama, titled Surviving the Pay Squeeze.

The programme questioned the Conservative government’s narrative that the cost-of-living crisis is due solely to the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Panorama asked the Resolution Foundation (RF) think tank to look at data on average wages during the 15 years since the 2008 financial crash. It found that if wages had continued to grow at pre-2008 levels, workers would on average be receiving a staggering £11,000 a year more than they currently do.

Torsten Bell, chief executive of the RF, said, “The wage stagnation of the last 15 years is almost completely unprecedented. No one who is alive and working in the British economy today has ever seen anything like this.”

The freeze has been particularly sharp in the UK. Whereas the average UK household earned £500 less than the average German in 2008, today that figure is around £4,000.

In January, the RF published its The Living Standards Outlook 2023, which paints a devastating picture of living standards in the UK and makes bleak projections for much of the remaining decade.

As the bulk of the data was compiled more than four months ago, some of the assessments made in the report are out of date, most notably the assumption that inflation would begin to fall early in 2023: annual Consumer Prices Index (CPI) inflation rose between January and February this year to 10.4 percent, and Retail Prices Index (RPI) to 13.8 percent. The real situation reported is therefore worse than presented in the report.

The RF highlights how 40-year high inflation has disproportionately affected the poorest in society, driven as it is by huge increases in energy and food prices which make up larger proportions of poorer households’ budgets.

High inflation is being driven by significant increases in energy and food prices [Photo by Resolution Foundation / CC BY-ND 3.0]

Its report details how many families are having to take desperate measures, “actions to cope with costs today which will worsen their future financial resilience”.

An example cited is that up to 27 percent of adults (14 million people) “are using money from savings for their daily living expenses” increasing to 34 percent of those in the bottom income quintile.

Others are cutting back on pensions savings or cancelling insurance—7 percent of households in the bottom income quintile for both. Workers in the lowest-income families were four times as likely as the highest income families to report that they were selling or pawning possessions.

One fifth of people “do not have any savings at all, and 36 per cent of people have savings of less than £1,000 this winter.”

The cost-of-living crisis is having a terrible effect on mental and physical health. The percentage of people facing “emotional distress” increased from an already high 40 percent in October 2021 to 47 percent in November 2022. Up to 63 percent of workers in the bottom quintile said that they were “very or quite worried about paying their bills this winter.”

The report forecasts that average incomes are set to fall by 3 percent in 2022-23, and another 4 percent in 2023-24, “driven by the slimming-down of government support for households, personal tax rises, and rising costs for mortgagors. The fall in 2023-24 is set to be largest single-year fall since 1975, and the two-year fall of 7 per cent (or £2,100 for a typical household) is bigger than in the Financial Crisis, where there was a two-year decline of 5 per cent.”

Mortgage interest payments are projected to be persistently a lot higher than they have been in recent years, due to higher interest rates [Photo by Resolution Foundation / CC BY-ND 3.0]

The study continues: “this precipitous decline will take typical incomes in 2023-24 to where they were in 2018-19 – and lower than they were in 2016- 17 – and would mean that this becomes the worst Parliament on record for living standards for almost all parts of the income distribution.

“Although incomes should start growing in 2024-25, typical incomes are set to still be below their pre-pandemic (2019-20) level in 2027-28. Almost all parts of the income distribution see incomes fall in 2022-23 and 2023- 24 (except the top 5 per cent, where higher interest rates boost investment and unearned income).”

This will be the worst Parliament on record for income growth across most of the income distribution [Photo by Resolution Foundation / CC BY-ND 3.0]

Absolute poverty is set to rise from 17.2 percent in 2021-22 to 18.3 percent in 2023-24, an increase of 800,000 people. A 2.9 percentage point rise is expected in absolute child poverty between 2021-22 and 2023-24, an extra 400,000 children.

By 2027-28, relative child poverty is forecast to reach its highest rate since 1998-99, with 170,000 more children in this position than in 2021-22. For families with three or more children, relative child poverty is predicted to hit 50 percent in 2025-26 and 55 percent in 2027-28; three quarters of children in families with four or more children will be in relative child poverty by 2027-28.

The report’s authors had few words of comfort: “Although policy makers might hope that 2023 will bring better economic news, household living standards are set to get worse before they get better. Inflation may have peaked in late 2022, but that does not mean that the pain caused by the cost of living crisis will be over soon.

“Food price inflation will continue to pose a problem for living standards, and the combination of a higher cap on energy prices and the fact that the £400 rebate paid this winter was a one-off means that the energy bill for a typical household in 2023-24 will be 43 per cent higher than in 2022-23.

“More fundamentally, falling inflation in 2023 does not mean that the level of prices will fall.”

They add, “[A]verage real earnings will grow a lot more slowly than they shrank: real wages won’t reach their Q1 2022 rate until the end of 2027—nearly six years later,” concluding that the “austerity era” begun in the wake of the financial crash of 2008 will last at least two decades.

Scores of organisations report similar dire social statistics. The Trussell Trust food poverty charity which operates Britain’s largest foodbank network said its foodbanks distributed almost 1.3 million food parcels between April and September 2022, an increase of 52 percent compared with the same period to September 2019 and half a million of which went to children.

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

According to the money-saving app ZIPZERO, two-fifths of people across Britain are worried about how they will feed themselves and their families.

