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Recent Covid data has underlined the alarming state of social care in the UK. Yet the biggest union of social care workers, Unison, has responded by allying with the very people overseeing this dire situation.

Not that far off a quarter of the UK’s virus-connected deaths so far, over 26,000, have been in care homes. That includes over 7,000 this year.

Since this article was written on 1 March the military has escalated its crackdown, killing and injuring dozens of protesters. More soon. See here for regular updates.

In the last days of February Myanmar’s military regime killed at least 18 people and injured dozens more, using live bullets, stun grenades and tear gas against striking workers and protesters.

On 6 February, the Chicago Teachers’ Union (CTU) issued a “framework... relating to resumption of in-person instruction” to its membership, and their vote to ratify was reported on 10 February.

That framework included familiar features. Every CPS (Chicago Public Schools) facility must have sufficient hand sanitiser, disinfectant wipes, “sneeze guards”, medical grade face coverings, and PPE.

Economists on a Wealth Tax Commission reported in December 2020 in favour of a small one-off wealth tax to raise £260 billion over five years. Britain has the lowest rate of tax on corporate profits among big, rich countries — 19% where the US rate is 26%, Germany 30%, France 32%.

A union organising drive at Amazon’s new fulfillment centre (BMH1) in Bessemer, Alabama, a majority Black and working-class city adjacent to Birmingham, began in the late summer of 2020, when a handful of workers, fed up with stressful working conditions, intrusive monitoring and lack of safety during the pandemic, contacted the Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union.

The union has a high profile in the region, where it has organised poultry workers, many of whom are African American, as are around 85% of the BMH1 workers.

Liverpool mayoral candidate Anna Rothery

If you don’t like the contestants in the race, replace them with other runners. That seems to be the approach of Labour’s North West Regional Office on choosing the party’s candidate for Liverpool City Mayor.

As members waited for ballot papers to arrive, they got an email from party bosses saying that “the right candidate” needed to be chosen. The three women already shortlisted did not fit that particular bill, so a new shortlist would be drawn up, and they wouldn’t be on it!

Emily Kenway is a former adviser to the UK’s first Anti-Slavery Commissioner and the author of The Truth About Modern Slavery (Pluto Press, 2021). She spoke to George Wheeler for Solidarity.

Can you explain a little of what the book is about, and why you wrote it?

Our new pamphlet on 1920s revolutionary socialist MP Shapurji Saklatvala is out now and can be bought here (profits from the first print run go to the Sage care workers’ strike fund). Its author Sacha Ismail explains why he started reading about Saklatvala and we decided to produce the pamphlet.

On Sunday 28 February 47 participants in Hong Kong’s democratic primaries last June were charged with “conspiracy to commit subversion”, a charge that brings a possible life sentence.

TheDaily Worker had a shameful record of justifying or denying the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s and the systematic denial of basic human rights in the USSR and Eastern Europe after the war. It had nothing to say against Stalin’s mass deportation of the Crimean Tatars and other peoples during World War 2, or against China’s treatment of the people of Tibet.

You could argue, however, that it never sunk so low as to attempt to justify or deny genocide. Its successor, the Morning Star, is doing just that.

At least two people were killed by Myanmar’s military over the weekend of 20 February, as it was confronted by fresh mass protests to overturn the coup it launched on 1 February. There is now a steady flow of confirmed killings, as well as unconfirmed reports of significantly larger numbers of deaths.

The army’s claims that it is only using rubber bullets have been categorically disproved.

The Modi government’s repression against Indian farmers’ protests (Solidarity 581) could signal the Hindu-nationalist regime’s panic-stricken weakening and decline, or the onset of an even more consolidated authoritarianism.

The repression is harsh and escalating.

Readers of the “Diary of a Tube Worker” in Solidarity will have noticed that since the beginning of the pandemic I have spent a lot of my time arguing against Covid-19 conspiracy theories in my workplace. More recently the shift is to anti-vaxx conspiracies and vaccine-hesitancy.

I don’t think I have been entirely successful in my endeavour. I have been a known sceptic about “nonsense” since I started on the job, being the first to say vocally, I don’t believe in any God, I don’t take notice of any horoscopes, I don’t believe in juju or ghosts, etc.

29 January saw a fire in Napier army barracks, in Kent, which is being used to house several hundred asylum-seekers. Simultaneously the site was in the middle of a Covid-19 outbreak, with over 130 positive cases. Clearly the poor, cramped living conditions are driving waves of deadly infection.

Home Secretary Priti Patel’s response? Assume the fire was a deliberate act of arson (without evidence) and rubbish claims that the accommodation was at all sub-standard (because it was fine for soldiers, despite having been uninhabited for ten years).

We raised £19,420 from our 2020 fund drive, enabling us to employ a new temporary part-time office worker and a new part-time staff organiser working "remotely", and to make our current special cheap subs offer. Still, we need more fund-raising, particularly to support a good "return to the streets" when that becomes possible and to give us options when looking for a new office.

