The coronavirus crisis has prompted a surge in usage of services such as broadband and mobile phones, as millions of people shifted to home working and lockdown restrictions shut down high streets across the country.

Almost a fifth of UK households have struggled to pay their TV, internet and phone bills this year, with some resorting to cutting spend on food and clothes to make payments, according to research from Ofcom. 

4.7m homes had experienced difficulty paying their telecoms bills in 2020. Of those, more than one million have cut back spending on items such as food or clothes.

“Lockdown has laid bare our dependence on a reliable internet connection,” said Lindsey Fussell, Ofcom’s network and communications group director. “So it’s important that affordable options are available so everyone can stay connected, particularly those who have fallen on hard times.”

Alistair Cromwell, the acting chief executive at Citizens Advice, said: “Since the March lockdown began, internet access has been vital to home working, running small businesses, accessing essential services like healthcare and continuing education. It is crucial that those who are struggling financially are not locked out.”

Millions in UK struggling to pay internet and phone bills, says Ofcom | Money | The Guardian

 The UK government’s partial public-sector pay freeze will hit workers who are already paid less than their counterparts in private companies, according to new research by the Resolution Foundation. It suggests that the pay squeeze by the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, may not achieve his aim of narrowing the gap between government and private workers.

2.6 million public sector workers whose pay will be frozen, including teachers and police, earn 7.9% less than their private sector counterparts once differences such as experience and location are taken into account, according to the analysis.

Unions said the pay freeze was a “kick in the teeth”, especially for key workers who had played a vital role in fighting the pandemic. 

Sunak said that pay rises for public sector workers – apart from NHS workers and the lowest-paid – could not be justified at a time when average earnings in the private sector were falling. “Coronavirus has deepened the disparity between public and private sector wages,” he said.

The government’s austerity pay freezes after the 2008 financial crisis have meant the “pay premium” for the public sector has fallen to zero once factors such as education and age are taken into account, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

Hannah Slaughter, an economist at the Resolution Foundation, said: “The government has justified the coming public sector pay freeze on the basis of the pay premium these workers will experience as a result of the pandemic. But this is a very poor description of the impact of the policy, with the freeze largely falling on those already experiencing pay penalties relative to the private sector. Ministers must be mindful that while public and private sector pay do move in line with each other over the longer term, there are risks in making that adjustment next April, when the economic challenges of the pandemic will still be immense, and consumer confidence needs supporting.”

Public-sector pay freeze will hit those earning less than private counterparts – report | Society | The Guardian

 The Institute of Health Visiting said their findings have laid bare the damage the pandemic had done to families, with the youngest and most vulnerable suffering most.

61% of health visitors in England reported an increase in cases of child neglect. Four out of five reported a rise in domestic violence and abuse, and perinatal mental illness.  65% of health visitors had caseloads of more than 300 children under five, 29% had caseloads of more than 500 and 12% caseloads of more than 700. One health visitor reported a caseload of 3,000 children.

The institute said the optimum maximum caseload for effective practice was 250 children, and fewer in areas of high vulnerability. 

Covid-19 had affected babies and young children in disadvantaged families disproportionately as a result of factors such as overcrowded housing with lack of outdoor space, the impact of poverty and parental stress and anxiety, it said.

The institute also said cuts in public health budgets meant health visiting was already in a “depleted state” before the pandemic, with a 31% reduction in health visitors since 2015. This left many services “ill-prepared to meet the rapidly rising levels of need” since the early weeks of the first lockdown and many vulnerable babies and young children without the support that they needed, it said.

Babies and children ‘forgotten and failed’ in Covid response, say health workers | World news | The Guardian

 If one listens to the media, the pharmaceutical corporations has become one of the most altruistic industries ever, foregoing bountiful profits to protect humanity from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Yet they and the many governments that advance their interests have refused to suspend their intellectual property rights to the vaccine discovers. They are defending their patents.

The U.S.  insists that IP protection is best to ensure “swift delivery.”

 The EU claims there is “no indication that IPR issues have been a genuine barrier … to Covid-19-related medicines and technologies” 

And the U.K. dismisses the proposal as “an extreme measure to address an unproven problem.”

The Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations’ diriector-general claims it “would jeopardize future medical innovation, making us more vulnerable to other diseases.” 

The Wall Street Journal denounced it as “A Global Covid Vaccine Heist,” warning “their effort would harm everyone, including the poor.”

As Shakespeare remarked, it is a case of them protesting too much.

We are told that voluntary mechanisms should suffice, and that the public-private COVAX initiative ensures fair and equitable access.

But the accepted facts of the situation is that the drug-making companies cannot  produce enough vaccines, safely and affordably, for everyone as expeditiously as they would like to tell us. It maybe 2024 before sufficient supplies of vaccine will have been produced to protect everybody. Nine out of 10 people in poor countries will miss out on a vaccine in 2021, according to Oxfam. 