ZIPZERO’s chief executive Mohsin Rashid said the impact of spiraling prices was “far more devastating and far-reaching than any could have predicted. In fact, it is fundamentally changing the nature of British society. Living standards in Britain today are bordering on a public health crisis and significant doubt is raised over what it means for the UK to be a developed economy in 2023.”

UK government plans prison ships and internment camps for asylum seekers

Thomas Scripps

When the UK government first announced plans for its Illegal Migration Bill earlier this month, the World Socialist Web Site wrote, “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.”

This has very rapidly come to pass. Over the weekend and early this week, newspapers reported plans to place migrants in ferries or barges and on military sites which would hold 1,500-2,000 people each.

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]

This was confirmed by Conservative government Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick in a statement to Parliament Wednesday. Telling MPs “accommodation for migrants should meet their essential needs and nothing more, because we cannot risk becoming a magnet for the millions of people who are displaced,” he announced old military sites would be repurposed initially in Essex, Lincolnshire and East Sussex to “collectively provide accommodation to several thousand asylum seekers through repurposed barrack blocks and Portacabins.”

Jenrick added that the government was “continuing to explore the possibility of accommodating migrants in vessels.” Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab told Sky News “nothing is off the table” and that “Barges would be one possible option.”

These camps and prison ships will initially be used for new arrivals but will doubtless be expanded to take the over 50,000 asylum seekers currently accommodated in nearly 400 private hotels around the country.

Tens of thousands are projected to enter the UK via a small boat crossing of the Channel in the next year. Under the Illegal Migration Bill, almost all of them will be immediately placed in a detention camp for 28 days without access to a lawyer or the opportunity to apply for bail.

This is formally pending removal to a “safe third country”. But since the UK government only has a removal agreement in place with Rwanda—with deportation flights there currently held up in the courts and which cannot take the numbers the government wishes to deport anyway—most will find themselves in a state of permanent semi-imprisonment in Britain, deprived of access to basic social services.

According to research by the Refugee Council, up to 200,000 people, including more than 40,000 children, could be “locked up or forced into destitution,” in the Guardian’s reporting.

The newspaper continued, “Even if Home Office does remove 30,000 people to Rwanda, the Refugee Council estimates that between 161,147 and 192,670 people could be left in limbo.”

Defending the policy of detaining children, to be deported once they turn 18, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said it was “important that we don’t inadvertently create a policy that incentivises people to bring children who wouldn’t otherwise come here.”

Earlier this month Sunak visited France to agree a £478 million scheme to establish a detention centre in that country which would hold migrants for up to 90 days before deporting them, and a doubling to 800 of French border officers patrolling the Channel coast.

Conditions in military sites already used to hold migrants in the UK are abysmal.

The Penally (now closed), Napier and Manston sites have been condemned by inspectors, parliamentary committees and NGOs as overcrowded, lacking facilities like heating, lighting and running water, dangerous and generally inhumane. Detained migrants have suffered fires and mass outbreaks of disease. Occupants have staged repeated protests, dealt with brutally by security.

In expanding these camps and railing against the use of hotels—made necessary by the fact that successive  governments have not provided enough housing for workers born in the UK, let alone migrants—the Tories are acting arm-in-arm with the far right, who have staged several small protests outside locations housing asylum seekers.

At a rally of 200 in Skegness last month, organised by the fascist group Patriotic Alternative, participants held banners reading, “Stop the invasion, we will not be replaced” and “We are being invaded,” one including the Tory campaign slogan “Stop the Boats”.

Rosie Carter of Hope Not Hate commented at the time that the organisation has seen a “102 percent increase in far-right, anti-migrant activity in the last year,” adding, “This huge increase in far-right, anti-migrant activity doesn’t exist in a vacuum,” and pointing to the government’s “inflammatory use of language that feeds and enables the far right”.

Her point was confirmed by Tory MP Sir John Hayes on Monday, who spoke in Parliament to defend Braverman’s earlier widely condemned references to an “invasion of our Southern coast.” Hayes said, “And I do use the words ‘tide’, ‘wave’... I think the home secretary described it as a ‘swarm’... of people coming here who know they are arriving illegally, who know they are breaking the law.”

Moves are also underway in the Tory Party to make the Illegal Migration Bill even more draconian. Between 50-60 Tory MPs on the right of the party planned a rebellion in debates and votes on the legislation this Monday-Tuesday, tabling a series of amendments. Several reports noted that this was encouraged by Braverman herself.

On Monday morning, MPs Danny Kruger, Simon Clarke, and Jonathan Gullis published an article on the Conservative Home website setting out their challenges: “Does the Bill preclude Strasbourg [the European Court of Human Rights] from blocking Rwanda flights?”, “Does the Bill address those sections of the Human Rights Act that could tie up the Government in months of litigation?”, “Does the Bill appropriately limit challenges against removal?” and “Does the Bill ensure that those removed from the UK will not be returned to the UK?”

Their main amendment was aimed at ordering UK courts to ignore rulings of the European Court. But it and others were withdrawn, the three explained, after the Tory right had been “encouraged by assurances that the government will give proper consideration to our concerns” and on the “expectation of receiving this commitment from ministers in parliament”.

This was delivered by Jenrick, who closed Monday’s debate by promising to “engage closely with colleagues” and attacking “the kind of egregious and vexatious [legal] challenges that we have seen in the past”.

