Shelter estimates that the average first-time buyer in England, with a 5% deposit, needs an income of £59,300. The majority of renters – making up about a third of the population – earn nowhere near that amount.

According to the National Housing Federation, over 8 million people in England live in unsuitable, unaffordable or unsafe homes, and the waiting list for people in need of an affordable place to live has reached 1.1 million.

The Chartered Institute of Housing found that 280,000 social-rent homes were sold, converted to higher rents or demolished between 2012 and 2020. Only 70,000 were built over the same period.

Those unable to exit the rented sector are seeing their economic circumstances deteriorate; average monthly rents rose by 10% over the past year, making renting a significantly more expensive option than repaying a mortgage.

In a report published last year, MPs on the housing and communities committee called for 90,000 more homes to be built annually for social rent over the next five years. Just 7,000 were built in 2019. 

 Some of the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies have used advertising to “greenwash” their ongoing contribution to the climate crisis, according to files published by the environmental lawyers ClientEarth. 

They describe the practice as “a great deception”.

 “We’re currently witnessing a great deception, where the companies most responsible for catastrophically heating the planet are spending millions on advertising campaigns about how their business plans are focused on sustainability,” said Johnny White, one of ClientEarth’s lawyers. “…instead of leading a low-carbon transition these companies are putting out advertising which distracts the public and launders their image. Our research shows these adverts are misrepresenting the true nature of companies’ businesses, of their contribution to climate change, and of their transition plans.”

ClientEarth’s analysis includes claims that:

1. ExxonMobil advertising suggested its experimental algae biofuels could one day reduce transport emissions, while it has no company-wide net zero target and its 2025 emission reduction targets do not include the vast majority of emissions resulting from its products.

2. Saudi Arabia’s Aramco said it conducted business “in a way that addresses the climate challenge” yet it is the world’s largest corporate greenhouse gas emitter and plans to continue exploring for more oil and gas, despite having reserves greater than those of Exxon, Chevron, Shell, BP and Total combined.

3. Chevron said it was “part of the solution” to climate change but does not have a net zero commitment or a strategy aligned with the Paris climate agreement. Its plans for carbon capture and storage cover less than 1% of its 2019 carbon emissions.

4. Shell said it was investing in “lower-carbon biofuels and hydrogen, electric vehicle charging, solar and wind power”, but in 2020 it earmarked between $2bn and $3bn a year for low-carbon businesses, compared to $17bn on fossil fuels operations.

5. Norway’s Equinor has talked of growing renewable capacity tenfold by 2026, but renewables are only planned to be 4% of its energy by that date.

‘A great deception’: oil giants taken to task over ‘greenwash’ ads | Oil and gas companies | The Guardian

A report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, published at the end of March, concluded that while racism and racial injustice still existed, geography, family influence, socioeconomic background, culture and religion all had a greater impact on life chances. The report said it did not find evidence of institutional racism in the areas it examined, such as policing and health.

The findings were also widely condemned by MPs, unions and equality campaigners as “divisive” and a missed opportunity for systemic change. Since its publication, at least 20 organisations and individuals who were listed as stakeholders in the report have distanced themselves from its findings.

 A UN working group of experts on people of African descent said: “In 2021, it is stunning to read a report on race and ethnicity that repackages racist tropes and stereotypes into fact, twisting data and misapplying statistics and studies into conclusory findings and ad hominem attacks on people of African descent.”

The experts criticised the report’s focus on family structure to explain racial disparities, describing it as “a tone-deaf attempt at rejecting the lived realities of people of African descent and other ethnic minorities in the UK”. It said the report failed to provide any persuasive evidence for claims there was no institutional racism in the UK and instead cited dubious evidence.

“This attempt to normalise white supremacy despite considerable research and evidence of institutional racism is an unfortunate sidestepping of the opportunity to acknowledge the atrocities of the past and the contributions of all in order to move forward,” the statement added.

The experts alleged the report omitted analysis of institutional racism by international human rights experts, including the UN working group of experts on people of African descent’s 2012 review after its country visit to the UK, the 2016 concluding observations of the committee on the elimination of racial discrimination, and the UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism’s report following her 2018 visit to the UK.

The UN body called on the government to reject the report and urged it to ensure the “accurate reflection of historical facts”, adding: “The distortion and falsification of [these] historic facts may license further racism, the promotion of negative racial stereotypes, and racial discrimination.” The UN experts behind the statement are the chair, Dominique Day, Ahmed Reid, Michal Balcerzak, Sabelo Gumedze and Ricardo Sunga III. The statement was endorsed by E Tendayi Achiume, the UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism. The experts also criticised the report’s “mythical representation of enslavement” as an attempt to sanitise the history of the slave trade.

No 10 race report tries to normalise white supremacy, say UN experts | Race | The Guardian

  Fox News host Tucker Carlson seemingly endorsed the “great replacement” conspiracy theory – the false claim, which has motivated fascist mass murderers from El Paso, Texas, to Christchurch, New Zealand, that governing elites have conspired to undermine majority-white populations by encouraging immigration. 

