Hunger will be the “single biggest challenge” schools face as children return to classrooms in the coming weeks, according to the Child Poverty Action Group

Already, 800,000 children living in poverty in England do not qualify for free school meals sparking calls for the government to introduce universal free school meals to help tackle the crisis.  Headteachers are bracing for rising numbers from homes that cannot afford to feed them properly.

In England, all infant schoolchildren are entitled to free school meals from reception to year two, but beyond that only children whose parents earn less than £7,400 a year are eligible. But the rise in the price cap for the average gas and electricity bill to £3,549 a year from October will mean many who earn more than this will face a stark choice between food and heating.

Andy Jolley, a former school governor and campaigner for free school meals, said: “It’s incredibly difficult to become eligible for free school meals. A lot of people who have lost their jobs, who you would imagine must be eligible, just aren’t.” He added: “Registration isn’t automatic. Parents have to tell the school and then go through a complicated process to apply. Often because of barriers such as language or fear of stigma, families don’t claim.”

Paul Gosling, head of Exeter Road community primary school in Exmouth and who is president of the National Association of Head Teachers union, said “We will have far more children turning up to school hungry.” and adding that his school was worrying about how to afford to keep the lights on, “let alone helping families”.

Jonny Uttley, CEO of the Education Alliance academy trust, which runs seven schools in Hull and East Riding, said: “This food poverty is the single biggest challenge schools will face. More and more children will turn up to school hungry. It will go well beyond the definition of free school meals now.” He explained that “even before the horrific energy cap rises”, he was planning measures such as breakfast clubs and uniform vouchers because of rising poverty in his schools. But now “the potential scale of the problem is so much worse”.

Uttley believes the government needs to introduce universal free school meals because so many families will be in desperate need despite falling outside the government’s poverty threshold.

Richard Murphy, economic justice campaigner and professor of accounting at Sheffield University, said free school meals for all children in state schools was the only possible solution. “Within months we will be facing the worst economic crisis that anyone alive has witnessed,” he said. “The government must move rapidly and universally as the cost of not doing so is not just child poverty but child hunger, and that cannot be acceptable.”

Fears of widespread child hunger spark calls for universal free school meals in UK | UK cost of living crisis | The Guardian

 Discussions that were meant to lead to a UN Ocean Treaty that would protect biodiversity in international waters have ended without agreement.

The fifth round of discussions, which began two weeks ago, were intended to establish a UN Ocean Treaty that would set rules for protecting biodiversity in two-thirds of the world’s oceanic areas that lie outside territorial waters.

UN members failed to agree on how to share benefits from marine life, establish protected areas, or to prevent human activity with life in international waters.

Environmental campaigners, who noted that discussions had been continuing on and off for 15 years, expressed disappointment and blamed wealthy countries, including the US, of being too slow to compromise. Among the issues holding up the treaty is agreement on a process for creating protected areas as well as environmental impact assessments.

 Laura Meller of Greenpeace’s Protect the Oceans campaign, explained, “Time has run out. Further delay means ocean destruction. We are sad and disappointed. While countries continue to talk, the oceans and all those who rely on them will suffer.” 

Greenpeace had already warned that treaty talks were on the brink of failure because of the greed of countries in the High Ambition Coalition and others such as the US and Canada. At issue, the group said, was prioritizing hypothetical future profits from Marine Genetics Resources over protecting the oceans.

Also, Russia had blocked negotiations, refusing to engage in the treaty process and in attempts at compromise as a diplomatic lever involved with its war in Ukraine.

‘Time has run out’: UN fails to reach agreement to protect marine life | United Nations | The Guardian

The value of average wages has fallen steadily for 12 years. 

Christina McAnea, general secretary of the biggest union, Unison, estimates that the real terms wages of her 1.3 million mainly public service members, some at or near the national minimum wage of £9.50 an hour, have fallen by up to 25%.

