Category: Labour Party

For Covid-safe trade union and Labour meetings!

A cozy, slightly out of focus picture of a zoom call.

For months now the Tory UK government has been gaslighting us into believing the Covid pandemic is over, even though most people’s experience is that they or someone they know is or has just been sick. Nearly one million UK residents had Covid last week, with over 7,000 hospitalised – their care and the need for barrier nursing and infection control adding further stress to the overstretched NHS.

And more than 130 people are dying every day.

The figures have gone down from their tragic heights earlier in the pandemic, largely thanks to vaccination, but no avoidable death can possibly be acceptable.

And nor should we accept preventable infection and reinfection from a virus which can cause not just immediate unpleasant sickness but long-term damage to our health.

A million workers off sick with Covid, added to the 2 million with Long Covid, is one of the unreported reasons why so many industries and services – especially the NHS – are short-staffed and unable to deliver to acceptable standards. For thousands, sick pay is non-existent; for those who are entitled, it is inadequate.

But let’s not mention Covid (or Brexit, for that matter) when we can blame strikers!

The Kraken is coming….

Sadly, many of our friends and comrades have accepted being gaslighted into shrugging off all protections and mitigations and, in so doing, putting their own and others’ health and lives at risk.

An airborne virus like Covid spreads when people inhale its miniscule aerosols. Transmission of the highly infectious Omicron (or the even more infectious Kraken subvariant, which is now spreading fast) is undetectable. Good ventilation and the installation of CO2 monitors and HEPA filters is crucial, especially in public buildings and workplaces. Where ventilation is poor, or the room crowded, masks are our protection.

My mask protects you! Your liberty infects me!

So why have so many intelligent, caring socialists accepted the line that wearing a mask is an infringement on their liberty?

No, it’s not. It’s an infringement of mine. When I wear a mask, I am protecting you from any infection I may have. When you don’t wear one, I am the person who could get infected.

At the height of the pandemic, most people seemed to understand that. How short their memories have become!

Those of us whose vulnerability to Covid has not much diminished, and those who keep adding to our numbers as they are diagnosed with cancer, auto-immune diseases, diabetes or other disabling illnesses, as well as those who live with us, are finding ourselves increasingly isolated, just as thousands of disabled people have been for generations.

In the past becoming housebound by age, disability or infirmity meant an end to political involvement. But just as technological advances in recent decades mean that mobile phones, social media, emails, texting and messaging have become standard tools for any activist, so now online video calls are enabling participation in democratic discussion and decision making for those who previously were excluded.

But just as there are still holdouts against mobile phones, we are now encountering unwarranted opposition to hybrid meetings. It’s as though those of us who are housebound are determined to take away comrades’ right to meet in person before going to the pub, rather than tentatively asking to be allowed to join in the non-pub part.

The arguments against hybrid can be gob smacking – we can only do hybrid with hi-tech systems; I spend all day at work on zoom so refuse to do it after 5pm; we can’t do hybrid because hiring halls with the facilities may cost us; we could alternate zoom and in person meetings (would anyone suggest women or black comrades could only come to 50% of meetings?).

Disability is a protected characteristic under the Equalities Act, yet discrimination against us is rife and goes unchallenged. (Yes, I know many reading this will have had to put up with it for all or large chunks of their lives, but that doesn’t make it any more acceptable.)

Covid Action activists are sick of being the only person wearing a mask at a labour movement meeting, sick of arguing to be allowed to join via zoom, sick of explaining that meeting in a room with no ventilation is dangerous.

There are so many bigger battles to be fought in respect of Covid – against the closure of the vaccination programme for under 50s; the fight for airborne pathogens to be included in clean air legislation; for improved sick pay; for Long Covid research and care; for the need for continued funding for research and surveys; against the Tories’ refusal to properly fund the public sector, not just the NHS but local authorities, civil servants and the care sector, so that in the event of the almost inevitable next pandemic we won’t be faced with the same inadequate preparations as we were in 2020. And then there’s the Independent Inquiry reminding us of the venality and negligence of the Tory government’s handling of the pandemic.

Covid has not gone away. At the very least the labour movement should be demanding the most basic of health and safety measures and inclusivity in its own workplaces and at its own meetings, rallies and conferences by encouraging mask wearing and facilitating hybrid meetings.

Published on the Covid Action website on 5 February 2023

The Johnson government may be on its way out, but Covid isn’t.

More than 200,000 people have died from Covid in the UK during Johnson’s rule, 294 of them in the past week.There are 11,500 patients in hospital with Covid – and the number of hospitalisations is rising, adding to the burden on the already overstretched NHS.

3.5 million people are currently infected – a rise of 30% from the previous week.

The UK has one of the highest death tolls in Europe, with 2,689 deaths per million people.

These grim numbers are rarely reported any more. We have supposedly moved into the post-pandemic era.

Like the Tories, the media have got bored with the Covid plague, now well into its third year. And most of us go along with that because we are all fed up with it as well. We want to socialise, meet our friends and family, go to parties, gigs and demos. Or just down the pub.

