I have been wishing that, somehow, I could clone myself; then I start thinking of the Simpson’s Episode where Homer uses Dr Frink’s time machine to save time because he is too lazy to get up and just get a beer for example. The result was that Homer wound up cloning himself by accident with each clone getting stupider and more dysfunctional each time. When, I think about it, it seems to be perfect solution to my wanting to be in several places at the same. Alas, this is impossible and there is no way that I can be at several simultaneous meetings (on-line and in-person) and protests all of which are extremely important relating to several appalling actions by the British government and organising to protect the gains and resist the additional attack on the working class here. There is as well, the upcoming SCOTUS decision to overturn Roe and Casey and my needing to get to the American embassy in South West London to protest that evening (I have gotten into the habit of checking the SCOTUS calendar to see when decisions are being made and to see if they deign to say what cases they are ruling on in advance).
I was trying to find a way of tying all the crap that we are living through over here in Britain into a nice little ball to explain what is going on and came to the obvious conclusion that I could talk about a serious attack on working class people in Britain.
This is, then, combined with an appalling dose of racism (even Price Charles said it was appalling) thrown in to add to the disaster in a hope of distracting people from the reality that they cannot afford to eat, heat their homes and to fill their cars with petrol on the same day.
Deporting refugees and migrants (mostly from the Mideast, specifically Iran) to Rwanda is an appalling attempt to scare the hell out of refugees and migrants crossing the English Channel from France. The fact that there are only a few specific countries whose refugees are permitted to come to Britain legally under current laws has led to this problem; yet the Government’s Home Office Minister
(Priti Patel) as well as the right-wing Tory government and MPs refuse to accept that under International Law they have a legal and moral obligation to provide a safe and legal route to all refugees and insist that the problem are evil people traffickers bringing “illegal” people to the country and “since they are illegal, they clearly they have no rights under international law”. This is absurd, refugees and migrants do have rights, but we know that this horrific policy is an attempt to play on racism and xenophobia in Britain. After all, it worked with Brexit, didn’t it?!
The first flight with refugees being sent to Rwanda (of all places) is set to leave this Tuesday. The response of Human Rights organisations and campaigners has been very strong, they’ve appealed the deportation orders, arguing that this is a violation of International Human Rights law, and some of the refugees that are facing deportation have been taken off the list. However, a court allowed the rest of the deportations to continue and there are protests that have happened this week and a major one that will happen at Gatwick airport where the deportation flight is set to leave from. There is another appeal that is ongoing and a ruling is expected on Monday. Even the PCS Trade Union whose workers may wind up violating international law in their jobs has gotten involved. This is the first flight and more are planned.
The Cost of Living Crisis
The cost of living crisis is the result of several things, some of them are international and others that are specific to Britain which they are having trouble hiding any more. The international influences relate to supply-chain linkages being broken during the pandemic and the suppression of wage growth brought about by neoliberalism and austerity in the advanced capitalist world. Moreover, the Russian invasion of the Ukraine and and bans on purchases of Russian oil and natural gas are also raising prices in countries that are dependent on oil and natural gas from Russia. Additionally, many countries in the global south that are not food sovereign due to neoliberalism and export led growth policies demanded by the World Bank thereby making them dependent upon foreign grain with both Ukraine and Russia being primary suppliers internationally. Famines and droughts have impacted grain production recently and while the US can step in the prices will be high and there is not enough output for them to cover what is absent.
Britain does not get much oil and natural gas from Russia and it is not dependent on grains from Russia and the Ukraine. So, whatever is causing the massive increases in prices of oil and natural gas and food prices points to a different problem, part of that problem is Brexit, and that is something that Boris Johnson’s government (“we will get Brexit done”) denied would be a problem when Britain left the EU. The rise in food prices relates again to supply chain disruptions and tariffs on imports from the EU which is what everyone said would happen if Britain went through with Brexit (Britain is not food sovereign and has not been for a while); it also does relate to increases in transport costs domestically and internationally due to the rising fuel prices.
This rise in prices due to the breakage in supply chains (and import duties) is compounding the long-term problem in Britain of stagnant money wages, the destruction of working conditions, the increase in precarity in working conditions and the social welfare policies embodied in Universal Credit. Universal Credit was not meant to enable people to survive on welfare benefits. The whole point of the manner in which Universal Credit was established was that those out of work could not have an income higher than those in employment (this is the principle of “less eligibility” borrowed from Jeremy Bentham and the 1834 Poor Law Amendment). Moreover, it put into place a budget cap which would be partially lifted once you went into work and if you didn’t do this, there were sanctions in place that could stop your receipt of benefits. Changes were introduced to make it harder to get benefits if you were disabled, including assessments for those already on benefits (Tony Blair’s government had already put this into place for those newly applying for benefits). The transformation in benefits available for disabled people meant that many refused to change over to Universal Credit and remained on the previous form of benefits called Legacy Benefits. In the middle of the cost of living crisis, the government has been forcing those still on Legacy Benefits onto Universal Credit where the benefits are actually lower.