The Times reports that the concession sought by the rebels were an immediate ban on “rule 39” orders under which the European Court can make directions to any state party to the European Convention of Human Rights—a ban on migrants returning from Rwanda even if they successfully appeal their deportation; a time limit for appealing deportations of just seven days; and the invalidation of more sections of the Human Rights Act, closing down routes by which removals could be challenged.

The third and final reading of the Bill is likely scheduled for the last week of May.

While the Tory government works out the details of its anti-migrant, police statelegislation, the Labour Party is chivvying from the sidelines, desperate to prove that it would far more competently handle the denial of asylum rights and deportation of migrants.

Shadow Immigration Minister Stephen Kinnock said in the debate Monday that in order for “a deterrent to be effective, it has to be credible.

“And this bill fails the credibility test because there is nowhere near enough capacity to detain asylum seekers in the UK, there is no returns agreement with the EU, and the Rwandan government is only agreeing to take thousands at some unspecified future date.

“So the boats will keep on coming, the backlog will keep on growing and the hotels will keep on filling.”

Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting, a leading Labour spokesperson, said likewise on Wednesday, “The government would rather give the appearance about doing something than stopping small boats. Speeding up claims, deporting people when their claims are unsuccessful, that’s the way to tackle the problem with the immigration system instead of spending millions housing people in hotels.”

The Tories’ repeated references to the millions of refugees in the world point to the motivations behind these dictatorial policies. Capitalism is producing disaster after disaster, from the Ukraine war to economic and climate catastrophes, uprooting vast numbers of people around the globe. The ruling class in every country, committed to austerity to fund war and bailouts for the rich, is meeting this social crisis and the enormous anger it generates with ever more brutal repression.

UK life expectancy growth lags behind all other G7 states besides US

Simon Whelan

According to an analysis of global life expectancy rankings published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, the UK lags behind all the other G7 advanced economies except the US. Life expectancy in the UK has grown at a slower rate than comparable countries over the past seven decades. The researchers conclude that this is due to widening social inequality.

Life expectancy rankings of the G7 countries are shown for each decade from 1950 to 2020. The G7—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK and the US—represent approximately half of global economic output. In 2021, the UK was ranked 29th in the world, compared to seventh in the 1950s.

Countries of the G7’s international life expectancy rankings, 1950–2020. Source: UN data, 2022. The data shown are the annual data for the corresponding year – not an average for the decade. The authors of the study note that the graph below "shows the rankings of the G7 countries at each decade from 1950 to 2020. Along with France and Japan, Germany and Italy have now surpassed the UK. In fact, the only G7 country to do worse than the UK is the USA." [Photo: screenshot from journals.sagepub.com]

The longitudinal research ends at the point when the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, causing global life expectancy to decline globally for the first time since World War II in 2020 and 2021. Life expectancy in Britain today is at its lowest in 10 years.

Evidence indicates the growth in life expectancy began slowing 10 years before the pandemic in 2010-11. Analysts at the time linked the phenomenon to the “age of austerity” beginning in 2008, including savage cuts to welfare benefits, the National Health Service and local government services. These most recent falls in UK life expectancy are the sharpest recorded outside those experienced in wartime.

The new research was conducted by academics from the University of Oxford and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who examined global life expectancy ratings between 1952 and 2020.

Life expectancy in Britain has increased in absolute terms, but similar countries have experienced larger increases. The researchers said this is partially due to income inequality, which rose considerably during and after the 1980s. Prof Martin McKee, of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine said, “That rise also saw an increase in the variation in life expectancy between different social groups. One reason why the overall increase in life expectancy has been so sluggish in the UK is that in recent years it has fallen for poorer groups”.

The research found varying increases in life expectancy between social classes, with workers on low incomes typically not living as long as higher earners.

Life expectancy for the most deprived sections of the working class is actually falling, not rising. The scissors-like dynamic with expected years of life rising for the richest in society and falling for the poorest is a direct expression of spiraling inequality, whereby wealth and income is gathered in ever more grotesque amounts among the super-rich while most workers struggle to get by on less each year.

“Perhaps we should not be surprised to see that inequality reflected in such wide health inequalities and a declining overall position,” said Dr. Lucinda Hiam, of the University of Oxford. Hiam added that the government also has an “acute crisis to address”, referring to deaths caused by long A&E waits and delayed appointments.

“A relative worsening of population health… has historically been seen as an early sign of severe political and economic problems,” said Dr. Hiam. “This new analysis suggests that the problems the UK faces are deep seated and raises serious questions about the path that this country is following.”

Such warnings fall on deaf ears. The ruling class has orchestrated a decades long social counterrevolution which is only accelerating.

While 1977 is commonly accepted as the least socially unequal year on record in the UK it was also the year the Labour government cut benefits and public services as conditions of an emergency loan from the International Monetary Fund which amounted to a Structural Adjustment Program.

Labour’s attacks were a prelude to the 1979 Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, which waged all-out war on the working class and sent rates of unemployment and poverty skyrocketing, while the affluent middle class and the super-rich made a killing.

Social inequality rocketed in the late 1970s and 1980, with the richest 1 percent in particular climbing far above the rest of society in the decades since. The Blair/Brown Labour government embraced Thatcherism, with Thatcher herself saying that their New Labour was her greatest achievement.

The researchers emphasize the impact of the 2010s—in the aftermath of the financial crisis and during which savage austerity policies and cuts were implemented—which have brought about a situation whereby “the average UK household having lower incomes in 2012 than in France or Germany, paving the way for a decade in which health and the economy stagnate”.