McAnea says the “mood has changed and people are much angrier”, not just because they feel “cheated” after the pandemic but because they think the services they provide are so poor in some areas that striking won’t make them worse. “Our health workers are saying: ‘We know the consequences of us going on strike, but I’ve had patients sitting in my ambulance for 10, 12 hours. And we need to be doing something that shows the government this isn’t acceptable.’”

McAnea estimates that Unison membership in the care sector has risen post-pandemic by a third to 150,000: in the sector’s whole beleaguered workforce, only “a drop in the ocean,” she says, “but way more than other unions”.

TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady believes what finally ignited the anger was the pandemic. 

“Millions of workers got us through Covid,” she says. “For the first time people realised how important their labour was and thought it would be rewarded.” And that the “opposite happened” was a “kick in the teeth”. Shapps “describing rail workers as heroes and now suddenly they’re the enemy” is just one example, she says. Workers, O’Grady says, have also been “discovering what is happening in boardrooms” – to City bonuses, CEO salaries, up 39% last year to £3.4m on average, and company profits.

 Sharon Graham of Unite has been especially adept at emphasising employer profits. At Felixstowe docks on Wednesday Graham told several hundred striking dockers in orange hi-vis Unite vests, warmed up by speakers blasting out Bob Marley (Get Up, Stand Up) and Aretha Franklin (Respect), that the company made £79m profit last year, distributing £42m to shareholders. It could pay the workers 50% more and still make a profit, she claimed. “So what’s wrong with asking for 10%?” She then promised to apply “leverage” on management by approaching the shipping companies disrupted by the eight-day stoppage and investors in the holding company, CK Hutchinson, controlled by Hong Kong billionaire Li Kai-Shing, “the 32nd second richest man in the world”. This is Graham’s trademark technique of what she calls “strike plus”. Having hired a team of “fantastic forensic accountants” to comb through company results, she says: “I want employers to do well, to make a profit. I just want workers to get a better piece of that pie.”

Graham has reduced Unite’s affiliation fees to Labour, recasting the union as an industrial organisation rather than immersing it in the party’s “internal machinations”. Arguing that “parliament has been captured by business” she adds: “Labour’s too scared to say that business is wrong even when there’s profit and workers are taking a pay cut. So now we’ve got to be in the workers’ corner.”

At next month’s TUC Congress, Unite will propose a motion calling on the TUC to “facilitate and encourage industrial coordination between unions so that workers in dispute can … win”. The aim would be to synchronise – or deliberately stagger – industrial action in separate disputes to maximise their impact.

Despite GMB and Unite campaigns at Amazon, the GMB’s attempts to negotiate a bigger rise than the 35p on offer, on hourly rates between £10.50 and £11.45, met with flat rejection despite walkouts. One GMB Amazon member says he is more concerned about the mental health impact of an isolated job “stuck in a cage” on a robotic production line than pay. But, he adds: “Amazon are too big and too powerful. If you had 200,000 members protesting, things would happen. But when you’ve got under 5,000 across all their places trying to do this, they’re just laughing.” Longer term, Unite’s Graham envisages UK, German and US unions pressuring corporate and governmental clients of Amazon’s highly profitable cloud business to require “neutrality” deals allowing them to organise such workers.

TUC research also shows that lower-paid younger workers are likeliest to be in insecure, less unionised private sector workplaces. Most of these “grandchildren” of the Thatcher era have scant knowledge of unions. Yet it also shows “that younger workers are even likelier to support our values than other workers”, says O’Grady. Raising the proportion of unionised workers aged between 20 and 29 to that across all ages – 23.4% – would bring in another 500,000 members.

Andrew Bailey, the Bank of England governor, has argued that workers seeking pay rises to protect themselves from inflation will make the problem worse, declaring that “the people who are least well-off … are worst affected because they don’t have the bargaining power”. Yet since the pandemic, CEO salaries in the top FTSE 100 companies rebounded to an expected average 67 times that of their own employees’ median earnings.

RMT’s Mick Lynch rejects Bailey’s “ridiculous prescription” that rather than pull “the many poor people” who are not in unions out of low pay, “the mission of union members who are moderately or modestly paid is to join the very low paid”. 