The idea of a “border crisis” with Mexico remains central to the populist right. Something similar is true in Europe, where governments nominally of the centre still allow their policies to be shaped by the populist backlash to the refugee crisis of 2015, even though the number of refugees entering Europe today is far lower. 

Authorities in Italy, Malta and Greece continue to obstruct rescues at sea, while Denmark, whose centre-left government was elected in 2019 after stealing its rightwing populist rivals’ platform on refugee policy, has revoked the residence permits of some 189 Syrian refugees, on the spurious grounds that it is now “safe” to return to some parts of Syria, such as Damascus. 

The UK government, meanwhile, has unveiled a draconian new plan to restrict the rights of asylum seekers who enter the country without permission, in response to last year’s moral panic over small boats crossing the Channel.

The right defend such positions on the grounds of security, but it is based upon xenophobia and racism. 

The economist Branko Milanović has argued for the importance of seeing citizenship – not just for who it excludes, but for the benefits it confers on the holders – as a crucial factor in shaping the way that the rich world relates to the rest of the globe.  According to Milanović, your place of birth has become an increasingly important predictor of your income.

Since 2008, as the top 1% have hoovered up increasing amounts of wealth while the living standards of most people in the west have stagnated, defending the relative privileges conferred by citizenship has become an increasingly attractive proposition to many voters. For the top 1%, citizenship is literally a commodity to be bought and sold: the global trade in passports is now worth an estimated £20bn a year.

The current UK government is a case in point: its attack on the human right to asylum has unfolded at the same time as it makes a show of offering a safe haven to Hong Kong residents with overseas UK citizenship who want to flee China’s dismantling of liberal democracy within the former British colony. As many as 300,000 people from Hong Kong are expected to be resettled in the UK in the next few years under a special visa scheme that launched in January.

Emigrants from Hong Kong have a genuine need for protection – only recently the former politician Nathan Law was rightly granted asylum in the UK – but so do people from other countries with what are euphemistically described as “historical ties” to Britain, such as Iraq. One reason the government has been so open in the case of Hong Kong may be because of the wealth and skills that people are expected to bring with them: one survey found that a typical emigrant has a university degree and an average salary of £33,270 a year. Home Office guidance for the visa scheme states that an emigrant from Hong Kong must be able to support themselves in the UK for six months without access to public funds: wealth barriers are a typical condition of UK visas.

The reason this apparent openness coexists with the authoritarian posturing on boats in the Channel is because the government is treating citizenship as an asset whose value on the global market needs to be maintained. 

Why is the right obsessed with ‘defending’ borders? Because it sees citizenship as a commodity | Immigration and asylum | The Guardian

 Grenfell Tower residents told the council landlord three months before the disaster they were “seriously concerned” that people might die in a fire, but their fears were not properly addressed and they were treated as “sub-citizens”.

In spring 2017 leaseholders escalated worries that gas main installation in the evacuation staircase posed a serious fire risk and warned the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC): “If we cannot get out people will die or at best suffer serious injury.”

Lee Chapman, the secretary of the Grenfell leaseholders’ association, told the inquiry it was “a life and death issue” that “just wasn’t being dealt with” by RBKC and its tenant management organisation (TMO). He said their responses were “totally uninformative and generic” and there was “an us and them” relationship between the landlord and residents.

David Collins, a resident who became chairman of a residents’ group set up in response to “extreme dissatisfaction” with how people in the tower were being treated, told the inquiry the TMO viewed residents as “a distraction to be minimised, sidelined or ignored”.

“Residents were experiencing threats, lies, bullying and harassment from TMO and Rydon [the main contractor],” Collins said.

Grenfell residents were treated as ‘sub-citizens’, inquiry told | Grenfell Tower inquiry | The Guardian

Brazil is in the grip of a health and social emergency. It has the world’s second-highest death toll from the pandemic at over 370,000, and hospitals are near collapse. A study last week found that 60% of Brazilian households have food insecurity, lacking sufficient access to enough to eat.

In Brasil, hungry residents of Heliopolis, São Paulo’s largest favela, require a daily handout of food that will keep them going until the next morning. They are given a bowl of pasta with meat and a portion of rice, two packets of biscuits and a carton of milk, shared between a whole household and usually their only meal of the day. The charity has 650  other food banks across São Paulo.

Five people were killed and dozens injured in Bangladesh after police opened fire on a crowd of workers protesting to demand unpaid wages and a pay rise at a Chinese-backed power plant. The workers attacked and set fire to several structures at the 1,320-megawatt power plant.

Police opened fire after about 2,000 of the protesters began hurling bricks and stones at officers at the construction site of the coal-fired plant in the south-eastern city of Chittagong, local police official Azizul Islam told Reuters.

The $2.4bn power plant is a major source of foreign investment into Bangladesh, and one of a series of projects that Beijing is pushing to cultivate closer ties with Dhaka. In 2016, China’s SEPCOIII Electric Power Construction signed a deal with S Alam group, a Bangladeshi conglomerate responsible for construction work at the site.

During that year, four protesters opposed to its construction were killed when police opened fire during clashes between villagers who were demonstrating both for and against the project.

