Housing law is complex and time-consuming, most solicitors will no longer be able to afford to take on housing issues. Legal aid for housing and homelessness cases – already unavailable in some parts of the country – is set to be ended.

Poor and vulnerable tenants will lose the chance to take their landlords to court when new government rules on legal costs come into force next year, experts are warning. The result is that even tenants who have been illegally evicted and lost their possessions, or who are living in dangerous conditions such as extremely damp properties which damage their health, will have no recourse to justice. Only those who can afford to bear the legal costs themselves will be able to pursue such a case.

Eleanor Solomon, a partner and housing law specialist at Anthony Gold Solicitors, described the policy on costs as “extremely damaging”. She said: “Legal cases are funded for tenants through legal aid or no win, no fee: both models rely on the rule in English law that the loser pays the winner’s costs. [Now] it’s either not financially viable, or you wouldn’t be able to do that work properly, which wouldn’t be acting in the best interest of the client.”

The new rules on fixed recoverable costs are set to come into force in April 2023. Housing policy experts and solicitors working in the field say the measure poses an “existential threat” to housing justice.

 The government is seeking to strengthen tenants’ rights through the renters’ reform bill but campaigners have warned that there is no point giving tenants new rights while also taking away the legal support they need to exercise them.

‘I wouldn’t have the money to pay a lawyer’: tenants left without means to sue rogue landlords | Housing | The Guardian

Refreshing report of anti-war protest in Spain

Thousands of anti-NATO demonstrators rallied in Madrid on Sunday before a summit of the Western military alliance in the Spanish capital this week.

Demonstrators called for US-led NATO to be dissolved and for military bases maintained by the United States in Spain to be closed. Banners with the words “No to NATO, No to War, For Peace” were held as they marched through the city.

The Spanish government banned another rally planned for Wednesday, the first day of the NATO summit, on security grounds.

“Tanks yes, but of beer with tapas,” sang demonstrators, who claimed an increase in defence spending in Europe urged by NATO was a threat to peace.

“I am fed up [with] this business of arms and killing people. The solution they propose is more arms and wars and we always pay for it. So no NATO, no [army] bases, let the Americans go and leave us alone without wars and weapons,” said Concha Hoyos, a retired Madrid resident.

Organisers claimed 5,000 people joined the march.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/6/26/thousands-demonstrate-in-madrid-ahead-of-nato-summit

While the idea of wars for oil are not new, climate change is adding another dimension to the link between militaries and fossil fuels. Massive global military carbon emissions often go unreported. The billions of dollars’ worth of weapons, jets, tanks and trucks that drive the grinding conflict contribute direct emissions that, amid the fog of battle, remain difficult to quantify — and which are not accounted for in the Paris target of limiting heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit).

Axel Michaelowa, senior founding partner of German-based climate consultancy, Perspectives Climate Group, is the lead author of a report, released during last week’s climate conference in Bonn, Germany, that highlights the need to better declare and account for military and conflict-related emissions. It shows that military operation emissions in peacetime and war are only partially known, and that no one is taking responsibility for them in the context of the UN climate goals.

“Given that military emissions can reach hundreds of million tonnes of CO2 per year,” nations need to “address more transparently” the direct and indirect climate impacts of war, said Michaelowa.

The expected emissions from rebuilding cities destroyed in the Syrian war are equal to the annual greenhouse gas output of Switzerland, notes Michealowa.

Militaries around the world have for decades been concerned that a growing climate crisis will be the key trigger of future conflict, yet they have done little to address their role in exacerbating global heating through fossil fuel burning. Countries have shown little interest in reining in such outsized military emissions.

The European Union, which collectively has the second-largest armed force, only reports some emissions due to national security concerns — indirect emissions generated by the production of military equipment and weapons, for example, are not included. According to a 2021 report by The Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOBS), a UK-based monitoring group, UK military emissions alone are at least three times higher than the 11 million tons of CO2 reported in 2018.

While the annual emissions from the US military, the world’s largest, are higher than Sweden or Denmark when properly counted, researchers have said. Emitting around 23.5 thousand kilotons of CO2 in 2017, the US war machine is itself estimated to be the single biggest institutional consumer of hydrocarbons on the planet.

Doug Weir, research and policy director at The Conflict and Environment Observatory, refers to the way the conflict has exposed “energy insecurity” and dependence on fossil fuels. Weir noted that military budgets are also often focused on securing fossil fuel supplies, including in Libya where the decadelong conflict has slowed oil production to a trickle. Between 2018 and 2021, Italy, Spain and Germany have spent more than €4 billion on missions that aim to preserve oil and gas supply.

For Stuart Parkinson, a researcher at Scientists for Global Responsibility and a military emissions expert, any war spending is tied up with fossil fuels — including in Ukraine.

