Australia: Labor government implements new onerous welfare requirements

John Harris

Further onerous new requirements on the unemployed have come into effect with the new financial year. The imposition of the punitive regime by the new federal Labor government further underscores how quickly its sham election promises of a “better future” have given way to demands for sacrifices, and attacks on the most vulnerable sections of the working class.

Unemployed workers outside an inner-western Sydney Centrelink office in March 2020 [Source: WSWS Media]

The new “Points Based Activation System” (PBAS) mandates a series of tasks and criteria for the unemployed to receive their sub-poverty level JobSeeker payment.

The PBAS expands on the former mutual obligation system which required 20 job applications per month. The new system now requires those on welfare to accumulate 100 points per month by completing a range of activities. More than 30 such activities are listed. If someone does not meet the monthly points target, they can be punished with demerits and the suspension of their payment.

The points-based system has been implemented at the direct behest of big business. While supporting the victimisation and harassment of the unemployed, corporate lobbies have complained that the previous job search requirement had resulted in businesses being inundated with job applications, including from those not qualified for the position.

The PBAS was passed through parliament in March this year under the former Morrison Coalition government with the bipartisan support of Labor as part of the Social Security Legislation Amendment Bill 2022. This followed localised trials of the points-based regime beginning in 2019.

Despite Labor having passed the measure, Labor employment minister Tony Burke cynically declared last month: “It's actually too late to not have a points system at all.” Burke added, “We want to make sure… that we can have a system that’s designed to get people into work.”

In other words, the PBAS scheme aims to make it harder for unemployed young people and workers to remain on welfare benefits. Its purpose is to force them into low-paid, temporary and casual work on whatever terms and conditions employers demand.

Burke also declared that Labor supports “mutual obligations,” that is the idea that the unemployed must perform services to society in return for their payments. This is directed against any conception of a social safety net, or welfare as a fundamental social right.

An indication of the pro-business character of the program can be gleaned from the activities and points distribution on the PBAS. If a person is a part of the government’s PaTH (Prepare, Trial and Hire) internship program, they will accumulate 25 points per week (100 points per month).

The PaTH program forces young people under the age of 25 into compulsory “pre-employment” training courses and has pushed thousands of unemployed young people into menial work for private employers. The program pays the equivalent of $4 an hour on top of the unemployment payment. 

The scheme was introduced by the Abbott Coalition government in 2016 with the bipartisan support of Labor allowing businesses to hire people on ultra-cheap wages. Under the program there is no guarantee that you will be covered by workers compensation if you are injured on the job.

Full-time work-for-the-dole or full-time study (25 hours per week) would still not be enough to obtain the required 100 points in a month. In both, participants only get 20 points per week and will still be required to carry out other activities such as job searching (5 points for every 5 jobs) to meet monthly obligations.

Those forced on to the work-for-the-dole program are effectively prevented from studying or seeking full-time employment. Instead, they must perform menial labour merely to receive their unemployment allowance.

Work-for-the-dole was introduced by the 1998 Howard Coalition government, as a rebranding of the Keating Labor government’s “New Work Opportunities” program. The scheme was continued under the Rudd and Gillard Labor governments.

Work-for-the-dole denies employee status under occupational health and safety, workers compensation and industrial relations laws, meaning that those workers have virtually no legal protections. Underscoring the dangers of this forced-work program, Josh Park-Fing, an 18-year-old unemployed youth from Meringandan, Queensland died in an accident in 2016 while on the program.

Immigrants who are learning English full-time (25 hours per week) will also receive only 20 points a week for that activity, forcing them to look for low-paid, part-time work.

Thousands of people have expressed their opposition to the new PBAS system on social media.

One comment which is indicative of the general discussion said, “this is a system designed to increase profits for the providers. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise. It is about private business access to even more welfare recipients and ticking the payments for services rendered box… What it is not designed to do is help anyone. It is designed for the business to increase their own profits. It is not a thought-out social policy and it does not provide a social service… Stop the roll out!”

The new PBAS scheme threatens the 949,940 people who subsist on JobSeeker and the Youth Allowance with even further hardship. Unemployed workers and young people are constantly harassed by job providers and Centrelink over mutual obligation requirements. 

According to the Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS), in a typical month more than 200,000 people have their JobSeeker payment suspended. This is nearly one in four of people using JobActive services. Around half of these suspensions were because people could not meet the job search requirements that they had been set, in many cases because there simply were not enough jobs.

The Roy Morgan Institute estimated the true jobless figures at 8.5 percent or 1.2 million workers in February, plus an “underemployment” level of 7.8 percent, approximately 1.12 million workers. That totals 16.3 percent, or 2.35 million workers who are looking for work or more work.

The PBAS is a step towards the abolition of the last remnants of the welfare system. The new Albanese Labor government has made it clear it has no intention of lifting the JobSeeker rate, which sits at roughly $46 a day or $642.70 per fortnight, well below the poverty line of $852 a fortnight.

The points-based system is part of a broader austerity agenda. In its first month in office, Labor signaled that it would impose deep-going cuts to social spending, to pay for the almost one trillion dollars of national debt, accrued primarily through massive handouts to big business over the past two years. Areas nominated for the chopping block include health, aged care and disability services.

This program is being rolled out, under conditions of a major social crisis, intensified by soaring inflation, with skyrocketing prices for petrol, rent, childcare, fresh food and other essentials.

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) inflicted the largest interest rate hike in 22 years of 0.5 percentage points last month in a deliberate move to suppress growing demands by workers for wage increases. The RBA has indicated that further interest rate rises are on the horizon. With Australia having one of the largest ratios of household debt to income, the ongoing rate rises threaten hundreds of thousands of mortgage holders with financial catastrophe.

Trudeau government increasingly using authoritarian secret orders-in-council

Matthew Richter

Canada’s Justin Trudeau-led federal Liberal government has adopted 72 secret orders-in-council since it came to power in November 2015, including 40 just in the past 2½ years.