 Not a single major drug company had joined WHO’s Covid-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP) to encourage industry contributions of IP, technologies and data to scale up worldwide sharing and production of all such needs.

The drug manufacturers PR boast that a few companies have “voluntarily” given up some IPR, albeit only temporarily.

 Moderna has promised to license its Covid-19 related patents to other vaccine manufacturers, and not enforce its own patents. But their pledge is limited, allowing it to enforce its patents “post pandemic,” as defined by Moderna.

AstraZeneca has announced that its vaccine, researched at Oxford University, will be available at cost in some locations, but only until July 2021. 

We should not be at all surprised for the simple fact is that pharmaceutical firms are in business to make as big a return on their investment as possible. The focus of their scientists may well be driven by a commitment to preserving human health and wellness, but charity does not outweigh their share-holders’ sense of business.

As  Anna Marriott, Oxfam’s health policy manager, explains,

“No one should be blocked from getting a life-saving vaccine because of the country they live in or the amount of money in their pocket. But unless something changes dramatically, billions of people around the world will not receive a safe and effective vaccine for COVID-19 for years to come.”

 The United States is on pace for the slowest population growth in a century and economists worry it will hamper economic recovery. The confluence of rising mortality and declining birth and immigration rates threatens to exacerbate the country’s years-long decline in population growth and threatens to impact the economy.

The number of American residents is expected to increase by just 700,000, or about 0.2%, in 2020, according to Moody’s Analytics. That would put the country on its slowest pace since 1918.

The trend could “make the economy less dynamic,” Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi told the outlet. “Fewer people means fewer homes (purchased), fewer cars, fewer vacations.”

“Economic growth is driven by a combination of productivity and population, the number of workers,” Michael Graetz, a former senior Treasury Department official and co-author of “The Wolf at the Door: The Menace of Economic Insecurity and How to Fight It,” told Salon. “So when you’ve got a smaller number of workers, you’re going to have a smaller economic growth.”

Economists are concerned about “dependency ratios,” said Graetz, who is now a professor at Columbia University. “Retirees and children are not producing wage income. So the decline in the birth rate reduces the dependency ratio because it reduces the number of children.”

With the ratio of workers to retirees increasing, “more of the workers’ income will have to go to support expenditures on retirees unless those expenditures are dramatically cut,” he said, referring to Social Security benefits and health care expenses.

U.S. population growth has been in decline for years. The Census Bureau estimated that the country’s population has grown just 8% over the last decade, the slowest rate since the 1930s, when the Great Depression and immigration restrictions slowed population growth to 7.2%. 

And the problem is hardly limited to the U.S., with many European and Asian countries seeing even slower growth rates. The long-term trend has resulted in an aging population, with the number of retirees rising by an estimated 37% over the last decade, while the fertility rate fell to its lowest level since the government began tracking it in the early 1900s.

The most obvious way to address the slowdown is to increase immigration, Graetz argued. 

The pandemic “has accelerated the use of robotics and other technologies to take on tasks that are more fraught during the pandemic” Elisabeth Reynolds, the head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Task Force on the Work of the Future, told the Financial Times. “It is fair to assume that some firms have learned how to maintain their productivity with fewer workers and they will not unlearn what they have learned.”

A recent paper by researchers at MIT and Boston University found that robots could replace as many as 2 million people in manufacturing alone by 2025. Many telecommunications firms, call centers, customer service firms, and food-service companies have already downsized their workforces.

 The gig economy and the number of part-time and temporary jobs, particularly with the decline of union power across the country, has expanded.

“The combination of that, with the fact that an adult in the United States today can expect to change jobs maybe a dozen times over their lifetime, creates a lot of insecurity for people who are not well equipped to deal with it,” Graetz explained. “Temporary and part-time work doesn’t supply a living, doesn’t enable you to know that you’re going to be able to pay for food, clothing, all the things that your family needs.”

“What the pandemic has done… is to shine a spotlight on just how precarious workers’ and their families’ connections are to the workforce and to jobs. And how quickly jobs can disappear unexpectedly,” Graetz said. “A lot of those jobs that have disappeared, and a lot of the businesses that have gone, that have closed as a result of the pandemic, and are not coming back…”

US Population Growth Falls to Lowest in a Century Amid Pandemic Fallout (truthout.org)

“The basic law of capitalism is you or I, not you and I.” Karl Liebknecht 

Capitalism is a rapacious and parasitic system which  compels working-people to spend most of their waking hours renting out their commodified and exploited labour power or else go without the money income required to purchase basic life necessities distributed in commodity form. Capitalism is an anarchic and competitive system that absurdly complicates production and distribution. Despite capitalism’s rather marvellous media public relations apparatus, negative perceptions of it has never ever been extinguished. You don’t require a PhD in economics to know that life sucks under capitalism. “Compassionate” pretends to be kind to workers, communities and the environment. At the same time, its predatory nature continues to make sure that the rich are getting richer. Capitalism will always be about profits at all cost. Despite the rhetoric of promises, conscience and ethical commitments, capitalism will only reform if it does not threaten its ability to accumulate money. Their clever PR presents a public image that it makes it look like changes are happening, when in fact, almost nothing is being done, apart from creative accounting.