We're aiming for £20,000 by 10-11 July.

UK-based banks HSBC and Standard Chartered have come under attack for their collaboration with the governments of Hong Kong and China.

Consider also Jardine Matheson, one of the top 200 trading companies in the world, with assets of £49 billion and a turnover of £40 billion. They own a significant proportion of Hong Kong’s very expensive real estate.

Part of an ongoing debate: see here for all the contributions

To an outsider, or to this outsider, anyway, the most striking thing about American political life is the saturation-level, all-pervasive, complacent chauvinism.

It’s almost innocent-seeming, almost endearing, like the boasting of a five year old. The Stars and Stripes everywhere. The custom of always, in public life, referring to any state that has to be mentioned as “the great state of Wyoming”, or whatever.

When trying to keep your workplace safe during the pandemic, when what you do could save lives, how would you expect your boss to respond? Maybe with some appreciation or a grudging “thank you”?

The official Health and Safety Executive has had 179,873 Covid-related cases since the start of the pandemic, but has brought not a single prosecution against an employer.

It has issued only 218 “enforcement notices” (“please fix this within 21 days” type things). HSE inspectors are pretty much unable to halt work activities because the HSE classifies the virus only as a “significant” risk, not a “serious” one.

Students at SOAS [a university in London centred on the study of Asia, Africa and the Near and Middle East] are refusing to pay fees as leverage to win their demands on the university management.

Cumbria’s Labour county council has announced that it will reconsider the development of a new deep coal mine.

The Burmese military is stepping up repression to secure the coup it launched on 1 February, but facing strong resistance – mass street protests (in their eleventh consecutive day as we go to press) plus widespread strikes and workers’ actions. (See here for our report last week, with some photos, and here for the week before.)

Part of an ongoing debate: see here for all the contributions

In his letter to Solidarity 581, Barrie Hardy delves a little further into some of the wider differences that have been discussed in Solidarity in the run-up to the 2020 US Presidential election. I want to pick up one in particular.

The government has come under attack from its own climate change advisors about the decision to allow a new deep coal mine to be built in Cumbria.

The Climate Change Committee (CCC) cited the projected 0.4Mt of annual CO2 emissions from the mine as contradicting the already wildly insufficient commitment to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. It would be the first new deep coal mine in 30 years in the UK, bucking the recent trend against coal, and particularly damaging to attempts to greenwash the Tory government ahead of hosting COP26.

Longstanding socialist and Labour Party activist Mick Brooks (1948-2021), who died in January as a result of complications from Covid-19, was co-author with Michael Roberts of the Fire Brigades Union’s 2013 pamphlet on public ownership of the banks and high finance, It's time to take over the banks. (The two also ran regular Karl Marx walking tours in London.)

The “Recapitulation Theory” in biology claims that the human embryo in the womb passes through every evolutionary stage from amoeba to fish to invertebrate, etc. etc., up to primitive human form. As a biological theory “recapitulation” is long discredited, but theMorning Star does seem to do something like “recapitulation” of Stalinism.

“Third Period” Stalinism of 1928-34 was an ultra-left line that held that social democracy and liberalism were the last obstacles in the way of socialist revolution and that their destruction by fascism might even hasten the revolution.

Fighter against "extremism" John Woodcock (Lord Walney), with two far-right Turkish politicians

On 7 February, the former right-wing Labour MP John Woodcock — now Lord Walney, a Tory supporter, and the government’s official for “countering violent extremism” — announced via the Daily Telegraph that the government had asked him to do a new “inquiry” into “extremism”.

The Chinese state has announced a sexist strategy to stop the “feminisation” of Chinese boys. It thinks the nation’s teens are too delicate, timid and effeminate.

This is a tidied-up transcript of a speech in a discussion with Emma Runswick of ZeroCovid at the Workers' Liberty Zoom forum on 14 February 2021.

I'm not an epidemiologist, and the labour movement is not a university faculty of epidemiology. So we don't think we can second-guess the scientists about the science of the pandemic.

We try to educate ourselves in the science, and we try to make intelligent judgements and comments where the scientific opinion is divided, as it often is, but we understand our limits.

Overall arguments made in “Requisition Big Pharma!” (Solidarity 580) are important and good. The implicit rejoinder to demands to bump school workers up the queue is apt. Yet the article imbalances further than justifiable, or necessary.

It notes “[t]he carefully-reasoned elderly-first vaccination schedule designed by scientists. (They explain its advantages over “no, vaccinate me first” cries from rival younger groups).

Redirecting... Send us £2 and we'll mail you six issues of Solidarity, so you can support our work, and follow all our coverage and debates properly. Because of the new virus surge and accompanying restrictions which limit street protests, street stalls, and in-person meetings, we've extended the offer until whenever lockdown ends. Available only to UK postal addresses, sorry: click here to subscribe from outside UK.

Every now and then on Twitter, users will post about their distress at being diagnosed with a terrible illness. The replies to these posts are almost always full of people making “helpful” suggestions: to forego meals and subsist off fistfuls of turmeric; to subscribe to expensive and miraculous yoga courses; homeopathy.