Now a new age of austerity has been declared under the slogan “the end of the peace dividend”, as the costs of pandemic corporate bailouts, rampant inflation and the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine are clawed out of workers’ wages, working conditions and public services.

Another researcher who contributed to the findings, Oxford University human geographer Danny Dorling, described the relative decline of life expectancy in the UK as “stark” and said it reflected recent Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) findings that the UK is now the second most economically unequal country in Europe after Bulgaria.

The findings by the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine echo other recent studies throwing light on how growing social inequality and entrenched poverty in the UK are destroying the health of the working class. One showed that Britain is now falling behind most comparable European countries on maternal mortality, which is commonly considered a canary in the coalmine for wider negative health implications.

Both falling life expectancy and worsening maternal mortality have been exacerbated recently by the pandemic.

Adenovirus outbreak in Indian state of West Bengal ravaging children

Naveen Dewage

The Indian state of West Bengal has been struggling with a severe outbreak of adenovirus that began in December of last year. By January 2023, more than 30 percent of all respiratory samples sent to the National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases (ICMR-NICED) in Kolkata tested positive for adenovirus. Currently, more than 12,000 people, predominately children, have had confirmed infections with the virus, a figure known to be grossly undercounted.

More than 3,000 children have been hospitalized with severe flu-like symptoms that include air hunger and laboured breathing. Although official figures indicate that only 19 have died from acute respiratory failure, local media reports place the real number at nearly 150 fatalities.

Dr. Manas Gumta, general secretary of the Association of Health Service Doctors, an organization of government doctors in West Bengal, has criticized the government for doing little to stop the spread of infection and underreporting the number of deaths caused by the virus.

He told the ANI news agency, “This we had seen earlier also during the time of COVID. The government is not fully transparent in reporting the number of deaths due to adenovirus.” Gumta added that infections with adenoviruses are notifiable to the World Health Organization (WHO), indicating that authorities had not done even this much.

Gumta continued, “The preparations by the West Bengal government are inadequate. Earlier, due to the government’s lack of preparedness in times of COVID, many people died. There was an oxygen crisis, ambulances fell short, and medicines and critical care unit ward—everything ran short. Now, adenovirus has come after COVID, and the government has still not apprised us regarding preparations which are leading to children getting infected and scores of deaths.” He called for the implementation of mitigation measures similar to those used against COVID, such as mask wearing, hand washing and social distancing.

Adenovirus is a common respiratory virus, which can cause a range of symptoms from coughs, fevers and sore throats to pink eyes. Gastrointestinal symptoms can also manifest, leading to nausea and vomiting, diarrhea and abdominal pain. Those with compromised immune systems may suffer a more severe and protracted illness.

Recent serotyping done at the ICMR-NICED has found recombination of adenovirus type 7 (HAdV-7) and 3 (HAdV-3) in most samples. Recent studies have indicated that infection with HAdV-7 can replicate more actively than HAdV-3 and promote a more robust cytokine response, which leads to more severe disease. This is consistent with the higher number of infections and the greater severity of many of these infections witnessed in West Bengal.

An important part of the background to the current wave of adenovirus infections is the COVID-19 pandemic. India is currently experiencing another surge in coronavirus infections, with more than 1,000 new cases now being reported daily, despite the extremely low number of tests being conducted. Like capitalist governments the world over, the West Bengal state and Indian Union governments are suppressing statistical collection on COVID-19 and related respiratory public health threats so they can declare the pandemic over and avoid being compelled to take any countermeasures that could impede commerce.

As such, the policy directing India’s COVID-19 response has become the de facto policy for handling the adenovirus outbreak in West Bengal. Mamata Banerjee, who is both the chief minister and health minister of the state’s Trinamool Congress (TMC) government, has slammed the media for reporting child deaths and the overflowing of Kolkata pediatric health by anxious parents and their desperately ill infant children.

On March 2, attempting to normalize the preventable deaths of these children, she cynically said, “Any child’s death is sad. Common cold and flu cases are registered every year during this time of seasonal transition. There is nothing to panic about. Such deaths are happening in every state, not just in Bengal.”

Banerjee even had the audacity to blame the deaths of these children on their parents, who had brought them to Kolkata from remote and poorly resourced regions for urgent medical attention. She suggested that the often long and arduous journey to West Bengal’s metropolis had led to their child’s deteriorated condition. She also maliciously downplayed the “official” death toll (12 at the time of her comments) by stating, “Of the 12 recent cases, two resulted from adenovirus infections. The rest were due to comorbidities. Some had pulmonary hemorrhages, some suffered from weight loss. There is nothing to be afraid of.”

Malnutrition and the absence of proper ambulance services and highways are not something for which parents of adenovirus-stricken children are responsible. Rather they are an indictment of the three-quarters of a century of independent capitalist rule in India, including the policies of the current Narendra Modi-led Union government—which spends an abysmal 1.5 percent of GDP on public health care annually—and Banerjee’s state government.

The virus outbreak and resultant child deaths reveal many aspects of poor public health care in West Bengal. Had even a small portion of the wealth of India’s billionaires been allocated to health care, these deaths could have been avoided.

