Britain

Liverpool arms fair a festival of death: Socialist Alternative joins protests

September 17, 2021

Jack Yarlett
NI rise neither brave nor bold – fully fund social care and make the rich pay

September 10, 2021

Kevin Corran, Unison Steward (Personal Capacity)
Back to school: fight to make our classrooms Covid safe

September 6, 2021

Socialist Alternative
9/11 terror – 20 years on, imperialism’s bloody cycle continues

August 31, 2021

Jason Toynbee, UCU Open University (personal capacity) and Brighton Socialist Alternative
Letter: Hotel hell – safe and decent housing for refugees now!

Louise Lewis
Nurses speak out: ‘only joint union action and public support can see us through now

August 26, 2021

Socialist Alternative

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UPCOMING EVENTS

Liverpool arms fair a festival of death: Socialist Alternative joins protests

Merseyside Socialist Alternative took part in a demonstration against the AOC arms fair on Saturday. The fair is happening at the Liverpool ACC in October. Weapons manufacturers will be using the space to hold a celebration of the arms industry that profits from warfare, death, and destruction.

Protests building

The demonstration was a successful and inspiring event, with thousands of people marching from Princes Park to St George’s Hall where they listened to speeches from speakers including Jeremy Corbyn and Ken Loach. Our members have been involved in organising and building this event for some time.

Liverpool City Council has stated that they have no authority to prevent the event from going ahead, although there are reports that councillors who voted against condemning the arms fair attended the demo for the sake of photo ops. The council is also continuing to uphold the dispersal zone along the waterfront introduced during the summer, most likely to ward off attempts at holding protests outside the venue.

Boycott

But there is popular opposition to the arms fair that can be mobilised to put a stop to it. Socialist Alternative is campaigning against the event and those facilitating it – including supporting calls for a boycott of the venue hosting it. This has already seen the band Massive Attack cancel a gig that was due to be held there. We will be joining a boycott of the venue being used at the university freshers fair later this month. Along with other student societies, we will be setting up our stalls outside the venue rather than using the facilities and taking the opportunity to build opposition to the arms fair.

Many are also critical of Unite the Union using the ACC as a venue for their upcoming national conference for as long as the arms fair is scheduled to go ahead there.

Not jobs vs peace

Right-wingers in the trade union leadership may defend the arms industry on the grounds that it creates jobs, but we should not be fooled by this false choice between jobs and peace. For real, socially useful job creation, these industries, along with the banks, should be nationalised under democratic control. This way their factories could be re-tooled and workers’ skills developed so that they could produce technologies to help avert the climate disaster, for example – not make instruments of destruction and death.

If this momentum is maintained and built on in order to mobilise further protests that disrupt the event, even if it means defying the dispersal zone around the venue, this celebration of war profiteering can be stopped.
NI rise neither brave nor bold – fully fund social care and make the rich pay

The recent decision by the Tory government to increase National Insurance (NI) by 1.25% is allegedly to deal with the crisis in social care. The move has been described by some in the mainstream media as “brave and bold”. But the reality is somewhat different. The main impact of these measures will be to tax workers. Meanwhile the transfer of public wealth into the coffers of the already rich owners of private companies will continue. The Tories are, in a new way, attempting to make workers pay for a crisis not of their making.

This measure will not come close to providing the NHS with adequate funding. Nor will it deal with the deep, serious and prolonged problems in social care. All governments over the last 40 years have implemented the neoliberal rule book in this sector, to devastating effect. This is true both for workers and for those they care for. The policies of privatisation and cuts have stripped care workers of the skills, time and opportunity to do their valuable job with dignity for themselves and their clients. So, as the care home-owner looks at getting another new car, we are left to lend money to colleagues for bus fare to do their job. These are some of the most caring and committed people that I’ve had the privilege to work with. But the conditions they toil under are oppressive and disgusting.

Care costs

The result is that elderly, sick and disabled people are left with what is all-too-often inadequate care with an enormous price tag. The total cost of care for someone living with dementia can be as much as £500,000, for example. But currently, anyone with assets worth over £24,000 must fund care themselves.

This tax increase will hit all workers hard – especially the low paid. It will add insult to injury to the NHS staff already outraged by a 3% pay offer. Social care workers who, particularly in the private sector, often work for minimum wage, will also be worse off. At the same time, UK billionaires have increased their wealth by over £106 billion during the pandemic. An immediate wealth tax levied on this ‘Covid capital’ could generate more than eight times one year’s estimated revenue from the NI rise. That’s without touching the eye watering sums this super-rich few accumulated pre-pandemic.

Dignity

Meanwhile, there is nothing in this legislation that deals with the lack of dignity in social care for workers and clients. Some of the most vulnerable people in this country are cared for by some of the most exploited workers. This is the true nature of the crisis in social care, and this tax only adds to the misery.

Within the detail of this legislation, we discover more of the government’s motives. The NI increase is expected to raise £36 billion over three years, with only £5.4 billion going “towards changes to the social care system”. Care workers will pay 13.25% from their meagre wages, yet care home-owners will only pay 3.25% on income over £50,000.