The cost of living crisis is continuing despite the attempt by Rishi Sunak to pretend to oppose the massive profits of the fossil fuel industry. Sunak had not wanted to do another budget, but the situation was so dire with rising food and fuel prices that he had no choice but to introduce some policies to ameliorate the crisis. There were some progressive policies (in the sense of helping the hardest hit by the crisis, e.g., disabled people, elderly people and those with low incomes and dependent on welfare benefits). These are very important because benefit incomes and pensions are tied to a lagged CPI, so when they were announced, they were already too low to address the rising prices of goods that are consumed by the working class. As such, the impact of the cost of living crisis was far worse for those that were already struggling. So, a one-off package of £650 for all those on benefits including those on Legacy benefits) will help with rising prices, rents and energy costs. The cost of living is also disproportionately hitting minority ethnic and marginalised communities in Britain; according to research conducted by People Like Us:
“According to the research, over a third of people from racially diverse backgrounds can no longer afford to pay their bills, rent or mortgage each month compared to a quarter of people from white backgrounds. Consequently, the same percentage of ethnic minority professionals are looking to downsize or plan to move back in with their families. Around a third are also projected to rack up extra debt by taking out loans or spending on credit cards, and another third are borrowing money from someone they know.”
Wouldn’t a better policy be uplifting all benefits by £20 actually be far more helpful? This was done for those on Universal Credit during the pandemic because benefits are not meant to enable people to survive on without work; the government did allow those on Legacy to get the £650 payment this time which wasn’t permitted for those on Legacy benefits (mostly disabled people) during the pandemic. However, you would only get that £650 if you were already on benefits, not if you applied after the date of the announcement. This one-off payment was only meant to be a short-term sticking plaster (band-aid) and not a way of addressing the problems that exists due to the manner in which the Universal Credit has been created.
However, the reality is that while these policies targeted rising fuel and heating prices, they really did nothing to help with rising food prices. An interesting thing about Sunak’s policies is that several of them (e.g., the one-off £300 increase the Winter Fuel Allowance for elderly people, the £400 grant to all households) literally go straight into the pockets of the fossil fuel industry. This is supposed to help you pay your heating bills and it does; but what it also does is ensure that the fossil fuel industry keeps getting more profits. They could have forbidden the companies generating and providing natural gas and oil from raising their costs, but they didn’t. So, is the cost of living crisis going to be used to abrogate COP26 agreements? When The Daily Mail of all right-wing papers suggests this and even raises evidence, we really do need to be concerned.
Additionally, while Sunak did put a windfall tax (called an energy profits levy because windfall taxes are not approved of in the Tory party) of 25% in place against these corporations, they also provided subsidies for reinvestment in production for these companies. So, any investment or reinvestment is subsidised by the British government to the tune of 80% of its costs for reinvestment and investment covered. The £5 bn earned on windfall taxes doesn’t cover the whole £15 billon package and it is not clear where that will come from yet. Sunak claimed that this was done to address the “supply crisis” in fossil fuel production. But there is not really a supply crisis in Britain caused by the Russian attack on Ukraine (which he claimed as a motive for the policies), most of oil and natural gas is domestically produced. So rather than support the production of sustainable energy generation in Britain (e.g., wind, tidal and solar), they throw money at every investment and reinvestment in fossil fuel generation and production.