Many children admitted to Kolkata Medical College and the Dr. BC Roy Post-Graduate Institute of Pediatric Sciences were suffering from malnourishment. “If an affected child is malnourished, the condition rapidly worsens,” a doctor told Telegraph India. Many also had premature births or low weight at birth, conditions that are themselves bound up with poor maternal health and nutrition. According to the National Family Health Survey 2019–2020, a government survey, West Bengal had a stunting rate of 33.8 percent among children under the age of six.

In recent months, a common sight has been parents of infected children protesting “medical negligence” in front of Kolkata Medical College and the BC Roy hospital. As reported by ABP Ananda, a Bengali news outlet based in Kolkata, due to bed and personnel shortages, parents have been made to sign a letter to gain hospital admittance consenting that their children might not be given ICU care even if medically needed. In some cases, children have waited long hours without even an initial medical examination after admittance. The lack of pediatric intensive care units has been a major problem, and patients with afflictions other than adenovirus infections who have needed such acute, specialized care have also been left without any help.

On Monday, February 27, a nine-month-old girl died of the virus, which causes severe respiratory distress, at a government hospital in Kolkata. She had been transferred two times before arriving at Kolkata. Doctors at those two facilities said they had been overwhelmed by patients in a critical state requiring immediate intensive intervention.

According to a March 8 ABP Ananda report, the X-ray machines at BC Roy hospital had to be switched off for a long time because they were overheated. X-ray examinations are used to diagnose patients with respiratory illness.

On March 24, the Times of India reported that despite a slowdown in new acute respiratory infection cases, pediatric intensive care units are still occupied largely by adenovirus infected children.

However, even when adenovirus patients survive acute respiratory difficulties and are discharged from health care facilities, their struggles may be far from over. Like COVID-19, severe adenovirus infection has serious health aftereffects.

On February 23, Times of India reported that this strain of adenovirus has post-infection complications like COVID-19. Many kids have returned to hospitals with persistent cough, wheezing, shortness of breath and fatigue which are the symptoms of post-infectious bronchiolitis obliterans (PIBO/popcorn lungs). This is caused by the obstruction of the smallest airways of the lungs due to inflammation and this condition can continue till adulthood. It can develop after weeks of recovery from the virus. There is a higher possibility of developing this condition for children who received oxygen support or mechanical ventilation.

Mihir Sarkar, professor of pediatrics at the Medical College Hospital, Kolkata told Times of India: “Children who were on prolonged oxygen support or mechanical ventilation are at higher risk of developing PIBO. This condition affects the pulmonary and bronchial parenchyma where the structure gets narrower or dilated causing a surge in cough.” This condition can also be caused by other respiratory viruses, like COVID-19.

There is widespread anger at the government’s indifference to the children’s deaths and infections. On March 20, the Youth Wing of the West Bengal unit of the Congress Party held a candlelight vigil march to exploit the social anger. However, this health care crisis is very much the outcome of the decades-long starving of public health care of funds by Congress Party-led Union governments and by West Bengal state governments, including during the 34 years (1977–2011) that they were led by the Stalinist CPM. In the name of fighting the far-right Hindu supremacist BJP, the Stalinists are close allies of the Congress Party, the big business party that pioneered the pro-market, pro-investor policies all Indian governments have pursued since 1991.

Congress Party leader Rahul Gandhi expelled from Indian parliament after trumped-up criminal conviction

Kranti Kumara & Keith Jones

Rahul Gandhi, the most prominent leader of India’s Congress Party and its prime ministerial candidate in the 2019 general election, was expelled from India’s parliament last Friday, just one day after he was convicted and sentenced to two years in prison on a bogus defamation charge.

Gandhi’s expulsion was the culmination of a weeks-long campaign by the governing Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to denigrate and silence him. From Monday, March 13, through Thursday, March 25, normal parliamentary business was paralyzed by BJP MPs’ demands that Gandhi apologize for “defaming” India by telling audiences in Britain in February that democracy in India is “under attack.”

Prime Minster Narendra Modi and his chief henchman, Home Minister Amit Shah, were no doubt piqued by Gandhi’s denunciations of their increasingly autocratic methods of rule. They also likely took umbrage at his assertion that the RSS—the shadowy, Hindu communalist militia and organization for “national revival” which created the BJP and to which the BJP leadership, Modi and Shah included, continues to pay fealty—has infiltrated all organs of the state, including the judiciary.

India's opposition Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi speaks during a meeting of his party workers in Ahmedabad, India, Monday, Sept. 5, 2022. [AP Photo/Ajit Solanki]

But if the BJP has decided to mount a legal vendetta against Gandhi, whose big business Congress Party has long been on life support, it is above all because he has raised pointed questions about the government and especially Modi’s close ties to the Indian oligarch Gautam Adani and his Adani Group.

In late January, the Adani Group and its associated companies saw their stock valuation cut in half after the Wall Street-based short-seller Hindenburg Research published a report accusing it of running the “greatest con game in corporate history.”

While the government and Indian financial regulators appear to have contained the immediate economic fallout from the Adani Group crisis, it continues to threaten the Modi government politically. Modi has a decades-long close personal association with Gautam Adani, whose companies have benefited to the tune of tens of billions of dollars from the privatization of state assets, including airports, seaports and mines. Between the Modi government’s coming to power in 2014 and last fall, Adani’s personal fortune rose exponentially, from $8 billion to $140 billion, making him for a time Asia’s biggest billionaire.