The pandemic has caused immeasurable hardships across the globe. It has radically exacerbated inequalities. When the coronavirus pandemic began to spread, those who feared the Apocalypse, all the so-called preppers and survivalists in their bunkers found themselves mistaken. Instead of the dog-eat-dog breakdown of civilisation, the pandemic resulted in a return to community and  people once again became good neighbours, helping one another out,  shopping for the frail and elderly, sharing what little they had toilet paper. Mutual aid and cooperation prevailed. Quarantines and social distancing didn’t develop into individualism but brought people together, revealed their commonalities, not their differences. The wild forest-fires and hurricanes, the floods and droughts arising from the climate crisis has made us realise that we are all one people in one world. Isolationism has been exposed as no response to global catastrophes. We now understand more than ever our obligations to one another regardless of nationality or colour. We need not be wide-eyed utopians  but accept as hard-nosed realists the importance of our enlightened self-interest and mutual solidarity.

Coal is the most polluting of the fossil fuels and its use for power generation alone currently accounts for about 30 per cent of global CO2 emissions

 There is “no immediate decline in sight” for coal-fired power demand, concludes  the International Energy Agency (IEA) Coal 2020 report.

 Governments around the world have breached the rights of seafarers during the Covid-19 pandemic, creating a “humanitarian crisis” in which hundreds of thousands of workers are stranded onboard ships, said the UN’s International Labour Organization’s committee of experts. The ILO panel warned that a lack of action by governments had risked seafarers being subjected to “forced labour”.

Seafarers had reported physical and mental exhaustion, anxiety and sickness after spending months on board ship during the pandemic. Hundreds of people were denied medical care ashore, resulting in  deaths.

The pandemic had laid bare the essential role of seafarers in the world economy, the committee said, noting that 90% of trade, including food and vital medical supplies, is moved by sea. It expressed “deep concern” that while ports around the world managed to operate uninterrupted during the health crisis, seafarers continued to face “extreme difficulties” in trying to disembark and transit through countries for repatriation. 

Seafarers were being forced to work beyond their contracts, denied access to medical care and deprived of their rights to repatriation, shore leave and annual leave, it said.  The panel called on governments to take action to grant seafarers access to medical attention, to enable them to be repatriated when contracts are finished and to allow crew changes.

Stephen Cotton, general secretary of the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), welcomed the “unequivocal ruling and recognition from the ILO committee of experts of the serious and ongoing forced labour risk of governments’ failure to resolve the crew change crisis and comply with international law. What is happening is unacceptable and a serious violation of fundamental human and labour rights.”

“This ruling clearly sets out that it is both legally and morally wrong for countries to continue to expect seafarers to work indefinitely, supplying the world with food, medicine and vital supplies, while depriving them of their fundamental rights as seafarers, as workers, and as humans. This landmark ruling is a clear vindication of what seafarers’ unions and shipowners have been saying for the past nine months.”

‘Humanitarian crisis’: UN panel decries Covid rules that trapped crews at sea | Shipping industry | The Guardian

 A powerful racial myth has been exposed.  A Home Office report has concluded that there is no credible evidence that any one ethnic group is over-represented in cases of child sexual exploitation.

For many in Britain today the term “grooming gang” immediately suggests Pakistani-heritage Muslim men abusing white girls. What started as a far-right trope had migrated into the mainstream, meeting little resistance along the way. The racial stereotype gained credence and the “grooming gangs” narrative fed into the agenda of the far right, but it was not only there that the issue was racialised

But Home Office researchers now tell us that “research has found that group-based offenders are most commonly White”. The two-year study by the Home Office makes very clear that there are no grounds for asserting that Muslim or Pakistani-heritage men are disproportionately engaged in such crimes. The horrific and widely reported crimes committed in places such as Rochdale, Oxford and Telford were real: but racist stereotyping and demonisation deflected from that. The report reveals that there was discord in its advisory group of experts, campaigners and others. Some members apparently wanted an even greater focus on Pakistani men, hinting at an appetite for producing policy-led evidence rather than evidence-led policy.

The claims that “grooming gangs” were not properly investigated due to “political correctness” and a fear of being accused of racism are heavily undermined by decades of research highlighting the consistent over-policing of minority communities. What’s more, the whole history of the UK’s responses to child sexual exploitation and abuse is littered with failings – as shown by the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse, Operation Yewtree and numerous other investigations and inquiries. There were also regrettable consequences for child protection, since victims and offenders who don’t fit the stereotype can be overlooked.

