The UK government had all the evidence it needed to know as far back as 2002 that the dangerous cladding used on Grenfell Tower should “never, ever” have been installed on tall buildings.

When the cladding – which consisted of a plastic core coated with thin sheets of aluminium – was tested, molten metal began to drip from the panel after just three minutes. The 30-minute test was halted after just five minutes for safety reasons when flames raged as high as 20m. The Building Research Establishment (BRE), a privatised testing organisation that carried out the test in summer 2001, handed its evidence to the government in September 2002.

Despite the “catastrophic” test failure, ACM panels were widely marketed as being compliant with a key standard known as Class 0, which meant they could be used on high-rise residential towers. The government issued no warning to industry and did not withdraw the Class 0 standard despite major concerns about its adequacy. ACM cladding was allowed to be installed on hundreds of high-rise developments over the fifteen years following the 2002 report.

Dr Debbie Smith, former managing director of the BRE was asked whether the government “was in no doubt at all that ACM panels” with a polyethylene core should “never, ever” be used over18 metres, Smith said yes.

Seven out of 11 companies’ were found by the BRE to have made misleading statements indicating their cladding met the Class 0 standard, meaning it could be used on buildings over 18m tall.

“It appears that the market claims of some manufactured products were not as they ought to be,” said Dr Smith.

Government knew in 2002 that Grenfell | The Independent

 Oil Change International’s Andy Rowell wrote that “there are always those who will want to profit from war or the threat of war, as unscrupulous as it may seem. And for the American oil and gas industry, there is no exception.”

“As Ukraine and Russia stand on the brink of a potentially lethal and bloody conflict, the American Petroleum Institute and its allies have been active on social media, arguing that now is a perfect time to expand LNG exports,” Rowell continued. “It is a flawed and short-sighted argument and one that will only cause more problems and chaos in the long term.”

Now that Germany has for the time being officially pulled the plug on the Russian pipeline, U.S. fossil fuel corporations stand to profit further from increased liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports to Europe, an ongoing trend that is likely to intensify amid the conflict in Ukraine.

American energy executives have declared in recent weeks that they were eager to replace Russian pipeline gas with American liquefied gas, although U.S. exports would not be enough to make up for the vast Russian supply.

Opinion | Big Oil Uses Ukraine Crisis to Push for Expansion of Dirty US Fossil Fuels | Andy Rowell (commondreams.org)

 The World Health Organization and the UN children’s agency Unicef warned, in a new report rebuked baby formula makers for “unethical” marketing strategies, accusing them of aggressively targeting expecting parents and health workers and putting shareholder interests before children’s health.

It found that the $55-billion formula milk industry systematically deploys aggressive marketing strategies, spending up to $5 billion a year to sway parents’ decisions on how to feed their infants.

Many countries’ failure to crack down on the marketing of breast milk substitutes means far too many children are still being reared on formula. It is widely recognised that breastfeeding carries huge health benefits. Experts have long extolled the health benefits of breastfeeding, saying that breast-fed children are healthier, perform better on intelligence tests and are less likely to be overweight or suffer from diabetes later in life. Women who breastfeed also have a reduced risk of breast and ovarian cancer, research shows.

Despite the known benefits, only 44 percent of babies under the age of six months are exclusively breastfed, as recommended by the WHO and Unicef.  In the past two decades, the sale of formula milk has more than doubled. 

Lead report author Nigel Rollins, of the WHO’s maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health division, blamed the industry’s aggressive marketing practices. Rollins pointed to how companies use pseudoscience to suggest that breast milk is not enough on its own or that formula does a better job of helping babies to sleep through the night.

“This report shows very clearly that formula milk marketing remains unacceptably pervasive, misleading and aggressive,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.

UN slams ‘aggressive’ formula milk marketing (france24.com)

 The wealth of the richest one per cent of households is more than 230 times that of the poorest 10 per cent.

The top 1 per cent of households have wealth of more than £3.6m each, while the top 10 percent hold 43 per cent of all the wealth in Great Britain.

This is compared to the household wealth of £15,400 or less for the poorest 10 per cent. 

Among the poorest 10 per cent of households, almost half held more financial debt than they did assets.

The figures according to new analysis from the Office of National Statistics reveal that the richest people in the UK have household wealth that is around 233 times higher than the wealth of some of the poorest in society.

Krishan Shah, a researcher at the Resolution Foundation, reacted to the figures, saying: “With wealth inequality remaining high and unchanged, this means that Britain’s huge absolute gaps in wealth have continued to grow.

The UK’s household wealth found that the median wealth in the South East was the highest in the country, at £503,400. This figure – once adjusted for inflation – has risen by 43 per cent since 2006. Comparatively median household wealth in the northeast stood at £168,500.

Some regions, such as the northeast and Scotland, have seen a decrease in wealth compared to the previous period of April 2016 to March 2018. They both experienced an inflation-adjusted fall in wealth of 7 per cent and 12 per cent respectively.

London also experienced a large decrease of 8 per cent, while the east of England and the west Midlands saw the largest growth – of 14 per cent and 13 per cent for each. 

Households whose ‘household reference person’ [main respondent to the survey] is of white ethnicity are four times more likely to have wealth in excess of £500,000 than households with a black African reference person. Pakistani and Indian households are less likely to hold pension wealth, with home ownership being more important in their asset holdings.

Total net wealth was calculated using four main components. These were “net property” (the value of your house or flat minus mortgage debt), “physical” (household contents, vehicles etc), private pension, and “net financial” (sum of your total savings or investments).

