More than a third of households in the UK have not managed to put aside any money since the first coronavirus lockdown began last year, and more than half are worried about running out of savings, a survey found. Many households are struggling with lower incomes and are eating into their savings.

The latest household financial confidence tracker, for Comparethemarket, found 52% of those surveyed were spending savings and 53% were worried they would run out of money. Of those with families, more than a quarter said they had struggled to pay bills in the past week, while 16% of those with no children at home said the same. 

The same proportions said they felt less financially secure now than in previous lockdowns, while 10% of families said if lockdown restrictions continued beyond April they were worried they would not be able to pay their mortgage or rent.

Ursula Gibbs, the commercial director of Comparethemarket, said: “…for many families the financial impact of coronavirus will be felt long after lockdown lifts. Families with children at home are particularly affected, and many are more concerned now about their ability to pay bills and make ends meet than at any other point in the past year.”

By December 2020 more than 9 million people had borrowed more than usual since the pandemic began. 

Laith Khalaf, an analyst at the finance firm AJ Bell, said: “There’s a pandemic paradox at the heart of personal finances in the UK, with signs of both financial distress and excess savings at the same time. “It is clear that the young, the self-employed and those on lower incomes have borne the brunt of the financial damage inflicted by the pandemic…” But adding, “… more affluent households with steady, undisturbed income streams have found themselves awash with cash, as spending options have been severely curtailed by ongoing lockdowns.”

More than half of UK households fear losing savings in Covid crisis | Family finances | The Guardian

 Poor white youngsters in England’s former industrial towns and those living on the coast are among the most likely to miss out on university, warns the watchdog for fair access.

Many have been warning that the fall-out over the Capitol riot would spill-over on to the left-wing’s freedoms to protest. We have noted that the campaign to de-platform the Right on social media poses a threat to all political activists. Once more our ‘rights’ and ‘liberties’ are merely at the convenience and the whim of those who hold the real power.

Facebook temporarily banned Britain’s main Trotskyist organisation, the Socialist Worker Party, as well as a number of its individual members. It was re-instated but without any explanation of why its account was suspended in the first place. (1)

Our position within the World Socialist Movement, despite our well-documented opposition to the SWP, is to condemn such an action. Some political parties may well indulge in some schadenfraude and suggest that the SWP had been hoisted by its own petard since it too has vigourously opposed the free speech of those it considers to be ‘class enemies’ in the past.

We in the Socialist Party, however, have always stood by our principle of protecting democracy for all, friend and foe, alike. An example being our defence of the Communist Party newspaper, the ‘Daily Worker’, when the government banned it during World War Two. (2)

Who do Facebook (or Twitter, or Instagram) think they are? Answer: they are the private business of social media and it private owners are just exercising their private property rights. It’s bad enough that the State imposes censorship but now we have powerful private corporations with not even a pretence of democratic control or accountability deciding what information or opinions should be in the public domain.

The Socialist Party holds a similar view as Karl Marx, who was hounded out of Europe because of press censorship to become a political refugee in London, when he explained that “…you cannot enjoy the advantages of a free press without putting up with its inconveniences. You cannot pluck the rose without its thorns!…there are also bad persons, who misuse speech to tell lies… No remedy against that has yet been found.“ (3)

(1) Facebook bans UK Socialist Workers Party, revives account with ‘no explanation’ as dozens of local pages remain suspended | Defend Democracy Press

(2) https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1941/1940s/no-438-february-1941/suppression-daily-worker/

(3) On Freedom of the Press — Ch 5 (historyisaweapon.com)

“Unless we step up and adapt now, the results will be increasing poverty, water shortages, agricultural losses and soaring levels of migration with an enormous toll on human life,”  3,000 scientists, from nearly 120 countries, including 5 Nobel laureates wrote.

A changing climate, including more severe floods and droughts, could depress growth in global food production by up to 30% by 2050, while rising seas and greater storm surges could destroy urban economies and force hundreds of millions of coastal dwellers from their homes, they noted. To avoid that, major new efforts are needed to conserve nature. Alongside the COVID-19 crisis, last year saw surging heat, intensifying drought and rampant wildfires, he noted, adding that the pandemic might have been avoided if the world had acted earlier to protect nature and prevent climate change.

“We must remember there is no vaccination for our changing climate,” said former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who chairs the Global Center on Adaptation (GCA), which is organising the Jan. 25-26 summit with the Dutch government. “Building resilience to climate impacts is not a nice-to-have… it is a must if we are to live in a sustainable and secure world.“

A GCA report assessing global progress on adaptation cited research showing government pandemic stimulus measures that support fossil fuels and high-carbon activities outnumbered green initiatives by four to one.

