SOLOMON HUGHES reveals how six MPs enjoyed £400-£600 hospitality at Ditchley Park for Google’s ‘AI parliamentary scheme’ — supposedly to develop ‘effective scrutiny’ of artificial intelligence, but actually funded by the increasingly unsavoury tech giant itself
100,000 dead — No, they did not do enough!
The consistent themes of the leadership response during the pandemic have been too little, too late and too slow, says HELEN O’CONNOR
Caroline Darian, daughter of Gisele Pelicot, took part in a conversation with Afua Hirsch at London’s Royal Geographical Society. LYNNE WALSH reports
As the regime in Iran continues to face international pressure to reduce its nuclear programme, workers continue to struggle for wages they can live on despite harsh repression of trade unionists, reports JAMSHID AHMADI
JEAN SILVAN EVANS pays tribute to the social campaigner who sang the Welsh national anthem to Khrushchev in Moscow and became Rhondda’s communist mayor in 1979
As summer nears, TOM HARDY explains how unions are organising heat strikes and cool stations while calling for legal maximum workplace temperatures — because employers currently have no duty to protect workers from dangerous heat
European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde sees Trump’s many disruptions as an opportunity to challenge the dollar’s ‘exorbitant privilege’ — but greater Euro assertiveness will also mean greater warmongering and militarism, warns NICK WRIGHT
KEITH BARLOW examines the 1975 referendum that saw Britain vote to stay in the EEC, revealing how Tony Benn understood that EU free-market principles and capital movement rules would tie the hands of any government putting people’s interests before corporate profits
IT IS staggering to see that the horrific milestone of more than 100,000 excess deaths is doing little to quiet the growing clamour to lift Covid-19 restrictions.
These deaths are more than just a set of grim daily statistics, they mark growing numbers of families being thrown into the long-term turmoil, insecurity and chaos that the loss of a loved one brings.
Each one of these deaths is someone’s parent, partner or child gasping for their last breath as the oxygen runs out in a hospital.
On the day that more than 100,000 deaths were announced the #Borishasfailedthenation hashtag trended on Twitter as a wave of public anger broke the surface.
To add insult to injury, the tone-deaf government announced that we should expect even more deaths.
But this statement should not just be accepted at face value because it will allow this government to continue to do the bare minimum to protect lives.
If we accept the idea that many more people will die, we are allowing the government a free hand to continue a deadly herd immunity strategy.
The endless horror tactics of every news channel filming the inside of hospital intensive care units will never normalise the suffering of critically ill patients or desensitise us to the struggles of exhausted and burnt-out NHS staff who deserve to be treated so much better by this Tory government.
Tory strategy is squarely to blame for making this crisis far worse than it might have been and no amount of TV-induced brain-fogging will stop growing numbers of people realising this.
The weaponising of mental health and children’s education will not detract from the simple fact that lives are on the line as this pandemic is allowed to rage out of control.
Enhancing the education of children or the mental health of the nation was never a priority before the pandemic — made obvious by the fact that vital public services were cut to the bone.
So many people affected by the never-ending rising death toll and economic devastation will be utterly changed and this will lead to a groundswell of anger due to the government’s careless and callous inaction.
The consistent themes of the leadership response during the pandemic have been too little, too late and too slow.
The low standards, fragmentation and inaccessibility of resources has been evident during the personal protective equipment roll-out, test and trace, the vaccine roll-out and in the delivery of vital financial support for people.
It clear that privatising the pandemic response has led us down the shameful road of having one of the highest death tolls in the world.
The stop-start lockdowns have increased the proliferation of this virus and the results have been lethal for more than 100,000 people.
The impact of long Covid is little understood but early indications suggest that this will be highly unpleasant and debilitating for tens of thousands of sufferers, including young people.
The statistics on rising child poverty hide a world where increasing numbers of children in Britain are now going cold and hungry and the Victorian diseases of the very poor, such as rickets, are on the rise again due to malnutrition.
How can this ever be accepted as the norm in the sixth-richest country in the world?
The Zero Covid Coalition launched by the Morning Star and other key comrades has outlined a clear set of demands for workers and jobs, our NHS, our benefits system and to protect public health during this pandemic.
We will unite and grow the labour and the trade movement around these basic demands because we will never accept grinding poverty and rising unnecessary deaths as the norm in Britain, whether there is a pandemic or not.
In the US the death toll has reached more than half a million people, and we must not just sit back and accept these numbers of excess deaths as inevitable over here.
Any reasonable-minded person will conclude that this Tory government has not done all that it could have to ensure the public are safe and protected.
We must organise ourselves and fight to hold this government to account and ensure that every single life is valued and that we push for a country that is run in the interests of the people and not profit.
Helen O’Connor is GMB Southern Region organiser.
More from this author
With fascists and their supporters cynically and falsely posing as ‘defenders of women,’ the left must take violence against women seriously and gain a better understanding of women’s oppression, warns HELEN O’CONNOR
As some celebrate a pay rise, outsourced, privatised workers face continued exploitation — ending this injustice by bringing them in-house must become a top priority for the labour movement, writes HELEN O’CONNOR
HELEN O’CONNOR sees a worrying trend of women exiting the labour movement in their thousands, and warns that if this tide is not stemmed with proper and effective action, it will only be to the benefit of the capitalist class
Far from being ‘more efficient’ and providing ‘choice,’ privateers taking over the public sector have worsened service delivery, and workers rights’ have been utterly compromised on the altar of corporate greed, warns HELEN O’CONNOR