These orders are secret in the strictest sense of the term. Nothing is publicly known about their contents, stipulations or purpose.

Parliament is not informed of their adoption, let alone their details. Nor are the government’s secret orders-in-council (OICs) subject to any retrospective scrutiny by parliament or any public body. 

Like other orders-in-council, those that are secret require the approval of only four cabinet ministers and the signature of the Governor-General, the Queen’s representative, to have the effect of law—meaning that a tiny cabal of ministers could issue executive orders with the most far-reaching consequences without any oversight or review.

As it is, everything suggests most members of cabinet are entirely in the dark about the government’s secret orders.

The only public indication that a secret OIC has been adopted is a gap in the consecutive numbers affixed to each OIC published on the Privy Council’s OIC database.

Prime Minister Trudeau with Governor-General Mary Simon

Through orders-in-council, the government, usually under powers delegated it by parliament, can make or change regulations and issue legislative orders enforceable by the courts.

Secret OICs give it the power to conceal from the public and parliament orders to the military, other parts of the national-security apparatus or foreign affairs ministry.   

The government’s increasing resort to rule by secret executive decrees attests to the advanced state of decomposition of bourgeois democracy in Canada, which is part of a global phenomenon.

During the 2015 federal election campaign, the Liberals criticized former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper for his government’s increasing reliance on secret orders-in-council. This was part of the Liberals’ efforts, strongly supported by the trade union bureaucracy, to cast themselves as “progressives” who would strengthen “democracy.”

However, as of the end of May, the Liberals had issued more than twice as many secret decrees in their 6½ years in power than did their Conservative predecessors during the almost 10 years they were at the helm of the Canadian capitalist state. Indeed, the 40 secret OICs the Trudeau government has issued just since the beginning of 2020 amount to 11 more than the 29 issued under Harper between 2006 and 2015.

Apart from the CBC which published two articles at the beginning of June, there has been almost no mention of the Trudeau government’s secret OICs in major media outlets. Inquiries from the opposition parties about the government’s increasing resort to secret OICs were limited to one parliamentary question period prompted by the initial CBC report. The indifference shown by the political and media establishment underlines the lack of any serious commitment to basic democratic rights within ruling circles.

The government has suppressed publication of the contents of the secret OICs on the expansive and self-serving grounds of “national security.” This catch-all explanation could be used to justify and conceal anything from increased state surveillance of ties between Canadian and Chinese academics to state preparations to suppress an eruption of mass working class opposition to the ruling elite’s policies of war abroad and austerity at home.

The first year of the COVID-19 pandemic saw the greatest number of secret OICs issued to date, with 21 secret OICs issued in 2020. It was during this period that the government initiated Operation Laser, the deployment of up to 24,000 active military personnel to deal with all eventualities arising from the pandemic. Ultimately, thousands of troops had to be assigned to provide care in the hardest hit nursing homes, most of them for-profit, where—due to a lack of personnel, equipment and prompt action—thousands of elderly, infirm residents perished in the pandemic’s first wave. However, a Canadian Armed Forces’ document leaked in the summer of 2020 confirmed that from the outset the military was tasked with preparing to quell potential civil unrest. That document further showed the military’s planning included operations modeled after those the CAF (Canadian Armed Forces) conducted during it neo-colonial occupation of Afghanistan between 2002 and 2011.

Two other noticeable gaps in the published record of OICs date from January and February of this year, that is, around the time of the far-right Freedom Convoy’s occupation of downtown Ottawa and the border blockades at Coutts, Alberta, Emerson, Manitoba and Windsor, Ontario. The Convoy was built up and politically promoted by the Conservatives and other right-wing elements as a battering ram to intimidate the population into accepting the elimination of all remaining COVID-19 public health measures, destabilize the government, and push politics sharply to the right. The Liberal government, with the support of the NDP and the trade unions, responded by invoking the never-before-used Emergencies Act, which gave the government sweeping powers to declare “no-go” zones, arrest people on the spot and confiscate financial resources and other property.

The Trudeau government has refused all comment on the subject of its secret orders, including divulging their general subject matter. To do so, it said, “could reasonably be expected to be injurious to the conduct of international affairs, the defence of Canada or any state allied or associated with Canada, or the detection, prevention or suppression of subversive or hostile activities.”

As of the end of May, 11 secret OICs had been adopted since the beginning of 2022, meaning the government is well on track to exceed the record of 21 set in 2020.

Due to the all-enveloping cloak of official secrecy, it is hard to say whether the orders issued this year were related to the fascistic Convoy, the war in Ukraine, or a combination of the two. Canada has unflinchingly backed the right-wing regime in Kiev with more than $600 million in weaponry and $1 billion-plus in economic aid and loans since January. A recent New York Times article confirmed that Canadian Special Forces have been active on the ground in Ukraine since the beginning of the war alongside their US, British, and Lithuanian counterparts, a decision that has been concealed from the population and likely was initiated by a secret OIC.

One only has to look at the secret OICs that were made public in an improperly redacted document obtained by the CBC in 2017 to get a sense of the anti-democratic purposes to which they are used. The CBC reported on three secret OICs issued during the tenure of the Harper Conservative government. Two secret orders, dating back to 2010, outline details for the deployment of the military in Canada. One outlined protocols for who would be responsible for giving the order to shoot down a hijacked civilian airliner under NORAD’s Operation Noble Eagle. The other empowers the military to assist the RCMP in providing support for situations that include “aggression” against “company headquarters … or even the government.”

