Third Camp Marxism

It’s Friday 13 March 2020. The UK has 789 confirmed cases of Covid-19. It is still 10 days away from a national lockdown that will stay in place for seven weeks, effectively shuttering large swathes of society.

And the government has just removed the Foreign Office advice that travellers from Wuhan, Northern Italy, and other “hotspots” for Covid-19 should self-isolate for 14 days on arrival in the UK. The country now has no advice or restrictions on international arrivals to contain the pandemic.

The Tories are trying to rush through their new Immigration Bill under the cover of the pandemic.

The “second reading” in Parliament was announced at a few days’ notice as Monday 18 May. The Labour Campaign for Free Movement is calling on the Labour leadership and MPs to oppose the Tories’ xenophobia by standing up for the alternative: solidarity, equality and free movement for all.

It asks supporters to:

JCB, a big company making mechanical diggers, has sent out letters beginning the consultation legally required when declaring more than 100 redundancies.

The required 45 days consultation will end on 2 July, just after the end of the current phase of the “furlough” scheme under which the government covers 80% of the wages of workers sent home for the lockdown.

JCB plans to cut 950 from its permanent workforce, and 500 agency-worker jobs.

Brazil is now one of the epicentres of the novel coronavirus pandemic. The number of confirmed cases is over 200,000, and deaths over 15,000, making it the fourth largest outbreak in the world.

The still almost-exponentially-increasing number of cases has, however, not been enough to convince Jair Bolsonaro to establish any sort of federal social distancing policy. The president was instead interviewed at a floating barbecue party (!) as the number of deaths reached 10,000.

On Sunday 10 May, in a pre-recorded message, Boris Johnson, stated the government’s desire to open primary schools to all Reception, Year 1 and Year 6 pupils on 1 June. He also said he hoped that Year 10 and Year 12 would be able to get some face to face contact in the near future.

Further guidance from the government then added nursery age children in primary schools to that list.

Watch the video of the article on this page:

As workers are encouraged to return to the workplace, as part of the government’s botched and reckless easing of lockdown measures, an urgent discussion is taking place across workplaces and through unions about resisting a lurch back to work in unsafe conditions.

In April 2020 49% of the UK workforce was working at home.

Just by scanning its founding supporters list, you can see that Momentum Renewal is a version of “continuity Momentum”, supported by the bulk of those responsible for the organisation’s trajectory over the last three and half years.

In some respects MR is almost certainly worse than "continuity". It seems to represent not just the existing Momentum office faction, but a particular wing of it - by and large, the worst wing of it.

Daily death tolls have been going down in Britain since 22 April and worldwide (for now, anyway) since 16 April.

Although death figures are unreliable, a country reporting a declining trend almost certainly really has one: definitions and reporting tend to widen rather than narrow.

We don't know whether the current rise of the pandemic in South America will reach levels similar to those suffered in Europe between early-mid March and mid-April, or whether Africa will see something like South America, or whether there will be a "second wave" in Europe.

1. Todd Hamer

To the casual observer there is something very odd about what is happening in the National Education Union. For some weeks the NEU leadership has rightly argued that it would be unsafe to reopen schools until there is a lower number of Coronavirus cases making possible tracing and testing (Test 1 of the NEU’s famous 5 Tests).