And we’ve all got enough to cope with trying to make our money stretch to pay for the weekly food shop, petrol and energy bills without having to worry about finding more to pay for masks or Covid tests.

But we must resist the normalisation of Covid and letting it rip through our society. We cannot and must not accept the continuing deaths, the high infection rates, the reinfections, the disruption to all our lives caused by sudden illness, unplanned absences, shortages, cancelled appointments and holidays. We cannot and must not accept the failure of a government whose first duty should be to protect its population whether that is from disease, starvation or war, especially when there is an alternative to ‘Living with Covid’, an alternative based on well-established age-old measures for protecting communities against infectious diseases through contact tracing and isolation.

Relief at the departure of Boris Johnson has to be tempered by the recognition that, while his famed sloppiness, dishonesty, selfishness and incompetence played their part, the failure of the Conservative government to handle the pandemic is ideological and not primarily a result of him as an individual.

That ideology is embraced by all of Johnson’s potential successors and exposed by their clamour for tax cuts and shrinking the state. Just as Johnson and Sunak have been trying to lay the costs of the pandemic onto working people with their dogmatic refusal to increase pay in line with inflation, so we are witnessing the grotesque spectacle of a line-up of B-list hopefuls competing to cut benefits and public services to pay for their ambitions.

Martin Rowson, The Mirror

In their parallel universe of voodoo economics, where inflation, food banks, hungry children, homelessness, increasing inequality, industrial unrest, soaring prices, energy and petrol costs, a collapsing pound, climate catastrophe, and most certainly a continuing Covid pandemic, do not exist, economic illiteracy is being paraded around the media studios as a badge of pride.

The crisis in our health service is far less important to them than their own faux-sincerity. Their newly vaunted moral principles and integrity haven’t been much on display in recent months when most of them defended the Partygate lies, the repugnant Rwandan deal and the suppression of dissent.

The NHS is not safe in any of their hands!

Martin Rowson, The Guardian

Nor is it safe in the hands of the loyalist Johnson quickly shifted from a short stint as his chief of staff to Health Secretary when Javid resigned.

Javid is a eugenicist who washed his hands of Covid almost as soon as he took over, happy for Johnson to cave in to the demands of the anti-vax, anti-mask Covid Recovery Group to remove all mitigations and protections.

Like Javid, Steve Barclay considers Covid over and done with. Back in January he was tweeting: “Now we’re learning to live with Covid, we need to get back to face-to-face working.”

Barclay is deemed to be even worse than his predecessor. The Health Service Journal’s editor, Alastair McLellan, says of him: “A real nightmare, vindictive, arrogant, a bully, hostile to the NHS and all its works, a micro-manager of the wrong things, views NHS management as bloated and profligate …… Never has a politician arrived in the post of health secretary … trailing a worse reputation than Steve Barclay.”

Zero Covid has launched an online letter writing campaign to remind him that Covid isn’t over and that he needs to take action to mitigate the effects of the virus now by implementing basic public health measures to protect us and reduce community transmission.

In recent months, the Tories have relied solely on the vaccination programme – and the vaccines have been crucial in reducing deaths and serious illness. But the current dominant strain of Omicron and its more transmissible sub-variants are breaking through the vaccine barriers so that reinfection is becoming increasingly common. And the vaccines have never been enough on their own. Simple, non-restrictive additional protective measures are needed if we are to stamp down on the virus.

Masks in public places, free tests, contact tracing, social distancing, decent sick pay, Covid-safe workplaces, enforceable air quality standards, Long Covid to be classified as a disability, autumn booster vaccinations for all, funding for research, monitoring and the now urgent development of the next generation of vaccines, and for this disgraceful government to support WTO patent waivers so that we vaccinate the world.

With his cut-price Trumpian populist approach to Covid, Johnson is leaving behind a legacy of social murder, waste, corruption and callousness. He is going as the death toll hits 200,000 deaths. 200,000 avoidable deaths. 200,000 people who have left behind grieving family and friends.

On top of that there are at least 2 million people suffering from Long Covid, possibly facing years if not a lifetime of pain, depression, fatigue, lost dreams and missed opportunities.

Not to forget the 4 million or so of those of us who remain at high risk from Covid and who, notwithstanding vaccines and anti-virals, have been abandoned not just by the government but by the rest of society to continue to shield ourselves in isolation behind our front doors.

Having delayed the Independent Inquiry into his government’s handling of the pandemic for so long, we must not allow Johnson and his chums to escape its judgments as it puts the deaths in care homes, the delayed lockdowns, the corrupt PPE contracts, the billions spent on the failed Test and Trace scheme, the fraudulent bounce-back loans, and so much more, under the microscope of public accountability.

The pandemic has caused untold damage to our society. Everybody bears the scars in one way or other. It has been global in its harm, but it has been so much worse in the UK than it needed to be.

We must not forgive, and we must not forget. And, whoever ends up leading it, we must not let this corrupt and callous government get away with pretending that the Covid pandemic is over. However much we may all wish it away, it is still with us, and it is still killing people.