Rather than increase the ridiculously insufficient “living wage” (minimum wage) which would actually provide longer term support for British workers whose money wages have been stagnant and still have not recovered to the levels of 2007-8, they argue that it would set off a “wage-price spiral”. That may be the case if the rising prices were actually driven by workers’ demand, but they are not. They are being driven by rising profits and passing of cost increases in industries that use fossil fuels for inputs and transportation purposes. Being an intermediate product, oil and gas enter the production of many commodities either directly (energy costs) or indirectly (e.g., transport costs). As Ozlem Onaran says:
“Let us get things right: inflation is an outcome of conflicting claims over the distribution of income. Currently the profit share of the employers and the wealth of the top 1% are being protected, while workers’ share in national income is being squeezed by the spike in the cost of energy, wheat, and other essential imported inputs. The Bank of England (BoE)’s governor has warned of apocalyptic prices and implied that workers must pay for the crisis by capping their wage demands. The current policies of the BoE to increase the interest rate will not cure inflation, because today’s inflation is not demand-driven, but it is pushed by the rise in imported input costs. The increase in the interest rate will just give more money to the wealthy who already own assets. There is a major problem with the current mandate of the BoE targeting narrowly the inflation rate at a level as low as possible (2%): it always comes at a cost to the workers either as high unemployment or bad jobs, such as zero-hour contracts. This only helps the rentier who make profits by speculation and lending, because their real return, i.e., the real interest rate is the nominal interest rate minus the rate inflation rate. Hence inflation being as low as possible is good for the rentier, while high unemployment and/or bad working conditions are bad for workers. It does not have to be like this, particularly after a decade of squeeze in wages. We could also say that the super-rich must pay.”
Let’s put it short and succinct: as wage incomes (wages and benefits) collapse under soaring rising prices, profits and rents are rising. The ruling class is passing on rising costs onto the working class (protecting its revenue of profits and rents) and as such, the burden of the cost of living crisis is falling on working class people (employed and unemployed). This is because the real wage (wages divided by prices) is falling and what we are able to buy with our wage incomes is shrinking. This is happening not only in Britain but in the US as well, according to the Economic Policy Institute:
“The overheating view often emphasizes the atypically fast nominal wage growth of the past year as justification of their arguments. But this nominal wage growth—while fast compared to the very recent past—still lags far behind overall inflation and hence signals that labor costs are still dampening, not amplifying, inflationary pressures.
In short, the rise in inflation has not been driven by anything that looks like an overheating labor market—instead it has been driven by higher corporate profit margins and supply-chain bottlenecks. Policy efforts meant to cool off labor markets—like very rapid and sharp interest rate increases—are likely not necessary to restrain inflationary pressures in the medium term.”
As such, blaming price rises on working class demand doesn’t hold water; but, instead, it is rising profit margins and speculation that is behind the spiralling inflation and arguing that there is a danger of the creation of a wage-price spiral if wages are increased is essentially fallacious. This is being argued by right-wing economists and politicians to hide what is actually happening.
Further Struggles Ahead
There are additional problems for working class people in Britain deriving from privatisation of the public sector, the weakness of trade unions in the private sector, the increased precarity of work and the destruction of long-term work contracts. There are additional problems caused by Brexit and the dependence on migrant labour in the British economy.
As in many advanced capitalist countries policies of neoliberalism which used export-led growth strategies (goods produced for external sale meant lower wages and domestic demand were less relevant) Offshoring of industrial manufacturing and production as part of neoliberalism also weakened the labour movement. Export led growth policies were used to lower subsistence levels of wages through stagnation of wages and first wages freezes and then limits to increases in the public sector. The destruction of wages and the boosting of profits were the response to the 2007-8 crisis. Wages essentially stagnated. Moreover, the privatisation of parts of the public sector enabled the further lowering of wages for workers in privatised sectors due to the use of agency labour with limited contracts and zero-hour contracts which were part and parcel of austerity introduced following the recession of 2007-8. The destruction of longer-term employment contracts in unionised sectors (short-term contracts, zero hours contracts, sub-contracting rather than direct employment) has been a major transformation for working class people and weakened trade union power as well (the most heavily unionised sectors are of public sector workers in Britain) and it was deliberate. Labour laws further limiting the ability of workers to strike were introduced by the Tory government.
Given this situation with economic growth stagnant, the pandemic led to rising unemployment. Furloughed wages never covered the full level of wages earned and Universal Credit (even with the £20 uplift) for those unemployed meant that wage levels were already low heading into the recovery and now the cost of living crisis has made things even worse creating a massive increase in usage of food banks, and there will be rising evictions as well. The sticking plaster of policies offered by Rishi Sunak will not be enough to contain the impact on the cost of living because the problem is actually structural both in terms of wages, employment and in benefits provision. Sunak (and the rest of the Tory government) is still pretending this is a short-term crisis which will go away (even though the intensity of the crisis is reflecting over a decade of policies designed to keep profits up at the expense of wages).
Low pay and poor conditions led many British workers to stop working in jobs where their hard work was not rewarded in decent pay and working condition. Large numbers of migrant workers (e.g., nurses from the Philippines, care workers from the EU and Global South), agricultural workers from poorer EU countries, and cleaners and cooks throughout the public and private sectors) provide a lot of the labour in these sectors and now we need to talk about the impact of Brexit again which has reduced the number of workers coming to Britain to do these jobs. As such, there are not enough workers to do the jobs that must be done to keep this country functioning. Add to this, the loss of jobs during the pandemic, people being sacked and not being replaced means that there are not enough workers to do these jobs and those that are there unable to cover for the insufficient size of the workforce.