The surge in secret OICs complements the growing powers arrogated to the military-intelligence apparatus following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the gutting of core democratic rights. In 2017, the Liberals introduced Bill C-59, the National Security Act, which was intended as a cosmetic makeover of the Harper Conservatives’ Anti-Terrorism Act (Bill C-51). A massive omnibus law that was rushed through Parliament in 2015, Bill C-51 vastly expanded the powers of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the premier domestic spy agency, and the Canadian Security Establishment (CSE), Ottawa’s foreign signals intelligence service. It made the definition of “terrorism” so broad that virtually anything from a political general strike to indigenous protests could be considered an act of “terrorism.” The power of “preventive” arrest—already enshrined in Canadian law by the Chretien Liberal government’s 2001 Anti-Terrorism Act—was greatly strengthened. CSIS also received the power to violate virtually any law in “disrupting” purported threats to “national security.”

The Liberals voted in favour of the Conservative Bill C-51, while promising that they would eliminate its flaws if elected in October 2015. Instead, Bill C-59 upheld all the key new repressive powers enacted under Bill C-51 and went even further by granting the CSE the power to conduct aggressive cyberwar attacks.

The Trudeau government’s attacks on democratic rights and recourse to authoritarian forms of rule mirror developments in all major imperialist powers. Bourgeois democracy is breaking down under the weight of mounting social contradictions and conflict driven by rampant social inequality and the ruling class’ embrace of austerity, war and reaction.

In the United States, Donald Trump and his accomplices in the Republican Party leadership remain free 18 months after their efforts to nullify the outcome of the 2020 presidential election and establish an authoritarian regime culminated in the January 6 coup attempt. Throughout Europe, senior military officials are discussing plans for military coups as governments in Germany, France and Spain deploy ruthless force against left-wing protesters and arm their security and military forces for conflicts with their great power rivals abroad and the working class at home.

The use of anti-democratic conspiracies to implement unpopular policies is supported by Canada’s entire political establishment. New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh responded to the reports on the Trudeau government’s use of secret OICs with timid, pro forma criticism. Rather than condemn the procedure as the frontal onslaught on democratic rights that it is, Singh instead expressed concern that the Liberals were resorting to secret orders-in-council too frequently, thereby discrediting parliament and other institutions of the capitalist state. He suggested that they should be used “more judiciously,” as the CBC put it. “It’s something we disagree with,” said Singh. “We want to see more transparency. We want to see people able to trust their institutions because they see the decisions being made in a transparent manner.”

It is thanks to the support provided by the NDP that Trudeau’s minority Liberal government has remained in power since the September 2019 election. While Singh claims to “disagree” with the Trudeau government’s conduct, his party has backed all its key decisions to the hilt, including its oversight of the murderous back-to-work/back-to-school campaign during the pandemic, the invocation of the Emergencies Act that gave police unprecedented powers to round up people and imprison them on the spot, and the waging of war with Russia alongside US imperialism and its NATO allies.

In response to the war’s outbreak and amid a mounting wave of worker struggles sparked by the surge in inflation, the NDP, citing the need for government “stability,” entered into a “confidence-and-supply” agreement with the Liberals in late March that will keep Trudeau in power through June 2025.

The NDP’s fulsome support for the government throughout the pandemic as it enforced a “profits before life” strategy and support for the government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act have enabled the Conservatives to cynically posture over the issue of secret OICs as defenders of democratic rights. Tory MP Marilyn Gladu described the Trudeau government as “the least transparent government we have had.”

This is rich coming from a party that ran roughshod over democratic rights when it was in power, including by virtually abolishing workers’ right to strike. More recently, the Conservatives, egged on by Trump and his fascistic allies, incited the far-right Convoy, whose leaders publicly called for a putsch to bring to power an emergency junta to abolish all COVID-19 protections. Gladu and her fellow Tory MPs even turfed out party leader Erin O’Toole because he was not forthright enough in his enthusiasm for the fascistic Convoy.

Pierre Poilievre, the frontrunner to permanently replace O’Toole in this September’s Conservative leadership vote, has placed his full-throated support for the Convoy and denunciation of vaccine mandates at the centre of his leadership campaign. On Thursday, Poilievre marched in Ottawa alongside James Topp, a military reservist with well-documented far-right ties, who has received media coverage for his cross-country march denouncing vaccine mandates and any public health measures to combat COVID-19.

Who will pay for Biden’s new “forever war”?

Andre Damon

This week, the United States and its NATO allies pledged to increase their troop presence in Europe seven-fold, in order to prepare for what they called “warfighting against nuclear-armed peer-competitors”–that is, war against Russia and China.

The NATO members declared that they would increase their “high readiness forces” from 40,000 to 300,000. Biden announced the US would send another 20,000 troops to Europe amid the escalating war with Russia, accompanied by the permanent deployment of guided missile destroyers and F-35 aircraft.

Biden, flanked by Gen. Andrew Poppas and Gen. Mark Milley, in 2016.

The US, which spends more on its armed forces than the next 10 largest militaries combined, has increased its military spending for six years in a row. Biden’s military budget for 2023, already the largest on record, was boosted another six percent by a vote in the Senate Armed Services Committee, bringing the total to $858 billion.

Since the start of the Biden administration, the US has pledged over $50 billion in military and economic aid to Ukraine. Ukrainian President Zelensky stated that the country needs at least $60 billion a year in aid to continue its war effort, a figure equivalent to nearly half of Ukraine’s pre-war economic output.

Last year, when Biden announced the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, he said, “We’ve been a nation too long at war. If you’re 20 years old today, you have never known an America at peace.” He declared, “It’s time to end the forever war.”

Now, Biden is committing the American population to a new perpetual war, asserting that there are no limits to the resources that must be devoted to it.

Asked Thursday at a news conference at the NATO Summit in Madrid to “explain what that means to the American people” and whether he was pledging “indefinite support from the United States for Ukraine,” Biden said “We are going to support Ukraine as long as it takes.”

Another reporter asked about the “high price of gasoline in the United States and around the world,” inquiring, “How long is it fair to expect American drivers and drivers around the world to pay that premium for this war?”

Biden reiterated, “As long as it takes.”