Published in Labour Outlook 15 July 2022

World Health Organisation advice

The Pandemic is not over

Below is the text of my speech to Women At the Forefront – Resisting the Tory Offensive @Arise Festival 2022 on 5 July 2022. The video of the meeting can be found here

Thanks to Arise for holding their festival online and not falling for the government’s gaslighting and accepting the normalisation of Covid. Sadly, far too many labour movement organisations are going along with it, holding in-person conferences and meetings without social distancing or facilities for online participation by those not just at high risk of catching Covid but also carers, those with disabilities and those who have to be at work. For some of us, online meetings have been one of the rare positives which have come out of the past two and a half years. Let’s make sure we keep them!

Anyway, thanks Arise for recognising that the PANDEMIC IS NOT OVER. Indeed, we are now in a rising fifth wave of this deadly, debilitating virus. The government has tried to get rid of monitoring programmes, and the ONS data we are getting is a week out of date, but even so we know that nearly 2 million people had Covid last week, 1 in 30 people in England, 1 in 18 in Scotland. A rise of 30% on the previous week. Nearly 10,000 people are in hospital with Covid.

The idea that we can live with Covid is absurd. Covid is not flu. It is not a cold. Omicron, and now its variants BA4/5, is highly contagious and even in its mildest form can lead to long term illness and incapacity. Reinfections are now becoming commonplace as the virus breaks through antibody and vaccine protections. And the more virus there is in the population the more likely it is to mutate. And there are no guarantees that the next mutations won’t be more deadly.

Letting it rip, as this government is doing, isn’t just making people sick – and far more people than needs be – and increasing poverty and hardship for those in precarious jobs with no sick pay, but it is causing untold damage to society, to the economy, to the NHS, to all our public services.

We are all experiencing the disruption unplanned absences and shortages are causing in every aspect of our lives, from sudden cancellations to airport chaos. We are told that 5 million people having gone missing from the workforce. What we’re not told is how that 5 million breaks down into those who have died from Covid, those who have long covid and can no longer work – or are having to care for relatives with it, those who have mental health issues following the stress of the pandemic and lockdowns or the sudden loss of family members and close friends, let alone those who have been forced out of the UK by Brexit and the continuing hostile environment.

But the government has washed its hands of all this. It has moved on.

Just as it failed to plan for the Covid pandemic, or how it was going to end it – you can’t turn a society off and then on again like a computer – it has no plans for covid variants, new pathogens or the future pandemics which are almost inevitable due to climate change. Indeed, it’s only plan seems to be to find ways for the workers to pay for the pandemic.

Particularly want to talk about one section of population government has most callously washed its hands off – and that is those of us who are classified as at the highest risk if we catch Covid.

When I say this, I know conjures up an image of an older person, probably in a wheelchair.

Yes, older people are at risk, especially if they have other illnesses – and because women live longer, we are going to be a higher proportion of those who are at risk because of age.

But the over 4 million people who are classified as ‘clinically extremely vulnerable’ come from all age groups and are not necessarily those with a disability. I’m at extremely high risk because I am on immuno-suppressant medication – medication which is given to thousands from every age group who have some form of inflammatory disease in order that we can live active lives. Many people with asthma and respiratory problems (an increasing number because of poor air quality in the big cities), are at high risk. So are those like my young neighbour who’s a teacher and has sickle cell, those with HIV or diabetes, and those receiving cancer treatments such as chemo and radiotherapy – an increasing number as the NHS tries to play catchup.

At the beginning of the pandemic, we were told to shield. For some people that meant living in one room – solitary confinement within their family home. But it also meant care packages and various forms of state support, and a legal right not to go to work. Now the guidance for people whose immune system means they are at higher risk is  

We recommend that you avoid meeting with someone who has tested positive for COVID-19.

If you have visitors to your home, ventilate your home by opening windows and doors to let fresh air in and consider asking visitors to exercise precautionary behaviours such as keeping their distance. Tests are no longer free for the general public, but you can ask visitors to take a rapid lateral flow test before visiting if you wish. You might also consider asking them to wear a face covering and want to wear a face covering yourself.

If it feels right for you, work from home if you can. If you cannot work from home, speak to your employer about what arrangements they can make to reduce your risk.

When out and about, keep social distancing if that feels right for you, and consider reducing the time you spend in enclosed crowded spaces.

Consider continuing to wear a face covering in crowded public spaces.

In other words, you’re on your own. Don’t go out. Don’t socialise. But do risk your life going into an unsafe workplace because you have no choice if you are going to earn an income to feed yourself and your family.

Your visitors will have to pay for their tests. There’s no mention of safer FF2/3 masks which offer you some protection, or of HEPA air filters to improve your ventilation. I live on a busy main road. If I open windows, it’s not fresh air that comes in – it’s every pollutant going.

Government guidance has no legal standing. Employers can make you go in to work. Unscrupulous employers like Jacob Rees Mogg who demands civil servants are at their desks……

The government has abandoned us. And so has the rest of society. We are invisible. Locked away and excluded from society like Victorian consumptives.