A U.N. report said last week that funding was already falling far short of needs before the COVID-19 crisis, with an annual average of $30 billion available for adaptation in 2017-2018. Estimates of the costs of adapting to climate change vary widely, but CPI and the GCA said adaptation finance needed to increase by between five and 10-fold from its current levels. Only about 5% of all climate finance goes to adapting to more extreme weather and rising seas. The U.N. secretary-general and others have called for that share to be raised to half, especially in financial support for poorer nations.

Patrick Verkooijen, CEO of the Rotterdam-based GCA, described climate change adaptation as a “casualty” of the pandemic. “Adaptation needs to accelerate but this acceleration is not happening. In fact, it’s even slowing down,” he said. Verkooijen said the shortfall in action and financing for adaptation could be turned around if decision-makers ensure the trillions they are preparing to spend on boosting their economies are also aimed at building climate resilience.

Adapt to climate change or risk ‘enormous toll’, scientists warn (trust.org)

 The pandemic caused an “unprecedented” hit to the global economy last year, destroying the equivalent of 225 million full-time jobs, the United Nations has said. The economic blow from Covid-19 has cost workers around the world $3.7tn (£2.7tn) in lost earnings.

Our blogs have in past years commemorated Robert Burns in various posts.

https://soymb.com/2017/01/burns-night.html

https://soymb.com/2017/01/red-rabbie-peoples-poet.html

https://soymb.com/2012/01/burns-night-remembering-ploughman-poet.html

https://soymb.com/2019/01/for-that-and-spartacist-rising.html

https://socialist-courier.blogspot.com/2013/01/burns-night.html

https://socialist-courier.blogspot.com/2016/01/burns-night.html

https://socialist-courier.blogspot.com/2018/01/rabbies-day.html

 There are estimated to be more than 14 million Gondi people in India. They call themselves “Koitur”, or “the ones who come from the green mountains”. “Gond” and “Koitur” or “Koya” are used interchangeably. Their traditional homeland, known as Gondwana, spreads across the states of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and parts of Maharashtra and Odisha. They refer to themselves by different names, such as Raj-Gonds, Madia-Gonds, Khatola-Gonds and Koyas, depending on where the tribes are located, although these names are, in fact, not strictly state-specific. The Gondi language is said to be derived from the Dravidian language group, a family of some 70 languages spoken mainly in the south of India. However, these people are believed to be genetically Proto-Australoids – related to Australian Aboriginal people. 

The Gondi people follow a pantheistic religion and their supreme deity is Parsapen, the child of supreme beings Salla and Gandra. Gondi legend has it that when Parsapen was born, so were the Gondi people, along with the universe. Each of the 750 Gond clans has its own deities, to whom shrines are built inside homes. In the Gond religion, there is no concept of heaven and hell, but a belief that dying people join their ancestors’ spirits. Outside each village is a sacred ground where memorials to the dead are erected. Offerings of food, maize and grains are made at these memorial sites to appease the spirits of the dead. There are no temples or statues to represent Gods. In their culture, the hill itself is holy ground. 

Medieval texts mention the rise of Gond kingdoms in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and parts of Maharashtra and Odisha. Despite the eventual fall of the Gond kingdoms, many Gondis in the interior region remained free of the influence of new rulers. With time, however, Hinduism and modernism have had a significant influence on their culture and religious practices. Tattoos, however, still form part of the Gondi identity. They are usually done at specific stages of life, such as coming of age, marriage or having a baby, and are believed to keep people safe from evil forces.

Although the uprisings at Naxalbari in the 1960s were ultimately put down, the movement spread across several federal states, including Chhattisgarh, as the struggle against what they saw as the government’s “anti-poor” policies – such as allocating mineral-rich areas to corporate organisations for development without consulting the people living in those regions – continued. The Maoists began to spread their ideology in the district of Bastar in Chhattisgarh in 1982. Bastar remained one of the fiercest battlegrounds between the cadres and government forces for many years. According to the home ministry’s annual report for 2018-2019, some 3,749 people have been killed in 10,660 incidents of Maoist violence across 10 Indian states since 2010. Chhattisgarh reported the highest number of casualties, with 1,370 people dead in 3,769 violent incidents.

In 2005, the Chhattisgarh government created the Salwa Judum (Gondi words meaning “Peace March”) by mobilising members of local tribes as fighters against the Maoists. They would vandalise the homes and shops of suspected Maoist supporters, while Maoists would kill those they suspected of being government informers. The Salwa Judum movement drew criticism from human rights observers as people found themselves caught in the crossfire between the two sides.

