Socialist Alternative

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)
Climate Change and Socialist Struggle: New pamphlet out now!

September 8, 2021

Tom Costello
UCU special congress – the fight for Higher Education must continue!

Socialist Alternative members in UCU
May 1968: A revolutionary opportunity wasted

September 7, 2021

Bob Sulatycki
Abortion Rights Slashed in Texas: Free, Safe, and Legal Abortion Now!

September 6, 2021

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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
Climate Change and Socialist Struggle: New pamphlet out now!

We publish below the introduction to the latest publication from Student Socialist Alternative – “Climate Change and Socialist Struggle”. To order your copy today, click here!

36 pages, £2/£3 solidarity price + postage.

Student Socialist Alternative has produced this pamphlet to coincide with the mass mobilisations around November’s COP26 UN Climate Change Summit. From 31 Oct – 12 Nov, Glasgow’s luxury hotels will be booked out to make way for thousands of government representatives eager to whitewash capitalism’s role in driving the world towards climate catastrophe.

The city will become home to a crowd of NGOs, capitalist politicians and ‘green’ businesspeople looking to appear like they are taking action on climate change. As of now, capitalist governments across Europe and elsewhere have used this year post-Covid to sell their ‘green’ credentials to prevent the increased threat of direct action from below by a new generation of young people and workers who are ready to do whatever it takes to ensure we can have a sustainable future on this planet.

Whatever promises the Tories and their counterparts make will be far from enough. While they maintain their fraudulent pledge to ‘build back greener’ in the aftermath of the pandemic, a widespread network of connections continues to exist between this government and fossil fuel industry interests that brazenly choose to prioritise their profits over human and animal lives. After all, the ruling class can always fly by private jet to the safer corners of the world while the poorest and most oppressed of the world face the consequences of their actions.

This finds its worst and deadliest expression in the ranks of the Tory Party. Ruling class ignorance and disregard for the lives of ordinary people were seen on full display just the other week when Viscount Ridley, a multi-millionaire high ranking Tory member of the House of Lords penned an article in The Times arguing that climate change would be beneficial by making the world warmer and thus nicer to live in.

Less blatantly ignorant but just as murderous is the argument from a collection of right-wing Tory MPs who have taken to dismissing net zero carbon emissions as a “fantasy”. Although these deadly forms of climate denial must be exposed, even the ‘mainstream’ Tory position is steeped in climate denialism. The misnamed Conservative Environmentalist Network itself, for instance, argues in favour of paying off giant corporations to achieve ‘net zero by 2050’ – long after we will have passed many catastrophic tipping points.

But nor does the approach of the likes of Starmer’s Labour and the SNP provide anything in the way of an alternative. While capitalism drives the most defining crisis for humanity and animal species in history, Starmer remains concerned solely with eliminating any last traces he can of socialists from the party, including by walking back on even the modest climate pledges of the Corbyn era.

Meanwhile, the SNP, headed by Sturgeon, while talking morally on Twitter about how “all that matters is that COP26 delivers an outcome to meet the Paris Agreement of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees’ (the window for which will soon be gone and will not prevent a huge amount of already “baked in” climate destruction!), has often acted in much of the same way as any other corrupt big business party.

The SNP in government in Scotland has instead repeatedly refused to implement programmes of public ownership and nationalisation of the energy sector to provide alternative green and high quality employment for workers in North Sea oil and gas, instead promising it will do all it can to prop up polluting industries. The Scottish Greens have recently entered into government with the SNP, but their programme, which refuses to tackle capitalist interests head-on, means the underlying system responsible for this crisis will remain untouched. The Greens’ involvement will unfortunately not mark a serious departure from the SNP’s current course.

All of this highlights more urgently than ever that we need an alternative – one based in struggle against big business interests, one that roots itself in the fight for a society based on meeting the needs of people and the planet, not profit.

This is why the International Socialist Alternative – a revolutionary organisation based in over 30 countries on all continents is making COP26 its chance to raise the need for a bold programme for socialist change.

If you read this and agree with what we have to say, join us in the struggle today, for a socialist world, free of oppression, poverty and environmental destruction! Join Student Socialist Alternative!

Order your copy today here.

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