While Rishi Sunak wallowed in the praise of his fellow Tories for reinforcing the hostile environment towards migrants crossing the Channel, news is breaking of a boat tragedy. The number of deaths has not been ascertained as yet.
Suella Braverman was quick to express her sorrow and shed her crocodile tears, ignoring the fact that it has been UK policy which has led to people risking their lives to reach the UK so to be able to lodge asylum claims.
While Rishi Sunak wallowed in the praise of his fellow Tories for reinforcing the hostile environment towards migrants crossing the Channel, news is breaking of a boat tragedy. The number of deaths has not been ascertained as yet.
Suella Braverman was quick to express her sorrow and shed her crocodile tears, ignoring the fact that it has been UK policy which has led to people risking their lives to reach the UK so to be able to lodge asylum claims.
Back in the Sixties, and beyond, there was a popular Pete Seegar protest song: Where Have All The Flowers Gone. It contains the line: ‘Oh, When will you ever learn?
Oh, When will you ever learn?’ The double question expressing exasperation at the senseless deaths of young men in senseless conflicts.
If the report, quoted by RT, but taken from The Times, is correct then Marx’s adage about history repeating itself, but the second time as farce, begins not to look applicable in this instance. Five will get you ten that there are ‘advisers’ from one or more states with a geo-political interest in sustaining this particular conflict embedded in Ukraine.
Wars are not the business of the working class; the effects falling most heavily upon them.
Neither is supporting the interests of the capitalist class the business of the working class.
Time to start supporting yourselves.
“British Royal Marines conducted high-risk operations in Ukraine in April, Lieutenant General Robert Magowan has admitted, according to a report in The Times on Tuesday.
Russia has consistently warned that NATO troops have been active in the conflict, but these statements have been dismissed by Western analysts and media.
Members of 45 Commando Group of the Royal Marines left Ukraine in January after evacuating the British embassy in Kiev to Poland. However, some 300 members of the elite unit were sent back into the country in April to reestablish the British mission in Kiev, before going on to conduct “other discreet operations,” Magowan wrote in the force’s official journal, The Globe and Laurel, the newspaper said.
These operations took place “in a hugely sensitive environment and with a high level of political and military risk,” Magowan, who formerly served as commandant general of the Royal Marines and is now deputy chief of Defense Staff at the Ministry of Defense, stated.
While Magowan did not elaborate on what kind of missions the commandos carried out, his statement marks the first time that the UK has admitted its troops conducted special operations in Ukraine. The Ministry of Defense refused to confirm earlier accounts of British special forces training Ukrainian troops in Kiev in April.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has described the conflict in Ukraine as one between Russia and the “entire Western military machine,” and claimed in September that there are entire military units in Ukraine “under the de-facto command of Western advisers.”
Putin’s words were rejected by Western media outlets. “There is no evidence of NATO ground forces participating in Ukraine,” Edward Arnold of the Royal United Services Institute think tank told the BBC at the time. “Nor of NATO commanders directing Ukrainian units on the battlefield. There is also a very low likelihood of this happening in the future as Nato seeks to mitigate escalation risks.”
Magowan’s admission proves Arnold incorrect, but the UK is not the only NATO country to acknowledge the presence of its forces in Ukraine. An unnamed Pentagon official told reporters in October that an unspecified number of US troops were inspecting American arms shipments somewhere within Ukraine.”
RT 13/12/22
Dave C.
A government-commissioned report by the King’s Fund health thinktank says years of denying funding to the health service and failing to address its growing workforce crisis have left it with too few staff, too little equipment and too many outdated buildings to perform the amount of surgery needed.
A “decade of neglect” by successive Conservative administrations has weakened the NHS to the point that it will not be able to tackle the 7 million-strong backlog of care the report concluded.
One of the experts consulted, said: “We have essentially had 10 years of managed decline. This is not a Covid problem. This is an austerity problem.”
“Though Covid certainly exacerbated the crisis in the NHS and social care, we are ultimately paying the price for a decade of neglect,” said the King’s Fund chief executive, Richard Murray. “The sporadic injections of cash during the austerity years after 2010 were at best meant to cover [the service’s] day-to-day running costs. This dearth of long-term investment has led to a health and care system hamstrung by a lack of staff and equipment and crumbling buildings. These critical challenges have been obvious for years.”
He continued, “The NHS in 2022 faces many of the same challenges it faced in 2000: unacceptably long waiting times and a service hobbled by staff shortages. To that is now added a cost of living crisis, industrial action by staff and a backdrop of a weak economy and weak public finances.”
The promises made earlier this year in NHS England’s “elective recovery plan” are highly unlikely to be met. They included pledges to end waits of two years, 18 months and one year by the summer, next spring and 2025 respectively.
Decade of neglect means NHS unable to tackle care backlog, report says | NHS | The Guardian
Thirty million people in the UK will be unable to afford what the public considers to be a decent standard of living by 2024, according to a study from the New Economics Foundation.
The thinktank said rising prices, below-inflation increases in earnings and projected increases in unemployment would result in 43% of households lacking the resources to put food on the table, buy new clothes or treat themselves and their families – a 12 percentage point rise compared with 2019.
The NEF said its calculation that by 2024 almost 90% of single parents and 50% of workers with children would fall below a minimum income standard.
Sam Tims, economist at the New Economics Foundation, said: “A decade of cuts, freezes, caps and haphazard migration between systems has left the UK with one of the weakest safety nets among developed countries. Millions of families were already living in avoidable deprivation and hardship but as we enter the greatest living standards crisis on modern records, the day-to-day experience of low-income families is set to become even more desperate.”