If we are all ever to live normal lives again, then we have to resist Tory normalisation of an abnormal situation.

Our demands are simple. They are not restrictive. They are basic public health measures to protect us and reduce community transmission.

Masks in public places, free tests, contact tracing, social distancing, decent sick pay, covid safe workplaces, enforceable air quality standards, long covid to be classified as a disability, autumn booster vaccinations for all, funding for research, monitoring and the now urgent next generation of vaccines, and for this disgraceful government to support patent waivers so that we can vaccine the world.

And don’t forget to get all your jabs, including flu.

We are approaching a staggering and tragic landmark – 200,000 deaths in the UK. 200,000 avoidable deaths, 200,000 social murders. We must not forgive, and we must not forget. And we must not let this corrupt and callous government get away with pretending that the covid pandemic is over. However much we may all wish it away, it is still with us, and it is still killing people.

Save lives now, then we can all live well!

Much in Labour’s 10-point plan for living with Covid is welcome, but it ignores the immediate crisis – we have to stop people dying from the virus before we can live with it.

More than 350 deaths per day, over 100,000 daily positive cases and nearly 20,000 covid hospital patients is neither acceptable nor normal.

The Tories’ narrative that the pandemic is over, their removal of even the weak Plan B protections (mask-wearing, working from home and the limited use of covid passes), and – even more worryingly – their plans to shortly end self-isolation for those testing positive for Covid, have to be challenged by Labour.

Johnson and Javid’s rejection of infection control measures in order to assuage their right wing backbenchers, is reckless to the extreme, and is based on eugenicist theories rather than any regard for science or the public’s health and wellbeing.

The brilliant NHS vaccination programme has reduced our risk of death dramatically. But there are no guarantees that Omicron’s inevitable successor variants or mutations will not be more vaccine resistant and deadly.

Not only do we need to keep promoting vaccination – including by calling for employers to give staff paid time-off to get jabbed and recover – we need the protective and mitigation measures of a Vaccines Plus strategy.

These include continuing personal protection measures such as:

  • social distancing and wearing masks in indoor public places, including schools, colleges and workplaces;
  • setting indoor air quality standards, with CO2 monitors and HEPA filters being installed in all classrooms and indoor public venues;
  • all NHS, social care, teachers and those deemed at high risk being issued with free FFP2/3 masks;
  • financial support for all those required to self-isolate or shield, and for businesses and self-employed who are taking a hit from the economic damage caused by the continuing unpredictable high levels of employee and customer absences.

Labour rightly says the test and trace system needs fixing. The first step there must be to dismantle the current discredited outsourced system and hand it (along with the necessary funding) over to the public health professionals in local authorities and the NHS who should always have been in charge of it.

It should go without saying that both LFD and PCR tests must remain free and readily available to all UK residents.

The right to work from home or flexibly has been a long-term demand by many, especially parents and carers, and the experience of the past two years means that now is the time for it to be legislatively enforced.

Adding these immediate essential measures to Labour’s longer-term plans and opposing the UK government’s lethal approach means we can stamp down hard on the virus and make it possible for us all to live our lives without the constant threat of chronic disease or death hanging over us.

But unless and until this deadly virus is suppressed to the lowest levels possible both in the UK and globally, we won’t be able to say we are living with it.

The Covid-19 Pandemic Isn’t Over Yet

Reckless?

The polite description of a strategy which is currently averaging over 1,000 deaths a week, over 7,000 hospitalisations, and the highest number of Covid-19 infections in Europe with over 35,000 daily cases.

Murderous is my non-polite description.

A return to normality?

Only if you think those 1,000+ deaths are normal.

Labour has an absolute duty to the people of this country to call out the Tories for their deadly, eugenicist policies; and Conference is the perfect opportunity for the Leadership and Shadow Health Team to put forward a robust alternative to the government’s disastrous handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.

To date, Labour’s approach has been marked by timidity and mealy-mouthed, piecemeal criticisms. The Tories’ scandalous strategy of ‘living with the virus’ has barely been challenged – and no alternative has been put forward.

The Tory government has ended shielding, furlough, and business rates’ holidays. It refuses to provide adequate ventilation in schools. It has failed to increase the absolutely miserly levels of statutory sick pay and is cutting universal credit. It cannot even bring itself to mandate masks in crowded places. Johnson, Sunak and Javid are acting as if the pandemic is over.

The idea that that we must learn to live with high levels of Covid-19 has to be challenged. It is unprecedented in the modern era for government policy to allow preventable deaths of its own citizens on a mass scale. We do not live with cholera, we do not live with polio, we do not live with tuberculosis, and we do not live with typhoid. Like all these diseases, Covid-19 can be managed, and community transmission eliminated.

Medical science and technology have progressed rapidly in the past decades; the speed at which the Covid-19 vaccines were developed is testament to that, so why on earth should we accepting a strategy which does not just allow, but encourages, people to continue to spread a virulent and deadly disease?