And Graham is adamant that current inflation is the result first of external shock and then from profiteering and price gouging by some businesses.

‘People are much angrier now’: why Britain is going on strike | Industrial action | The Guardian

 Home Office statistics expose the hollowness of Home Office propaganda. The story about asylum seekers that has become almost received wisdom is that most, especially those coming across the Channel, are scammers jumping the queue and that they deserve locking up and deportation. The statistics not only help unpick that Home Office myth but point also to a different story. They show that there is no “queue” to jump; that the real problem is Britain’s refusal to open legal routes, even for those whose lives are in mortal danger, and to whom Britain owes a moral obligation; that those who cross the Channel on small boats are mostly genuine refugees forced to make that journey because of Home Office intransigence; that the policy of mass deportation of unauthorised migrants is dangerous and immoral.

The latest migrant panic is all about Albanians. In an article in the Daily Mail, drawing on a “secret military intelligence report”, the claim was that 40% of cross-Channel migrants were Albanian. 

Radio 4’s Today programme on Thursday claimed that “government officials believe the majority” of people arriving on small boats were from Albania, a claim presented without challenge as a fact. 

That same day, the Home Office unveiled an agreement with Tirana to “fast-track” the removal of Albanians, who apparently don’t require asylum because they come from a “safe and prosperous nation”.

The statistics tell a different story. 

The number of Albanians crossing the Channel has certainly increased, but in the first six months of this year stood at around 17% of the total. It is possible that the figures have dramatically changed since the end of June, but we have little evidence for that except for unverified Home Office sources and a secret document from military intelligence.

The claim that Albanians don’t need asylum because they come from a “safe” country is also belied by the data. In the year ending this June, 53% of Albanian claimants had been granted asylum, or other forms of leave to stay in the country, on first decision, and a higher proportion on appeal. Between January and June this year that amounted to 385 people; fewer than half that figure were formally refused. What happens to the majority of Albanians who might otherwise have been granted asylum when they are placed in a “fast-track” deportation lane, no one will say.

The data also gives the lie to the claim made by Home Secretary Priti Patel that most asylum claims are bogus and that “70% of people crossing the Channel… are economic migrants”. In the year ending this June, three-quarters of all those claiming asylum were successful. Half of those who appealed against refusals were also successful, pushing the total success rate to almost 90%.

What of cross-Channel migrants? Of all the migrants who have arrived on small boats since 2018, 82% are still waiting for a verdict on their asylum claim. It shows how unresponsive is the Home Office process; this is not just because of higher numbers – though numbers have gone up, they are still below the figures seen in the early 2000s – but because it’s a system that seems almost designed to be glacially slow.

Of the fewer than one in five whose cases have received a decision, 49% were successful. Just 8% had their application turned down. 

And the remainder? The government refused to make a decision because they were deemed to have come from a “safe” country. But, given that the majority of Albanians, who come from a supposedly “safe” country, are granted asylum, one would imagine that a large proportion of those whose application the Home Office refused to consider would also, in a less ideologically driven system, have been successful.

The figures also question the claim that there is no need for unauthorised journeys to Britain. In 2018, just three Afghans – 1% of arrivals – came by boat across the Channel. In the first six months of this year that figure had shot up to 2,066 – about 16% of the total. The main cause is, of course, the Taliban takeover of a year ago. There are supposed to be two official routes for Afghan asylum seekers. So why are so many arriving by boat from Calais? Because not only is it murderously difficult to apply for a visa under the eyes of the Taliban, but even those who might be thought of as the most deserving are often refused asylum. Last week, the story emerged of a former female Afghan judge who had jailed dozens of Taliban fighters, many of whom have been freed from jail since the Taliban victory and many of whom are now in government. She is in hiding with her son, in fear of her life. She has family in Britain. Nevertheless, the Home Office rejected her asylum application. It’s almost as if the government wants Afghans to trust to people smugglers to help them make the perilous journey to Calais and then to embark on a rubber dinghy.