There could be £30 billion earmarked for the NHS, to help deal with the record backlog of operations and appointments, caused by decades of underfunding and accentuated by the pandemic. The private health companies will be lining up to get access to these contracts from their Tory chums, as they did with the billions of public money trousered by their friends, family and backers during the “track & trace” scandals. These plans will not provide anywhere near enough funds to deal with the backlog of work in the NHS.

NI rise unfair

The extra money going into social care, inadequate and insulting as it is, will go nowhere near to dealing with the real crisis – which itself directly impacts on the ability of the NHS to function. To the problems of endemic low pay, decades of privatisation and low morale, this is a feeble response. It provides no solution for the millions of people who currently require care, nor for the millions more who will do in the future. Instead, the overwhelming cost burden will continue to be placed on individuals and their families.

Social care is drifting into a dystopian nightmare where the bosses squeeze every penny out of their staff, as they battle to give dignified care to our elderly, disabled and vulnerable people, and at the same time try to have a dignified existence at work and at home. At the same time, while the Tories’ plan to lift the assets cap (above which the individual becomes personally responsible for their care costs) from £24,000 to £86,000 represents a small improvement, it still means millions will face having to sell their homes should they succumb to long-term illness.

Local government has been under attack for decades by the agenda of privatisation and austerity. Many Local Authorities are near bankruptcy, but these plans saddle them with responsibility for meeting the extra costs of social care created by lifting the asset cap, without properly restoring council funding.

Solution needed

The enormity of the crisis means that we must fight for a brave and bold solution. Health and Social Care union leaders have called for the government to: “fund the sector properly, deliver for low-paid staff and take the profit out of caring”. These are important demands. But what we need is a comprehensive care system which provides social care, free at the point of use, to all who need it. Such a system would require a massive increase in funding, with care workers paid a decent wage and all privatised care services brought back in-house.

This would be easily affordable if the search for funding started at the top of society, not the bottom. NI is already an unfair form of taxation, in which the rate increases more slowly for those earning more than £50,000 a year. Yet Labour’s new Blairite leadership refuses to support even the basic principle that it should be the rich who are asked to pay more tax. Being prepared to challenge an economic system in which a tiny minority own and control vast swathes of the economy is utterly out of the question for them. This only shows that Starmer is leader of the ‘opposition’ in name only. The real opposition to this government of the rich must be built by working-class and young people.

Build a real opposition

We need co-ordinated union action by the health and social care unions, including Unison and Unite. This should be organised on pay, but also on the future of these vital services. Determined action such as this could act to channel the anger of working-class people across the country. Bold leadership in these unions, with rank-and-file activists organising within their workplaces and communities, can challenge this weak government. The Tories have presided over tens of thousands of preventable deaths due to Covid-19. They have failed to prevent the NHS facing catastrophic shortages of equipment and personnel. Their austerity and privatisation have driven the social care sector into a disastrous crisis. Now we must build a movement to challenge them. The brewing anger and discontent of keyworkers can be a vital part of the powerful force that pushes the Tories out.

We say:

· Take the wealth out of the hands of the billionaires – not working class people – to fund mass investment in social care.

· End and reverse privatisation! Bring social care, along with all outsourced health and care services back into public ownership, under democratic control and management of working class people.

· Take the banks and big business into democratic public ownership so that the enormous wealth hoarded by the capitalist class can be invested where it is really needed.

· For a socialist society that puts people’s need, including health and social care, before profits of the capitalist class

Image credit: Creative Commons
Back to school: fight to make our classrooms Covid safe

For many, the relaxation of the government’s Covid safety guidelines on 16 August was met with a mixture of relief and trepidation. There was relief that we could once again meet with loved ones, go out with friends, and return to some semblance of normality. But there was also trepidation that the government had gone too far and too fast in junking safety measures. And with schools now set to reopen across England, Wales and Northern Ireland (schools in Scotland have already been back for two weeks), education workers like myself are all too familiar with this troubling dissonance. In fact, thanks to the ‘Leicester Fortnight’, Students and education workers in my area were back to school in the week beginning 23 August… and I can already say that many of my concerns have been borne out.

Last Tuesday, the Guardian published a short article which interviewed six teachers about how they felt about returning to school. The views differed, of course, but the majority expressed serious concerns about workplace safety. One teacher stated: “I couldn’t believe it when students were told they no longer had to wear masks. The whole system is a farce. I’d be very surprised if this is a school year that is ‘normal’ again. Too many [Covid] cases, too few measures.” The report from a teacher at a school in Scotland, which like in Leicester has already returned, is prescient: “Nearly 200 pupils [in his school] are already off due to Covid”. Indeed, Scotland has seen a surge of covid cases over the last two weeks, for now stabilising at around 6,000 daily infections – the highest ever – even though many restrictions remain in place!