“Military spending is carbon intensive because of the fossil-fuel dependence of the military,” he said, noting that Russia and Ukraine together accounted for around 3.5% of the $2.1 trillion global total military spend before the war, but that Ukraine has since been given $19 billion in military aid from the US alone. A least eight NATO countries are planning to increase military budgets due to the war, with Germany announcing a €100 billion increase, said Parkinson.

“The increase in military spending will impact on the total military carbon footprint on top of the massive emissions from the war directly,” he said.

If compulsory accounting of military emissions could threaten a country’s ability to meet its climate targets, “this could have a deterrent effect on aggression,” said Axel Michaelowa. “If we have a world that is built on renewable, decentralized energy, there will be less funds for those who want to invade their neighbors,”

Ukraine war threatens climate targets | Environment | All topics from climate change to conservation | DW | 23.06.2022

 Here are details of another session at Summer School

Take on the Capitalists!

Hosted by Carla Dee

A game of Monopoly normally starts with everyone having the same amount of money, unlike real life. In this session, we’ll see what Monopoly is like with added class divide. 

One player begins with a much bigger pile of money than their competitors, who start with just a few notes each. How long before the ‘capitalist’ has three hotels on Mayfair, or can they be beaten at their own game?

Go here for details

Summer School 2022 – spgb.net (worldsocialism.org)

Under a sanely ordered social system goods would be produced solely for use and transport and medical and other services would be organised to meet the needs of the population. Not so under capitalism. We need a society where the production of everything – everything from food to housing to health care – is provided on the basis of need, not sales or profit. The market is a crazy way of distributing – in fact, it rations – what people need. The anarchy of production inherent to the capitalist system ensures that periods of prosperity and boom are not everlasting and that a slump is always somewhere around the corner. In any period of boom some industries will inevitably over-expand their production in relation to market demand and have to curtail output and lay off workers as a consequence. This has a knock-on effect for other sectors of industry, resulting in falling output and increasing unemployment for the economy as a whole.

Under capitalism, the means of wealth production—factories, farms, mines, media, means of communication and transportation—are owned and controlled by a small minority of the world’s population. The world is run for the purpose of accumulating profits for that capitalist minority. In the pursuit of profit, the needs, feelings, hopes and dreams of the vast majority. who are the wealth-producers, will inevitably be hurt. Capital exploits the working class and also it abuses us in many ways. It makes workers subjects of a set of economic, political and social relationships which we do not control. In fact, even the capitalists do not control the workings of their system—the system ultimately controls the capitalists and the governments which rule on their behalf. The truth about capitalism is that the workers are economically disenfranchised from real power and the bosses only imagine that they are in charge; everything is chaos and disorder: nobody knows what will happen next.

We live in a society which is full of frightened people. Millions of men and women who are scared of those in power who they do not control. If you are a wage slave you live in the constant fear that you will become too poor to exist. You are on the verge of the living hell reserved for workers who have no money. If you have a home you fear falling behind with the mortgage payments or rent. Repossession is your constant threat.

Fear is characteristic of the normal wage slave. Fear which is the daily companion of most workers is not something natural. To be sure, there are natural fears: physical dangers which threaten all of us occasionally and some to the extent that it destroys them. But most of the powers which assault the working class are the product of the way that society is organised. They are the socially-created effects of a social cause. The cause of our fear is the capitalist system. Under capitalism it is quite sensible to be scared. Even at its moments of greatest hopefulness, capitalism only offers the reasonable person grounds for worry. Just as one social problem is apparently being reformed out of existence two more emerge to plague us. Plans and policies to improve the system fail, either immediately or in the long term. Optimistic prospects of peace collapse when new ruling elites with unforeseen appetites for profits make war a necessity.

Capitalism requires repression. Not only that visible, brutal, blood-stained repression which comes out of the barrel of a gun or other means of state coercion. Mass emotional repression is the order of the day. Workers must learn to know their places, fear stepping out of line, feel afraid to question what it is not for us to question—run and hide, mentally if not physically, when talk of freedom is in the air. The “fear of freedom” (to use the term popularised by Erich Fromm, whose writings have much to offer us in examining the psychology of capitalist life) is amongst the greatest barriers to majority socialist understanding in the world today.

In a socialist society, humans will be free. The most basic social freedom of all is free access to the goods and services we need. Capitalism can never offer such freedom. The market is the antithesis of free access. Socialism means that the common store of global wealth, including all services and the widest artistic opportunities, will be free to all. There will be no money. Each will take from what is available according to their needs, just as all will give to society according to their abilities. Cooperative, democratic human freedom will prevail.

With this economic freedom from the shackles of the market will come a profound emotional freeing of people from the burden of living in fear of powers beyond them. No more bosses, no more gods, no more money-worship. Without the State, liberated from leaders and classes, humanity will be free to explore what we want to make of ourselves. The dreams which had previously been confined to utopian visions will be on the social agenda. Humans will possess the liberty to live with a consciousness unhindered by the fears which come from always having to look over your shoulder. What is needed is the strength to act and the knowledge that conscious, democratic action for socialism is the way out. To our fellow frightened workers we say: Don’t be afraid; it’s time now to give the capitalists something to worry about.