Britain also grants asylum status to many Rwandan refugees – at least seven so far this year. So, while the government has signed a deal with Rwanda for the mass deportation of unauthorised migrants, insisting that it is a “safe and prosperous” nation, it acknowledges at the same time that the country is unsafe enough for people to be forced to flee and be granted asylum.

There are lies, damn lies, and then there is Home Office propaganda about migrants | Kenan Malik | The Guardian

 While many parts of the world endure heatwaves and drought, Pakistan’s monsoon rains have brought deadly floods.

Almost a thousand dead including children, over 3.1 million people displaced, 710,000 livestock drowned and thousands of kilometres of roads and many bridges destroyed. 

It isthe worst floods in a decade which have destroyed homes, crops, livelihoods and infrastructure and leaving millions vulnerable. Pakistan is experiencing abnormal monsoon rainfall nearly ten times higher than usual, resulting in uncontrollable urban and flash floods, landslides, across the country.

Chairman of Pakistan Red Crescent, Abrar ul Haq said, “The situation is worsening by the day. These torrential floods have severely restricted transportation and mobility… and damage to vehicles, infrastructure and connectivity are further making our emergency relief works almost impossible. Most of those affected are also immobile or marooned making us hard to reach them…” He added, “We fear the worst is yet to come as these kinds of waters could mean the risk of water-borne diseases are looming over the heads of our people.”

 As gold prices have surged so have rates of killings, extortion and violent land invasions in Peru. Criminal gangs have taken advantage of lax law enforcement, unemployment and rising poverty. Where they need land they steal it. In 2019, the authorities  launched a clampdown on illegal mining, Operation Mercury. The goal was to raze La Pampa, home to about 25,000 people, from the map. It did get results. Deforestation caused by illegal mining dropped by 92%. But a lack of strategy and political will has undone the advances, according to Karina Garay, a former environmental prosecutor in the 2019 taskforce.\

“We advanced one step with Mercury, now we’ve gone back two steps,” she says. “There have always been mafias here. Now that the illegal miners have returned, so have the criminals.”

There are more than 46,000 people mining in Madre De Dios, according to a recent report, far more than the 2020 report by Peru’s mines ministry, which estimated there were about 50,000 in the entire country.

‘They attacked with machetes’: murder, mafias and illegal mining in Peru’s gold fields | Global development | The Guardian

 In the United States those who have committed crimes and have been punished by being put into prison, emerge after their period of sentence to further retribution. 

All but two states have so-called “pay-to-stay” laws that make prisoners pay for their time spent in jail. Critics say it’s an unfair second penalty that hinders rehabilitation by putting former inmates in debt for life. 

“Pay-to-stay” laws were put into place in many areas during the tough-on-crime era of the 1980s and ’90s. As prison populations swiftly rose, policymakers questioned how to pay for the cost. So, instead of raising taxes, the solution was to shift the cost burden from the state and the taxpayers onto the incarcerated, themselves.

Laws vary from state to state. To collect prison debt by attaching an automatic lien to every inmate, claiming half of any financial windfall they might receive for up to 20 years after they are released from prison, said Dan Barrett, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut. That included things like insurance settlements, inheritances and lottery winnings, and even money awarded to inmates in lawsuits over alleged abuse by prison guards. 

In Connecticut, onve released, an ex-prisoner will face a debt of $249 for each day behind bars. 

At $249 per day, prison stays leave ex-inmates deep in debt | AP News

Modern capitalist production is no longer carried on in tens of thousands of small businesses employing three or four workers. Where such enterprises continue to exist, their influence and effect on economic life are negligible. Their place has been taken, by huge corporations employing tens or even hundreds of thousands of workers at one time across the world.

The idea that monopolies can be eliminated and replaced by free-market competition among numerous small-scale independent producers, is an idle dream which can never become a living reality. Multinational monopolies are not the creation of “evil men” which can be undone by “good men.” It is an inevitable and inescapable product of capitalist development. The capitalist class itself has become largely divorced from production.