I am a great fan of vaccination – and as socialists we should all be supporting it as a collective societal good. But we must not forget that 20% of adults have not had even one jab – one in five of us; breakthrough infections occur even after two jabs; over 100,000 children missed school last week (a figure undoubtedly heightened by the Government’s delay in authorising teenager jabs); and business and industry are facing unpredictable staff shortages as those thousands sick or isolating can’t work.

Vaccine-Plus

But vaccination on its own is not enough. It must be backed up by a range of mandatory mitigation measures, which focus on protection and support rather than restrictions on activities. They include an effective, local and fully-funded Find, Test, Trace, Isolate and Support operation run by the NHS and local authorities; all workplaces, including schools, colleges and hospitality venues, being made Covid-safe; and continuing precautionary measures including self-isolation, social distancing, handwashing, mask-wearing and good ventilation.

As Independent Sage scientists say in their recent Covid Winter Protection Plan (https://www.independentsage.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Winter-Plan-final.pdf)

“Unless such protections are implemented immediately there is a serious danger that more intrusive and wide-ranging restrictions will become necessary later”.

When we talk about vaccination we mustn’t just talk about the UK – a global pandemic requires global vaccination.

No one is safe until everyone is safe

Many on the left have questioned whether the UK should be giving boosters and teenager jabs when poorer countries are crying out for vaccines. But the ‘beggar my neighbour’ approach of the rich capitalist countries isn’t really a supply issue. It is political.

Countries like the UK are turning their backs on the poorer parts of the world; countries they have not hesitated to plunder and wage war in for centuries. Vaccine apartheid and cuts in overseas aid go hand in hand. It’s no surprise that a government which refuses to ensure British children are safe when they go to school, hoards vaccines and refuses to support patent waivers, profit restrictions, prices at cost, or sharing technology, science and know-how.

So rather than engaging in a factional civil war, the Labour leadership should be talking about issues that really affect millions at home and abroad. Conference should be showcasing a different approach to dealing with the pandemic that has dominated all our lives for over 18 months, and that has not gone away – however much we all wish it had.

This is an edited version of my article in the Morning Star on 27 September 2021 during the Labour Party Conference.

Covid’s ideological breeding ground

covid death graph
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/

Battered and depressed by the tragic details of the daily news updates and the frustrations of lockdown, it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture – and to forget that the Tory response to the Covid-19 crisis is governed by an extreme right-wing ideology which, when combined with the arrogance and greed of the British upper class, means that their decisions have little to do with saving lives, let alone the NHS.

But there are three key elements of Tory ideology we must not forget as we recoil in horror at what is happening:

  • Lansley ‘reforms’ (aka as the 2012 Health and Social Care Act), which institutionalised competition within the NHS
  • Austerity, which didn’t just starve the NHS of resources but led to follies such as the failure to replenish stockpiles of essential equipment despite the recommendations of Exercise Cygnus
  • Privatisation at every level of the economy, shrinking the state and putting profit before people.

Add to these the poisonous concept of British exceptionalism, cultivated during and by Brexit and given free rein now Boris Johnson and his ‘advisers’ are in Downing Street –the appalling and avoidable result of which is that the UK tops the European death league – and we can begin to understand why we have had to experience:

  • The herd immunity policy pushed by Downing Street’s eugenicists – more appropriately called the ‘cull the herd’ policy.
  • The strategy of mitigation rather than suppression; the failure to comply with WHO guidance to test, trace and isolate; and the refusal to lockdown and close borders at a time when it may have prevented thousands of deaths.
  • Boris’s Nightingale Hospitals – white elephants which diverted resources from existing hospitals and care homes. The questions about who profited from building these have yet to be asked.
  • The disregard and indifference towards social care and care home residents and workers. Why should we be surprised by this when the Tories have repeatedly failed to come up with any social care policy for years, let alone one which would integrate a sector dominated by private companies with the public NHS?
  • The refusal to work with Europe, not just on research and procurement, but now on data collection, with the Vote Leave data harvesters deeply involved in Downing Street’s preferred contact tracing App.
  • Private companies involved at every level – for example Deloitte, G4S, Serco and Capita are all involved in one way or another with procurement and contact testing, with data harvesting a binary choice between the US tech giants and AI firms linked to the Tories’ cronies.
  • The exposure of the health, wealth and race divides in our society, inequalities which have worsened over the past decade and which are now resulting in increased deaths in poor and multi-racial communities.

Now we must add messaging on easing the lockdown so muddled – as economic libertarianism comes into conflict with the public’s health – that key members of the Government have been unable to explain what we are all being advised to do.

1000x-1

Labour has a historically poor record of confronting the Tories on an ideological level, often letting them get away with pretending they haven’t really got one. Labour failed to challenge austerity until 2015. It tended to treat Brexit as a technical issue to do with trade and EU institutions rather than internationalism and solidarity, and was reluctant to call out its motivating mixture of deeply entrenched xenophobic bigotry, Atlanticism and the demands of a faction of capital. Labour’s response to the coronavirus crisis has similarly focussed on immediate issues rather than challenging the ideological reasons underlying the Tories’ failure to protect the health and lives of all their citizens.

