The latest audio uploads to the Party website –

FAQ What if we had to start the Socialist Party from scratch? – Paddy Shannon, 12th May 2021

Identity politics – the new communalism – Adam Buick, 13th May 2021. (Hosted by the Oxford Communist Corresponding Society).

Daily life in socialism – Paul Bennett, 14th May 2021. (Due to technical problems the discussion wasn’t recorded).

FAQ Are the rich the problem? – Paddy Shannon, 19th May 2021.

What is social progress? – Pat Deutz, 21st May 2021.

Double bill on Authority – Tim Hart and Carla Dee, 31st May 2021.

Coronavirus and vaccination in India – Abhishek Chowdhury, 4th June 2021

 Defender

Which white horse – this one or that – is Russian,

Or does it come under Britannia’s rule?

Perhaps the wave could be Chinese, they feel

Compelled to pursue a global mission,

Though the USA will be duty bound

To claim the oceans as rightfully theirs,

Being de facto governor of world affairs,

Setting the seas on democratic ground.

Time to send a gunboat just to make sure

No competitor’s counter claim persists,

Crewed, of course, by highly trained journalists

To make the news territory secure.

As an exercise in futility,

It’s as sensible as bombing the sea.

D. A.

The government has set “historic” targets on the climate crisis but has failed so far to come up with the policies needed to reach them, the government’s independent advisers on the climate have warned.

The Climate Change Committee published two progress reports showing the UK lagging behind on its key goal of 78% cuts to greenhouse gases by 2035 and making recommendations on how to get back on track.

Lord Deben, the committee chairman, said: “The targets are remarkable and have set a major example to the world. But the policy is just not there. It’s very clear we need to step up very rapidly.” Deben warned that if the UK did not have its own clear roadmap and policies, other countries would not come forward with credible plans. “People are going to judge us by whether we link promises with policy and a programme to deliver. If all we do is promise, other people will not take us seriously … it puts the whole process of Cop26 into jeopardy,” he said.

Greenhouse gas emissions fell last year, but because of the impacts of the pandemic rather than policy. 

Chris Stark, the chief executive of the CCC, said: “The fall in emissions is a real whopper. But progress is illusory. Government strategy on cutting emissions has been late and what has come has almost all been too little.”

The committee found that while emissions from energy generation had fallen sharply in recent years, those from other key sectors – transport, buildings, industry and agriculture – were not coming down in line with the targets. 

The government has been criticised for a series of actions and proposals that campaigners have said run contrary to ministers’ green claims and damage the UK’s reputation ahead of Cop26. These include: the initial go-ahead for a mooted new coalmine in Cumbria, now subject to a public inquiry; new licences for oil and gas exploration in the North Sea; a £27bn road-building plan; slashing incentives for electric cars; airport expansion; cutting air passenger duty on domestic flights; scrapping the green homes grant insulation programme; and cutting overseas aid.

Climate campaigners also said the government’s actions were at odds with its words.

 Mike Childs, the head of policy at Friends of the Earth, said: “With no climate action plan and his government’s support for more roads, runways, and an overseas gas mega-project, Boris Johnson risks being a laughing stock at the UN climate summit he is hosting in Glasgow later this year. The chancellor’s role in delivering net zero is crucial – unfortunately, this year’s budget did little to demonstrate the Treasury’s enthusiasm for building back greener.”

Chris Venables, the head of politics at Green Alliance, a thinktank, said: “It’s becoming clearer than ever that there’s an embarrassing lack of progress at home from the UK government in this crucial year for tackling climate change…”

UK policies will not deliver emission cuts pledge, says climate adviser | Climate Change Committee | The Guardian

 The story of Canada’s stolen children continues.  

Remains of 215 children were found at a residential school run by the Catholic Church in British Columbia.

Now more unmarked graves of indigenous children at the site of a similar former residential school in Saskatchewan province.  The Marieval residential school operated from 1899 to 1997 in the Qu’Appelle Valley. Marieval was run by the Roman Catholic Church until Cowessess First Nation took over its operations in 1981.