The BJP went into hysterics when Gandhi sought to make the Adani affair the Congress’ principal line of attack in last month’s budget session of parliament and demanded a probe into the Modi-Adani nexus. The Lok Sabha speaker, a BJP MP, repeatedly turned off Gandhi’s microphone and ordered questions he raised about Adani’s relations with Modi be expunged from the parliamentary record.

In the midst of all this, on February 16, a BJP Gujarat state assemblyman, Purnesh Modi, revived a 2019 court case against Gandhi. It is this case that resulted in the Congress leader’s conviction last week and his expulsion from parliament the following day under a law that allows MPs sentenced to two or more years’ imprisonment to be “disqualified.”

While Gandhi has the legal right to challenge his conviction, the government has already rushed to declare his parliamentary seat vacant.

The “defamation” case against Gandhi is transparently trumped up, relying as it does on a discredited British colonial law.

It arises from a speech he gave in April 13, 2019, to an election campaign rally in Kolar, Karnataka. Speaking in Hindi, and seeking to impugn the BJP government for corruption, Gandhi said, “I have a question. Why do all of them—all of these thieves—have Modi, Modi, Modi, in their names? Nirav Modi, Lalit Modi, Narendra Modi. And if we search a bit more, many more such Modis will come out.”

Nirav Modi is a fugitive diamond trader and jewelry store-chain owner, who has been charged by Interpol and the Indian state with numerous crimes including fraud, embezzlement, money laundering and corruption.

Lalit Modi, the scion of a prominent business family and founder of the Indian Premier cricket league, has been living in London for years to escape having to answer money-laundering charges. He had such close relations with Vasundhara Raje during her first term as the BJP chief minister of Rajasthan, he was dubbed by the press and opposition as the state’s “Super Chief Minister.”

Three days after Rahul Gandhi’s 2019 Kolar speech, Purnesh Modi filed a criminal complaint against him accusing the Congress leader of defaming the entire “Modi community.”

This is absurd. As various commentators have pointed out, there is no such thing as a “Modi community,” not even in the sense used by the Indian political establishment and media, who for decades have promoted caste-ism and communalism as a means of jockeying for pelf and power and dividing the working class. Modi is not a caste or jati group. People with that surname live across numerous north Indian states, and may be “low” or “high” caste and of various faiths.

That the case again Gandhi was filed in a Gujarat court—rather than one in Karnataka, where he made the supposedly defamatory remark, or New Delhi, where he lives—only serves to further underscore its trumped-up, politically-motivated character. The BJP has governed Gujarat, the state from which Narendra Modi hails and presided over as state chief minister for over a decade, uninterruptedly since 1996. It is well-known that the judiciary in the state, which played a major role in covering up Modi and the BJP’s role in instigating and facilitating the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat, is staunchly pro-BJP.

Like many legal cases in India, that against Rahul Gandhi moved forward at a snail’s pace, but in this case the plaintiff, the BJP legislator Purnesh Modi, himself sought a delay of up to one year. Then suddenly in February, as the BJP was fuming over Rahul Gandhi’s accusations about Narendra Modi’s corrupt dealings with Adani, it was revived at the plaintiff’s request and, in striking contrast with most Indian legal actions, thereafter shot forward to a rapid verdict.

On March 16 the judge found the Congress leader guilty of defamation and immediately imposed on him the maximum sentence of two years imprisonment—not coincidentally the minimum threshold for disqualification from the Indian parliament under the Section 8(3) of the Representation of People Act, 1951.

And on cue, the BJP majority in the Lok Sabha voted the very next day to expel Gandhi, strip him of his seat and end all his parliamentary privileges. Only if his conviction is overturned on appeal will Gandhi have the right to stand in the next election, slated for April–May 2024.

Those who have expelled Gandhi for supposedly defaming the non-existent Modi community are themselves rank communalists. Many of them, beginning with Modi and Shah, have made the most odious and inflammatory remarks. During the same 2019 election campaign, Shah likened Bangladeshi migrants to “termites” and vowed a BJP government “will pick up the infiltrators one by one and throw them into the Bay of Bengal.”

The opposition parties have denounced Gandhi’s expulsion and warned that the government is using the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the Indian equivalent of the FBI, the tax department, other government agencies and the courts to attack its political opponents. Last month, the BJP government ordered tax officials to carry out a days-long raid on BBC offices in New Delhi and Mumbai in retaliation for the British-based broadcaster airing a documentary that highlighted Modi’s role in the 2002 Gujarat anti-Muslim pogrom.

The Congress and the other opposition parties have no fundamental differences with the BJP government’s foreign and socioeconomic policies: integrating India ever more completely into the US military-strategic offensive against China; massively expanding Indian’s nuclear-armed military; fostering a “pro-investor” climate through privatization, massive tax concessions to big business and the rich, and by further expanding contract labour; and pursuing a profit-before-lives policy in response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

However, the Hindu supremacist BJP is relentlessly amassing political power in its own hands at their expense, flouting basic parliamentary norms, encouraging the central government-appointed governors to obtrusively interfere in state government affairs, and painting their limited criticisms as semi-treasonous.

Responding to Gandhi’s expulsion from parliament, senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor tweeted: “I’m stunned by this action and by its rapidity, within 24 hours of the court verdict and while an appeal was known to be in process. This is politics with the gloves off and it bodes ill for our democracy.”