This is to a large extent understandable whilst we are in the midst of the pandemic. Indeed, as one of those tagged with that horrible expression ‘extremely vulnerable’, my most frequently voiced criticism is why aren’t we all shouting louder and louder about the government’s catastrophic mismanagement of almost every single aspect of the crisis. But just as we mustn’t lose sight of the bigger picture in the now, we also need to be looking at it for the future.

One of the most depressing features of the global response to the pandemic has been the lack of international solidarity. Britain has not been alone in pursuing its own beggar thy neighbour policies. Trump’s xenophobia threatens the whole world.

The devastation being wrought by Covid-19 is massive. The global economy is in freefall, and because globalisation and technology have linked the world’s populations like never before, the coming depression will hit everyone.  By the time the pandemic is under control, millions of working people across the world will have lost not just their lives or their loved ones, but their homes and their livelihoods. Hunger and destitution will make many desperate. Add the climate crisis to the pandemic crisis and humanity’s future is bleak if the most powerful countries continue to pursue what their strong men leaders perceive as their own national interests and fail to learn the importance of international solidarity and what could be the real meaning and strength of globalisation.

In this country, if it is left to the Tories, their new normal will be a return, with a few tweaks here and there – and with a lot of failed companies and thousands of unemployed workers – to the same old system of profit first people last. To this will be added the spice of a no deal Brexit at the end of the year. As many of us would love much of our lives to return to the way they were just a few weeks ago, it is going to be hard to challenge the ‘Britain will bounce back’ concept.

But we must. Labour has to seize the opportunity to articulate our values, challenge the Tories on an ideological level, and develop a new programme that really grasps the existential challenges the world faces. Our immediate demand has to be that workers neither in the developed north nor the global south pay for the pandemic through unemployment, tax rises and poorer public services. But we then need to go much further than that.

Our last manifesto was written for a different time and for a different economic situation. Some of its policies have shown themselves to be the most vital in the current situation – the much-mocked free broadband, nationalised railways, NHS investment; other policies such as a universal basic income and a national care service are now on the agenda. But our vision has to be even greater than any of those.

Experience during lockdown has shown both the vital role of the state and which aspects of our society and economy are valuable and essential, which are desirable, and which are unnecessary. If we are serious about tackling the climate crisis then that information must be used to inform a new transformative and radical economic and industrial strategy, which goes beyond the Green New Deal and addresses new ways of working, new ways of living, a shift in the balance between the public and private sectors, and the pressing need to alter the whole basis of income and wealth distribution.

The world changed after the 1919 flu epidemic, and again following World War Two. VE Day was not just about an end to the fighting in Europe and the Allies’ collective defeat of fascism. It was a day of celebration and comradeship which paved the way for one of the most transformative periods in this country’s history. That did not happen by accident. We came together and restructured our society and economy to fight the war and rebuild after it, just as we are doing now in a smaller way to cope with the Covid pandemic. ‘No going back to the way things were’ applies just as much today as it did in 1945.

Keir Starmer rightly says we can’t go back to business as usual and that we must go forward with a vision of a better society. But what does that mean? And how do we turn the rhetoric into reality? Across the world most communities have responded to the crisis with kindness, neighbourliness, sympathy and collectivity. We must all, across the Labour movement, now make use of whatever downtime we have, and the way we can now use technology to talk to each other, to brainstorm new, imaginative and progressive ways of living and organising society. We must be ready to #BuildBackBetter;  for a future based on our movement’s collective ideas, understanding and experiences; for a future which rejects the Tories’ right-wing virus breeding ground of fragmented public services, greed and survival of the fittest, and is founded on genuine solidarity and socialism.

 

78323176_10159176846483009_7521445126455951360_o

 

 

Vote Labour for Hope and all our Futures!

78323176_10159176846483009_7521445126455951360_o

I voted Labour on 12 December 2019 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🌹🌹🌹

Because I believe in social justice and a fair and equal society.

Because I want to stop the right-wing’s Brexit project and remain in Europe
Because I want to live in a progressive, outward-looking country
  • where we don’t fear others and welcome migrants
  • where we don’t just want but can expand our horizons and aspirations,
  • where we work together to stop our planet being destroyed to enrich selfish billionaires and corporations
  • where everyone has a right to a warm, secure home, where mums don’t go without to feed their kids, where we don’t get ripped off by privatised utility companies and unscrupulous landlords, where debt isn’t a way of life
  • where our NHS works for all of us and nobody fears a visit to A&E lest they get left for hours in pain without a bed
  • where I don’t look out of my window at homeless people sleeping and begging, and a sign stuck to the wall advising them how to register to vote
  • where I don’t have to keep telling my landlord that only a third of social tenants can afford broadband and therefore can’t access their services
  • where we restore the welfare state I was born into and have benefited from all my life
  • where our leaders aren’t racist, sexist and homophobic bigots and liars
  • where we aren’t faced with the prospect of incipient fascism.

Vote Labour today for hope and for all our futures!

🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩

 

Only Labour Can Stop Brexit

Only a vote for Labour in Thursday’s European elections can stop the Brexit Party topping the polls.