This misdirected focus can be found in the Home Office report itself. Its title and executive summary both imply it covers “group-based child sexual exploitation” in the whole. But it fails to include a whole range of problems that might reasonably fit into that category, such as abuse that occurs online, and in schools, care homes and other institutions. Instead, it follows the crowd by dwelling on child sexual exploitation “in the community”. This construct is vaguely defined and poorly justified, although certainly more acceptable sounding than “grooming gangs” – the broadly equivalent term that has no legal meaning but plenty of racial and political baggage.

Child sexual abuse is not a “Muslim problem” but is endemic to virtually all communities. Look at the numbers: the sheer scale makes the ubiquity of abuse inevitable.

 An estimated one in 13 adults in England has been sexually abused as children. In 2019/20, police across the UK recorded more than 73,518 sexual offences against children, and the Home Office review itself reminds us that only around one in 10 victims actually disclose child sexual abuse to an official at the time.

The common denominator is not immigration, race, culture or Islam. Child sexual abuse is the product of a complex interplay of patriarchy, power, exploitation, opportunity and disregard for children. The past decade has shown that too many people in power are insufficiently concerned when sexual abusers are not from Asian or Muslim backgrounds.

A new Home Office report admits grooming gangs are not a ‘Muslim problem’ | Child protection | The Guardian

Despite the misery of millions, ten of the richest people in the world have boosted their already vast wealth by more than $400bn (£296bn) since the coronavirus pandemic began as their businesses were boosted by lockdowns and financial crises across the globe.

 Americans for Tax Fairness estimates the collective wealth of America’s 651 billionaires has risen by $1.1tn over the same period. Frank Clemente of Americans for Tax Fairness said:

“Their pandemic profits are so immense that America’s billionaires could pay for a major Covid relief bill and still not lose a dime of their pre-virus riches. Their wealth growth is so great that they alone could provide a $3,000 stimulus payment to every man, woman and child in the country, and still be richer than they were nine months ago.”

Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, has watched his wealth rocket by $70bn since March to a record $185bn as hundreds of millions of people trapped at home turned to the online delivery giant to keep themselves fed and entertained.  During the pandemic, his wealth has grown by 66%.

 His gains pale in comparison to those of Elon Musk, chief executive of electric car company Tesla. Musk’s fortune soared to $153bn, up from $25bn in March, as investors bet that the pandemic would lead governments to speed up the switch from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles. Musk, 49, owns 20% of Tesla and is now the world’s second-richest person, up from 35th in the global league table of billionaires back in January. Tesla shares have risen almost sevenfold since March as investors bet that the company would be a clear leader in an electric future. From Monday, the firm will be included in the blue-chip S&P 500 index – news which has led to a further surge in demand for shares over recent weeks. 

Bernard Arnault, Europe’s richest person, has seen his fortune double since the pandemic began, as demand for luxury brands in his LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton stable bounced back. Arnault’s wealth increased from $69bn in March to $148bn, to make him the third-richest person on the planet. 

Bill Gates of Microsoft  and the fourth-richest person, has an estimated $120bn fortune. Gates’s wealth has increased by about $20bn since March.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who saw his wealth increase by about 80% to $100bn,

Warren Buffett, whose fortune increased by 26% to $85bn.

 Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, whose wealth swelled by 50% to $88bn.

 Google’s Larry Page increased his wealth by half to $76bn, his co-founder, Sergey Brin, saw a similar increase to $74bn, 

Amancio Ortega, founder of Inditex, saw his fortune rise 47% to $75bn.

Ana Arendar, the head of Oxfam’s inequality campaign, said the fact that the richest of the rich have made so much money during the coronavirus pandemic “proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the global economic system is not fit for purpose”.

“Allowing the wealth of a tiny few to explode while hundreds of millions suffer is nothing short of a dereliction of duty,” she said of global governments’ inaction on widening inequality. “Extreme poverty is rising for the first time in a decade and hundreds of millions of people face dire hardship; in many cases failing into debt, skipping meals and being forced into destitution,” Arendar said. “Governments need to stop pandering to the richest…”

Luke Hildyard, executive director of the High Pay Centre, a thinktank that focuses on excessive pay, said: “People perhaps fail to appreciate the vast extent of billionaire wealth. To give you some perspective, just the increase in the net worth of these 10 individuals over the past 10 months is more than the estimated amount that the UK government has spent this year fighting the health and economic consequences of the coronavirus on behalf of 66 million people.”

Ten billionaires reap $400bn boost to wealth during pandemic | E-commerce | The Guardian

Fine words and but such sentiments are no solution. Tinkering around with the re-distribution of wealth does not go to the root cause of inequality. We need an economic system change