Fight Back! interviewed Andy Brooks, General Secretary of the New Communist Party of Britain, on the impact of the pandemic in Britain. Fight Back!: How are the working people of Britain being impacted by the pandemic?

Brooks: Well the pandemic is something no one in living memory has ever experienced. Thousands of workers, including many pensioners, have died due to the coronavirus. The emergency measures that were eventually taken in late March have now reduced the mortality rate. But many of those deaths could have been avoided if the Johnson government had taken emergency action when COVID-19 first spread to Britain at the beginning of the year.

Most schools and all “non-essential” shops have been closed for over two months, along with all sporting and social events under a lockdown regime not seen since the Second World War.

The government’s emergency measures to stave off social unrest were taken in consultation with the unions as well as Labour and the other opposition parties in Parliament. These included the suspension of business rates for small firms, extending sick pay and increased NHS [National Health Service] funding and providing subsidies for furloughed workers and the self-employed. But they only went part of the way to tackling the escalating threat of a devastating epidemic that has stretched the health service to its limits and seriously undermined the economy at the same time.

Workers have responded cautiously to the easing of some of the restrictions in June. Boris Johnson’s decision to shelve the plan to get primary school pupils back into the classroom before the summer break was welcomed by parents and teachers fearful of a premature return that could trigger off a second wave of the coronavirus plague, particularly given the government’s failure to get an adequate track and test system running and still no sign of a COVID-19 vaccine in sight.

Fight Back!: Are the big factories and large workplaces still functioning? If so, how are workers resisting?

Brooks: Manufacturers were exempted from the UK coronavirus clampdown on “non-essential” work, travel and gatherings. Staff were encouraged to work from home in large parts of the financial sector but in other areas the imposition of social distancing has led to massive cuts in their services.

The social restrictions, which banned all meetings of more than two people, has paralyzed the unions at the grassroots level. Many national union elections have been deferred for a year and all union conferences have been postponed until September at the earliest. The union bureaucracies, of course, continue to function and at a national level; they continue to negotiate with employers while lobbying the Labour Party leadership and the government in the usual way. But the rank and file have not been completely side-lined. While health service workers’ demands for personal protective equipment have still to be adequately met, transport and postal workers have had more success by threatening or taking wildcat action to enforce health and safety demands.

The actions of some Royal Mail depot managers, [which were] indifferent to the government’s emergency health and safety regulations, led to worker walkouts in a number of sorting offices in April that forced management to deep clean the sites and enforce the two metre spacing guidelines.

In London at least 33 London bus drivers have died from COVID-19 and a further ten underground and railway staff have also fallen to the deadly infection. In the absence of any serious response from management, many drivers began taping off the front of their buses to avoid close contact with passengers. This forced Transport for London to suspend all bus fares on April 20 when passengers were banned from using the front door in a bid to shield drivers because the emergency measure meant the card reader next to the driver's cab was out of bounds.

Now we’re seeing workers, particularly young workers, taking to the street in support of the new Black Lives Matter campaign that erupted over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. When they pulled down the statue of the Bristol slave dealer Edward Colston and dumped it in the river last week they sent a message to the ruling class that goes far beyond the issue of the trans-Atlantic slave trade which built the British Empire in the first place.

Fight Back!: How does your organization view the government's response to the pandemic?

Brooks: The Tory government’s response has been evasive and ambiguous. It’s led by Boris Johnson, a vain man clearly unfit to hold public office even by the low standards of the Tory Party he leads. Initially Boris Johnson’s plan for dealing with the coronavirus plague was to let the infection sweep through the population to keep people working to protect the capitalist economy, while accepting that tens of thousands of vulnerable elderly people would die prematurely as a consequence. But Johnson was forced to abandon the “herd immunity” ideas of his Rasputin, Dominic Cummings, which would have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of vulnerable pensioners, through public pressure that included doctors and pensioners’ groups.

Government figures say that some 41,000 people have died, so far, from coronavirus. Others say the real death toll, when all the deaths in care homes are factored in, is much, much higher. What is certain is that Britain has the highest death rate in the whole of Europe. The easing of the lockdown has led to a surge in the numbers returning to work in central London. Trains and buses are, once again, packed in the rush hours, firing fears that a new round of infection will spread like wildfire across the capital.

Fight Back!: What is the New Communist Party doing in response to this crisis?

Brooks: Our regular fund-raising events have been cancelled. We cannot hold public meetings. Our bookshop outlets are closed and our street sales have been suspended. This has produced a cash-flow problem, but our supporters have responded to the call and our weekly paper continues to come out, as it always has since 1977, for regular subscribers who receive it in the post.

As soon as we can, we will return to campaigning on the street. In the meantime, we fight to put the communist answer to the capitalist crisis back on the working-class agenda in the columns of our paper and in the social media. We stand for Marxism-Leninism. We fight for peace and socialism, solidarity with Venezuela and national liberation movements all around the world and the people’s democracies of China, Cuba, Democratic Korea, Laos and Vietnam. We’ve got plenty to say and everything we’ve said in the past has been proved right.