No one thought to ask Biden an obvious question: How long will “it” take? What will be the cost of this open-ended war, and what will be the consequences?

The United States is spearheading a global conflict that threatens the lives of millions of people and, if it develops into a nuclear exchange, the fate of humanity itself.

Can anyone imagine, moreover, that a war against Russia, the aim of which is to overthrow the government of the world’s largest country, coupled with a war against China, the world’s second-largest economy, can be achieved without totally impoverishing the American population?

The social and economic consequences of the militarization of society pledged by the US and its allies at the NATO summit are incalculable. In every country, government spending on public health and social infrastructure is to be gutted to free up resources for the war effort. 

The costs of the war are to be imposed onto the working class through the dismantling of social programs and the demand that workers accept a reduction in real wages in the name of the “national interest.”

The eruption of the war has been accompanied by the total abandonment of any efforts to stop the spread of COVID-19.  According to US government estimates, there will be 100 million new cases of COVID-19 this fall, more than the number of all COVID-19 cases previously reported to date. And Congress has refused to pass any additional pandemic funding, meaning that uninsured people will be forced to pay for COVID-19 vaccines, testing, and treatments out of pocket.

This week, New York City announced that it is slashing public school funding by $215 million, in what is expected to be a surge in austerity measures around the country.

Already, the war has fueled demands for slashing “entitlement” spending. “NATO Needs More Guns and Less Butter,” Glenn Hubbard, the former Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year, demanding cuts in spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. “Spending offsets to accommodate higher defense spending would surely require slowing the growth in social-insurance spending,” he wrote.

While out-of-control military spending against the backdrop of decades of Wall Street bailouts has contributed to the inflationary crisis, the US political establishment is seeking to impose the full burden of the crisis onto the working class. The Federal Reserve has initiated a program of seeking to deliberately increase unemployment by raising interest rates, hoping to restore “balance” to the labor market by throwing hundreds of thousands of people out of work.

The intensification of the war will take place against a tidal wave of layoffs, beginning in the technology and real estate sector, and spreading through the auto industry. According to one tracker, there were 26,000 layoffs in the technology sector alone last month, up from 20,000 the month before.

The global war being initiated by the Biden administration is at one and the same time a war against the working class of the United States. Through war, the US ruling class is seeking to at once divert internal tensions outward through the creation of an external enemy, while at the same time building up the forces of repression to crush strikes and social struggles.

Biden’s commitment for unlimited American involvement in the war with Russia enjoys the support of the entire US political establishment. The outcome of the NATO summit was hailed by the editorial boards of the major US newspapers, from the Democratic-aligned New York Times and Washington Post, to the Republican-aligned Wall Street Journal.

“Whatever else happens in President Biden’s tenure, and no matter how long that tenure lasts, the events this week in Europe will ensure that his presidency is a consequential one,” the Post proclaimed.

Not a single Democratic member of Congress has criticized Biden’s pledge of endless resources for the war effort.

Despite the unending barrage of propaganda aimed at exciting public hated of Russia and China, the war in Ukraine is broadly unpopular.  In a YouGov poll published this week, 40 percent of respondents said the US should be “less militarily engaged in conflicts around the world,” compared with 12 percent who said it should be more engaged.

Asked what Biden’s top priority should be, 38 percent said the White House should seek to address the surging cost of living, compared with 8 percent who said the US should “ensure a defeat of Russia in Ukraine.”

Forty-six percent of respondents said they “oppose the United States military becoming directly involved in combat in the Russia-Ukraine war,” compared to just 23 percent who support such a move.

The American population has not forgotten the crimes carried out by American imperialism against the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and dozens of other countries subjected to US destabilization campaigns, proxy wars, and murderous economic sanctions.

Scottish National Party makes renewed right-wing independence pitch

Thomas Scripps

Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has published a draft bill for a second referendum on Scottish independence. It specifies October 19, 2023 as the date for the poll, defines the question to be put, “Should Scotland be an independent country?”, and outlines who can vote.

Since the power to legally call a referendum lies with the Conservative government in Westminster, which has ruled out doing so, Sturgeon has requested a ruling from the Supreme Court on whether the Scottish government can act unilaterally.

She told the Scottish parliament in Holyrood Tuesday that a defeat would prove, “No matter how Scotland votes, regardless of what future we desire for our country, the UK Government can block and overrule. The UK Government will always have the final say.” This would mean, Sturgeon continued, “if the law says that is not possible, the General Election [due 2024] will be a ‘de facto’ referendum.”

Sturgeon and the Scottish National Party (SNP) are orchestrating a reactionary stunt on behalf of a section of the bourgeoisie in Scotland.

Particularly under the brutal and boorish rule of Boris Johnson, there has undoubtedly been a growth in support for independence from the government in Westminster. The last Scottish independence referendum in 2014 delivered a 55 to 45 percent “No” vote. According to the latest Ipsos Mori poll, 51 percent are in favour.

But such polls only underscore the deeply divisive nature of an effort to make Scottish nationalism the dominant issue on both sides of the border.

With the working class throughout the UK coming into struggle against the Johnson government, and amid the NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, the pro-austerity, pro-war SNP advances a nationalist policy of divide and rule.

There is no progressive content to the call for Scottish independence. No one has ever seriously tried to explain how workers in Scotland are specifically oppressed over and above workers in England by British imperialism. The furthest the argument goes is that Scotland is forced to accept governments and policies it does not choose. But not voting for Johnson or his predecessors is something the bulk of the working class in Scotland share with their counterparts in England and Wales.

Moreover, the main issue of concern for the SNP is Scotland remaining within the European Union, not as a democratic issue but from the standpoint of the economic interests of the Scottish bourgeoisie and a privileged layer of the upper middle class. Speaking to Sky News this week, Sturgeon referred to Scotland voting 65 to 35 percent against Brexit and said, “Back then [2014], Scotland was told we would lose European Union membership if we voted for independence and now we are out of the European Union because we didn’t become independent—that’s happened against our will.”