The reaction from the bourgeois press has been muted. Some sections of the liberal media, like the Chennai-based Hindu, have wrung their hands—just as they have in the face of a long litany of previous authoritarian BJP actions and communalist outrages, from the targeting of government opponents as “urban Naxhalites,” the 2019 constitutional coup against Kashmir and the anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act, to the violent suppression of anti-government protests and the bulldozing of the homes of people involved in them.

The dominant sections of the ruling class continue to see Modi and the BJP, with its cadre of far-right Hindu supremacist activists, as their best bet under conditions of cascading global crises to ruthlessly intensify the exploitation of the working class at home and pursue their predatory great-power ambitions on the global stage.

As for the BJP, for all its chest-thumping about India’s world-beating growth and the supposed mass support for Modi, it knows that it is sitting atop a social powder-keg. Poverty wages, precarious employment, the government’s privatization drive and austerity measures, mass joblessness and agrarian distress have fueled a wave of mass strikes and protests.

Rahul Gandhi, during his recent 10-day visit to the UK, said Indian democracy was under threat from the BJP and RSS, while passing over the Congress Party’s own decades-long record of conniving with the Hindu right and its role in spearheading for most of the past 30 years Indian big business’ socially incendiary pro-market/pro-investor “reform” program.

Noting that the western “democracies”—i.e., the imperialist powers—have been silent on the Modi government’s authoritarian actions and communalist agenda, Gandhi appealed for their support by suggesting that a Congress-led government would be even more supportive of their war preparations against China. Indeed, Gandhi and the Congress party have consistently attacked the Modi government for being “soft” on China.

Yet it is to the Congress party and other right-wing caste-ist and ethnic chauvinist parties that the Stalinist CPM and CPI and the trade unions have for decades politically subordinated the working class in the name of fighting the “fascist BJP.” They have done so while systematically isolating the struggles of the working class and confining them to contract struggles and futile protests to Congress and BJP-led Union governments to adopt “pro-people policies.”

Tentative agreement would leave tens of thousands of Disney World workers in poverty

Patrick Smith

Disney World workers celebrate contract rejection. [Photo: UNITE HERE]

Last Thursday, The Service Trades Council Union (STCU), which cover 45,000 full-time “cast members” at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, announced that it had reached a tentative agreement (TA) with the company. The agreement includes stage technicians, bus drivers, laundry workers, monorail operators, guest service workers, banquet and food workers, housemen and other staff needed to operate Disney World and its hotels.

Essentially unchanged from the previous TA which workers overwhelmingly rejected, the new one is more “front-loaded,” increasing pay to from $15 to $18 per hour by this December, according to CNN. The TA would then only increase income over the next four years by fifty cents a year. Workers rejected the previous offer by 96 percent. The agreement also includes tuition reimbursement and paid child bonding leave, but the STCU did not disclose specifics.

The STCU hosted a “Rally for a Raise” on March 16 near the Magic Kingdom. The rally supposedly aimed to “create public support” for an $18 per hour starting wage, which would still leave workers in poverty.

Their previous contract ran out in October of last year, with negotiations dating back to August 2022. The new contract would expire in 2026.

Matt Hollis, the STCU president, cynically claimed, “Securing an $18 minimum hourly rate this year, increasing the overall economic value of Disney’s original offer, and ensuring full back pay for every worker is the priorities union members were determined to fight for. Knowing that cast members’ wages will be changed significantly and their ability to make decisions for themselves and their families and improve their lives is truly a fantastic feeling and accomplishment.” In reality, the pay raises will be mostly eaten up by inflation, currently at 6 percent a year.

Jeff Vahle, president of the Walt Disney World Resort, said of the contract: “Our cast members are central to Walt Disney World’s enduring magic, which is why we are pleased to have reached this tentative agreement. Disney is proud to offer an industry-leading employment package with comprehensive benefits, affordable medical coverage, and 100 percent paid tuition for higher education for hourly employees through the Disney Aspire program. With the support of the unions, we anticipate cast members will approve this new agreement.”

The Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford area, widely known for its resort theme parks, is dominated by the leisure and hospital industry, which is the region’s most prominent employment base. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, there were 280,000 local workers employed in the industry. In early 2020, the number dropped sharply to 130,000 but has rebounded to around 290,000, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Disney employs 75,000, the most significant section of that number.

Starting March 1, hybrid workers were required to work in person four days a week, according to an email CEO Bob Iger sent to employees. In the email, Iger said he believes “working on-site will benefit the company’s creativity, culture, and employees’ careers.”

Disney World has benefited significantly from the premature ending of COVID-19 restrictions, even though the virus continues to kill approximately 500 Americans per day. Revenues increased 36 percent, and profits doubled for Disney’s theme parks in the last fiscal year. Revenue and operating profits are above what the company posted in the fiscal year 2019, before the pandemic, with a 12 percent rise in revenue and a 10 percent gain in earnings.

At the same time, Disney recently announced that it would be cutting 7,000 jobs or 3 percent of its workforce to lower operating costs.

CEO Bob Chapek received a $20 million severance package when the board of directors fired him in November last year. Iger, worth $350 million, replaced him after a two-year hiatus. Geoff Morrell, head of corporate and public affairs, received a severance of $10.3 million for three months of service, averaging $100,000 per day.