 They have become shareholders, owners of stocks and bonds with the actual work of management and superintendence, which is necessary and valuable in any society, is no longer done by the capitalist or owner of industry. It is performed by hired executives. They are simply highly skilled workers in the profession of organising production, albeit often rewarded in share options and sharing in the profits and dividends.

Capitalist production means the accumulation of capital and production for the market. Capitalism is a world system. It has created a world market. It has brought the entire world under its complete domination. But capitalism is divided into a number of more or less independent national powers. It is among them that the struggle for world control goes on fiercely. It is a struggle frightful in its consequences. The economic competition among the various nation-states is exceedingly sharp. It becomes sharper when the capitalists of every country seek new markets abroad or protect existing spheres of influence from encroachment by other nations. No capitalist class can possibly rest content with the markets it already has. Capital accumulation is always the goal for investors.

Profits made by the neo-colonial exploitation of developing and undeveloped countries are extraordinarily high. Foreign workers are employed and are made to toil incredibly long hours at incredibly low wages. In many cases, of sweat-shops, are outright slaves. Secondly, they are a rich source of raw materials which may be obtained cheaply with little concern for the workers and the environment. These resources are obtained from the indigenous ruling class rulers by corruption and bribery, and if necessary simply seized and kept by force.  Wealth is sucked out of these vulnerable countries, depriving them of any independence regardless of the blood spilt in various national liberation struggles.

 Once the world is divided, and there were no more defenceless nations and peoples that can be controlled, occupied, dominated and exploited, the bigger stronger nations can only expand their share of the world market by cutting the share of some other power. And as the iron law of capitalism is that you must expand or stagnate and die, the stage becomes set for military conflicts. For a period, it is possible to confine the rivalries to mere economic warfare and trade wars. But the point is reached where, such economic pressure for one side, is not enough, or sufficiently menacing. The economic struggle turns into a military confrontation. That is the origin of modern wars. The cause of wars are fto caputure lucrative areas of capital investment and trade expansion. Working people fight them, die  and get maimed in them. The capitalist always wins them.

Naturally if the plain and simple truth about the reason for wars were told it would be impossible to recruit or garner support for them. That is why the capitalist media keep filling the heads of the people with propaganda and poisonous ideas so that they are willing to kill and be killed. Patriotism and nationalism are imbued into the minds of every citizen from birth. Foreigners are depicted as possible and potential foes who must be defended against. Social spending must be cut for the welfare services to ensure adequate budgets are directed towards acquiring weaponry from the armament industries.

 Capitalism is not production for use. All the statesmen, all the industrialists, all the bankers, all the politicians and economists of capitalism, are unable to make capitalism serve the needs of the people. For capitalism, war functions excellently.  Money flows like water. There are undreamed-of profits. 

Capitalism stands self-condemned. Its usefulness of the past is now long gone. If it is allowed to continue, the world will only plunge deeper into suffering and destruction.

 “It pains me to be the bearer of bad news, when millions of people in the region have already suffered the longest drought in 40 years. Sadly, our models show with a high degree of confidence that we are entering the 5th consecutive failed rainy season in the Horn of Africa. In Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia, we are on the brink of an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe,” said Dr. Guleid Artan, Director of the IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Centre (ICPAC), which is WMO’s regional climate centre for East Africa.

The forecast for October to December issued at the Greater Horn of Africa Seasonal Climate Outlook Forum shows high chances of drier than average conditions across most parts of the region. In particular, the drought affected areas of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia are expected to receive significantly below normal rainfall totals through until the end of the year.

The October to December season contributes up to 70% of the annual total rainfall in the equatorial parts of the Greater Horn of Africa, particularly in eastern Kenya. The rainfall deficits are likely to extend to parts of Eritrea, most of Uganda and also Tanzania.

Greater Horn of Africa faces 5th failed rainy season – Ethiopia | ReliefWeb

While drought in the developed world means hose-pipe bans for the developing and undeveloped world, it is a matter of life and death.