Solidarity 616, 1 December 2021

Discussions about the state of the National Health Service are remarkably muted given the desperate reality. NHS campaigners, the left and the labour movement need to introduce a real sense of alarm — and clear, appropriately radical solutions. In the Guardian earlier this month, one doctor wrote about her difficulty even getting an emergency ambulance for a baby with falling oxygen levels. She commented that “this incident was only one of many examples I could quote which illustrate how close basic medical care is to collapsing in the UK”. The Financial Times has found that 2,047 more people...

Really the only good thing about the Tories’ proposals for social care funding is that they are so blatantly not a solution to anything. The door is still open wide, perhaps now even wider, for a labour movement push for a real alternative on this crucial issue, shifting the debate, winning concessions and damaging the government in the process. But at the moment the push is far too weak. Our minimum alternative should be to make social care and support provision a publicly-owned, publicly-provided system, with enough public funding to ensure it is completely free, high quality and provides...

On 30 November-1 December, the Caribbean nation of Barbados became a republic, removing the UK monarch as its head of state. The English monarchy took control of Barbados from 1625, wiping out the island’s indigenous population and creating a society based on slavery. The forced labour of black Barbadians played a crucial role in the rise of the first capitalist empire: by 1660 Barbados generated more trade than all other English colonies combined. Enslaved Barbadians resisted fiercely, including through a major uprising in 1816, an important precursor to the abolition of slavery in the...

To be fair to the Morning Star , the fact that it had no coverage of the Wednesday 24 November tragedy in the Channel until its Friday edition (26 November), a day later than the rest of the media, was probably due to its limited resources and inability to extend deadlines. When it did come, the Morning Star ’s coverage was mainly pretty good: a front page headline “Give Safe Routes To Refugees” and a lead story quoting refugee rights groups blaming racist border fortification policies by both the British and French governments. The editorial on Friday 26 November was headed “Britain’s...

Academic freedom is a specific principle relating to the sphere of academia and the university setting. It is the right to research and teach without political or commercial interference and institutional censorship. Despite Jack McDonough ( Solidarity 615 ), I’d say Kathleen Stock’s academic freedom has not been compromised. Since Kathleen Stock’s resignation, she has positioned herself as a victim of a university-rife “cancel culture” and she has tarnished student protesters as medieval witch-hunters. It is the voices of the student protesters that have been silenced, not Stock’s. What were...

An Iraqi court has resumed hearing a case in which a judge was asked to formalise a religious wedding between a 12-year-old girl and a 25-year-old man. The court, located in Baghdad’s Kadhamiya district, adjourned the case last week amidst demonstrations. Demonstrators had been chanting “No to child marriage” and “Marrying children is a crime against children”. The case caught national attention when the girl’s mother — in a video on social media — called on authorities to save her daughter. She told local media her daughter had been raped and forced into a marriage to her stepfather’s brother...

Water companies in the England and Wales have been found to be illegally dumping raw sewage directly into Britain’s waterways and seas at staggering rates. An investigation from the Environment Agency (EA) found that in 2020 alone water companies had discharged sewage into rivers more than 400,000 times, for a total of more than three million hours. Companies are legally allowed to discharge raw sewage this way but only in exceptional situations where it would otherwise threaten to overwhelm the sewer system, such as after prolonged periods of rain. Then discharging allows fluid to move...

Franziska Elmer is a marine biologist working on a project to boost the growth of algae in the oceans as a carbon draw-down technique. She spoke to Stuart Jordan from Solidarity . We are working on a research and development project that investigates how the macroalgae Sargassum fluitans and natans can be grown in parts of the ocean that have very little nutrients in the surface water. A few hundred metres below the surface there is very nutrient-rich water that is currently not used by any organisms as there is no light for photosynthesis. By bringing this water up through artificial...

Ten thousand strikers at twelve John Deere plants across the US have accepted a contract backed by management and the UAW union after 5 weeks of strike action. One striker summed up the feelings of those battling Deere (and unfortunately their own union): “We were sold out”. A six year contract with a 12% wage increase (i.e a shoddy 2% a year) was passed by 61% across Deere, although in the tractor plant at Waterloo, Iowa, it is reported that 56% of workers rejected the deal. The bosses’ papers dutifully parrot the Deere media blitz that a “significant margin” passed the deal, which is meant...

The government decision to scrap the eastern sections of the HS2 high-speed rail project is unsurprising. Rumours that the Tories were looking for short cuts over the project alongside an apparent new “package” of upgrades had circulated for some time. But the government’s own claims that their new package of upgrades to existing lines adds some new capacity bear scrutiny. The section that would have connected Birmingham to Leeds will now end at the existing East Midlands Parkway station. A new high speed line between Manchester and Leeds has gone. Instead it will end in Marsden, West...