School outbreaks

Part of the problem with managing covid in our schools has to do with years of underinvestment in education infrastructure, as well as the pernicious role of privatisation (academisation). But it also has to do with the way that covid cases have been identified up until now. Current research around the Covid virus is that transmission takes place mainly via airborne particles. This means that the small, oversubscribed classrooms, typical of the UK state schooling system, have acted as effective breeding grounds for the virus. This was clearly understood by education stewards and workers in the earlier stages of the pandemic and was consistently affirmed by medical professionals. The Department for Education’s (DfE) recent (and inadequate) decision to spend £25million on 300,000 CO2 monitors to alert staff and students if CO2 levels rise, meaning that fresh air is failing to circulate, is a recognition of this. The fact that they have failed to complete even these minor adjustments before schools have returned demonstrates a cavalier attitude toward the wellbeing of education workers and children.

However, it is a reality which many local authorities and school leaders continue to deny. Gripped by a surging second wave, back in March this year Martin Samuels, Leicester city council’s strategic director of social care and education, persistently took to the press to deny that schools could be vectors of transmission, instead blaming parents for irresponsible behaviour at the school gates. On 31 July, the Times ran an article headlined ‘Study shows schools do not spread Covid’ (based on the following research: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01826-x).

The evidence for such assertions is the ostensibly small number of ‘outbreaks’ we have previously seen in schools. But this evidence is based on flawed testing guidelines. Before the government guidelines were updated on Monday August 16, staff and students exposed to a positive case were required to self-isolate without getting a PCR test. The consequence of this has been to obfuscate any outbreaks in schools, making it appear like all infections were coming from the community. With testing now becoming more widely used (in order to keep staff and students in schools), we may yet see dramatic evidence of mass school outbreaks.

Tory cowardice

The government is now fully committed to avoiding any further lockdowns come what may (‘let the bodies pile high’, Boris Johnson said) — and they have done this in the most cowardly fashion possible… by passing responsibility for safety measures onto anyone but themselves. As a BBC report states: “In many ways, the responsibility has been handed over to head teachers to decide what common-sense measures are needed.” Some school leaders will decide to keep some of the safety measures, such as one-way systems and limitations on mixing. Some school leaders, no doubt seeing rumblings from below, are taking a tougher approach than that suggested by the government. Others may see this as an opportunity to return to normal. But most likely, school leaders will look to Local Authorities and Public Health England (PHE) for guidance. This is the case in Leicester where the Local Authority has issued a series of guidelines for schools and PHE continues to work closely with all involved.

But workers cannot rely on Local Authorities or quangos like PHE to look after their interests – it is critical that education unions step in to fill this vacuum with policies that foreground the safety and wellbeing of staff and students. Of course, fears about the tremendous educational and social damage done by confining children to their home for long periods of time are real. No one wants to return to another lockdown, least of all education workers. But if we are to avoid further damaging restrictions, it is imperative that any steps toward lifting safety measures are careful and not rushed. By contrast, in areas where schools have already reopened, the approach has been complete chaos. This unfortunate situation has been allowed to develop because, so far, the unions have failed to intervene with a sufficiently bold approach. Appeals by education union leaders for the government to see sense are not enough. Words need to be backed by action to force their hand and to enable organised workers to take control over safety measures.

Safety is not the only problem either. Concerns about workload also need to be urgently addressed. As one education worker in the Wirral explained, “I feel tired just thinking about returning to work.” She continues: “Some of the usual demands of the job were minimised due to covid restrictions, such as fewer long reports to write; now they will be reinstated along with covid considerations.” Many education workers have also found that since teaching remotely there are now fewer boundaries between work and life, with parents more frequently in contact. All of this with no pay-rise!?

Who is still at risk?

The vaccine is a huge benefit to us all, but it is not a silver bullet. The main risks may not now be covid deaths (although this remains a serious concern) or even the dreaded ‘long covid’, but the NHS being completely overwhelmed by covid related admissions, and people being denied critical care because of a lack of capacity. We have already seen multiple Trusts announce ‘Opel 4’ Black Alerts, meaning that hospitals are “unable to deliver comprehensive care” and patient safety is at risk, over recent months. Typically, Black Alerts – which to be clear should never happen, let alone become the norm as they have under the Tories – are most associated with the darkest months of Winter. Spiralling infection rates in our schools could severely exacerbate this crisis, especially when flu season begins.

Too often, the health and wellbeing of education workers and students is discussed as if it is somehow separate from that of NHS workers. Nothing could be further from the truth. The NHS is the biggest employer in the country. It is made up of the parents, the siblings, the relatives and the friends of education workers and students. We all depend on it when we are unwell. When the NHS is in crisis it hurts all of us. So, when we talk about protecting the health and wellbeing NHS workers, we are simultaneously talking about the conditions of education workers and students. They are bound together by so many threads. The fight for safety in our schools is also, therefore, a fight for the future of our NHS! This is just one of the reasons why it is so important to get the school reopening right and why it is so troubling that the government, once again, are about to get it so wrong!

We say:
- Make school safe – for democratic control by education workers, students and communities over the measures necessary to keep classrooms Covid safe
- Trade union action now – the leadership of the main education unions, including NEU and Unison, need to step up and back up strong words with well-organised and coordinated action by workers
- Invest in our schools and stop the cuts – let’s put an end to crammed classrooms and properly support the Covid generation
- No to academisation and privatisation – bring all schools back under local-authority control now
Image: AugusteBlanqui, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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