Russian Entrenchment in Africa

Chloe Atkinson

Russia’s involvement in Africa is growing, as it increases its military cooperation, trade, and energy cooperation with African nations. While there are concerns about Russia’s motives and the human rights records of some of the African nations that Russia is cooperating with, it is clear that Russia sees Africa as an important partner in its efforts to increase its global influence. Russia’s involvement in Africa dates back to the Soviet era when it supported African nations during the Cold War. However, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’s interest in Africa waned. In recent years, Russia has been making a renewed effort to strengthen its ties with African nations.

But Russian entrenchment in Africa could be detrimental to the continent for several reasons. Firstly, it could lead to increased competition between global powers for access to Africa’s natural resources, which could result in further exploitation of these resources and exacerbate existing conflicts. This will likely have a negative impact on the continent’s economic and political stability.

Secondly, the proliferation of foreign arms and military equipment could fuel existing conflicts and contribute to the rise of extremist groups. This could further destabilize the continent and threaten the safety and security of its people.

Thirdly, foreign involvement in Africa could undermine the efforts of African countries to establish their own sovereignty and economic independence. This could be particularly damaging for countries that are already struggling to emerge from poverty and underdevelopment.

Fourth, it could have a negative impact on democracy and human rights in the region. Russia has a history of supporting authoritarian regimes and suppressing political opposition, and its involvement in Africa could reinforce these tendencies.

Russia’s decision to sell weapons and military equipment to African nations is driven by a combination of economic, political, and strategic interests. While this has generated controversy and concern among some, it is likely that Russia will continue to pursue these sales as a means of advancing its interests in the region.

As an arms supplier, Russia is one of the largest exporters in the world, and selling to African countries provides a lucrative market. Many African countries have experienced conflicts and political instability, which has created a demand for military hardware to address security challenges. Russia is able to supply these nations with a wide range of weapons and military equipment, including fighter jets, tanks, and small arms.

By selling such hardware to African nations, Russia is able to establish and maintain relationships with key players on the continent, which can be leveraged for diplomatic and geopolitical gains. Russia has also been known to use arms sales as a tool to counterbalance other countries’ influence in the region, such as the United States and China. Russia is also able to advance its strategic interests by gaining access to ports and airfields on the continent, which could be used for military operations.

Russia has also increased its trade with African nations. In 2019, with Africa reached $20 billion, with the majority of this trade coming from the export of oil and gas. Russia has also been investing in infrastructure projects, such as the construction of railways and ports. Energy cooperation is another important element of Russia’s influence in Africa and it has provided expertise in the development of nuclear power there. One example of this is the construction of the El Dabaa nuclear power plant in Egypt, which is being built with Russian assistance.

Critics have raised concerns over Russia’s heavy involvement in Africa, with some arguing that, like China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), it is part of Russia’s efforts to increase its global influence and counter the influence of Western nations. Others have raised concerns about the human rights records of some of the African nations that Russia is cooperating with, such as the Central African Republic.

China’s BRI is a massive undertaking aimed at building infrastructure and increasing connectivity across Asia, Africa, and Europe. By building ports, highways, railways, and other infrastructure projects in countries along the routes of the ancient Silk Road, China hopes to increase its trade and economic ties with these countries, as well as to
extend its geopolitical influence.

Notably, Russia’s investment in Africa is significantly smaller in scale compared to China’s BRI, Russia’s investment has primarily been focused on military cooperation and arms sales, rather than large-scale infrastructure projects.

In addition to its other activities on the continent, Russia has been involved in Africa’s mining industry through various means, including investment, exploration, and providing mining equipment and technology, mainly through partnerships. Russia has also invested in gold mining operations in countries such as Guinea and Sudan. Russian mining companies such as Alrosa and Norilsk Nickel have been active in Africa, particularly in diamond and nickel mining respectively. These companies have operations in countries such as Angola, Botswana, and South Africa. Russia has also provided mining equipment and technology to several countries including Rwanda.

Some experts believe that with China’s increasing investment in Africa and numerous western countries focusing on the continent’s potential, the stage is set for a swift expansion of Russia’s presence on the continent. However, following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, the competition for influence between the three power blocks could potentially become a destabilizing force in certain areas of Africa.

According to Miguel Garrido at Modern Diplomacy, “Africa should liberate herself from the turbulence Russia brings to her soil. That, however, may not be all that simple… Many African countries have come to depend either on Russia’s assistance, or on imports of Russian grain or defense equipment. Russia’s ties with Africa even seem to have played a part in multiple African countries’ decisions not to sanction Russia, nor vote against Moscow in UN General Assembly resolutions on the war in Ukraine.”

Chatham House Africa programme director Dr. Alex Vines also noted that “most abstentions (51 per cent) condemning Russia’s invasion at the UN came from African countries, marking a partial resurgence of what was many African nations’ default position in the Cold War.”

In Garrido’s view, African nations must decide if they want to free themselves from Russia’s harmful influence. As noted by a recent study for the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, “the West can and should support such a purpose, by means of policies encouraging the strengthening of democracy in the African continent, promoting regional security, and backing Africa’s economic development.”

And according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “Through the infamous Wagner mercenary group, Moscow is inserting itself in countries such as Mali and Burkina Faso and is taking advantage of Western policy missteps, growing anti-European sentiment, and longstanding failures of international and local actors to address the root causes of regional instability.”

It is clear then that African countries face a period of severe instability if they continue to allow other countries to interfere in their internal politics. But if they allow Russia continued influence, they face an even more detrimental challenge. The future of Africa lies in each of the continent’s countries’ ability to prevent Russian entrenchment in the region.