Researchers at the London School of Economics, Arun Advani and Hannah Tarrant, argued that the ONS figures had underestimated the share of wealth going to the richest households and that the analysis failed to account for business wealth.

Wealth of the richest 1 percent more than 230 times that of the poorest 10 percent, ONS says | The Independent

 117,500 tons of herbicides and insecticides are used across America’s farmlands annually, posing a potentially fatal risk to thousands of endangered and threatened species.

Meat and dairy production is driving the use of these pesticides. One-third of agricultural lands in the US is dedicated to corn and soy, primarily to provide calorie-dense diets for fattening up farmed animals.

Corn and soybean production globally accounts for about half of all sales of pesticides. Around three-quarters of the soy produced around the world feeds livestock, along with up to 45 per cent of corn grown in the US.

The most commonly-used substances in the US are glyphosate and atrazine.

Glyphosate can harm or kill 93 per cent of plants and animals protected under the Endangered Species Act. The research also points to adverse effects that glyphosate exposure has on human health, noting that the World Health Organization says it is “probably carcinogenic to humans”.

“More than 13,000 lawsuits have been filed in the US alleging that the pesticide causes non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma”, the researchers state.

Atrazine is banned in 35 countries. It is likely to harm or kill more than 1,000 protected species in the USA.

Converting more and more land for mono-crops like soy and corn is wiping out biologically-diverse habitats. From 2018 to 2019, about 2.6 million acres of US grasslands were converted to row crop agriculture, with 70 per cent used for soy, corn and wheat. 

Stripping out native grasses and vegetation decimates the habitats and food sources of a wide-range of species. Grasslands are also a little-recognised but crucial natural ally when it comes to battling the climate crisis. Grasses can store large amounts of carbon in the soil, sometimes as much as forest soils.

US meat industry using 235m pounds of pesticides a year, threatening thousands of at-risk species, study finds (yahoo.com)

 At least 200,000 tonnes of supermarket own-label food fit for human consumption ends up as animal food or is used to generate energy, according to research by the sustainability group Anthesis.

The surplus food could be going to hungry families instead of going to waste.

Supermarkets wasting 200,000 tonnes of food that could go to needy, say charities | Supermarkets | The Guardian

  “What we are doing is not making it worse for the Taliban, it is making it worse for the people. We are not punishing the Taliban. It is ordinary Afghans that are paying the price of peace.”

 David Miliband, the former UK foreign secretary and chief executive of the International Rescue Committee.

 Puerto Rico government employees and supporters have taken to the streets, emboldened by thousands of public school teachers who abandoned classrooms in early February to demand raises and better pensions. Protests have multiplied. Government workers are grappling with rising prices while getting the same salaries they had in 2008.

 Legislators are the only public workers who have an automatic cost-of-living increase for their salaries. Most of the other public employees in Puerto Rico, which is a United States territory, have not gotten pay raises in more than a decade — sometimes two — as the cost of living has risen and the island has suffered a lengthy economic crisis and a government bankruptcy in the aftermath of deadly hurricanes, earthquakes and the coronavirus pandemic.

Power and water bills are nearly 60 percent higher in Puerto Rico than the US average. Groceries are 18 percent more expensive than on the mainland. Many public employees work one or two additional jobs to make ends meet.

‘They’re fed up’: Workers in Puerto Rico take to the streets | Workers’ Rights News | Al Jazeera

 Despite charges of voter fraud, Juan Orlando Hernández was elected president of Honduras in late 2013 with full support from the United States. 

On Feb. 15, nine years after his election and one month after he left office, Hernández was arrested on charges of drug trafficking at the request of the United States, which has also requested his extradition. Once his power was gone, Hernández, the U.S. ally, instantly became the United States’ enemy. When he served the interests of the United States, Hernández was untouchable. 

The real power in Central America is and always will be Washington. Once you no longer serve a purpose, Washington may exhibit that power. Hernández being arrested for drug trafficking by a country that consumes the most drugs in the world is riddled with hypocrisy, but it reminds Central America that the U.S. will always be in charge.

The United States effectively painted Honduras as a backward country, when it is, in fact, a victim of American intervention and condescension. Even now, as the Biden-Harris administration works to end corruption in Central America as a means to end migration, the framing is always the same. Honduras is corrupt. The U.S. is exceptional. Where was that exceptionalism during the Hernández’ administration? The U.S. knew who he was but expressed no problem with him until his arrest.

This American tradition of supporting political criminals will never go away.

Ex-Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández arrested on drug trafficking charges (msnbc.com)

Fircroft College in Birmingham 

19th – 21st August 2022.

This year’s Summer School theme is ‘The Class Divide’.

The Class Divide

The richest 10% of people own more than 80% of global wealth, and the 10 richest men have six times more wealth than the poorest 3.1 billion people combined. These vast inequalities in wealth reflect how society is split into two classes: the capitalist class get their wealth through owning industries and corporations, and the working class rely on wages or benefits to buy what is needed.

The Socialist Party’s weekend of talks and discussion looks at why capitalism is divided into classes and how the antagonism between them impacts the way we live. What is ‘class consciousness’ and how does it develop? To what extent is it meaningful to say that there is a middle class? What classes were there before capitalism, in previous stages of history? And what could a future classless society be like?

The full residential cost (including accommodation and meals from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon) is £100; the concessionary rate is £50. 

Book online here or send a cheque (payable to the Socialist Party of Great Britain) with your contact details to Summer School, The Socialist Party, 52 Clapham High Street, London, SW4 7UN. 

Day visitors are welcome, but please book by e-mail in advance. 

E-mail enquiries to spgbschool@yahoo.co.uk.