The illnesses are very real; but the remedies often tell you a lot more about the people proposing them than about how to get well again.

Some 600 people have been detained in Turkey since 4 January after protests against the government’s appointment of Melih Bulu as head of Boğaziçi University spread in Istanbul and Ankara. Most have been released, despite repeated statements from officials that the protesters are “terrorists”.

Boğaziçi University students have sent an open letter to Turkish President Erdoğan. Excerpts:

I’ve been wanting to watch The Perfect Candidate ever since watching Wadjda, by the same director Haifaa al-Mansour, last year. For far too long, the former was not readily available online: it finally is now.

Haifaa al-Mansour is Saudi Arabia’s first female filmmaker, and one of the countries most well-known and controversial. Both films are set in Saudi Arabia; both follow outspoken, confident female protagonists, living within and struggling against the misogynist society they find themselves within.

Part of an ongoing debate: see here for all the contributions

Thomas Carolan begins his latest article on the Trump phenomenon with these words, “US democracy is in its greatest crisis since the civil war of the 1860s.”

Is it really?

Joe Biden has announced the end of US support for Saudi-led offensive military operations in Yemen, arguing in a foreign policy speech that they have “created a humanitarian and strategic catastrophe”. The details remain to be seen, but we should use this shift to exert pressure on the British government too.

Demonstrations and strikes have spread across Myanmar to overturn the military military coup which began on 1 February.

On the night of 2 February, the most central parts of Moscow – that is to say, the fanciest, most iconic, and at other times, the most touristy – were taken over in a culmination of ultraviolence brought to the streets by droves of armed men.

British Gas engineers continued their strikes against their bosses’ “fire and rehire” threat from 5-8 February. Their union, GMB, has announced further strikes on 12-15, 19-22 February, and 26 February to 1 March.

There have been 17 strike days so far, leading to a backlog of over 170,000 boiler repairs and more than 200,000 delayed service visits. The strikes have remained solid throughout, with well-supported pickets and demonstrations taking place on a safely-distanced basis throughout the country.

Coverage since the 4 November 2020 election:

Courtesy of The Times newspaper, Gerard Coyne is back in the limelight. Coyne stood for Unite General Secretary in the 2017 contest. Cheered on by the media, he ran a foul, racist-scapegoating, muckraking campaign, with large amounts of venom directed at the then Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Cuban artists protest at the Ministry of Culture in Havana, November 2020

Distracted by the USA’s Capitol’s storming, readers may have overlooked another, more serious “attempted coup”.

“[T]he US establishment is attempting to carry out a ‘soft coup’ in Cuba”, say some — and the San Isidro Movement (MSI) artists’ collective is to the fore.

“Our history is littered with examples of initiatives sold as being necessary to fight extremism that quickly devolve into tools used for the mass violation of the human and civil rights of the American people”, write Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and nine other representatives, opposing the call from leaders of both US political parties for expanded “national security” powers in response to the 6 January far-right attack on Congress.

Many in the Abolitionist movement to destroy US slavery were originally pacifists, militantly anti-slavery but hoping to convince slaveowners to abandon the institution. Many of the growing number of black Americans who joined the movement opposed such ideas, and events would severely test even those Abolitionists most committed to non-violence. When the Civil War finally came in 1861, the vast majority backed the Northern war effort.

A BBC survey has found nine out of ten major local authorities in England with not enough cash to cover their spending plans in the financial year 2021-2. Coronavirus could lead to them going £1.7bn over budget. To keep services going, say council leaders, billions cut from central government funding to councils over the last ten years must be restored.

HMRC bosses have now announced their long-awaited pay "deal" to staff. The deal presented was the consequence of 15 months of secretive negotiations with union officers and full-timers. Not even the union’s democratically elected HMRC Group Executive Committee was given any details of the deal until late last month.

The deal gives above inflationary pay rises in exchange for a bonfire of terms and conditions, including selling weekends to the employer, sacrificing holiday entitlement and ripping-up previous standing agreements protecting call centre workers, among other things.

Part of an ongoing debate: see here for all the contributions

Having governed since 2015 and won a landslide in November’s general election, Myanmar’s National League for Democracy, led by Aung San Suu Kyi, has been ousted by a military coup. Taking a leaf from the Trump playbook, the generals are claiming fraud.

The NLD won 58.6% for the lower chamber and 61.6% for the upper chamber, versus 5.9% and 3.1% for the military front party USDP.

Cleaners outsourced by the British Medical Association have prevented 30 redundancies there.

The cleaners, employed by CWS, were furloughed since the first lockdown, with the BMA topping up the 20% of their salaries not covered by HMRC. In October 2020 the BMA suspended this, citing lost rental and event income. The cleaners’ union CAIWU appealed to CWS to continue the furlough arrangement — costing the company just £1,741. CWS instead dismissed the cleaners from 31 January.