 Should we be surprised by the Supreme Court’s decision to rescind access to abortions and give individual states the authority to pass their own rules and regulations? Right-wing Poland has imposed restrictions upon women having abortions and in left-wing Nicaragua Daniel Ortega has also reduced a woman’s rights to abortion. Despite the anti-abortion propaganda, there is and never has been “abortion on demand”. In every country, there has been laws to be followed by pregnant women and their doctors.  But no-one should experience or witness the human misery caused by unwanted pregnancies.

Abortion is a very serious matter and cannot be seen as another means of contraception. Unfortunately, many of those who support the so-called “pro-life” position are bitterly opposed to sex education beyond the most vague biological facts and some now suggest the next target to be undone should be Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965, when SCOTUS ruled the use of contraception between two married individuals was a matter of privacy and constitutionally protected. One way to make terminations unnecessary is to make contraception easily available, give all young people a good sex education with an emphasis on equality, relationships, love, safety and respect for each other and most importantly the end to poverty that deprives working women of child-care provisions. 

Abortion and contraception are not totally separate issues. How about the IUD which prevents a fertilized egg from implanting in the wall of the uterus? What about the ‘morning after” pill? Are these contraceptives or early forms of abortion, or both? Then there is the social question of how teenage girls are sexualized by the persuasive power of the glamorization of sex in the media.

In an ideal world, there would be no unwanted pregnancies, but there are, and even in a socialist world, with all the best sex education, access to contraception, there will still be. In an unwanted pregnancy the woman herself should have the final say. No other person should have more rights over her than she has herself. Abortions should be performed as early as possible and as late as necessary. 

The truth of the matter is that pro-lifers may defame a person who has an abortion, or who assists in the abortion as “child murderers” but they never condemn the economic system that is complicit in the deaths of millions of children from hunger and preventable illnesses.

Socialists can respect the opinions of people motivated by the idea of protecting all forms of human life out of regard for the supremacy of humanity. Unfortunately, most of those within the so-called pro-life organisations hold little genuine concern for the real sufferings of their fellow  human beings. All express concern for unborn children and yet we wonder how many of these anti-abortionists express anything like the same compassion over the deaths of living children.

Pious sentiments about the sanctity of human life have a hollow ring when each and every day brings fresh evidence of the lack of respect for human life. And moralistic cant about “rights” will do nothing to change the material circumstances that cause women to seek abortions. Only in a society in which human needs are paramount — the needs of women to control their own fertility, the needs of parents to have creative work besides looking after their children, the needs of children to grow up in a secure, loving environment free from want and deprivation. the needs of the handicapped to be respected and useful members of the community — is it possible to imagine a situation where all babies are wanted and abortion is made unnecessary.

 Almost 8 million children under 5 in 15 crisis-hit countries are at risk of death from severe wasting unless they receive immediate therapeutic food and care – with the numbers rising, UNICEF warned.

Since the start of the year, the escalating global food crisis has forced one child every 60 seconds  to suffer from severe wasting in 15 countries bearing the brunt of the crisis, including in the Horn of Africa and the Central Sahel. This rise in severe wasting is in addition to existing levels of child undernutrition. Within the 15 countries, UNICEF estimates that at least 40 million children are severely nutrition insecure, meaning they are not receiving the bare minimum diverse diet they need to grow and develop in early childhood. Further, 21 million children are severely food insecure, meaning they lack access to enough food to meet minimum food needs, leaving them at high risk of severe wasting.

“We are now seeing the tinderbox of conditions for extreme levels of child wasting begin to catch fire,” said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell. “Food aid is critical, but we cannot save starving children with bags of wheat. We need to reach these children now with therapeutic treatment before it is too late.” 

The price of ready-to-use therapeutic food to treat severe wasting has soared by 16 per cent in recent weeks due to a sharp rise in the cost of raw ingredients

“It is hard to describe what it means for a child to be ‘severely wasted,’ but when you meet a child who is suffering from this most lethal form of malnutrition, you understand – and you never forget,” said Russell.

Severe wasting – where children are too thin for their height – is the most visible and lethal form of undernutrition. Weakened immune systems increase the risk of death among children under 5 by up to 11 times compared to well-nourished children.

Global hunger crisis pushing one child into severe malnutrition every minute in 15 crisis-hit countries [EN/AR] – World | ReliefWeb

 “There is a real risk that multiple famines will be declared in 2022. And 2023 could be even worse.” – U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres 

UN chief warns of ‘catastrophe’ from global food shortage | AP News

 The percentage of the world’s population living without democracy has grown from 49% to 70% in only a decade.

Undemocratic systems are affecting 5.4 billion people.

Populist leaders: Democracies in danger of extinction | The Global Observer | Opinion | EL PAÍS English Edition (elpais.com)