Our paper represents the voice of struggle in all its forms. It gives a clear communist line on the issues of the day, a Marxist-Leninist analysis of the problems facing the working class and it provides a window to the world communist movement and the national liberation movement; the bigger the readership, the greater our influence. This is our paramount task.

#Britain #International #CapitalismAndEconomy #Opinion #Europe #Healthcare #Interviews #Socialism #COVID19 #NewCommunistPartyOfBritain #UnitedKingdom

Here in the U.S., the working class continues suffering from right-wing anti-worker policies – cutbacks and privatization of public services and education, giveaways to for-profit health care and insurance corporations, outlawing collective bargaining and unions, curbing voting rights, etc. Few of us among the working class would mourn the death of right-wing figureheads like ex-President George Bush, or Wisconsin Governor Walker, or Florida Governor Rick Scott. Nor should we mourn for Margaret Thatcher after what she did to the working class in Britain.

Under her rule, the coal miners were some of many victims, with Thatcher declaring the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) as “the enemy within.” In 1984, the NUM waged a militant strike for over a year, fighting Thatcher’s privatizations and the closing of coal mines. In Thatcher’s Britain, a militarized police force beat the miners and their supporters off the streets. At least six picketers were killed during the great miners’ strike of 1984-85. Thatcher’s domination of the National Coal Board meant no work agreement, numerous mines closed and more than 20,000 miners losing their jobs. The NUM was gutted.

This should stand as a stark reminder to workers here in the U.S., union and non-union, where we have such a deep-rooted history of militant labor unionism amongst coal miners. The government is in the hands of the wealthy, they will use whatever means necessary to serve the rich.

Thatcher’s policies overseas were even worse. In response to the decline of the British Empire, Thatcher revived a racist and colonial foreign policy. This is the other great tower of her ‘contributions’ to humanity. For example, Prime Minister Thatcher declared the African National Congress a terrorist organization, opposed sanctions on racist apartheid South Africa and, in 1987, Thatcher’s spokesperson said in responding to a reporter that anyone who believed the ANC would ever rule South Africa was “living in cloud-cuckoo land.”

Thatcher was unlikely to win a second term as Prime Minister until she launched a completely unnecessary, but bloody war against Argentina over the tiny Malvinas islands, thousands of miles from Britain and right next to Argentina. Thatcher revived jingoism, the extreme nationalism of British imperialism, and won big in the next elections. In terms of arrogance, she puts the American Republican Party to shame.

So too Thatcher amped up the war on the people in the occupied six counties of Ireland. She unleashed death squads and brought in the shoot to kill policy, but Irish Republicans adapted. It was Thatcher who forced the Irish Hunger Strike, soon broadening sympathy and support for the Irish Republican movement throughout Ireland and the world. Bobby Sands and his comrades are being remembered throughout the world, and especially in Palestine, today.

Due to her anti-worker policies in Britain and her colonial approach to the rest of the world, Maggie Thatcher leaves a legacy of repression, misery and bloodshed. There is no sadness in her death, only the feeling of a burden being lifted and giving new energy to our determination to organize working people and the oppressed to take control of our destiny.

#UnitedKingdom #Imperialism #Remembrances #Europe #Ireland #Argentina #britain #Apartheid #workersStruggle #coalMiner #MargaretThatcher #NationalUnionOfMineworkers

Commentary

George Bush is trying to scare the American people into privatizing Social Security by claiming that there will be a crisis 40 years from now. Before jumping on the privatization bandwagon, it would be a good idea to look at two countries that already partially privatized their government pension programs: Britain and Argentina.

Following their reelection in 1984, Britain's Conservative Party passed a law allowing workers to opt out of the guaranteed government pension program and into private investment accounts. The Conservatives had already reduced the government pensions by linking them to prices instead of workers wages (another idea the Bush administration is throwing around). The result of privatization? “A bloody mess,” according to the Financial Times, a major business newspaper in Britain.

British government pensions are now the lowest in Western Europe. The privatization scheme cost the government billions of pounds (at current exchange rates a British pound is worth about two U.S. dollars). The real benefits went to insurance companies and other financial institutions that skimmed off as much of 30% of workers' contributions. These so-called investments were so bad that financial companies were later forced to reimburse retirees to the tune of 12 billion pounds. With the private investment accounts in such a mess, a half million British workers gave up their accounts last year and moved back to the government pension system.

Argentina's privatization effort ended up being bad not only for retirees, but also played a part in the country's recent economic crisis. As part of their free-market policies, Argentina partially privatized their government pension program in 1994. Tax revenues were diverted to private accounts, forcing the government to go deeper into debt. Economists Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot estimated that the cost of privatization (including interest) was the same as the Argentine government deficit during the years after 1994. These deficits contributed to the eventual government default on their loans, and the painful economic crisis that saw the Argentine peso lose two-thirds of its value, drove the unemployment rate over 20%, and led to a further cut in government pension benefits.

With a track record like this, why would the Bush administration make such a strong push to privatize social security? It is part free-market ideology and part payback to Wall Street. But whatever the reasons, it is a recipe for disaster – not only for workers, but also for the economy as a whole.

#UnitedStates #Commentary #Argentina #privatization #SocialSecurity #britain