The surprise victory of the Brexit campaign of the most right-wing elements of the Tory Party in the 2016 referendum—animated by fantasies of a global renewal of British imperialism through Thatcherite deregulation, a deepened alliance with US imperialism and the freedom to strike global trade relation—has undoubtedly acted as a spur to social reaction, trade and military war. But this was only one expression of the deepening of inter-imperialist and national antagonisms that have reached such malignant and deadly dimensions today.

The SNP’s anti-Brexit stance in 2014 was in fact shared by most of the British bourgeoisie, whose agenda was to pursue trade war from within the EU, not outside of it, and to spearhead a drive to war as Washington’s point man in Europe acting to police the independent global ambitions of Germany and France.

As has been proved by the savage austerity measures and attacks on democratic rights throughout the continent, and the lineup of all the EU powers behind the US-NATO war with Russia, both alternatives in the referendum on EU membership were then and are now hostile to the fundamental interests of the working class.

A Scotland freed from Westminster would be “independent” in name only. Home to just five and a half million people, it would be even more ruthlessly subordinated to international finance capital than it already is, with the SNP charged with enacting tax and spending cuts and scrapping regulations to make the region attractive for investment.

The SNP wants to regain membership of the EU while preserving access to the UK market. But the threatened collapse of the Northern Ireland Protocol amid an explosion of sectarian tensions is a warning of the political realities that national divisions create.

Economically, such a policy would facilitate a ferocious race to the bottom between Scotland and the UK, with attacks on workers of the kind already set out in the SNP’s spending review to 2027. According to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, “the axe is set to fall on a wide range of public service areas.” These include a savage 8 percent in real terms cut over the next four years for local government, universities, prisons and rural affairs. According to the Unison trade union, this will equate to around 40,000 job losses, with the public workforce reduced to pre-pandemic levels. Cuts on this scale made in England and Wales would be equivalent to 480,000 jobs—a perspective Johnson would happily embrace.

Public bodies are to find annual “efficiencies” of 3 percent. Even prior to the spending review, National Health Service workers were offered a well below-inflation 5 percent pay rise and local government workers a grindingly low 2 percent.

An independent Scotland would also remain a loyal member of the imperialist war camp. Sturgeon commented in May in reference to the war in Ukraine, “I’m even more firm in my view today that coupled with a strong relationship with the United Kingdom, membership of the European Union and NATO will be cornerstones of an independent Scotland’s security policy.”

Sturgeon is in addition offering her threadbare status as a politician seeking “national self-determination” to portray NATO’s imperialist war aims in Ukraine in a similar light, declaring with reference to the war, “At its heart the Scottish independence movement is an internationalist project.”

The SNP’s vestigial opposition to Trident nuclear submarines being based at the Faslane naval base near Glasgow would, like previous opposition to NATO, be swiftly jettisoned. Stewart McDonald, the SNP’s defence spokesperson, told the BBC regarding NATO, “We would join on similar terms of Norway or Denmark in that we don’t want to permanently host nuclear weapons from other states but we certainly would take our commitments as members of the alliance seriously.”

The operative word in McDonald’s statement is “permanently”. Phillips O’Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of Andrews told the Daily Express, “If it defined anti-nuclear as ‘at no time will nuclear weapons be allowed on a naval ship in Scottish waters’ then that indeed would probably make Scotland not eligible for NATO, but I don’t think they’re defining it that rigidly”.

Former SNP defence spokesperson and Lieutenant-Colonel in the British Army, now a Liberal Democrat, Stuart Crawford suggested in the same paper that the nuclear naval base, “might be the biggest bargaining chip Scotland might have in any possible future independence negotiations”.

Workers in an independent Scotland would confront the same political challenges as they do today but would do so while cut off from their class allies in the rest of the UK.

Striking rail workers picketing during the recent UK wide national rail strike at the Cowlairs maintenance depot in Springburn, north Glasgow, June 25, 2022 [Photo: WSWS]

A politically criminal role is being played by the pseudo-left in providing a left cover for the SNP and its scheming for a Scottish capitalist state.

Writing for the Scottish Socialist Party in the pro-independence National, Ritchie Venton claimed, “the subservient relationship with Westminster, and financial straitjacket under devolution, means that – like the Tories – the SNP/Green government is operating the same pay restraint.” Freed from such subservience, he insinuated, the SNP could honour a “people’s mandate to defy and defeat Tory cuts to pay, jobs and services.”

Ukraine bans import of Russian books and performances of Russian music

Sandy English

On June 19, the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada (parliament) approved by wide margins two reactionary bills that censor Russian literature and musical performances and increase the amount of Ukrainian sung and spoken on the radio. A third law seeks to promote publication of content in the Ukrainian language, which will be used by the Ukrainian national-chauvinists to suppress Russian as a language.

Law 7273-D prohibits the “public performance, display, demonstration,” including music videos, of any Russian citizen. Russian artists are allowed to perform in Ukraine only if they have opposed the invasion of the country, presumably publicly, and are on a supervised, government-managed list.

The passage of the new measures follows in the wake of the widespread acts of censorship by orchestras and classical music competitions around the world to prevent Russian artists—regardless of their political views—from performing.

The list of such actions includes the banning of conductor Tugan Sokhiev by the New York Philharmonic; the cancellation of performances by pianist Alexander Malofeev in Vancouver and Montreal in March; and the firing of Russian conductor Valery Gergiev from the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra. The list of shame also includes the decision of the Sibelius Violin Competition to expel Russian competitors in April, and the banning of Alexander Boldachev from the Dutch Harp Festival in May.

Popular music performers have also been caught up in the anti-Russian campaign such as Russian DJ and performer Nina Kraviz, excluded from the Movement Music Festival in Detroit, the Crave in The Hague, the Netherlands and PollerWiesen in Dortmund, Germany.