The Cowessess First Nation began to use ground-penetrating radar to locate unmarked graves at the cemetery of the Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan. The Cowessess called the discovery “horrific and shocking”.

With 146 residential schools across Canada, there are likely more undiscovered burial sites. With records being either destroyed or withheld, many children who went to — and died — at Canada’s residential schools are undocumented.

Niigaan James Sinclair, an Anishinaabe writer and associate professor at the University of Manitoba, says the new discovery of unmarked graves in Saskatchewan confirm stories told in the community for decades. 

“Every Indigenous community in this country has a story of lost children, has a story of children who went to the schools and never came home,” he said.

Survivor Elizabeth Sackanay related the abuse she endured at St. Anne’s Indian Residential School in Fort Albany, Ont. still haunts her to this day.

“What I went through in residential school, I wouldn’t want anyone to go through,” Sackanay said . When she was at the school, Sackanay said kids used to disappear, sometimes overnight, and the priests would tell the other children that they had simply gone home. “How can they go home in the middle of the night?” she said. “When they are going to bed when you go to bed, and they’re gone in the morning?”

It’s estimated that more than 150,000 Indigenous children were forced to attend these state-funded schools where they were often subjected to physical and sexual abuse. Under the Indian Act, Indigenous people were forced by the Canadian government to attend residential schools, and the RCMP played a major role in what survivors call kidnappings

Sask. First Nation finds hundreds of burial sites near former residential school | CTV News

 For the 29th year, the members of the UN General Assembly voted in favor of a resolution demanding an end to the 60-year U.S. economic blockade on Cuba.

184 nations voted for the resolution, while the U.S. and Israel voted against it. (Three nations — Brazil, Colombia, and Ukraine abstained.)

Biden newly declared foreign policy called “rules-based order” actually means the United States-based order.

 There were not enough skilled workers in the Czech Republic.

 Many businesses report that the labor shortages that blighted the Czech economy before the pandemic are already an issue again. Joblessness at the end of the first quarter stood at just 3.2%, the second-lowest in the EU after neighbouring Poland.

Despite the import of hundreds of thousands of workers from Ukraine and other selected source markets, the lack of factory hands, builders and drivers — as well as more skilled workers — had become a major brake on economic growth.

A dearth of foreign workers is an issue for other sectors. The supply of Ukrainians and other nationalities invited to Czechia under government visa schemes dried up during the pandemic as embassies and borders closed and those already in the country began to wend their way home. Construction has been particularly hard-hit. Further up the skills ladder, the IT sector’s heavy reliance on foreign workers meant that before the pandemic it could take up to two years to fill vacancies. Whether those foreign workers will soon start making their way back to Czechia is not yet clear. Border restrictions and limited transport links persist, while the government is only now discussing restarting its visa easing schemes.

One study by the Mendel University in Brno released in May called for politicians to stop offering the view that immigration is a security threat and instead explain that the country needs a long-term strategy to attract foreign workers. The rhetoric since the migrant crisis of 2015 “actually went hand in hand with the admission of a large number of migrants in the industries that required it,” the researchers noted with irony. However, the likelihood that the long-term needs of the economy can push ahead of politics just four months ahead of national elections in October is slim.

Although not Czech-born, Prime Minister Andrej Babis was not shy of using anti-migrant rhetoric to help win the last election in 2017. Now, with his ANO party trailing in polls, the populist billionaire is already beating a similar drum, warning voters that his opponents want to force them to share their houses with migrants.

Labor shortages are back to haunt Czech economy | Business| Economy and finance news from a German perspective | DW | 23.06.2021

Americans pay around two and a half times as much for prescription drugs as people in other developed countries.

 Prescriptions cost so much because the pharmaceutical industry wields monopoly control to set and keep drug prices high. 