 In 2008, the Indian Express reported: “Since the launch of Salwa Judum in June 2005, more than 800 people, including some 300 security personnel, have been killed by Naxalites. Special Police Officer (SPO) deaths alone total 98 – one in 2005; 29 in 2006; 66 in 2007; and two, so far, this year. There are 23 Salwa Judum camps in Bijapur and Dantewara [Dantewada] districts of Bastar region where almost 50,000 tribals from over 600 villages have been settled.”

One of the fallouts was the mass displacement of an estimated 50,000 tribe members from Chhattisgarh to neighbouring states. Eventually, the countermovement was disbanded in 2011 on the orders of India’s Supreme Court. 

Disenchanted Naxalite cadres have started to shun violence. Rejoining mainstream society meant surrendering to the police in exchange for not being prosecuted as an “insurgent”. 

Tribal rights activist Soni Sori, 45, is trying to get on with her life as a mother to three children, as well as continue her work as a human rights activist and advocate in Dantewada district, where there is a tense standoff between the Naxalite-Maoist movement and security forces. Her work as an activist involves helping Indigenous people reclaim the land they say has been stolen from them by the authorities, as well as fight for social justice, particularly for women. Women here complain regularly of mistreatment by the police, including wrongful arrest, rape and even shootings, but there are no official figures showing the number of such incidents. Sori says she is often accused by the authorities of having Naxal links but denies being involved with the group. Her interests lie in women’s rights and saving forests and hills – the home of her tribe’s gods – from capitalism and a government which she sees as wanting to exploit the region’s rich mineral resources to support the country’s development. To this end, Sori and her friends organise peace marches and dharnas – peaceful, sit-in protests. They do not engage in violence, she says. Despite this, she has been arrested many times and police officers are stationed outside her house.

Sori says she does not believe in an armed struggle because it is the common woman and man who ends up suffering the most as a result. She says she does not feel “under pressure” to join, but Naxalites have tried to “influence” her by arguing that their struggles and the enemy are the same – the government. She says, the people living in this region do feel conflicted about the troubles between rebels and police forces. While they see the injustice people here suffer because of government policy and actions, they can also be harmed by Naxalites.

Sori has continued to protest peacefully on behalf of the Gond people. She joined hundreds of tribal people, mostly from the Gond tribe, who had gathered at Bailadila in Dantewada district to protest against the granting of a mining lease. The site on which the mining was proposed was on the Nandraj Hill, considered sacred by the Gondi tribe. The Nandraj Hill, on the iron-ore-rich Bailadila range, is dedicated to Pitod Devi, wife of nature god Nandraj. The locals believe the family of Nandraj resides in the hills and protects them from the “furies” of nature. It is disputes like these, say human rights activists, as well as the fact that once an industry is built, the locals do not benefit from it in terms of jobs or other facilities, that have driven many into the arms of the Maoist movement.

Bastar-based human rights lawyer and researcher Bela Bhatia says: “Every illegality that the government allows means that the family and the community of the deceased are going to lean towards the Maoists. There is no third side to this story. Failure on the part of the government to keep its constitutional promises leads the people to join the movement.”

Living in the shadow of rebellion: India’s Gond tribe | Conflict News | Al Jazeera

Further background reading:

The Maoist Insurgency in India (worldsocialism.org)

 One reason why this blog concentrates attention on world population demographics is that  socialism was declared an impossibility because there were just too many people to look after in security and comfort. Mostly, the over-population alarmists like the climate change denialists have been proved wrong but they are still out there disguising their misanthropic prejudices. This story from the Guardian is of interest. 

In 1968, the Stanford biologists Paul and Anne Ehrlich infamously predicted that millions would soon starve to death in their bestselling, doom-saying book The Population Bomb; since then, neo-Malthusian rumblings of imminent disaster have been a continual refrain in certain sections of the environmental movement – fears that were recently given voice on David Attenborough’s documentary Life on our Planet.

At the time the Ehrlichs were publishing their apocalyptic prophecies, the world was at its peak of population growth, which at that point was increasing at a rate of 2.1% a year. Since then, the global population has risen from 3.5 billion to 7.67 billion. Also the growth rate has slowed considerably. As women’s empowerment advances, and access to contraception improves, birth rates and fertility rates around the world have fallen, and in many countries now there are fewer than 2.1 children per woman – the minimum required to maintain a stable population.

It have been a problem in the world’s wealthiest nations – notably in Japan and Germany – for some time. In South Korea last year, birthrates fell to 0.84 per woman, a record low despite extensive government efforts to promote childbearing. From next year, cash bonuses of 2m won (£1,320) will be paid to every couple expecting a child, on top of existing child benefit payments.

The fertility rate is also falling dramatically in England and Wales – from 1.9 children per woman in 2012 to just 1.65 in 2019. Provisional figures from the Office for National Statistics for 2020 suggest it could now be 1.6, which would be the lowest rate since before the second world war. The problem is even more severe in Scotland, where the rate has fallen from 1.67 in 2012 to 1.37 in 2019.