Ukrainian Rada

The mainstream media in the West has largely expressed approval of the draconian Ukrainian censorship, whose implementation nearly anywhere else in the world would provoke cries of outrage. The BBC, for example, noted that Law 7273-D would supposedly “minimise the risks of possible hostile propaganda through music in Ukraine and will increase the volume of national music products in the cultural space.”

Another part of the new law seeks to increase the amount of Ukrainian on the airwaves. Forty percent of the songs and 75 percent of the daily volume of news, analysis and entertainment programming on the radio must be in Ukrainian. This is an increase from the quotas made in a 2016 law.

A 2019 law had already made Ukrainian the only official “state language.” Nearly one third of the population of Ukraine speaks Russian as a first language and there are minorities speaking Bulgarian, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Tartar and Karaite, as well as other languages.

If Russian culture in the spoken word must go, so must Russian on the printed page. Law 7459 bans the “import and distribution in Ukraine of publishing products” from the Russian Federation and forbids printed material “issued in the language of the aggressor state” (i.e., Russian) from being imported from other countries. The German media reports that some Russian classics are to be exempted from the ban, including works by Tolstoy and Pushkin. Also reported, unsurprisingly, has been opposition to the ban from readers in Ukraine.

The crackdown is a continuation of the attempt by the Ukrainian regime at “ethno-cultural cleansing” of Russian literature, of any period or political persuasion. This effort includes the proposals by and actions of the Ukrainian Book Institute (UBI), a division of the Ministry of Culture. A spokesperson for the UBI recently called works by authors such as Pushkin and Dostoyevsky “really very harmful literature” and suggested they be removed from public and school libraries.

Deutsche Welle reports that a Ukrainian “Education Ministry working group has already advised striking some 40 Russian or Soviet authors and poets—among them Leo Tolstoy, Alexander Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Michail [sic] Bulgakov—from school curricula.”

Law 7459 is complemented by Law 6287 which seeks the development “of the Ukrainian book market as an important factor in … national security.” The law provides subsides for bookstores that do not sell Russian books and provides citizens with certificates to purchase Ukrainian books.

The Ukrainian Minister of Culture, Oleksandr Tkachenko, welcomed the restrictions, saying, “The laws are designed to help Ukrainian authors share quality content with the widest possible audience, which after the Russian invasion do not accept any Russian creative product on a physical level.”

The laws must be signed by President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is expected to do so.

These actions are further proof that the United States and NATO are not defending a democratic regime but a chauvinist and nationalist one that resorts to every measure to suppress non-Ukrainian “identity.”

While the Russian invasion is reactionary, it is being used by the Ukrainian far right, which dominates the Ukrainian government, to accelerate the program of ethnic exclusivism that it has hungered after for decades. It is a part of the increasingly anti-democratic measures taken by the regime recently. Earlier this month, a Ukrainian court upheld the banning by Zelensky of 11 opposition parties, including the largest, the Opposition Platform—For Life party.

The escalating of the US-NATO proxy war against Russia has been accompanied by an all-out assault on democratic rights in the imperialist countries as well. In the United States, the dismantling of abortion laws and the degradation of the separation of church and state by rulings of the Supreme Court are high watermarks in this reactionary wave. For months now the far right in the Republican Party has been attempting to remove books and films from school libraries that deal with issues of race and sexuality. All of these acts should be understood in a global context in which capitalism is not only incompatible with democracy, but with even the minimally free development of culture.

COVID-19 infections rising in Turkey as scientists warn of a new surge

Ozan Özgür

As capitalist governments all over the world except China have lifted measures against the transmission of COVID-19 and declared the pandemic over, the Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants are rapidly spreading and becoming dominant internationally.

Official figures show that the COVID-19 pandemic is on the rise again in Turkey, where the Health Ministry has also recently confirmed the first official case of monkeypox. According to COVID-19 data released by the Health Ministry on a delayed and weekly basis since June, 7,556 people tested positive in the week of June 6-12, 10,954 in the week of June 13-19, and 26,635 in the week of June 20-26. This represents a more than three-fold increase in three weeks.

Doctors of the Istanbul Medical Chamber stand in homage to Dr. M. Mustafa Kartal who died of COVID-19, December 11, 2020, Istanbul. [Photo by Istanbul Medical Chamber]

While the lifting of the mask mandate on public transportation in May was based on the unscientific claim that the number of cases was below 1,000 for three consecutive days, it is not explained why this measure has not been reinstated, as the seven-day average of daily new cases is now almost 4,000 per day.

The significant increase in the official case figures is taking place despite the lack of widespread testing and must be taken as a serious warning by the working population. Moreover, the Ministry of Health has not disclosed the number of daily tests performed for some time, which prevents a full understanding of the seriousness of the situation. In Turkey, a country of 85 million people, the last time figures were released showed that the number of daily tests was as low as 100,000.

Since March 11, 2020, when the first COVID-19 case was detected in Turkey, the number of official infections has reached 15.1 million, while over 99,000 people have died. However, there are various studies suggesting that the real death toll is at least three times higher than the official figure and that many millions more people have been infected.

The Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) did not release the “Death and Cause of Death Statistics” for 2020, 2021 and 2022, which should have been released on June 24 according to the National Data Release Calendar. According to calculations made by Güçlü Yaman, a member of the Turkish Medical Association (TTB) Pandemic Working Group, however, the excess deaths during the pandemic have reached 288,000.

Making clear that no public health measures will be implemented by the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca recently stated, “It is important for those at risk to pay attention to personal precautions. Although the number of cases has more than tripled in the last two weeks, in contrast, the hospital load continues to decrease. The bad days are behind us.”