Asbestos is banned in 70 countries which have deemed that this construction material is a “silent killer” since its fibres are carcinogenic.
According to the World Health Organization, all types of asbestos cause “lung cancer, mesothelioma, cancer of the larynx and ovary, and asbestosis [fibrosis of the lungs]”. Exposure to the fibres and handling or inhaling them could also result in death.
In 2011, India banned asbestos mining and asbestos waste used in ships. But it continues to trade in raw asbestos and asbestos-based products, commonly found in the roofs of houses, especially in poorer regions of the country.
Aaron Cosbey, a development economist and head of Small World Sustainability, a consultancy, said that trade goes on because commercial interests have been prioritised over human welfare.
According to a November 2021 report by the Indian government, between 2019 and 2020, India imported 361,164 tonnes of asbestos, a 1 percent decrease compared with 364,105 tonnes in the previous year.
The report noted that almost the entire import was chrysotile asbestos, with 85 percent of these fibres coming from Russia. About 3 percent also came from Brazil, Kazakhstan and Hungary each, and 2 percent came from Poland and South Africa respectively.
India also exports asbestos. The Indian government’s November 2021 report noted that most of the exports went to Bangladesh, and 7 percent to Sri Lanka.
Gopal Krishna, an environmental lawyer and co-founder of the Ban Asbestos Network of India, explained:
“The trade continues because nobody in India has time to deal with health complaints when money is involved and there is a lewd relationship between the Indian government and the asbestos manufacturers in the country…The Indian government is aware of the harmful impacts of asbestos, but is heavily influenced by the profit-inducing capacity of the industry…” He added, “These business enterprises don’t operate on logic. They operate on profit.”
Why does India still use and trade asbestos? | Health News | Al Jazeera
More than 11,000 children are known to have been killed or maimed in Yemen’s civil war since it escalated nearly eight years ago.
“The true toll of this conflict is likely to be far higher,” said the children’s agency UNICEF “Thousands of children have lost their lives, hundreds of thousands more remain at risk of death from preventable disease or starvation.”
2.2 million Yemeni children are acutely malnourished, one-quarter of them aged under five, and most are at extreme risk from cholera, measles and other vaccine-preventable diseases, UNICEF said.
UN report: More than 11,000 children killed or maimed in Yemen civil war (france24.com)
From mid-2019 to the end of 2020, U.S. wealth grew by about $20 trillion.
The richest 10% (who are roughly speaking America’s millionaires) took $15 trillion of that.
The average millionaire in America gained about $600,000 during that year and a half.
The “poorest millionaires” gained about $200,000. The 25,000 very richest Americans (the .01%) each took an estimated $80 million during that time.
According to Americans for Tax Fairness and IRS data, over a recent five-year span the 25 wealthiest billionaires paid an effective federal income tax rate of just 3.4% when their wealth growth is counted as income.
Meanwhile, the average federal income tax rate for all taxpayers was 13.3% in 2019.
The nine main water and sewerage companies had paid out £65.9bn in dividends in the last three decades. They have also taken on debts of £54bn.
Ofwat said Northumbrian Water and Portsmouth Water had paid dividends which were significantly higher than the regulator’s expectations and the companies’ financial resilience. Northumbrian dividends in the past year were £181.5m and Portsmouth Water paid £5.1m to shareholders.
David Black, the chief executive of Ofwat, said: “In too many areas, water and wastewater companies are falling short when it comes to looking after customers, the environment and their own financial resilience. We are clear; these companies need to address this unacceptable performance as a matter of urgency. For some companies poor performance has become the norm. This cannot go on. We are requiring the worst performers, including Thames Water and Southern Water, to return around £120m to customers.”
“In 2021-22 the number of serious pollution incidents increased and there was a deterioration in the compliance of treatment works. Only four companies met the performance level to reduce sewage flooding in customers homes … Companies urgently need to improve their performance on this measure. There are cases of sustained poor performance over a number of years, such as South West Water.”
Poor performance now ‘the norm’ for some water firms, warns Ofwat | Water | The Guardian
WAGE SLAVERY
As workers across the UK prepare for strike action over pay, it has emerged that 2022 has been the worst year for real wage growth in nearly half a century.
The Trades Union Congress (TUC) found that real wages – the amount people earned in relation to their cost of living – fell by an average of £76 a month in 2022 as a result of pay not keeping pace with inflation.
Key workers in the public sector are now £180 a month worse off in real terms than they were a year ago, it said. It means workers have seen the sharpest fall in real wages since 1977 and the second worst on record since the end of the second world war.
Nurses’ real pay fell by £1,800 over the last year, while paramedics’ real pay fell by £2,400, according to the TUC. Nurses are earning £5,000 a year less – in real terms – than they were in 2010.
And for midwives and paramedics the figure rises to more than £6,000.
TUC general secretary, Frances O’Grady, said the current wave of industrial action in Britain is the result of workers “being pushed to breaking point” by years of pay austerity. She also accused ministers of being more interested in escalating disputes than resolving them.
“Family budgets have been shredded by soaring bills and more than a decade of pay being held down. The Conservatives have presided over the longest real wage squeeze in over 200 years,” she said. “The Tories’ failure to get pay rising has left millions of households brutally exposed to the cost of living emergency. It’s time to reward work – not wealth. We cannot be a country where NHS and teaching staff have to use food banks, while City bankers are given unlimited bonuses.”
Workers have faced food inflation running at over 12% and annual energy bills more than £1,000 higher than last year. Despite this, ministers have been actively blocking pay offers by employers – in the case of the rail dispute – or refusing to intervene in others.
2022 the UK’s worst year for real wage growth since 1977, TUC says | UK news | The Guardian