A ‘tactical’ ‘protest’ vote in these elections is not an option. Remainers must support Labour.

Allowing the Brexit Party to top the poll will not bring about a People’s Vote. The opposite. It will send a message to Europe and the world that a bunch of anti-European right-wing little-Englander charlatans speak for this country, and it will strengthen both their neo-fascist friends across Europe and the No Deal Brexiteers in the Tory Party.

Farage said yesterday “If we win on Thursday, we kill off any chance of them forcing a second referendum on us”. He went on to demand a place in the EU negotiating team.

 Only Labour can beat the Faragists.

 Only Labour can stop Boris and Nigel taking the UK out of the EU on Hallowe’en with No Deal.

 I share the frustration of so many Labour members at the Leadership’s ambiguity on Brexit. But we have to acknowledge that they have pursued the policy agreed unanimously at last year’s Conference – to call for a General Election and for “all options to remain on the table, including campaigning for a public vote”.

There were many shortcomings to that composite motion, not least its failure to spell out that Labour is fundamentally a Remain Party, but the way to change that is not desertion but to use every avenue within the Party to effect policy change, in particular by motions to this year’s Annual Conference as well as supporting calls for a Special Emergency Conference on Brexit now.

I’ve criticised the lack of Labour campaigning in this election. But JeremyCorbyn, accompanied by many Shadow Ministers, was out in Vauxhall yesterday, meeting members, knocking on doors and talking about Labour’s positive vision, including:

“If we can’t get a sensible compromise or a General Election, we’ll back a public vote”. (here) 

Voting anything but Labour may make you feel ‘better’, but it is a wasted vote. None of the smaller parties are in a position to deliver the public vote on Brexit of their claims – only Labour can do that. Nor are they in a position to influence the policies and practices of the EU – only Labour and its allies in the S&D can challenge for the Commission Presidency and affect the EU’s attitude not just to the UK but to a range of policies in respect of austerity, migration and the climate crisis.

Instead of using these elections to send a message to Jeremy Corbyn, our message has to be that fascists of the neo-, alt- or any other variety, are not welcome here, and that only Labour can stop Brexit.

Joan

Photos: @JohnStuttle with thanks - Vauxhall Park, 21 May 2019

How to lose votes and alienate EU-friends

 

love corbyn hate brexitDear Jeremy and Labour Party comrades

I have decades of experience campaigning in Lambeth and across London. I am currently a member of Vauxhall CLP EC and a coordinator for the local Momentum group. I am writing to share my concerns about how the current EU election is being run.

The  day after I received my postal voting form I received a personalised letter from the Lib Dem’s Mayoral candidate. I see from Facebook that lots of other postal voters have received similar from the Brexits. But nothing from Labour. We wouldn’t know an election is going on!

In my constituency the chance to get out on the doorstep and explain that our unrepresentative hard Brexiteer MP, Kate Hoey, does not represent the views of local Party members has been seized by all wings of the Party with enthusiasm. Three of London’s MEP candidates are members of this constituency. Again, all wings of what is often depicted as a politically split CLP have welcomed their nominations and are eager to campaign for them.

But – along with the lack of attention being given to the thousands of postal voters, who faced with a long and complicated ballot form let alone a short and ‘complicated’ (in the Facebook sense of the word) campaign really need some guidance – the Labour Party machinery has not just been unhelpful but at worst has pushed activists away.

I manage a Community Centre but was quickly told that it would be impossible to host any kind of rally or meeting there because, even if I personally donated the cost, it would not be permitted as it would be charged against election expenses. I have even been told that putting up a Labour poster is banned. (By the way, I have no intention of obeying that edict – and if it is true then I would like to see it in writing.)

It does not help that this lacklustre attitude to campaigning – so unlike the spirit of the 2017 campaign – is reflected in the paucity of literature that has been produced. What has been produced is dire. Instead of suggesting that the European Parliament funds the Met Police, the NHS and schools (and is therefore responsible for the current cuts), why haven’t the policies contained in the excellent PES manifesto, which Labour signed up to some months ago, been used as the basis for spelling out what our MEPs can do; why hasn’t the excellent record of what socialist MEPs have achieved contained in Labour’s own European Manifesto been mentioned? That Manifesto is great – but who’s going to know that. It’s top secret.

Instead we get the fluffy Hallmark slogan of ‘bringing our country together again’. To do that requires honesty, bravery and a clear position on Brexit. These elections are about Europe. The issue cannot be ignored. It has to be confronted head on. Is it any surprise that the two parties who are rising in the polls are the two who are campaigning with the clearest message in respect of Brexit.  A clear strong message will do more to bring the country together than woolly ambiguity.

And what about social media ? From voter registration drives, to enthusiastically selling the messages in the Manifesto across Facebook and Twitter, the Party could be doing so much more. More than nothing, that is. In 2017 Labour dominated social media – why are we not doing the same by recapturing the spirit we found then? Labour’s posts don’t even mention the elections. It is being left to individual candidates to wage an air war on their own. And to individual CLPs like my own to organise doorstepping, canvassing, and photo ops with the candidates and the rare Shadow Cabinet Minister who is actively campaigning to get across Labour’s internationalist message.