From the outset, the Erdoğan government, like its counterparts around the world, has acted not according to public health experts and scientists, but according to the profit interests of the ruling class. Treasury and Finance Minister Nureddin Nebati recently summarized the “system” that has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and tens of millions of people being infected, as well as the relentless exploitation of the working class, stating, “Producers and exporters profit from this system, except for low-income people. The wheels are turning.”

The share of corporations in national income has risen from 42.9 to 47 percent in the last two years of the pandemic, while the total wealth of Turkey’s millionaires has reached 3.9 trillion Turkish liras. In contrast, 90 percent of the population consisting of the working class and lower-middle class live below the poverty line and are getting poorer.

The official annual inflation rate is now over 70 percent, as the cost of living is skyrocketing. However, the Inflation Research Group (ENAG), an independent agency, calculates that real annual inflation is already over 160 percent.

Amid the Erdoğan government’s policy of mass infection and death, scientists and public health experts warn that the Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants have unleashed a new wave of infection and death on a global scale. On June 21, Professor Mehmet Ceyhan from Hacettepe University in Ankara pointed out that there has been an increase in applications to hospitals due to COVID-19, underlining that the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants of Omicron are transmitted very quickly.

He added, “We are not aware of the increase in cases because the conditions for testing in Turkey have been made very difficult. There is no budget for pandemics anymore. The pandemic is being treated as if it does not exist.”

Dr. Esin Davutoğlu Şenol, an infectious diseases specialist, said, “There is an increase in the number of deaths in the world. There is an uptrend due to new variants. ... Masks should be mandatory in public transportation vehicles and closed areas.” She also drew attention to the decline in immunity provided by vaccination to the new Omicron subvariants.

Dr. İftihar Köksal, an infectious diseases and microbiology specialist, commented on why the government has stopped announcing the number of infections, stating, “Cases and hospitalizations are increasing. Since the [Health] Ministry lifted the restrictions and did not make any announcement, citizens think that COVID is over. But it is not over and there is a significant increase in cases.”

Dr. Meral Sönmezoğlu from Yeditepe University Hospitals Infectious Diseases and Clinical Microbiology added, “People are getting tested less. People who come with complaints such as respiratory tract infections and fever are all COVID.” She added, “When we look at the [daily case] numbers, it reached the numbers in January and February. It was too hasty to abolish the mask mandate in closed areas.” This mandate was removed at the end of April.

Dr. Sönmezoğlu concluded, “The World Health Organization (WHO) decided on the pandemic. WHO did not [stop calling it] a pandemic, but our country accepted the pandemic is over. There are cases in the world. Indonesia and Turkey do not report cases to WHO. Because tourism is the only income expectation.”

Alongside the danger of a new surge, complaints of Long COVID symptoms are on the rise. Studies, especially in the US, estimate that Long COVID or Post Acute Coronavirus Syndrome (PACS) affects nearly 10-30 percent of those infected. Symptoms can include abnormal heart rhythms, muscle and joint pains, kidney failure, blood clot disorders, stroke, diabetes, anxiety and other neurological and mental health dysfunction.

On June 20, a Twitter user named Anıl İlerigider, who lives in Germany and presents himself as a biotechnologist, wrote: “My coworker who was infected with #Omicron (most likely BA.4/5) at the beginning of June with 3 doses of vaccine suddenly started losing his/her hair. Followed by terrible headache & toothache, gum recession and inflammation, his/her two teeth fell out. My coworker was devastated.” He then asked, “Have any of you been similarly sick?” and received many responses.

One response states, “I am 57 years old, I had COVID in March and now I have what you wrote and high blood pressure.” Another user wrote, “I was infected at the beginning of the pandemic. I did not recover for three months. I still have pain in my eyes and some visual impairment.” A third noted, “I was tested positive while I was vaccinated with two doses. I had brain fog and a noticeable decrease in my perception.”

Another commenter wrote, “My tooth enamel became thinner and 2-3 of my teeth were broken.” A fifth person added, “I was vaccinated with three doses when I was infected with COVID in mid-February. It was mild, but lung damage remained. Hair loss, forgetfulness and distraction are very high (even now).”

Latest COVID-19 surge deepens across Europe and globally, fueled by Omicron BA.4 and BA.5

Benjamin Mateus

At a press conference Wednesday, amid the latest global surge of COVID-19 infections, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus cautioned that “our ability to track the virus is under threat as reporting and genomic sequences are declining, meaning it is harder to track Omicron and analyze future emerging threats.” This warning was issued as the highly infectious and immune-resistant Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants have become dominant globally and account for 55 percent of all international samples.

According to Our World in Data, the global seven-day rolling average of daily new cases is approaching 750,000, almost 60 percent above the lows seen in the first week of June. Cases are rising in four of six WHO regions of the globe—Europe, the Americas (including 24.6 percent in South America), Southeast Asia and Eastern Mediterranean, with Europe seeing the fastest growth in this period.

In the week ending June 20, 4.5 million new cases were officially registered, a 23 percent rise from the previous week. COVID-19 deaths for the same week rose by over 9,000, a more than 8 percent increase and the first substantial jump since the peaks in early February.

The new surge in cases must be viewed in the context of the systemic and near-universal dismantling of all COVID-19 surveillance and data reporting, meaning that these figures represent significant undercounts. In every country where COVID-19 infections are surging, test positivity rates are also soaring. In mid-June, more than 41 percent of all COVID-19 tests in Germany were positive, while in France that figure is over 22 percent. Similar skyrocketing test positivity rates can be seen across Europe.

[Photo by Our World in Data / CC BY 4.0]

Another more accurate measurement of the real spread of the virus, wastewater sampling, shows record levels of viral transmission in Madrid, Spain. This takes place as official cases are less than a quarter of the record set in mid-January 2022.

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The surge is expected to deepen in the coming weeks and persist throughout the summer, as tourist season is in full swing. Speaking with Agence France-Presse (AFP), WHO Europe Regional Director Dr. Hans Kluge stated this week, “As countries across the European region have lifted the social measures that were previously in place, the virus will transmit at high levels over the summer. This virus won’t go away just because countries stop looking for it. It’s still spreading, it’s still changing, and it’s still taking lives.”