So while the U.S. makes up only 15 percent of the global insulin market, it accounts for nearly half of the revenue that these corporations bring in every year. 

Insulin prices are on average eight times higher in the United States than in 32 other countries, including Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Turkey.

 In one study, one in three Americans has skipped refilling a prescription.  In another study, one in four Americans who rely on insulin also admitted to rationing it

Opinion | Big Pharma Companies Have All the Power With Families Like Mine at Their Mercy | Annemarie Gibson (commondreams.org)

 Robert Black, the most senior executive at the Kensington and Chelsea Tenants Management Organisation (TMO), told the public inquiry into the disaster that the obsolete plan showing no more than 12 vulnerable or disabled people was caused by staff not carrying out managers’ instructions allowing the block’s fire safety plan to become 15 years out of date so it failed to account for more than two dozen of the disabled people in the block.

Grenfell flats was in fact home to 37 disabled people and 15 of them died. 

Counsel to the inquiry Richard Millett QC put it to Black: “In reality, as the chief executive you were ultimately responsible for a failure to keep these documents up to date lower down in your organisation”.

“Pass,” he replied. “It should have been updated. I’m not shying away from that, so that’s my situation.”

 “Information should have been updated by staff,” Black told the inquiry. “The whole thing that I suffered throughout my career working with people is the ability to forget to fill in the paperwork.”

Black also said he had made a decision not to act on warnings that the landlord should draw up specific emergency evacuation plans for vulnerable and disabled people, claiming it was impractical and that the key policy was to tell residents to stay put in the event of a fire.

The inquiry heard how, in the preceding years, the TMO let the idea of producing personal emergency evacuation plans for vulnerable people “drop” despite warnings from safety consultants and the London fire brigade that its fire risk management was falling short. Seven years before the fire a consultancy hired by the TMO said it should develop “formal procedures to deal effectively with fire safety issues associated with disabled or vulnerable tenants and leaseholders … this should include a range of options from relocation in severe cases … and the provision of personal emergency evacuation plans in those less serious cases.”

It indicated this was a “high risk” issue, but asked whether this was done, Black said: “No, we didn’t have individual emergency plans per block.” He didn’t accept that specific fire evacuation plans needed to be made for disabled people, despite being warned that failing to do so would breach fire safety regulations. 

Black also described how he gave the TMO’s director in charge of financial services and IT, Barbara Matthews, responsibility for fire safety, even though he did not check if she had any experience in fire safety.

“Can you account for having a head of health and safety who had no health and safety background?” asked Millett.

“I wouldn’t have had the income to have someone sitting on the executive specifically doing health and safety,” said Black. “Local authority funding across the country had been cut.”

CEO of Grenfell Tower landlord blames staff for outdated fire safety plan | Grenfell Tower inquiry | The Guardian

 While many poor people became poorer, five million people became millionaires across the world in 2020 despite economic damage from the Covid-19 pandemic.

Because of recovering stock markets and soaring house prices helping to boost their wealth in 2020 more than 1% of adults worldwide were millionaires for the first time.

Total global wealth grew by 7.4%.

Wealth creation appeared to be “completely detached” from the economic woes of the pandemic, the researchers said.

Anthony Shorrocks, economist and author of the Global Wealth Report, said, “Global wealth not only held steady in the face of such turmoil but in fact rapidly increased in the second half of the year,” 

Wealth differences between adults widened in 2020, and  Shorrocks said if asset price increases, such as house price rises, were removed from the analysis, “then global household wealth may well have fallen”.

 “In the lower wealth bands where financial assets are less prevalent, wealth has tended to stand still, or, in many cases, regressed,” he said.

Nannette Hechler-Fayd’herbe, chief investment officer at Credit Suisse, said:  “The lowering of interest rates by central banks has probably had the greatest impact. It is a major reason why share prices and house prices have flourished, and these translate directly into our valuations of household wealth.”

Millions become millionaires in Covid pandemic – BBC News