Having seen the complexity of the ballot paper, with 10 Parties and 11 independents standing in London, the party needs to at least be explaining the voting system! Will there be ‘Get-out-the-vote’ leaflets doing that or will it, like everything else about this campaign, be left to individual candidates and grassroots members to do that. Without spending any money?

I gather the spending restrictions are because any expenditure now may get charged against a future early general election. But it won’t be spending too much at the GE which will lose us votes. It will be not campaigning now. We are losing the General Election campaign on the doorstep today . Once voters – and members (a third of Labour List readers!) – abandon Labour to vote for another party they rarely come back. The majority of Labour members and voters in London support remaining in the EU, and we have been losing members and voters in my constituency for months because of our MP’s and the Leader’s positions on Brexit. If Labour does badly on 23 May because of the lack of campaign support already unhappy members will be even further demotivated.

Complex messages need to be got across in this election. We need to be explaining how voting for other smaller parties is a wasted vote as they are not in a position to either deliver the public vote on Brexit of their claims – only Labour can do that – nor are they in a position to influence the policies and practices of the European Union – only Labour and its allies in the S&D can challenge for the Commission Presidency and affect the EU’s attitude to the UK. And we need to be spelling out that only Labour is committed to challenging the growth of fascist and alt-right populism across Europe and in the UK.

London is a great working class city and the majority of its diverse, multi-national residents want to stay in the European Union. We have great candidates who will represent this city and its people heart and soul.  Let’s please tell Londoners who they are, how to vote, and why, above all, they should vote Labour. Against austerity, for real action against climate catastrophe, for peace and prosperity across our continent.

I feel obliged to complain like this because if ordinary members like me don’t, then nothing will change.90a243ae-cfe8-4112-8830-0dc546ce0e45

In hope and solidarity

Joan

 

 

Footnote:

I’m pleased to say that after I wrote this the Labour Party machinery swung into action – in London at least – and has produced election material, including on social media. Hundreds of Party members have enthusiastically accompanied our candidates on the doorstep. But, as the same time, far too many members are saying they are voting for one of the smaller Remain parties. A wasted vote, which could allow Farage’s Party to top the poll and send a message to Europe and the world that a bunch of anti-European, anti-migrant right-wing little-Englander charlatans represent the values and opinions of this country.

I will be voting Labour on Thursday and I call on all socialist Remainers to do the same.

Joan, 19 May 2019 

I wrote to Jeremy this morning. Here’s what I said –

Dear Jeremy

I was appalled to wake up to hear the Tory spin that you might accept the paltry concessions offered by the PM to push Brexit through Parliament.

Concessions on things which should be happening anyway. And even if the Tories are prepared to row back on a few workplace rights they have spent the last decades demolishing, and offer some more Sports Direct depots to the former coalfield communities, what about our environmental rights, what about our consumer rights, what about our rights as European citizens to travel, study, work, live, and love across our neighbouring continent, what about the rights of EU citizens in this country, what about all of our rights to free movement across the world – or is that just for the rich? Where are your demands on these rights? Where are the Tories’ concessions on these?

The fact that I could believe this possible is an indictment of the position you have taken on Brexit ever since the referendum – indeed during it when I was told by your staff that you felt you had done enough meetings on Europe after just doing a couple, and therefore could not do one in south London with me.

You are making it impossible for comrades like myself to defend your Leadership. Brexit is an anti-internationalist, anti-solidarity, anti-peace, anti-immigrant right-wing project – there is no fantasy Lexit which will overturn austerity; indeed, the reverse as the country is impoverished and the NHS crumbles for lack of staff, medicines and funding.

Good comrades are leaving the Party in Vauxhall because you have not only failed to provide clear and decisive leadership against Brexit but also because you have failed to take any action against our MP, who has been consistently allowed to break the whip and collude with the most rabidly right-wing of Brexiteers such as Nigel Farage and Arron Banks. Motions of no confidence in Kate Hoey have won unanimous support across the Party here, but nothing ever happens; but it is more than clear that nobody here will campaign for her if she is allowed to restand as our PPC. The trade union sponsorship the CLP has received for her for the last 30 years has recently been stopped. It is time the Party did the same.

Criticism of the institutions of the EU is fine. But you have to make them in the light of the objective circumstances of the time; and the objective circumstances now are that the right are advancing across the world and we – you – need to be leading the fightback against them. Rather than bunkering into a ‘socialism in one country’ world view, the fight needs to be taken into Europe, where we need to be working with socialists, not against them.

I hate referendums. But I believe that another is unavoidable if the anti-Europe vote in the first one is to be overturned. You need to not just support another vote, but make it very, very clear that you will campaign and fight to challenge the original decision and support Remain and Reform loudly and proudly.

I believe the advice you are receiving is wrong. You need to get out of the bunker and the Westminster bubble and talk to comrades who take a pro-European view. More than happy to get on the bus and come and chat any time.

Comradely greetings

Joan