Third Camp Marxism

Some issues emerge clearly from the leaked Labour Party report on its Governance and Legal Unit's handling of antisemitism and other issues.

1. The remnants of New Labour, entrenched in the party machine, hated any attempt, however modest, to move the party to the left. They were opposed to Ed Miliband and Andy Burnham as well as Corbyn. They were virulently hostile to even minimally left-wing policies.

At Trinity House, an HMRC workplace in the north west, a worker was diagnosed with Covid-19. The bosses only moved people from their immediate team.

The local union demanded that the building be shut entirely and deep cleaned. Management initially refused, so the union issued an ultimatum, and management agreed to shut the building.

We now have an issue with the Passport Office, where the employer wants to bring large number of workers back into the office to do routine work, despite the fact that very little international travel is taking place presently.

Young workers and women are likely to be the hardest hit by the coronavirus shutdown of businesses such as restaurants, hotels, pubs and retailers.

Low earners are seven times as likely as high earners to work in a business sector that has shut down, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Their analysis found a third of the bottom 10% of earners worked in the worst-hit sectors, against one in 20 (5%) of those in the top 10%.

“You can sit in the mess room, but only two of you. There is the locker room and then the ticket office. The GLAP (the glass box by the barriers) is your choice if you want to go in there."

The supervisors are doing their shift change. M asks if there is anything she should know from D.

“I can’t tell you anything, we don’t have the sheets, so not sure who is coming in. But you’ve got T, Jay and S. It’s pretty dead anyway”.

1. Requisition (in other words, take into emergency public ownership)
• private hospitals, as Ireland and Spain have done
• the pharmaceutical and medical-supplies industries, so that production can be ramped up in a coordinated way of tests, PPE, ventilators, etc.
• high finance, so that the epidemic is not compounded by a snowballing economic slump resulting from an implosion of credit
• and other sectors where coordinated mobilisation is necessary.

CoronaVerses: poems from the pandemic (see here) is a rapidly pulled together collection in a rapidly changing world. Collected over the course of a week after Janine Booth set up a CoronaVerses Facebook group, it was collated and released in just over a fortnight.

Tesco’s response to the pandemic has been unusually clear, and provides a firm starting point for those of us wanting to ensure greater protections on the shop floor now and better pay and conditions when this crisis starts to subside.

We’ve been given paid leave to self-isolate up to 14 days, and our vulnerable colleagues (everyone who needs a flu jab, or is pregnant, or over 65) have been given 12 weeks’ paid leave to make sure they stay safe.

Despite many years of public service cuts, privatisation (including of hospitals), outsourcing, cuts to social security, and so on, Germany still hasn’t really had full-on Thatcherism.

Remnants of the “German model” of so-called “social partnership” still exist. The number of hospital beds is much higher than in Britain, partly for that reason, and partly for another.

Trade unionists and other have called for the government to write off all households’ council-tax and benefit-overpayment debt, and to freeze rent, utility, council tax, and loan-repayment loans during the pandemic.

They also call for the suspension of all debt-collection activity. They estimate the plan would cost the government about $10 billion (see here).

African-Americans are being hit harder by Covid-19 than others in the USA.

In Chicago, African-Americans are half the Covid-19 cases and more than 70% of deaths, yet only 30% of the city.

In Milwaukee, they are 81% of Covid-19 cases and 26% of the population. In Louisiana, 70% of deaths and 33% of the population.

Almost always in epidemics, the worst-off suffer worse. They are likely to be in poorer health already; to live in more crowded housing; to have to continue to work in sometimes crowded workplaces, rather than working from home or taking time off.