Five people killed as police fire at protesting workers in Bangladesh | Bangladesh | The Guardian

  The Costs of War Project on Friday released an update on what nearly two decades of the Afghan war has cost in both dollars and human lives.

241,000 people have died as a direct result of the war.

The United States has spent $2.26 trillion on military operations in Afghanistan (and Pakistan) since the 2001 U.S. invasion.

As Biden Plans Withdrawal, Analysis Shows Afghan War Cost At Least 241,000 Lives and $2.26 Trillion | Common Dreams News

People who could be key witnesses to deaths in detention have been “deliberately” deported before they could give evidence.

Irene Nembhard of the London law firm Birnberg Peirce, who was involved in a case where the Home Office attempted to deport key witnesses, said: “These are black detainees and they are not being seen as valuable witnesses. This failure indicates institutional racism but also a failure to see people as people.”

 A court ruling held Patel accountable for failures in ensuring that deaths in immigration detention centres were properly investigated. The ruling concerns two friends from Nigeria – Ahmed Lawal and Oscar Lucky Okwurime – who were in Harmondsworth detention centre when Okwurime was found dead in his cell in September 2019.

Although Lawal was a key witness, the Home Office attempted to deport him five days after his friend’s death – before he could provide any evidence for the inquest, which subsequently concluded Okwurime had died because of poor medical care.

Jamie Bell of Duncan Lewis solicitors, representing Lawal, told the Observer they were in contact with “multiple” witnesses who had expressed interest in providing evidence but who abruptly disappeared.

“We just don’t know what happened to them, but the Home Office did not identify any potential witnesses after the death,” he said. Bell was aware of around 20 people in the corridor of the centre where Okwurime died, but who went missing. He added that many witnesses may have been deported before they could share testimony with the authorities, but it was impossible to quantify because individuals were not identified to a coroner in the first place.

Deborah Coles, director of the charity Inquest, said: “This was a damning judgment on deliberate attempts to frustrate and undermine effective investigations and proper scrutiny.”

Coroner, Timothy Brennand, also questioned why “no formal, declared statements were obtained timeously from these witnesses” before attempts were made to deport them. He added: “Two detainees were on the point of being physically deported in circumstances where the Home Office either was not aware, or chose to ignore the fact that these detainees were important witnesses required to give evidence at a forthcoming inquest hearing.”

The charity Medical Justice wrote to the Home Office requesting details of any witnesses who had been recorded to assist in any investigation, along with details of the actual deceased. According to the charity, the Home Office “fobbed them off” and told them not to expect any information before the end of this month.

Last month, Patel pledged to remove people who enter the UK illegally having travelled through a “safe country” – plans condemned by many as unworkable and incoherent. Patel’s recent proposals to reform the asylum system, warning it will “deepen hostility to refugees” and could “formalise and embed a culture of disbelief” against them.

A report by Catholic organisation the Jesuit Refugee Service UK, states the system is “more concerned with refusing asylum claims and removing claimants than with ensuring that people in need of sanctuary are offered protection and a chance to rebuild their lives”.

Sarah Teather, director of JRS UK, said, “We need an asylum system rooted in a sense of shared humanity, not a barbaric rehash of the old culture of hostility. Reform of the asylum system is badly needed. This is not it.”

Witnesses to deaths in detention ‘deliberately’ deported from the UK | Immigration and asylum | The Guardian

 IMF fiscal projections shows that budget cuts are expected in 154 countries this year, and as many as 159 countries in 2022. 

This means that 6.6 billion people or 85% of the global population will be living under austerity conditions by next year, a trend likely to continue at least until 2025.

The high levels of expenditures needed to cope with the pandemic have left governments with growing fiscal deficit and debt. However, rather than exploring financing options to provide direly-needed support for socio-economic recovery, governments—advised by the IMF, the G20 and others—are opting for austerity.

 More than 40 governments are forecasted to spend less than the (already low) pre-pandemic levels, with budgets 12% smaller on average in 2021-22 than those in 2018-19 before COVID-19, including countries with high developmental needs like Ecuador, Equatorial Guinea, Kiribati, Liberia, Libya, Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Yemen, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Austerity proves to be a deadly policy. 

From 2010 to 2019, billions of people were affected by reduced pensions and social security benefits; by lower subsidies, including for food, agricultural inputs and fuel; by wage bill cuts and caps, which hampered the delivery of public services like education, health, social work, water and public transport; by the rationalization and narrow-targeting of social protection programs so that only the poorest populations received smaller and smaller benefits, while most people were excluded; and by less employment security for workers, as labor regulations were dismantled. Many governments also introduced regressive taxes, like consumption taxes, which further lowered disposable household income. In many countries, public services were downsized or privatized, including health. 

The weak state of public health systems—overburdened, underfunded and understaffed from a decade of austerity—aggravated health inequalities and made populations more vulnerable to COVID-19. After COVID-19’s devastating impacts, austerity will only cause more unnecessary suffering and hardship.

Opinion | As Nations Slash Budgets, Global Study Warns of Looming Austerity Shocks (commondreams.org)