Increasingly this is also the case in middle-income countries too, including Thailand and Brazil. In Iran, a birthrate of 1.7 children per woman has alarmed the government; it recently announced that state clinics would no longer hand out contraceptives or offer vasectomies.

Thanks to this worldwide pattern of falling fertility levels, the UN now believes that we will see an end to population growth within decades – before the slide begins in earnest.  A study published in the Lancet  predicted that the global population would come to a peak much earlier than expected – reaching 9.73 billion in 2064 – before dropping to 8.79 billion by 2100. Falling birthrates, noted the authors, were likely to have significant “economic, social, environmental, and geopolitical consequences” around the world. It predicts that 23 countries would see their populations more than halve before the end of this century, including Spain, Italy and Ukraine. China, where a controversial one-child per couple policy – brought in to slow spiralling population growth – only ended in 2016, is now also expected to experience massive population declines in the coming years, by an estimated 48% by 2100. That is right. The problem is not over-population but under-population. The world faces a crisis of an ageing populations placing shrinking economies under ever greater strain.

Japan has been showing this trend for more than a decade, might offer some insight. Already there are too few people to fill all its houses – one in every eight homes now lies empty. In Japan, they call such vacant buildings akiya – ghost homes. Most are found in rural areas, these houses quickly fall into disrepair, leaving them as eerie presences in the landscape, thus speeding the decline of the neighbourhood. Many akiya have been left empty after the death of their occupants; inherited by their city-living relatives, many go unclaimed and untended. With tJapan’s population expected to fall from 127 million to 100 million or even lower by 2049, these akiya are set to grow ever more common – and are predicted to account for a third of all Japanese housing stock by 2033. As the rural population declines, old fields and neglected gardens are reclaimed by wildlife. Sightings of Asian black bears have been growing increasingly common in recent years, as the animals scavenge unharvested nuts and fruits.

In the EU an area the size of Italy is expected to be abandoned by 2030. Spain is among the European countries expected to lose more than half its population by 2100; already, three- quarters of Spanish municipalities are in decline. Galicia and Castilla y León are among the regions worst affected, as entire settlements have gradually emptied of their residents. More than 3,000 ghost villages now haunt the hills, standing in various states of dereliction. Rural abandonment on a large scale is one factor that has contributed to the recent resurgence of large carnivores in Europe: lynx, wolverines, brown bears and wolves have all seen increases in their populations over the last decade. In Spain, the Iberian wolf has rebounded from 400 individuals to more than 2,000, many of which are to be found haunting the ghost villages of Galicia, as they hunt wild boar and roe deer – whose numbers have also skyrocketed. A brown bear was spotted in Galicia last year for the first time in 150 years.

In this post-peak population world: smaller populations living in urban centres. While beyond the city limits, wildlife thrive and  animal roam.

 The Covid-19 technology access pool (C-Tap) was launched in May last year by the WHO to facilitate the sharing of patent-protected information to fight the virus, including diagnostics, therapeutics and trial data. The “pooling” of treatments and data would allow qualified manufacturers from around the world to produce critical equipment, drugs or vaccines without fear of prosecution for breaching patents. The goal would be to lower production costs, ease global shortages of key drugs and technology and, advocates say, ultimately end the pandemic sooner.

 It has attracted zero contributions in the eight months since it was established. We repeat, no technology or treatments have been shared.  This reflects the false messages put out by the drug-companies that they are co-operating to develop treatments for the pandemic which will benefit the more vulnerable nations. 

Another United Nations-backed patent-sharing platform, the medicines patent pool (MPP), widened its mandate last year to include Covid-19 treatments, but it too has so far not negotiated any deals for drugs, data or technology to fight the coronavirus pandemic.

Charles Gore, the executive director of the MPP, said the lack of engagement was symbolic of a widespread failure to tackle the pandemic in a global way. “Unfortunately what we’ve seen is too little of, ‘Let’s do this all together as a world’, and a little too much of me-first,” Gore said. He explained the pharmaceutical industry was following the lead of governments, who have sought to strike their own deals for vaccines, technology and treatments rather than prioritise global distribution. Gore said sharing technology or treatments could cost companies profits.

Others said the piecemeal approach to global access had contributed to shortages of lifesaving technology and treatments, scarcities that would also mark the rollout of vaccines until at least 2023, according to one analysis.

Ellen ‘t Hoen, a medical IP expert and campaigner, said wealthy governments around the world had poured billions of taxpayer dollars into developing vaccines that would be ultimately owned and controlled by companies and their shareholders.

WHO platform for pharmaceutical firms unused since pandemic began | World Health Organization | The Guardian