These comments are an about-face for Kluge, who welcomed the first Omicron wave in January as a supposed harbinger of permanent immunity for the population. On January 24, 2022, he said, “It’s plausible that the region is moving towards a kind of pandemic endgame. We anticipate that there will be a period of quiet before COVID-19 may come back towards the end of the year but not necessarily the pandemic coming back.”

The 53 countries representing the WHO European region are now averaging nearly 500,000 official daily new cases, accounting for a significant majority of current global infections, up from 150,000 daily infections in late May. Austria, Cyprus, France, Germany, Greece, Luxembourg and Portugal have recently seen the highest case rates. Weekly deaths from COVID-19 across Europe now stand at roughly 2,500, comparable to figures registered in the summer of 2020 before vaccines were available.

The current developments in Greece starkly exemplify what is unfolding across Europe and will soon transpire in every other country that has allowed the virus to spread uncontrolled. Last Monday, the National Organization for Public Health (EODY) reported nearly 7,700 COVID-19 cases, double the daily cases seen at the beginning of June. The next day, EODY said cases had exploded with more than 20,000 infections, with the seven-day rolling average reaching over 13,000. Of these, approximately 15 percent represent reinfections.

The EODY also noted that there were 16 more COVID-related deaths, with 95 patients in intensive care units. These are mostly the elderly over 70, and many have multiple underlying medical conditions predisposing them to severe manifestations. The trend in deaths across Greece is climbing once again, even though more than 71 percent of the population is fully vaccinated. The elderly and debilitated will suffer most from these surges and reinfections, as their waning immunity to the virus places them at greater risk than other demographics.

Similarly, the United Kingdom is experiencing another wave of infections and hospitalizations. Official new cases are up 34 percent from the prior week. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), one in 30 people is now infected with COVID-19. Their data estimates that around 1.8 million people were infected despite 98 percent of the population having antibodies either from previous vaccination or infection. Scotland has been hit the hardest in the current surge.

The seven-day average of people hospitalized for COVID in the UK has reached close to 7,400, a 45 percent increase over the lows reached in early June. The current trend in admissions will soon approach the highs seen during the Delta wave.

Virologist Dr. Stephen Griffin, an associate medical professor at Leeds University, told the Financial Times, “Vaccines reduce severe disease, and waves such as this do not cause the same spikes in hospitalizations as we saw, for example, with the Alpha variants. However, the constant bombardment of waves we are seeing does cause a clinical impact that is not to be underestimated.”

Indeed, the clinical impact of Long COVID, or post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC), is mounting with each new wave of infections. This will have untold consequences on the population’s overall health as the complex interaction between the virus and the various organ systems, including the brain and neurological systems, will accumulate.

The repeated mantra that the coronavirus only causes mild disease is increasingly belied by objective reality, in which mass infections and long-term debilitation have profoundly destabilized the global economy and led to mounting labor shortages internationally. The most visible manifestation of this at present is the huge number of flight cancellations due to staffing shortages at airports and airlines. The aviation consultancy Cirium reported that June, the start of summer season in Europe, saw 7,870 flights canceled for departures from the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain alone.

In the US, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced Wednesday that BA.4 (15.7 percent) and BA.5 (36.6 percent) now dominate all other variants across the country. This will likely cause another surge of infections in the coming weeks, as the seven-day average of daily new cases has plateaued at just over 100,000. The positivity rate in the US has reached nearly 14 percent, while since mid-April hospitalizations have more than doubled to 33,600 admissions on average. Over the past two weeks, COVID-19-related deaths have risen by nearly 50 percent to 380 per day, while estimates of daily excess deaths attributable to the pandemic now stand at 660 per day in the US.

On Tuesday, an expert committee advised the FDA that COVID-19 booster shots should be updated to reflect the circulating subvariants. As the New York Times carefully said, “The panel’s vote paves the way for the FDA to push manufacturers to make reformulated boosters in time for the Biden administration to offer them later this year, before an expected winter surge,” which coincides with the mid-term elections.

Moderna executives told the FDA panel that the vaccine manufacturer would not be able to produce Omicron-specific vaccines until late October or early November, while Pfizer pledges to have such vaccines ready by early October. FDA regulators shared their concerns that by the time such a vaccine specifically tailored to BA.4 and BA.5 is developed, it would already be outdated. This underscores the fact that chasing the virus through a vaccine-only strategy is a futile game.

Infectious disease specialist Dr. Mark Sawyer from the UC San Diego School of Medicine told the Times, “We’re all troubled by the steady erosion of immune protection. We’re going to be behind the eight ball if we wait longer.” He added that “right now the critical thing is the manufacturers need to know what to put into their vaccine. Over the coming months, I think we’ll get a sense, and there’ll be plenty of time for debate over who is most appropriate for boosters.”

However, potential BA.4/BA.5-specific boosters and next generation therapies require funding for the Biden administration to bid with suppliers. White House COVID-19 response coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha said on Wednesday, “There are new generations of treatments that are coming online, companies that are making them with some very promising data. [However,] the US government and no one in the US is negotiating with these companies for these treatments because we don’t have the resources.” Yet, there are ample resources to fund the US-NATO proxy in Ukraine against nuclear-armed Russia, and as President Joe Biden reiterated Thursday, to do so for “as long as it takes.”

Additionally, funding and research into pan-coronavirus and intranasal vaccines are urgently needed. However, these must be coordinated through a strategy that also ensures non-pharmaceutical measures are taken to end the perpetual community transmission of the virus and prevent the development of newer coronavirus strains. These treatments must be prioritized for healthcare workers and patients at long-term care facilities, the elderly, and essential workers, while infrastructure for air quality and ventilation needs to be urgently undertaken.