Recently, it has been noticed that there is a blockage in accessing new passports due to an insufficient number of workers. Boris Johnson’s “brilliant” suggestion was to privatise the passport service thereby saving the government the costs of hiring more people which are needed to enable the service to function. Somehow, he has not thought of the fact that when this happens, they will need to pay benefits to those sacked and the loss of skill and knowledge which will happen when agency workers (it will be Serco and other horrific employers that will take this on) are brought in to do the work of skilled labour. This is almost a constant in Tory Britain, destroy the service provision and when workers are not able to do the work, privatise the sector which destroys the service as it now has to create a profit to survive and we know that profits are more important than the quality of the service and amount of the service provided (we can look at the care sector in Britain for a perfect example).
There has been a revival of industrial action in Britain which is way overdue due to the spiralling costs of living. In April, The Guardian reported that:
“Over the past 12 months, the Trades Union Congress has logged at least 300 disputes in different industries, indicating that more and more workers are challenging below-inflation pay offers after a decade of wage stagnation following the 2008 banking crash.
Organised workers in some sectors are racking up sizeable wins, despite inflation shrinking pay packets overall. The GMB recorded six such victories over the past five months, including outsourced bin workers in Eastbourne and Hastings securing 19%-plus rises. Unite has secured 35 wins in recent months, including warehouse workers at B&Q’s national distribution centre in Worksop, Nottinghamshire, operated by the logistics firm Wincanton, who gained a near-11% pay boost after taking strike action.
There is a growing willingness to threaten or use strikes to force companies to match soaring price inflation, which the Office for Budget Responsibility estimated last week would cause the fastest fall in living standards since modern records began in the 1950s.”
There has already been a tube strike in London on 6th of June and further strikes are planned by the RMT Union due to funding cuts as well as the cost of living. Additionally, bus drivers and rail workers (TSSA and ASLEF) are planning strikes in July during the Commonwealth Games. The summer expected to see a massive increase in worker actions in response to the cost of living crisis and threats to hard-won pensions (e.g., teachers). Given anti-union laws in Britain require a threshold of workers participating in strike ballots and a high threshold to call a strike, it is far easier to fight a local strike rather than a national one. So, while most strikes are local (e.g., against local council policies, teachers and staff at single schools voting for strike action over pensions, bus workers in various areas, wage struggles over privatisations at hospitals and local government contracts), there has been a significant uptick in industrial actions and more are expected as the cost of living crisis hits workers.
Even the Trade Union Congress (TUC; similar to the US AFL-CIO) has finally decided to call a national protest on June 18th in London which hopefully it will put in enough resources to build properly. Most building is being done locally by Trade Unions.
The Tories are not happy about this in the least and Grant Schapps (British Transport Secretary) has threatened to hire agency workers as scabs to fill in for workers that are striking in the hope of breaking strikes. This policy was already present in the last Tory Election Manifesto. You may recognise this policy from when Saint/President Ronnie Reagan busted the PATCO union when the air traffic controllers went on strike and he brought in the military to run air-traffic control. The difference is that the Tories are even more vicious and more dangerous; imagine them bringing in agency workers that never have driven a train or have any experience in the transport sectors of rail, buses and underground to run the system? Ronnie Raygun admitted that he was trying to bust the PATCO union, the Tories, of course, are lying and saying they are not.
This policy advocated by the Tories is a violation of the right to strike which is part of Human Rights law. But then again Human Rights and International Human Rights Law have never stopped the Tories (look at the Rwanda deportations of refugees and migrants for example) from abrogating their international obligations to refugees and migrants.
For that matter, even treaties signed by Britain with the EU around Brexit which ensured open borders between Ireland and the North of Ireland as agreed in the Good Friday agreement (Northern Ireland Protocol) is expendable. A border in the Irish Sea was a compromise proposed by Britain; alas the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) opposes it and is refusing to join the newly elected Northern Ireland Assembly (in which the DUP no longer hold the majority) unless something is done about this protocol. As an understatement the Irish Republic and the majority of the Northern Ireland Assembly are beyond angry and certainly when these policies are announced, the EU will be seething. Would you sign a treaty with a country that breaks said treaty and violates international law which they are insisting that they aren’t doing? Opposition leaders are asking for a clarification of the legality of the proposal (certainly they could say more, don’t you think?) ...
